If you liked David Biepsiel’s State of American Poetry address, here’s a nice counterpart by Natasha Trethewey at the Virginia Quarterly Review.
“Despair about the place of poetry in American culture is nothing new,” she begins, and goes on to write about the necessity and indelibility of poetry at the most basic levels:
For all of that, poetry is the corrective, the sacred language that allows us to connect across time and space, across all the things in everyday life that separate us and would destroy us.
