I would like to recommend to poets and writers generally a new book, We, the Lonely People: Searching for Community by Ralph Keyes. An excellent reporter and lively writer himself, Keyes studies the effect of the breakdown of community in our mass anonymous society as it is expressed in our daily lives. He writes about the strange communities that develop among teenagers in shopping malls, lonely people in laundromats (not to speak of bars and better known places of gathering), in queues outside theaters, in encounter groups, clubs of all sorts (especially the rapidly expanding “anonymous” clubs of alcoholics, overweight people, hot lines and open line talk shows, all ways in which great intimacy is shared on the one hand while essential anonymity is retained on the other). For one thing, the book contains some important insights into the writing world itself — especially the effects of publications (and television programs) to develop a sense of family among their readers. More profoundly, however, it suggests the themes of search and yearning to which good poetry and fiction today might well be speaking.
Judson Jerome