[Susan McLean]

Jim, I am glad that the confusion didn't last.

Samantha, forms proliferate and change over time. I think that is a good thing. So, even though this form of lai is one that many people are unfamiliar with, why not make them familiar with it as an available option? The kinds of lais you describe seem unlikely to find many writers trying to write them in English, though one can never rule anything out.

Susan

[Jim Moonan]

.
Just poking back in to say that, regardless of what a lai is and is not, the crux of this poem conveys in a precise way a hard-to-express dynamic that flows between human beings.

The title is bad-ass.

.

[Samantha Pious]

It is a good thing that forms proliferate and change. However, it's a bad thing to give a new form a false history, claiming (as the Medium writer and several other bloggers seem to) that a 21st-century form (the single-stanza lai) was used in the 13th and 14th centuries (when the Middle French lai and the Middle High German Leich both entailed many more stanzas). It would be somewhat like claiming that the sonnet was first invented by, say, Shakespeare or Petrarch (when in fact it originated in thirteenth-century Sicily).