J. D. McClatchy, From "Twenty Questions" in Twenty Questions:

One has heard a good deal lately about the New Formalism. What's up?

It's one side of a wooden nickel. On one side, a real buffalo called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, a frivolous exercise in nonsense. On the other, a big chief with a feather in his hair: the new formalists, who claim to be restoring traditional values to poetry. Where mindlessness was, there shall rigor be; where technical sloppiness was applauded, it shall be driven out with a crisp quatrain or brisk narrative. Their aims seem noble, and are narrow. Worse, their practice is rarely above the second-rate. It's not that they write in verse; it's that they write bad verse--exactly the sort of plodding, inaccurate lines that versifiers have been blamed for down the centuries. If only Pope were alive, here's a new Dunciad to be written! The parade of pasty, pinstripe formalists and preprogrammed L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E cyborgs, all slaves of a single idea, the feministas, hip-hop end men, hollow-voiced cliff dwellers from the Southwest, every Boston poet in a straight line so that they may pat each other on the back, East Village tyros...Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS is restored.

There's only one solution: write like McClatchy.

He seems remarkably uninformed and illogical for such a fancy literary critic. He acknowledges that there has always been bad poetry, even in the days when all poetry was in meter, yet he seems to think the presence of bad metered poetry in today's day and age makes a mockery of the formalist endeavor.

I think he is also way off the mark in claiming that the aims of those who write formal poetry are to drive out mindlessness and sloppiness, or that there is necessarily such a high-minded superciliousness behind the writing of formal poetry. I write it with complete respect for those who write free verse, not with scorn or intending to reproach my free-verse brethern. I write it because it seems to suit my talents, such as they are, and because I enjoy this kind of verse. I really don't need to be told by a second-rate free-verse poet that I have a political or social agenda simply because I like to rhyme.

It's sad, though, that an influential person like JDM doesn't encourage all poets to find the voice and mode that works for themselves, whether it be free or formal verse, instead of making snarky comments that bless only the boring middle-ground he is hoping to claim as his own.

Roger,

With all due respect, I think you're missing the point here. Bearing in mind that McClatchy is the man who edited James Merrill, it's fairly ludicrous to paint him as someone who's against metrical poetry per se, or who thinks all poets writing in form are "supercilious" or whatever.

I think McClatchy's point is that the "New Formalism" is becoming like language poetry, hip-hop, la feministas, whatever, in that for the group the politics of the form is too often a larger isssue than the quality of the poem. He isn't dismissing the traditions of poetry, he is dismissing their use for a political purpose. to foster an atmosphere of "us vs. them".

The excerpt beginning this thread was very specific in its criticism of the "New Formalism", and is not directed against metrical poetry as an art form. He's talking about people he thinks have "perverted" the art, or twisted it to their own political ends.

IMO opinion McClatchy's piece, in toto is a trenchant and thought-provoking piece of criticism. And, for what it's worth, I can't stand the man's poetry.

(robt.)

The problem is, there is no term for people who write in meter these days but who are not "New Formalists" in the sense of having an ax to grind or being disapproving of non-formalists or trying to "restore" poetry as it was written in days gone by. When people condemn "New Formalists," I think they are (wittingly or unwittingly) aligning themselves with those who think that rhyme and meter are a dead letter, necessarily retrogressive or reactionary.

Anyway, to speak of "they" who write formal poetry and to say that "their practice is rarely above second-rate," seems both unfair and unuseful. His "rarely" allows for exceptions, like Merrill, but who are the "they" he is condemning en masse, and what of the implication that it cannot be said of people who write the way McClatchy likes (neither LANGUAGE nor New Formal) that "their practice is rarely above second-rate"?

It should be obvious, even to McClatchy, that most poetry written in any form, from formal to free to LANGUAGE to you name it, is second-rate. So are most novels. So are most songs. So are most paintings. So are most sculptures. So are most actors. What does McClatchy mean to be saying, therefore, when he singles out New Formalism by claiming that most of the poems produced in its name are second-rate? I'm serious. What is his point? That formalists should write better? That formalism is empty and arid and should be avoided henceforth? That formalism is no different from any other kind of poetry or art form? That true art is hard to make in any style?

