7. (or 6) I have less and less patience with poems that don't in some way engage human emotion. Poems in which I do not feel the presence of a feeling (as well as thinking) human being. This preference is, I think gendered. I hear my students talk about their fear of sentiment (they seem as afraid of sentiment as of sentimentality or do they just not distinguish between the two?) and I can't figure out where this is coming from. I used to be afraid of writing poetry of witness, a sort of AA poetry, but now I think I prefer that to the mechanistic poetry that wants to be person-less. Is this about age? Gender again?