In 1980 when "Chocolates" was published in Caviare at the Funeral, a group of poets were arguing against the ubiquity of lyric poetry in theUnited States, and against the overuse of the confessional "I," claiming that, among other things, it suggested isolation of the self from the larger human community. In the 1980s this loose group of poets were considered part of the Expansive Movement in poetry, which called for a return to narrative and formalism. In his essay "Poetry and Politics" included in the anthology Poetry After Modernism, poet and critic Frederick Pollack claimed that after modernism "Poetry seems not to be a public discourse at all, or to be only incidentally or vestigially public." Pollack uses Simpson's poem "In the Suburbs" to underscore the lemming-like attitude of writers who ignore the possibility that language in general, and poetry in particular, can represent a...