Billy Mills celebrates epistolary poems, including both that use the letter-writing form and those poems actually sent through the mail. He makes the ubiquitous eulogy for the death of letter writing which, even while I agree with him, somehow irks me. I think it's because he seems to conflate the diminishing of actual letter writing with the diminishing of direct-address epistolary poems. One does not necessarily follow the other. If he likes epistolary poems, he needn't fret for their extinction alongside mailed handwritten pages from one person to another. He grieves, believing the letter poem will be replaced by the email or text-message poem, which only makes him come off as curmudgeonly, nostalgic for something that's not lost.
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March 10, 2009
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