I had a course in modern poetry back in the mid 80s.
We read one poem by her because it was in the book. It was mediocre at best. Back then the American poets you wanted to read were Frost, Whitman, Eliot, Berryman, Plath, Carver, Tess Gallagher, Roethke., Sexton.
We had to memorize passages of Frost in High School, along with Poe. In college it was Eliot and Pound.
The sad fact is no one reads poetry anymore, or is taught it. Therefore second and third rate stuff that would never have been published 100 or 50 years ago can be published and canonized today.
You sound like me. I was an English major in the seventies at University of Montana Missoula, where Richard Hugo held sway. Those were the days. I heard Tess Gallagher read too.
I think that poetry is important to people too, in ways that might not be readily apparent. This is one of the reasons I hate seeing college becoming just a factory producing people better able to get jobs and pay off student loan debt. Things like poetry is what produces a well-rounded, thinking person, something considerably higher than an animal.
I heard a radio show on CBC once discussing the old elementary school practice of having kids memorize poetry. It turns out that there are benefits of this. Some people actually recall this poetry years later to help them in stressful times. A lot of kids memorizing poetry in country grade schools like mine were not going past 8th grade and a bit of high school and everybody knew it, but this didn’t make it any less important. .Daffodils came up a lot. Wordsworth gets little respect today, except from my British ex-boyfriend and my mother, both dead now.
I remember learning Pippa Passes.
I think that Pound said something like “Poetry is news that stays news.”
I realize that he was pretty politically incorrect and ended up in a mental institution in Idaho, but it’s still one if my favorite quotes ever.
Not everybody finds it interesting.