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| | The Narrative Impulse |
 | | Ai, Frank Bidart, Ana Castillo, Alfred Corn, Thomas Disch, Suzanne Gardiner, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert McDowell, David Mura, Carol Muske and Joyce Carol Oates, participated in panel discussions and readings where the role of narrative in poetry was explored. |
 | | Through narrative, poets explore and define identity; and through the process of identification, a reader whose gender, race, or culture is not the same as those poets' comes to understand and feel solidarity with them--the reader, that is, with good will and the ability to exercise the imagination in behalf of others. |
 | | If the difference is race, one the Festival's participants, the poet Ai, presents a crucial test case, as she suggested in comments presented before her reading, since her background ins Japanese-American, African-American, and Choctaw. |
| www.poetrysociety.org /journal/articles/corn.html (884 words) |
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