Any poet can make audience members groan with her words. I want to know whether she can turn the world on with her smile. Can she take a nothing poem and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?

Let's hear a groan for going out into the wilderness to start a relationship with a gorgeous, nature-loving man.

I was at that reading. There was an annoying cabal of groaners punctuating every. single. poem. I had to be evacuated from the premises near the end by a friend who saw me in a pose of despair. It's one thing for a medium to die, it's another for the active practitioners to smother their art with cloying prose and the suffocating weight of politics.