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Americans are impatient with riddles and so they give poetry a wide berth, knowing from Miss Fernwood’s 8 th grade English class that a page of writing with an uneven right margin means a series of jokes with no punch lines, a puzzle with no right answers. And Americans have an irreverent streak: we sit in church hoping someone will fart. Poetry is a hushed chapel in which the poet sighs and the congregation must sigh along with her. And in this chapel, nobody ever farts. The gases are absorbed in the heart and emitted verbally.
- Good Poems, American Places