[Michael Cantor]

I don't believe in drawing a line between "literary" and "non-literary" audiences, and I believe that precisely what makes many of our greatest poets "great" is that their work is accessible enough to appeal to an intelligent reader who does not have an MFA, or even an MA - but strong and "literary" enough to impress (possibly on a different level, or in a different manner) an audience of dedicated and poetically-educated poets.

Personally, this is what I try to do in my own work. I spent forty years working in industrial organizations - managing factories, dealing with bankers, selling to engineers - and I try to write poetry that is accessible to the technicians and business people with whom I worked - that they won't find opaque and inbred. (Whether they will like it or not is another issue.) At the same time, I also aim at an audience of inbred poets, and would be delighted to impress the living hell out of the MFA and Sewanee crowd. My approach to most of this is to try to write poems - most of the time - that function on two or three levels, but that don't require a reader's knowledge of, say, Greek mythology, to work. When I write about rarified settings or situations (and I've done this often enough with Japan, as one example), I try (not always well) to introduce enough basics so that you don't have to be a Japanophile to follow the poem.

Does it work? Not very often, I'm sure. But, then again, I'm not "great". I think the point is that I don't in believe in the approach that you sometimes John, which I regard as popularizing or "writing down" to the audience (and, actually, you only do that some of the time - your better poems strike me as working on multiple levels); nor do I believe in some strong dividing line between the "ordinary reader" and us hyper-sensitive and hyper-educated poets. I think we should attempt to aim at both, and that a good poem - good poetry - can do just that.