The Three Ps of Post- Montana MFA '08:

Stephen Burt responds to the NEA poll that finds 17% of Americans read poetry (that is, have read at least one poem in the last year):

How many poets, though, are moved to write poems, or not to write poems, by their sense of the scope of an audience, by their sense of the number of available strangers? Isn’t one listener (known or unknown) enough? Isn’t the writing the point of the writing, prior to and more durably than any sense of how many people take note?