Strong Verse, Part 6: Lyric, Narrative, and Dialogue

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Playing music with someone must line up quarks in the brain. My banjo playin' buddy David Yezzi wrote the following:

Contemporary poetry is woefully limited by its over-reliance on the lyric form, but the lyric itself is today further reduced by the absence of the dramatic element, by the loss of voices (and of milieux) other than the poet’s own.

in March's New Criterion. I'll let his entire article serve as part 6 of my discourse on what makes for strong verse.