It's Enough to Make Richard Posner Dig Poetry

On the eve of the publication of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser grants an interview to Dan Wickett. What with Wickett being so respectful and all, Kooser doesn't get to show his sassy side much, but he explains, among other things, his belief in the poet's need for cost-benefit analysis:

"What I mean is that for every choice a poet makes, as to every word, every punctuation mark, there can be seen to be a cost and a benefit. The use of a period instead of a semicolon, in a particular poem, may change the emphasis slightly. Is that change of emphasis a benefit, or has it cost something? You might choose to write with no capital letters, say. The benefit of that might be a certain colloquialness of feeling, but the cost would be that your readers might have a hard time following the sense."