How refreshing it was to encounter The Reaper Essays. The Reaper was a literary journal which ceased publication in 1989 after 18 issues. The Editors, Mark Jarman & Robert McDowell, believed that by then they had achieved their stated aim of creating the circumstances in which a new narrative poetry might flourish. The Reaper was their editorial persona named as responsible for many of the excellent essays contained in this book. (Other chapters, no less excellent, include a fictitious correspondence between Dante and Homer, and a laugh out loud hilarious spoof of an interview with a contemporary poet couple.)
On the positive side, I feel as though I have finally been given permission to write narrative poetry. Selections such as "The Reaper's Non-Negotiable Demands," which includes a call for no more poems about poetry, and "How to Write Narrative Poetry" which gives ten admirable rules to follow, not only encourage me to believe in the art form but also prompt me to reconsider my own oeuvre, past and present. On the negative side, I think Mark & Robert downed the scythe too early. In "Thanatopsis Revisited" that po-biz icon American Poetry Review comes under their microscope and is accused of publishing too few narrative poems. Now I happen to have the most recent issue of APR and found that 17 years later we have about the same proportion of narrative: lyric.
My other evidence for this lack of progress goes back to the spoof interview "The Reaper Interviews Jean Doh & Sean Dough." I doubt I would have found this chapter so hilarious if it wasn't, alas, still so true.