What would the poem be like that reflected the broader world at the same time as affirming the lyric reality of the self in the contemporary world?  I think much this last day or two about my poetry’s obligation to fuse the lyric impulse, which remains so strong, with the impulse that led me to “Yemen,” with a broader sense of the cultural moment—EDI, the “culture wars” and so on—with the realities of this beautiful Vermont lake, including its radio-playing eternally ski- and float-dragging stealth speedboats, with war in Ukraine, the collapse of England… the “encyclopedic” poem, Medrie might call it—but I don’t imagine it so, would not feel any obligation of completeness.  Merely a more faithful record of what the lyric self really is: caught up in a web of obligations, distractions, fears, irritants, realities that poetry cannot wholly avoid and still be of its time.  So that each poem earns its lyricism rather than assuming it or, worse, sheltering it pathetically from the harsher realities of the world.  True lyric must be more comprehensive than I have allowed it to be in my work.

One answer would be, has been, that such a poem must be fragmentary, “open,” that it must signal its openness to multiple realities with a sharp tension between white space and ink.  Dudek’s Atlantis.  Inscriptions of real forces etched as if by chance onto the blank page, the self with the pen in hand not attending much.  Dated now, and always risked tedium anyway.