I suspect that this single paragraph doesn't express all of McClatchy's attitudes on the subject, but to me it shows that he had at least a moment of less-than-stellar thinking and insight.

Or third-rate. Or fourth.

Although I'm now thinking that I don't want to become too involved in this thread...I'd hazard a guess: McClatchy might be referring to the way in which some formalists seem to believe that their poetry is automatically good/better simply because it has meter and rhyme. The analogous, for any school, would be in the way some members of each school believe their poems are automatically good/better merely because they're following certain tenets of their school. Here, again, the subject of (e-)valuation rears its head, if it has one.

Incidentally, I've always wondered why "New Formalism" needed to be called "new." What's new about it, specifically? Or is it merely a temporal designation?

C.

To refute McClatchy, I'd say just go and read the new selected poems by Charles Martin or Sam Gwynn or recent books by Rhina Espaillat or A. E. Stallings and then decide if the work is really mediocre. I just finished Martin's *Starting from Sleep* and I admired so much of it that I'm considering reviewing it, even though I want to stop writing reviews.

I don't think McClatchy is against metrical or formal structures per se. Why then the rhetorical wish for another Pope to come along? That doesn't sound at all to me like someone who ipso facto devalues metrical poetry. On the contrary, I think the key phrase in that passage is "all slaves of a single idea"--and not only that narrow vision, but the fact that that narrow vision is politicized. I would be curious to know exactly what he means by "the sort of plodding, inaccurate lines that versifiers have been blamed for down the centuries" (inaccurate? interesting choice of word, that), but I thought the passage was interesting because it was so specific and pointed in its criticism.

In the same essay he writes:

In a time when one is asked to admire a string-tied bundle of old newspapers at the Whitney Biennial, why shouldn't one take every heartcry-in-jagged-lines as a poem? It is no wonder sentimental, neo-con critics of poetry yearn for a golden age, when the old father by the hearth read to his children from a well-thumbed copy of Wordsworth. The holiness of the heart's affections has never seemed so distant, so desired.

Nonsense. There are more poets and readers today than ever, but the proportion of good poets and good readers is probably the same as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. During the so-called golden age, Longfellow's "Hiawatha" was bought and read as a national epic, while Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" (published the same year, 1855) was ignored.

I would like to think if Beat poetry, for instance, was still fashionable in the way l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry (and its flip side, new formalism) currently are, McClatchy would be writing against ITS single-idea approach. It's the narrowness that is the key, I think.

And for the record, I think McClatchy's poetry is boring as well. I couldn't get through more than a few lines at a time before my mind drifted off.

Curtis: yes. And I suppose it is "new formalism" for the same reason pop art was originally refered to as "neodada"--the name will fit until something better comes along.

Tom,

If I had to point a finger--and, hell, I might as well--I'd say that the one factor above all that irritate me in reading some formalist verse is how the lines don't really seem to turn the poem. I.e., they often seem like place-holders, used to fill out the form, with no other major purpose. They give information which will be important for the conclusion (it is a step toward the end) but the meaning of the poem doesn't shift much between them, in a way that I'd call...uh, "expansive," or "multi-dimensional." Even when the ending line or couplet might provide a sharp turn, an unexpected conclusion, or a tight summary, the lines leading to the end are often merely expository in nature, almost prosaic in their development.

I've been re-reading Millay's sonnets recently, and I've marked where her turns actually seem to add to an overall experience which is multifaceted, yes, and also complete as a whole communication by the end: just when I'm thinking I know where she's going, she often shifts the route after the breaks, and I feel as if my own consciousness has been expanded. The lead-in (previous line) seems right, the shift seems right, and the slightly new direction (next line) seems right; and, finally, the composite of these three is much larger than what is directly communicated.

The formalist poems I like tend to avoid the "one-track" approach, but I'd be lying if I said that I've never thoroughly enjoyed some poems that "plodded" toward the end. Sometimes, the main idea of a poem, in combination with interesting rhythms and sounds and language, makes the development process between lines less important.

These considerations might only be a reflection of my own personal preference, of course.

Curtis.




[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited June 22, 2003).]

