Joseph Duemer, whose excellent blog I read from time to time, is the editor or co-editor of an anthology of poems about dogs, I discovered a few weeks ago at Border's. There's nothing wrong with those thematic anthologies; in fact they can have a pleasantly aleatory quality. The 500 best poems about feet. I was trying to define what I take as the linguistic impoverishment of a certain style of America poetry, and I found this poem called "Dogs":

Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else’s dog
that you’re keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog’s absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time.

They say the average person has a (passive) vocabulary of about 50,000 words. You'd think, then, that this famous poet, whom I will call "Bill," would use more than the same 50 to write each poem.

Compare this to another poet who I will call "Frank," who fills his poems with proper names, words in other languages, gay slang and campiness, erudite vocabulary, and "cornball" surrealism. Both styles could be called "colloquial" in some sense, but they are miles apart.