| Sumario: | 'Change the Subject' is one in a collection of lyric essays on poetics that enact arguments about genre, written in conversation with work by Drs. Jen Webb and Julia Prendergast. I propose that we can mark important differences among works by looking at the extent to which a specific piece of writing (arriving in sentences or in lines) commits itself to certain kinds of operations, belonging more or less to lyric (which may govern a novel, story, or essay) or to narrative (which may drive a poem). I offer a way to think about how specific works are made/make their meanings, and how they help both writers and readers encounter complex and difficult realities. 'Change the Subject' connects narrative and lyric operations to grammatical enactments of subject and verb. Placing Emily Wilson's The Iliad beside Alice Oswald's lyric 'translation', Memorial, it considers their different uses of simile and the narrative grammar of battle in The Iliad, which enacts death, as it becomes a lyric grammar of resurrection in Oswald. I weave into this a reading of Alice Munro's 'Carried Away' and use encounters with wildlife to examine my resistance to telling stories that approach the sublime in a 'realist' mode.
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