I remember first hearing the term New Formalism in the 1980s and writing to Dana Gioia, saying it sounded nutty to me. Ever since then I have consistently, in print and in conversation, expressed my reservations about it. Nonetheless, edit one anthology.... So it goes. I'm for strong technique, real vision--all the things poets have always been for, I guess, and I still find it dismaying when New Formalist poets are discussed as if they were a monolithic movement. Having made a few generalizations myself over the years, I'm getting think generalizations are odious. The proof of the validity of any poem is usually the poem itself. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, ...

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited June 22, 2003).]

The same JD McClatchy had high praise indeed for Anthony Hecht at the West Chester conference. Wouldn't it be cool to post a copy of that?

I'm with David in having reservations about generalizing. When I like a poem it often feels to me as if my explanation for liking it is pretty much post hoc, principles I've cobbled together to give my taste some more or less tangible basis. Same with poems I don't like, except that then I feel much less need to explain my reaction.
There ARE principles, but they emerge from practice over time. The practice isn't a matter of trying to fill out some Platonic template or ideal. But at some level we begin to generalize from our reactions because that's one of the things human brain do: lungs exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, kidneys filter the blood, brains generalize (and discriminate, too!). So there is satisfaction in criticism that seeks to generalize, and it can be intense satisfaction, although always a distant second to that of writing or reading a good poem.
Although I'm a pretty committed writer of formal verse, I wonder if formal versus free might be a useless way to divide poetry. You know, it took us thousands of years to figure out that skin color is a crappy basis for generalizing about human beings; maybe it won't take that long to come to a similar understanding about poetry, something vastly less important.
RPW

You know Curtis, I like what you said about the lines in formal poetry not being, so to speak, real "verse"--that is, they don't turn the poem, but merely exist as a nod to the form(at) of the poem, eg. "it's iambic pentameter so I need to end the line after the fifth stress." I've pretty much completely abandoned writing in form that would be considered "metrical," per se, but I do remember something Elizabeth Bishop said in an interview before she died. She was teaching at Harvard, and complaining about her students, to wit: (and this is a paraphrase) "you can't even scan their free verse!" Rhythm--whether codified into a metric or "free"--still has to have some kind of regularity, doncha think, something that is "scan-able" (as in the sense of discerning a rhythm, a regularity of sound)?

I did not attend West Chester and there is no published record of McClatchy's remarks on Hecht (if you find them feel free to post them), but I don't think McClatchy was pointing an accusatory finger at any particular poet(s). Rather, the passage I quoted seemed to be quite specific in its reservations. Again, it is a generalization, but in this case I thought it was a particularly useful one, warning about the limitations of reducing poetry to a "single-issue," whether that be post-structuralist language theory, jazz-inflections and rhythms, identity (whether racial, gender, or sexual orientation), or metrics. It didn't seem to me that McClatchy was singling out "new formalism," but rather pointing to the problems of reductionary thinking. Or theorizing.

Movements have different uses. To academics, they're something to categorize and write papers about. To writers, they're ways to self-identify, put feathers in your cap, and identify yourself to other people doing the same sort of thing. To publishers, they're a marketing gimick, to be ruthlessly flogged until the horse dies a speedy death, with the resulting carcass shunned (until it's time to mount a revival).

I've been identified as a Splatterpunk, a Mannerpunk, a New Trollope and likely several other things which really don't matter.

New Formalism isn't so much new as it's just the cool (or dorky) name the kids who like rhyming verse are calling themselves this week (who aren't calling themselves Rappers, that is). If it lets us sell more poems, cool, and if not, ditch it.

While I share feelings similar to Dave Mason's, there may be another dynamic at work in McClatchy's comment. Like Dave, I've never felt entirely comfortable with the dorky New Formalist label. I was writing formal poems long before the term was coined and I'd ever met, spoken to, or written to another formal poet of my generation. I also sometimes write free verse haunted by various types of meter or written hybrid poems that employ various degrees of free and formal verse.

The other dynamic that might be at play is this: That McClatchy wants to claim meter and form for himself while simultaneaously distancing himself from New Formalism, which is often attacked for political reasons as somehow being inherently politically reactionary. Claiming to like form but not New Formalism may be analogous to saying, "But some of my best friends write formal poems."

