News at Eleven: I've never been a fan of poets navel-gazing,

but I suppose the truth is that if poetry doesn't gaze into its own navel once in a while, no one else is going to do it for it. And we ought to remember that the medium in which most people encounter poetry isn't the sold book, but the individual poem, read or heard--Auden's 'Funeral Blues' in Four Weddings and a Funeral, or Armitage's own 'Mist', carved into a rockface in the Yorkshire Moors. Maybe this is what's most important in the struggle for readers; picking the terms of engagement.

from The Huffington Post: Poetry Parnassus--An Olympic Achievement

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