. . . it was a curious thing, that there were so many famous poems by not-so-famous poets. —Mary Ruefle Poetry is always looking for another dance partner. At some point, usually early in one’s life, say during the ‘teen years, when poets first begin to write poems, (as is usually the case, allowing for a few exceptions, some notable,) the relation of the poet to the poem is one of innocence. The impulse seems automatic; the joy, intrinsic. The poem has its own being. It emanates gratitude and relief. The only audience is the poet. It is everything. The poems—often immature cathartic effusions of longing, grief, or other sentiments—are precious to the young poet, although they may have little if any value to anyone else. And down through the years, and although the lines may be have been lost or forgotten, their early presence remains an emotional artifact of experience. Marie Howe writes, “Poetry exists whether it’s written or not. Much poetry is thought. It happens within a gaze, or a memory.” So the poem-of-the-page exits as an artifact of impressions. Normally, after a few years of banal adolescent outpourings, or say by the time our poet becomes more aware of the world, and begins to read other poets, the question may arise: ‘What kind of poetry am I composing?’ Or, ‘What kind of poet am I?’ Or, ‘How might my poetry be received by the world?’ And finally, ‘Is this something others might read, maybe find beneficial in some way?’ It is no longer an age of innocence. In my late ‘teens I distinctly recall being put onto the work of Dylan Thomas by a lovely writer, the mother of one of my friends. At 16 I pronounced Dylan, Di land, until I was politely corrected—and was so enamored of his verse, rereading his major poems so often that to my surprise I had actually memorized them, and would be doing some quotidian task—washing my father’s car for an upcoming date—while my head was busy with revisiting “Fern Hill,” or “A Winter’s Tale”. At times I actually I imagined myself as Dylan Thomas, of course I lacked the sloppily-knotted cravat, the sonorous bardic voice, the paunchy countenance, the capacity for excessive drink, and of course, his unique linguistic genius—as Spender once put it—and my poems at the time were overfilled—corpulent with florid images and florid diction. It was a phase, but phases leave something of themselves, a residue, and although the poetry published in my twenties was unlike my earlier idol, there was an occasional echo, but then there were more apparent echoes of Hopkins in the works of Thomas. And so it goes. The poet becomes an agent of unconscious collaboration, unconsciously joining a conduit of allies, and along with an expanding awareness of the poetry of other poets, our poet begins to read essays on verse, articles on voice—this is a desperate quest in itself—and journeys through anthologies as numerous as they are diverse—anthologies themed by poets of a period, a school, a century, a country, or by ethnicity, and ultimately, having found attractive poems that are often memorable, seeks to find the poets behind them, and thus enters the world of biographies. It is about this time, if not earlier, when the poet becomes conscious of the need for an audience, imagined, or otherwise. This little commentary—we might call it a detour—poets, by nature, are detourists, affected it seems, by just about every ‘fabulous reality’—is an attempt to clarify the expanding varieties of poetry in terms of their collective influence on the single practitioner of the art. Poetry is an art. To call it anything else lessens it, and poetry doesn’t need to be reduced any more than it is—Billy Collins’ comment about poetry being the matchstick girl of the arts notwithstanding. I hope we could move along with an illustration that should serve also as a microcosm, one to include the concept of community-as-audience, and thus, bringing these comments full circle to include Verse-Virtual. Once in the long ago, I traveled upstate to the Navajo reservation in the northeast part of Arizona to experience firsthand a unique approach to language acquisition being taught to the children at the K-2 elementary school there. We had been invited by the principal, a modest man, and a dedicated humanist from Boston who had married a Navajo woman. We stayed at their home, having a dinner of Navajo pizza, then frybread with honey and cinnamon, and the next morning were off to visit the Ganado elementary school, named after a Navajo leader who led his people through the difficult transition to reservation life. There, we observed classrooms of children intently working on writing little ‘books’—a book was two or three small pages, usually a description of an incident, a family outing, the uncle who found a lost sheep—the Navajo have been sheep herding for over 500 years in this part of Arizona—a sick child who suddenly recovered, the grandmother’s woven blanket she made now on display at the local trading post, built in the 19th century and located minutes from the children’s school, the thunderstorm that