As I have said in earlier blogs, I always knew I wanted to be a writer. (And I feel fortunate that my path seemed so clear for me.) One article that helped me to think about being a writer, a poet in particular, was Dana Gioa’s “Can Poetry Matter?” which first ran way back in May 1991 in The Atlantic Monthly. The essays begins: "American Poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized … [Read more...]