7. The poetics of inquiry and action I value is rooted in antiquity, and has found in the 20th and 21st centuries renewed push from poets like Williams, Olson, and Creeley, as well as from rhetoricians and critics like Kenneth Burke and Nancy Struever, to name a few. Struever’s example of Benjamin clearly speaks to my contemporary sense of writing—one that is engaged critically with the cultural and social conditions and forms around us. Poets perform significant actions that enable possibilities to move outside the poem. The New Americans truly worked this notion of poetry as inquiry and action contra the linguistic turn that has motivated later investigations of poetry as cultural artifact in resistance to commodified language. I value belief and inquiry into the symbolizing potentials at hand in any given situation.