Of course there are any number of problems with McClatchy's assertions: even so short a passage is riddled with enormous generalizations (all people writing in traditional forms and/or meters are ipso facto new formalists); he doesn't qualify his terms (traditional values, rigor, inaccurate lines); his accusations are somewhat vague (what are "their aims" and why are they "narrow"? compared to what?). But he raises some really interesting points about the problems of "schools" and "labels."

Labels are indeed often used as a selling point, so to speak. But not everyone looks at poetry as a "salable commodity." Although the numbers of people seeking to publish their poems has exploded, it still does not mean everyone who writes poetry is looking to publish. Hard to believe, I realize, but there it is.

Another issue might be called a variant of "where there's smoke, there's fire": I have never read once of l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry or confessional poetry or GLBT-identified poetry or the like associated with conservative political viewpoints or agendas. But the "New Formalism=Political Conservativism" equation is consistently associated with the idea of metrical poetry as a "movement." I am not questioning the validity of that assumption. But I DO wonder why that assumption is made so often, so consistently.

Finally, a large part of the labeling problem may be self-perpetuating. For example: also posted recently is a notice that The Dictionary of Literary Biography has now published a separate volume on New Formalism and poets who self-identify as "new formalists." There are a number of websites specifically identifying themselves as New Formalist or Expansive. This website itself segregates metrical and non-metrical poems into different workshops. I have seen on several websites people boasting proudly of "OUR" poet (who is always someone working in traditional form or meter) who did so and so (with the implication, I guess, that everyone who isn't one of "OUR" poets is one of "THEM").

That labeling and segregating is being done by whom?



[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited June 26, 2003).]

Tom, to answer your following question--

"Another issue might be called a variant of "where there's smoke, there's fire": I have never read once of l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry or confessional poetry or GLBT-identified poetry or the like associated with conservative political viewpoints or agendas. But the "New Formalism=Political Conservativism" equation is consistently associated with the idea of metrical poetry as a "movement." I am not questioning the validity of that assumption. But I DO wonder why that assumption is made so often, so consistently."

--Generally, so-called Language Poetry is identified--and self-identified--with the political left. New Formalists have made no such claim about being politically conservative, since many, such as Charles Marting, are self-described liberals. Labelling New Formalism as rightwing was simply a method used to demonize the group by free versers who felt threatened by the upstart movement.

Paul, I agree with your general point. I am another example of a self-described liberal who loves formal poetry, and I'm sure there are many others like me. (Calvin Trillin writes some pretty funny metrical ditties for The Nation, for example).

But isn't there at least a germ of truth, overall, in the association of formalism with political conservatism? Magazines like Edge City and the New Criterion, for example, couple formal poetry with right-leaning editorial content. And the conservatives certainly seem to outnumber the liberals here at Erato. Perhaps it's not surprising that conservatives are more comfortable aligning themselves with tradition?

Anyway, I think those who dismiss formalism because they perceive it as a conservative activity, or because they believe that the very act of writing in meter is somehow associated with an outdated way of viewing the world, or that it is associated with a white Christian patriarchy, are full of shit.

Roger, there probably is some sort of connection between the conservation of language, poetic forms and traditions and a mild degree of political conservatism in this otherwise frenetically modern society. That might account for journals like The New Criterion and Edge City review. But overall, I'd say the vast majority of formalists are like most educated Americans, politically grouped in the center-left of the political spectrum. Erato's relatively high percentage of politically conservative formalists is an aberration. Oddly, by contrast, not only is metrical poet Calvin Trillin over at The Nation, but its poetry editor, Grace Schulman, is a sometimes formalist too. My own first widely read essay was "Toward a Liberal Poetics." Over the last decade or so, I've been pushed in a more conservative direction by the extremity of the cultural left. Positions once defined as liberal, like equal rights before the law regardless of race or sex, are now considered not only conservative, but are demonized as racist and sexist. The politically correct position is now to legally favor some selected groups over others. Liberal means, according to Webster, favoring freedom to choose. Political correctness has made so-called liberals less liberal.

