What is found there

I've been thinking about the worth of poetry lately, given that I'm about to start the 30/30 Project, and that I will be hoping that friends and family will make a donation to Tupelo Press in support of my daily poetry efforts. What makes poetry worth supporting? Why is it important that small publishers stay alive, putting poetry in people's hands, giving poets a wider voice?

As an undergraduate at UCSB's College of Creative Studies, one of the writers we frequently discussed was William Carlos Williams, a doctor, a poet, a writer of short stories. Williams's lasting influence on me comes from the end of his long poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," when he writes:

My heart rouses
  thinking to bring you news
    of something
that concerns you
  and concerns many men.  Look at
    what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
  despised poems.
    It is difficult
to get the news from poems
  yet men die miserably every day
    for lack
of what is found there.
  Hear me out
    for I too am concerned
and every man
  who wants to die at peace in his bed
    besides.

Leaving aside the fact that this is not an example of inclusive language, I feel the rightness of the idea of there being something in poetry that cannot be found elsewhere and which is important and vital. Each art form has its own vocabulary of this "something" - the "news" I get from a painting is different from the "news" I get from music. And poetry is the place where I feel like I am able to get closest to being part of the news, of being, in this sense, a newsmaker. Sometimes I have felt this in art I've made, but mostly in poems. 

And it does rouse my heart to think that I am part of bringing my news to someone who might be needing it, just as so many poets have brought the news to me.

(find a longer excerpt from "Asphodel" here: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/asphodel-greeny-flower-excerpt)