Mike seems to have missed my point. All poetry is written for a small audience, like it or not, so the fact that Lyn Hejinian sells more copies of My Life than many poets who supposedly reach for a more mainstream audience might be a significant fact, if you want to argue that language poetry is more audience-unfriendly than other kinds. (Hejinian's book is at about 40,000). (The U.S. poetry best seller list does include a few living poets that Mike misses in his hasty summary: Walcott, Hoagland, Angelou.) The Hejinian BAP is on the list of the top 100, along with the Hoover postmodern Norton. I consider any poetry book to be ranked higher than 100,000, even if for a very brief time, to be doing very well indeed. After all, poetry books can't help you shed those unwanted pounds or defeat a liberal in an argument. On the other hand, any book ranked above (should I say below?) a million simply is not reaching its audience. In this group are many worthy writers who are not read because readers don't know about them. I'm sure Mike would say this is true of Rhina Espaillat. It's not her fault that she's not read, is it? Surely this would be a case of the audience being inadequate to the poet, not the poet being inadequate to the audience.