For The Poet August Kleinzahler Comments

The quoted material has been attributed to Kleinzahler, in an article, Mary Oliver Saved My Life, online. The context was a telephone conversation in which he was dismissing, or patronizing, poetry therapy - the reading and writing of poetry to address or perhaps relieve suffering. I grew up with Brooks & Warren and the old New Critics. Regrettably their characterization of poetry as art, and their tendency to dismiss what is simple and informal, has relegated Establishment Poetry to Academia. There are hundreds - thousands - of contemporary poets who write complex, oblique, inaccessible poetry for the hundreds and thousands of their peer poets - and no one else. Whether they actually read each other's work, I have no way of knowing. Ironically, Kleinzahler is not one of those.