Thanks for posting this link, Guy. I'm glad to have read the essay. It did get more notice on another poetry board, most of it directed toward Barr's negative view of MFA programs.
That's the element of the piece I can most readily agree with: too many people are being encouraged to see poetry as a way to paid employment.
Other than that, I find myself arguing with, or at least questioning, several of Barr's fundamental points. Each of my questions could spawn a GT thread of its own. (Some of those threads already exist, I think.)
How do we know the size of the audience for poetry? If we derive it from book and magazine sales and ignore the Internet, the size we compute is certainly too small.
And the audience we can perceive on the Internet is hungry for lyric poetry. Look at The Writer's Almanac and columns such as "American Life in Poetry." Is Barr really complaining that there is too much of what people seem to want?
And poetry as a form of science writing? Didn't we invent the plain style in the late seventeenth century because it was better for elucidating the sciences? (Yes, I should read "Grace" before I argue, but I do question.)
Rather than go on, I'd like to hope that others will pick up these arguments.
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