How has poetry changed over the years?
When I was in school at the end of the 1950s, the ’60s, poetry was by and large what happened in New York or Boston or San Francisco. Those are still places where poets live and write, but there really is not one center of poetry anymore in the United States. I remember—and this goes back a number of years—when we published Ted Kooser. It amazed some friends of mine on the East Coast that there was this guy in Nebraska who was writing good poems, and I think a lot of them at the time didn’t really believe that people could be living there and doing good work. It’s all over the map now. One of the concomitant truths with that is the variety of styles, the variety of contents of American poetry, is much greater than in the past. There is no legitimate aesthetic model that says, “This is the way you do it.” It’s done in lots of different ways. How have attitudes and opinions about poetry changed? There’s been a holdover from high modernism, I think—the notion that if poetry is difficult i
