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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 you are a kindred spirit of mine! so happy to have found you! i agree with you whole-heartedly... i do get dismayed when i see posts all about how students in college should get degrees in engineering and such because they will more easily have jobs when they come out... i get that, but there is more to being educated... i am a homeschooler who has tried my darnedest to give my boys a classical education... a liberal arts education...

from the beginning i introduced them to poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson, Ogden Nash, Milnes, and many others... all the Mother Goose Rhymes, for certain... they memorized a plethora of poems including Jabberwocky, The Raven, Paul Revere's Ride... i even taught a Children's Poetry workshop several times a year for homeschooled kids... today my sons so easily read the Greeks and the Romans... we are currently reading Dante's The Divine Comedy and The Aeneid...

i think it is important to educate the whole man... we study Latin, Logic, Mathematics, Geomety, World History, art and music... this is the type of education that some of our Founding Fathers received, and Thomas Jefferson is my inspiration in teaching my sons... i want them to truly be free thinkers and life-long learners... my goal has always been that their education touches on all three aspects of being human: the mind/intellect, the soul/heart and the physical/hands...

honestly, i do not care what they end up doing professionally... they will likely do more than one thing in their lifetimes... i can see one perhaps joining the Coast Guard for a time, then teaching online writing courses and literature while raising horses and being a worship leader at church... and the other perhaps being a theater actor and chef... but whatever may come, they will be able to draw upon the many different aspects of their education... life is more than what is practical... utilitarian...

i know i have rambled, but it is nice to have found you :)