Does Poetry Matter?

Commentary in the The Boston Globe about the current direction of Poetry magazine and some questions about that strategy.

Count me among the doubtful as to the direction of the project: we don't need "more poems that do what people expect poems to do" so much as we need better educated readers. Readers who can perform sustained acts of attention, who can negotiate the intricacies of complex metaphor and who can handle the polyvocality and/or disjunction of modernist and post-modernist writing, are readers less likely to tolerate the crap that passes for politics these days.