A Poet Gets Real

RealClearPolicy links to a thumb-sucker in something called The Agonist, which contains a wry quote I like very much:

The only significant number of subscribers to the average poetry magazine are those persons who are published in it, or those who are angling to get published in it. For the rest of the reading public, poetry magazines might as well be on Mars. This is a brute fact of life that poets and wannabe poets have a hard time admitting, but which they know to be true. The poetry world is small, incestuous, and self-absorbed, and nobody outside of it is aware of its existence.

I wish this much self-awareness existed in the many other essentially irrelevant fields in which humans dabble.