"To be acknowledged outside of my city is amazing to me, because I don't really feel like I did nothing distasteful. I made the music I want to make, and people started to like it."

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People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.

— Rae Armantrout