As evidenced by the variety of writers who participated in the PSA's Narrative Impulse Festival, the return to narrative by poets in recent years cannot be attributed to one school or group of poets. The panel I participated in, "Writers of Fiction and Poetry," highlighted the fact that many poets have recently turned to fiction or, in my case, memoir. A couple poets brought up how, when they were young poets, the division between poets and fiction writers was much more rigid than now; a mark of your seriousness as a poet then was, in part, your refusal to entertain the thought of writing anything else. As one looks at the variety of young poets who are visual artists, performance artists or video artists, this breakdown between genres is taking place all over the art world. Part of this shift is tied to the forces of multiculturalism and the increasing diversity of artists and audiences in this society. As Ana Castillo pointed out, she sees her writing in many different genres as a way of making her work to as broad a population as possible, particularly members of her community who may not first look to poetry when they turn to literature. Similarly, I have felt the need in my memoirs to provide the historical, cultural, and political backdrop to my poetry that's simply not there in the mainstream culture. I have also come to feel less respectful of the boundaries between high and low art in part because I came to suspect that those boundaries often kept people of color from participating in "high" art. Here too I think of Bhaktins' characterization of the novel as the genre which exposes the rigidity of other genres and "sparks their renovation," infecting them "with the spirit of process and inclusiveness." For Bhaktin, the novel exposes those points in other genres where the language has gone stale and out of touch with contemporary reality.

Near the end of the second panel, "Implications of the Narrative," a lively discussion broke out concerning whether or not writers do or should think about their audience as they write. A number of poets argued that for writers to think about their audience is dangerous, and they maintained they write only by listening to their internal process or voices. While I don't think writers should have to think about their audience, it's obvious that writers like Shakespeare or Dickens did think about their audience, and the quality of their work speaks for itself. Certainly, we ought to be able to make a distinction between a high modernist like Joyce and his relationship to audience and Dickens'. I know that in my own work I do make certain decisions based on genre--e.g. poetry versus theater work--which take into account differences in audience and the way they receive the work. I'm also aware when I construct a narrative in poetry that the formal difficulties of that narrative and its language are more demanding than when I'm writing memoir, and this difference does involve some consideration of audience. At the same time, my writing of both genres influences the other (I feel to the benefit of both). The focus on the writer as engaged in an unsullied process alone with his or her soul is only a partial picture of the writing process, a romantic orthodoxy which has outlived its usefulness. If the impulse for narrative is, in part, an impulse to consider the question of audience--as I believe it is--such considerations need not necessarily be pernicious. They may in fact lead to the challenging of moribund conventions and a renewed attention to the world around us.