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Alison Thanks for letting me on Alice Notley. I like the idea of an epic set in the subway a lot. And you're probably right as far as 'Nightmarkets' and 'Monkey's Mask' not being epics, but then again I can do a rites-of-passage breakdown of each and show how these works closely resemble the old hero quest. In Wearne's book, for example, the two brothers can be easily seen as the 'ego' and 'shadow'; the 'call to adventure' which comes with the boys being called to army; the 1975 dismisal can be read every bit as the archetypal 'wasteland' which is the outset of most epics e.g. Dante's forest, Homer's king-less Ithaca, etc. But then again I can do the same thing with every novel, play, movie, TV commercial, pop song, etc. I can't remember too much of Porter's 'Monkey's mask' but 'Akhenaton' is very much like an epic, especially with its 'supernatural' elements and the last poem which takes the edge off the tragedy and elevates the doomed hero into stars. > if an epic is what demands to be written, then write it. >Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. Well, it's certainly what's demanded with my subjectmatter, but what I was talking about, which probably didn't come across properly, was investigating the possibilities for a new (actually very very old) kind of poetry book; a cover-to-cover story in poetry which is not a collection of ANY sort. Or is that too much of a commercial/critical risk for a publisher to take? Ali