Too busy enjoying the beautiful weather to spend much time in front of the computer; also housecleaning and plotting what could be a climactic session of the present D&D adventure today. Plus finishing up some literary journalism: a piece for the PSA's Crossroads magazine and my Perloff review. But I did want to mention a very interesting interview that Ben Friedlander did of Dan Bouchard a couple years ago. This version appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter (why isn't that available online, for goodness sake?) and you can read a longer version here. In the interview Ben points out that Bouchard is a "moralist," which I've also noticed is a quality that I find attractive in my contemporaries. I don't think there's much moralizing in my own poetry until comparatively recently, but perhaps I'm wrong about that. Moralizing poems can be a drag, but when the poet has a generally consistent stance among and between poems in a given book or series I find that to be a valuable and bracing point of orientation for a reader. Maybe we need to bring back the days of instructive pamphlets to revive poetry's audience a bit. I would like to see a series of poems premised on useful advice for the benefit of one's soul or business ethics or foreign policy or whatever.