Audience for poetry

In America at the present time, the audience for poetry in the general population is astonishingly small. I recently experienced this when confronting a group at a reading who revealed they did not read poetry. I assumed they have no idea what a good poem is. The audience was mainly elderly, the ages ranging from the late 50s to the 90s. The deprivation for these readers of the insight and truth in a good poem is saddening. They might find a correlation between their own experiences and the revelation in the poem.