Death of the Short Lyric
Is it me, or has the short lyric gradually vanished from American lit journals? It seems as though long narrative poems are making a comeback. This really worries me, mostly because I enjoy short, compact lyrics over longer narrative poems. Ths short lyric seems to be alive and well in Britain, however, at least based on the few British poets I’ve read lately. This trend worries me, primarily beacuse much of my book-length ms contains small, compact lyrics. More and more it seems that publishers prefer more prosaic poems that think (what I like to call cerebral verse) rather than poems that show via imagery. Whatever happened to the golden rule anyway . . . show don’t tell?