Great Regulars: Jeffrey Brown: What comes through

in the essay is the canon and the way it's taught is part of the problem. So you're proposing, in a sense, a new canon?

Tony Hoagland: Yes, I think that the way people are drawn into poetry or perhaps into any art form is by a contact, a random contact sometimes, or an educational contact, with something that's extremely contemporary. And at that point the art becomes something that is organic to culture and to perception and to the ability to think about the moment that we live in or simply that it articulates feelings and contradictions in human nature and inner circumstances that are just especially contemporary. That that moment is crucial.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Conversation: Tony Hoagland on 'Poems That Could Save America'

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