"a poem...makes you shut up."

       Poet Galway Kinnell was once introduced at a poetry reading as "a living American poet."  Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets Toi Derricotte notes how funny but also how sad this is, indicating "the distance between most Americans and poetry."

       But later in a letter written to "Friend(s) of Poetry," Derricotte mentions a 4th grader who had been writing poems for several days with a group of students in a class she taught, who, when asked, "So what is a poem?"  replied, "I don't know what a poem is, but it makes you shut up."

       "Living" poems (whether the poet be dead or alive), that's what they do--make us shut up, in realization of a truth we had not fully known until that moment.