Reading America

But it’s generally true that abroad they have more interesting taste in American poetry than in the U.S. French anthologies of American poetry are better than the American ones. When I talk to Brazilian or Danish poets, they ask me about Michael Palmer or Rosmarie Waldrop or Robert Creeley. They’ve never heard of Stephen Dunn or Mary Oliver or Alan Dugan or some prizewinner. In countries where poets are intellectuals, they simply can’t relate to all those poems about changing the storm windows or the jonquils coming up through the snow.

Eliot Weinberger in conversation with Kent Johnson, Jacket 16 — March 2002