David, Since I knew of you already as a collaborator with my old teacher from the seventies, John Nims, whom I remember with great affection and respect, I've enjoyed your comments and getting to know your poetry better, and it is no surprise that both are full of interest.
My question concerns your role as a champion of the idea that contemporary poetry should be breaking out of its little lyrical box and trying to reclaim some of the ground lost to other literary forms in the last century. I couldn't agree more with this general idea, but it seems to me that the type of poetry most often mentioned in this context, narrative poetry, is not something that many lyric poets are very disposed or well equipped to write, while there are other possibilities for poetry, which we often associate with the genres of satire and elegy, and which may fit the talents of a wider range of lyric poets, but which we don't support very well in our journals or our criticism.
What's lost sight of, perhaps, is that lyric poetry is a very rarefied genre, which, while highly valued, has never occupied too much public space. In the great wealth of ancient literature there is almost no Greek lyric poetry after the deaths of Pindar and Bacchylides in the 5th century. With the exception of the great odes of Horace, a little Statius, and some choral odes in Seneca's plays, the Romans had virtually no lyric poetry. Yet undoubtedly in the intellectual life of each culture, poets had a far larger place than in our own. These poets were not often writing intense personal reflections on their own inner lives, but they were writing about the culture around them: its mores, its history, its religion, its metaphysics. I think you're right when you say that contemporary poetry is puritanical in its solemnity; it's also highly restrictive and even anti-intellectual in its range of topics. Many journals actually say upfront that religion and politics are off limits!
Some people will counter that my notion of "lyric" is tied to mere formal characteristics, but the connection between form and subject is not fanciful or merely conventional. Today, the occasional treatment of public issues in lyric modes, like the sonnet, signifies to me the pressure felt by thinking poets to write about important topics in a form that is conventionally lyric and personal.
What I'm asking, I guess, is whether or not an even more radical advocacy of an expanded poetry, not limited to the lyric or to narrative, might resonate with our contemporaries. I apologize in advance if my question simply betrays my ignorance of your own already stated views. I do, of course, know that you, Dana Gioia, and others have written well on this general topic, and my recollection may well be faulty in thinking that the dominant emphasis has been on narrative as the neglected genre, but, in any event, I would certainly be interested in your thoughts.
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