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          But in reality, the mainstream reader does not respond to those attempts, perhaps because the mainstream is difficult to reach except through advertising. Instead, a small new audience has been created: the average person who writes poetry.
          The problem for the potential “great poet” is that the average-person poet is not generally as well schooled in the art and craft of great poetry as members of the postmodern tower. Even many MFA’s have not read, much less studied, universally acknowledged great poets, like Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, or Dante, for starters. I have known MFA students — fine poets, with high GPAs — who had never heard of Herbert, Hopkins, or Henley. “Great” for the even less refined is the poem-as-punch-line, poetry recited in Latin to impress the gullible, the masturbatory peeping-tom poem whose shock-value quickly stales to a bland, adolescent sound-bite.
          Can we blame our educational system for our ignorance? To some extent, certainly. But more than anything we must blame our faithlessness — a faithlessness, of course, instilled in us by that cool postmodern intelligentsia. With no absolutes but a tangle of possible meanings,  with no criteria for distinguishing quality, with no shared “truth” but differance (Derrida), with privatized experiences we can convey to no one, we ignore the masters and become not only alienated from each other, but preoccupied voyeurs of our own life. Today, the typical reader of poetry is more interested in versified gossip than any dark night or bright afternoon of the soul, especially if that poet is oneself.
          The true poet must reckon not only with being exploited by academia (postmodern and otherwise), superficially reviewed by the mainstream press, and, despite some poets’ outreach, ignored by the mainstream. Even most of her fellow poets will not appreciate her exquisite craft, her erudite allusions, the expansive depth of her vision. Who has the time? Poets writing in a prosy free verse style are usually the most accessible. Formal and highly experimental poets take more work than the average reader is willing to invest.
          The true poet must accept her position as outcast. It would seem that her only choice is to defy pressures that would squeeze her into the collective anthology (and by anthology I do not mean a print collection of poems), where poets are stored as text samples for analysis to be summarized in a discourse devoid of wisdom or even conventional good sense.
          If a poet develops a distinctive style distinguishable from the generic anthologized hum, how can she expect to ever be read?
          Poets and poetasters alike must shuffle toward the same elusive goal: Attention. The poetaster has everything to gain. But the true poet is forced into balancing high literary possibilities with accessibility, and trading in hope of genuine appreciation for simple attention. Then she must find a readership though publication — which inherently demands compromise, because only limited poetry is filtered to the public by publishing power players.
          Any book of poetry published by a big house is scrutinized and chosen by editors of questionable qualifications: Are they poets? Are they good poets, good readers of poetry, or even good editors? According to whom? Even poetasters complain that many famous poets’ books published by big houses are not worthy of big house prestige. And one can scarcely imagine what works of poetic art have slipped into oblivion through the fingers of shadowy editors with their own agenda. If a great poetry book makes its way into the world via a small house or as a self-publication, it will never win a Pulitzer — the ultra-elitist American award reserved for books published by a few select houses. Whitman, the grandfather of American poetry, would never have merited such an undemocratic award.
          Big house editors will not even glance at a poet’s work until he has racked up several “really good” journal credits. Working poets know that there are numerous journals equal in quality to Poetry and The New Yorker — journals that head the short list of “really good” credits. Most of the handful of “really good” journals got their start back when producing a magazine was not as easy as it is in our age of desktop and online publishing. There were fewer journals to choose from, so most of our famous early poets were at some point published there, and of course every poet dreams of standing beside them. Since those journals have been around for most of the last century, they have had plenty of time to establish their “brand.” Their inflated prestige is due less to lofty quality than to longevity.
          There is nothing inherent in designer label journals that makes them truly superior to all the others, yet in order to distinguish themselves, poets still judge each other, and themselves, in large part by where they’ve been published. The prestige mystique then becomes self-perpetuating in that the more poets try to get into those journals simply because they’re prestigious, the more those journals gain prestige. The prestige of literary journals advances like prices on the stock market; value is determined by psychology. Where but America would poets be so preoccupied with pursuing the myth of quality to validate their occupation?
          With all due respect to poets seeking an audience, does it really benefit any poet to wait six months or a year or two or three for a journal’s rejection of his allowable three to five poems? And if a poem is accepted, should he meekly bow, good bastard of the arts that he is, unworthy of equal pay for equal work, and humbly accept his one or two free copies, which should arrive within a year or so of acceptance? Does it help his writing to play the game? Is it in his interest as an artist to publish a book with a mainstream publisher, who prints maybe a thousand copies, spends no money to advertise them, invests little or no effort to market them, then lets them go out of print before most readers of poetry have even heard of them (and certainly no one else has)? Unless, perhaps, he is a celebrity poet. Does it benefit a poet to be an aggressive self-promoter just to turn his soul (isn’t that what his art is?) over to an editor, a tiny coterie, and a few dilettantes that rarely, if ever, truly read his poetry? Is it not demeaning to play the poetry contest lotto, in which you have to pay hard cash to have your work considered, and if it is good, picked, perhaps randomly, from among the other equally good choices (unless, of course, the choice was, shall we say, predestined)? Is it really a sign of failure, rather than a stance of defiance, to self-publish? Is it not dangerous to one’s soul to win, to flaunt, that Pulitzer?
          In order to sell themselves to book publishers, or once they have published, in order to sell their books and the journals in which their work has appeared — in order to sell themselves, to really “make it” — poets are expected to give poetry readings.