Thanks for the attention, I guess. I am glad she’s promoting poetry and poets. But, I must confess, I don’t really know what I should be thinking when I read this. Do I not have the right clothes for writing poetry? Is that why the New Yorker still hasn’t published me?

But how much of uncertainty is due to a pointless elitism? The silly old punk rock ethos: whatever is popular is no longer worthwhile.

One thinks about the fuss when Jonathan Franzen expressed doubts about his novel The Corrections becoming an Oprah Book Club selection. What was he afraid of? Of more people reading it? Of course, we all understand what he was afraid of – a mixture of sexism and anti-populism. Sexism because Oprah specifically targets middle class (read bourgeois) women and anti-populism because, well, she is insanely popular and most things she endorses also become unreasonably popular. And if the appreciative audience of one’s work extends beyond a certain intellectual and artistic elite, is it still high art or literature?

One could also be reminded of how award winning author Jon Banville, who writes “literary” books under his own name and genre books under a nom de plume as an example of someone who feared that mass appreciation would depreciate the literary value of his other works.