> In times when the only way for a younger poet to make an impact
>has been getting fairly short poems published in highly intellectual (read:
>anti-mythical) journals, am I deluded to be investing my energies into a
>work which can only be published as a dismembered body in a variety of
>potentially hostile journals before seeing the light of the day as an
>entire volume? And is there a way out of this maze?
Ali - if an epic is what demands to be written, then write it.
Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.
I'd hesitate to call Nightmarkets an "epic" - surely much more
novelistic. Also Monkey's Mask and so on. I don't know what you'd call
John Scott's work; some of it has much more in common with classical
_lyric_. I used to say the epic was a dead form, which seemed to be
confirmed by the yawn lines of poems like Omeros.
But then I read a couple of poems. Fredy Neptune is most definitely an
epic poem, and I liked it immensely, thinking of it as a kind of Iliad,
though it by no means adheres to any formula, and Alice Notley's The
Descent of Alette, which draws richly from the Comedy and the myth of
Inanna, among many other things, and is "set" in the subways of NY. And
which is the first poem I've read which I wholeheartedly wished I had
written myself.
So I had to eat my words.
Best
Alison
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