Many of the young poets who began publishing during the turmoil of the late sixties felt commanded by interior and exterior pressures to plunge beneath received moral and aesthetic discourse, exploring the special potencies of images rescued from the depths of the unconscious. Because the archetypal aura of their early, psyche-laden imagery was so strong, because the personal and political anguish of their youth was so intense, some of these poets have understandably been reluctant to pull away from the pyrotechnics of deep imagery and the cathartic charges of the surreal. But the three under consideration—Thomas Lux, Gregory Orr, who is the Poetry Consultant of VQR, and Laura Jensen—have, in their own distinctive ways, grappled with the challenges of surviving their youth and remaking their work into something no less potent but more conscious and more directly communicative than their earlier work.

If there is such a thing as the natural history of the imagination of a given time and place, then the recent work of Lux, Orr, and Jensen has something important to tell us about the the inside face of history, and about how poets seek out the sustenance necessary to survive into a creative maturity—in a vocation where survival has sometimes seemed the exception rather than the rule. Each of the three offers us an example of a fire-tempered conscience and each has returned, in different ways, to the oldest impulse of American poetry, moral witness-bearing. My sense is that Lux, Orr, and Jensen feel empowered to pass on their moral, psychological, and social insight because they've turned personal corners, survived themselves and their youthful rites of passage.