Day by day, John Latta issues his uncomfortable complaint... & it seems right to me, most of the time. What sets him apart : a view of the poet as marking a distance between poetry & all the other busy discourse-games & artifice. Drawing a line on behalf of an imagined unity or congruence between the speaker/singer and the natural world. Nature as a source of equilibrium or restoration, after the corruptions of civilization - actually as a mirror of a free identity or way of living. This is in line with Pound, and through him, Whitman, Dante, the Troubadours... maybe way back to the old bards & shamans.

& the poem as complex material matrix of sound & sense, an object, a work of art - not a flippant game with discourse-symbols, or an abstract program or technical tweak, not a clever groupuscule - because the poet is engaged with a personal & psychic renewal-through-poetry, which necessarily involves subjective experience & objective vision - a personal try at the traditions of verse-music, & a working-out of actual experiential difficulties, which can't be reduced to group sing-alongs & Facebook "shout-outs".

Latta's shambling laughter & sharp left jabs are a way of coaxing us back toward a more natural & significant sense of the "honor", the dignity, of poetry - when it stands on its own feet, & separates itself from the generally lightweight distractions of the phony world of ingratiating po-biz chitter-chat...

a poem as having specific weight & gravity, & form & color - bearing witness to some silent lifting, or lifting silence... a struggle, a labor of composition (as in painting, music, sculpture...) - composing the lips for speech-song...