What $100 Million Is Doing For Poetry

“Many years from now, when people are looking back, my first hope would be that the course of the river of American poetry would have been altered by a few degrees–or maybe more–by the Poetry Foundation. If less than that happens, but there’s something discernible enough to be called the Chicago Movement, that wouldn’t disappoint me, either. I don’t know what the Chicago Movement is. I have no idea. It’s not poets or a kind of poetry. But it implies a departure from the status quo today. If there’s an effect on the art form, I hope it would be a bigger audience and a poetry that is deriving energy from a general audience.”