"While it’s hard not to feel sometimes that all we’re doing when we write is sitting in a room talking to ourselves, what a poetry friendship can do, or has done for me at any rate, is connect the practice of the art to its beginnings in a premodern, even pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer, past when agents and publicists did not exist. It has given me a kind of freedom from the expense of spirit in a waste of shame that has accompanied the art’s professionalization —and it has shown me how poetry, even while drenched in a market economy, still has its roots in older, more intimate forms of human belonging." Alan Shapiro Triquarterly