I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best served by these things.
It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.
Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I've probably written such things and then torn them up.
When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.
