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Utterance, mutterance. I guess the terminology is bad. Is there are literary term for "engagement"? What I'm thinking of is for example the effect of participation in the Spanish Civil War on certain poets. This is what I meant when referring to the prophets. The sense of public address. Marvell was a master of this (cf. his Horatian ode on Cromwell etc.). It's not so much a style but the force of personality emerging in direct speech addressed to an issue of public concern. The wars of Symbolism against "journalism" maybe put a false dichotomy in place between literary mannerism & ordinary speech, forcing poetry into a special reserve, when SOMETIMES it can straddle both extremes. So today we have rap & poetry slams on the one side & cryptic poetry cliques with their own self-enclosed idioms on the other (I'm speaking of US "alternative" poetry culture). But style & technique are no guide. Individual poets have to master & transcend all styles. The search for the new avant-garde might do well to just read some of the better poems in the New Yorker, or say for example CK Williams's poem "Fear" published as an op-ed piece in the NY Times about a year ago. Maybe by managing such imperfect but effective public address, the mainstream IS the avant-garde. Heaven forefend, comrades! Nice to hear from you, Kent! Henry