Hello, listeners, this is Rusty Reno at First Things Magazine, and I'm at the editor's desk for the next episode of The Editor's Desk.

And I have with me Micah Maddox, the author of The Integrity of Poetry from the February 2023 issue.

And Micah is, among other illustrious roles, the poetry editor of First Things

Magazine.

Welcome to the podcast, Micah.

Thanks for having me, Rusty.

Dana Joya, you take his 1991 article, Can Poetry Matter as a kind, well, then ultimately it's a book,

isn't it? That's correct. That's correct. In 92, collected in a book with other essays, that's

right. You take that as you're jumping off point. And so I ask you, where have we come since

he penned that, I guess, a lament about the role of poetry in American society.

Yeah, right. In that article and also in the book, Joya observes that this strange situation where we have all these poets writing and publishing and no one reading their poetry.

And he argues in fact that poetry had become a sort of exchange medium, that you

would write these poems and publish them in small, usually university press, literary journals

that no one reads and sits on the shelves and libraries in order to get that tenure-track job,

you know, at University of Pennsylvania. And that this was, he says, sort of a violence against poetry,

the integrity of poetry had been in harmed, and that essentially the audience for poetry was no

longer there because poets had abandoned the general reader. And so he made this argument that

poets need to begin writing for a general audience, reading their poems on the radio.

Teachers need to begin encouraging students to memorize poetry, to sort of recreate an audience for poetry.

So I start with that and say, well, where are we now?

Are poets writing for a general audience, or are they still ignoring them in writing or essentially

a coterie of other of other MFA professors and so forth? And it's interesting because in some

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