Great Regulars: Consider how Robert Pinsky describes

the laughter of the Polish émigré and Nobel Prize-winning dissident Czeslaw Milosz: "The sound of it was infectious, but more precisely it was commanding. His laughter had the counter-authority of human intelligence, triumphing over the petty-minded authority of a regime." That's one hell of a chuckle. The problem isn't that Pinsky likes and admires Milosz; it's that he can't hear a Polish poet snortle without having fantasies about barricades and firing squads. He's by no means alone in that. Many of us in the American poetry world have a habit of exalting foreign writers while turning them into cartoons. And we do so because their very foreignness implies a distance--a potentially "great" distance--that we no longer have from our own writers, most of whom make regular appearances on the reading circuit and have publicly available office phones.

from David Orr: The New York Times: On Poetry: The Great(ness) Game

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