In my interview for Fringe Magazine with Adam Deutsch, Publisher/Editor of Cooper Dillon Books, most interesting to me was his idea that poetry is on the outskirts of our culture because of an absence of community. We fail to see ourselves -- the poetry world -- as community, and often fail to act as a community, supporting each other in ways that would strengthen the art itself.
Community isn't a new concept, but it's newly emerging as an alternative to the conventional ways of doing things, a more collaborative way to live. You see it in movements like co-housing and sustainable community gardening. A sense of being connected and that we all benefit from working together, not competing with each other. Replacing competition with cooperation. Perhaps it's too much to expect poets and writers not to feel competitive in the difficult process of getting published and developing an audience. But the point Adam made in the interview was that just a little more sense of community would benefit the entire poetry world. More books would get sold and read. I think he's hit on a big idea. More power to him and his press.