I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.
It's American Alternative radio stations that bug me. We're considered Alternative, but don't expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and Offspring. We're hardly of that generation.
A lot of the American press at the time was saying 'just watch what happens when Bertelsmann tries to buy EMI, that will be a moment of truth that will show the Commission's true colors.' Well, that deal never happened either.
I guess when I first started speaking with an American accent, there's a tendency to create a caricature of the accent because you just exaggerate the pieces that stand out to you.