washed away part of an old Hogan on an ancient plateau in the red clay hills surrounding Ganado, in other words, every possible fabulous reality. The stories and poems were placed between decorative covers, designs or drawings by the students, then duplicated and stapled for distribution. The term, fabulous reality is from Walden, when Thoreau wrote, “ . . .reality is fabulous,” and the teachers having read Walden, encourage the children to write stories and poems about the people, places, and events in their lives that have made an impression on them—their memorable realities. The children would each, in turn, share their poems and stories by reading them aloud, and so there was writing, reading, and speech reinforcing each other, or what we know as a ‘whole language’ approach to literacy. Theirs was a ready-made audience of similar interests. They were writing about events and people who for them made a memorable impression, a ‘fabulous reality’. They would also learn, as they developed, how to write about subjects from, and to, a larger world, but that would come in time. If we look behind every poem we find a similar phenomenon; something that struck the poet, or the writer, that would not rest until it was ‘set down’ on the page. If the poet is fortunate, then there is publication, whether in a child’s classroom on a remote reservation, or in an online journal, or in a print medium, and the door for reader response is opened. The response suggests there is some fundamental symbiotic exchange between the poet and the reader. In this way, like Elliot Page in Whip It, the poet finds her/his tribe. There is resonance and a shared identity, and above all, a unique disclosure of the unknown, not possible in any other medium. Although there have been deviations from formal verse patterns; from Milton’s use of blank verse, which was quite a detour from formal verse at the time, there has been an increasing embrace of fragmentation and compartmentalization that has evolved into the present day; Whitman with his open lines, the French symbolists, the Uranian poets and the Martian poets, more of a historical curiosity now, to the Modernists whose spokesperson and perhaps chief initiator, Pound, sounded the manifesto to ‘Make it new,’ a charge echoed in Dana Gioia’s article, “Can Poetry Matter?” (The Atlantic, 1991,) nearly a century later, arguing for a greater readership of poetry by taking out of the stuffy land of academia and encouraging experimentation to curb, perhaps overcome, the decline of interest, all the more remarkable given the author’s work, which is, in the main, derivative. Poetry was headed in the direction of fragmentation into various movements earlier even before Gioia’s advocacy for diversification—Dadaism, Flarfism, Verbivocovisual language of concrete poetry, Erasure Poetry, mixed media, Projectivists, Objectivists, Surrealism, Micropoetics, the New York school that emerged as a reaction to the Confessionalists, and so on, it continues into the present day, with each new movement, or innovative verse pattern practiced by an individual or a group, that attracts like-minds, or like sensibilities. Echoes. Homes. Tribes. There was a reading a few years ago by a rather notable poet who spoke openly about a conversion of a kind. He said he didn’t know what kind of poetry spoke to him, or what he could claim kinship with until he discovered the Language poets, and here he had found himself, his voice, his raison d'être. He was clearly aligned with the Language poets in stance and tone. By stance I don’t mean only an attitude toward the subject, but a general philosophic foundation, one might say a world view, and in this case, that was Language poetry, a capricious blend of nihilism and cynicism. The conventions are fill-ins around the trope of irony. He had found his tribe. It seems there has been a scramble for market share as if poetry is a commodity when, in fact, popular literary poetry has, in terms of the larger goals of a people, or a nation, a sub-culture, and generally ignored, if not considered a closed conversation. That conversation may expand over time, gain readership shares, and it is none the less for that, but it challenges us to consider it anything other than a sub-culture, a closed conversation among those who speak through it, among those who are of similar sensibilities, especially now, in an age of increasing volume of attention-getting and attention-retaining technologies—instamessaging, AI, digital photography and video production, printer organs, and various news media that eagerly informs us of each new discovery with increasing celerity. To be overly concerned with poetry as a closed conversation, one that needs to be popularized without criteria or condition, does not speak well of the poet, or poetry. We find our tribes. Art may be anything made by anyone. In our cultural free-for-all age, manufactured audiences seem endless; the demographic keeps expanding, and behind it all, there stands the poet and the poem; an eternal bond of innocence and purity.