To speak for a moment on behalf of McClatchy, he has, as Tim Murphy just reminded me, published formal poets like Tim Steele, A. E. Stallings, and Greg Williamson. Me too, once, some time ago.

Paul:

I suppose in a similar way, there are those of us who have been pushed in a more liberal/radical direction by rightwing, Christian, and Republican politicians. For example, the Supreme Court's decriminalization of sodomy by adults in the privacy of their homes elicited an opinion by all three dissenting Justices--Renquist, Scalia and Thomas--that the Court, in overturning the previous Bowers decision, declared the Court was advocating for the "homosexual agenda." (Are there copies of this agenda available for reading? I would be curious to see exactly what this agenda consists of.)

Perhaps it is because Republican lawmakers have decreed that homosexuals are advocating for "special rights"--like the right to marry or to adopt children. Here's a situation. My uncle was gay. He had a lover--since he could not legally marry--for thirty-three years. When my uncle was taken to the hospital because he could not breathe, his lover had to wait for information from my father, because he was not a member of my uncle's "immediate family." For him to dare advocate the right to be allowed to make medical decisions for his husband (or lover if you so prefer--the nomenclature is so difficult these days, isn't it?) of thirty-three years would be considered one of those "special rights" the GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transexual) community are agitating for.

I have used the example of "special rights" for the GLBT commnunity because I am personally acquainted--and affected--by political decisions such as the Lawrence decision. My boyfriend, on the other hand, is a die-hard conservative Republican (he's lucky he's so cute, that's all I can say). He is a bigtime Hilary Clinton-basher, for example, but was cheering the Lawrence decision as well. Look, for example (if you must--lol) at the Log Cabin Republicans. I am raising all of this simply to point out that "political correctness" may, like the ideas of "liberal," "radical," and "conservative" be much more complex and nuancedthan simple either/or thinking makes them out to be.

I suppose this is all a roundabout way of agreeing that generalizations are extremely limited in their usefulness. What I found surprising was how ardently some people go to defend them. In this case, it would be actions that segregate formal from free verse, or asserting that one is ispo facto better than the other. If you think about art forms that were invented and/or primarily developed in the West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries--jazz, modern dance, atonal music, nonrepresentational painting and sculpture, performance art, theater of the absurd, flash fiction, and the like--ALL of them take aspects of traditional arts into account for their own particular aesthetic approach.

I thought Matisse was rather interesting. When he taught students art, he didn't teach them fauvist color theories or cubist "perspective," he taught them line drawing and anatomy and perspective and basic color theory--the same theory that art academies and studios had taught for hundreds of years. When one of his students complained all of this was "old hat" and were they ever going to get to the "interesting" (ie modern) stuff, he was scandalized. You need a foundation in the traditions, he told them, before you can even understand what modern/contemporary artists are tying to do, let alone creating art along modern lines.

I found McClatchy's assertion interesting because it doesn't advocate a particular political position. He doesn't say, new formalism is garbage because its practioners are backward-looking conservative ninnies hoping to turn back the clock to some proverbial Eden that never really existed to begin with, or that l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets are misguided because they are reducing poetry to a narrow set of liberal/radical political theories. To me, that passage is a clearing away, an attempt to disentangle poetry from the ideological and political deritrus it has accumulated over time.

Dear Tom,

Well, as you note, there were only 3 dissenters in the sodomy case and the law was struck down. Liberals have little to fear from the ever-shrinking number of cultural conservatives or the increasingly small amount of influence the religious right has over all of our institutions. What's on the increase is political correctness, which the same allegedly conservative court has just made the law of the land. Despite the equal protection clause of the constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, O'Connor has just made group rights, an official racial hierarchy, and "diversity" the law of the land.

As to poetry, I still maintain my original thesis in "Toward a Liberal Poetics." As Matisse suggested, we have to ground poetry in the traditional fundamentals; then genuine artists who've mastered their craft can exercise the greatest freedom in creating art, liberally choosing whatever techniques suit them.

By the way, if you haven't already read it, you MUST read Charles Martin's marvellous poem "How My Queer Uncle Came to Die at Last." It was published a while back in the Hudson and appears now in his selected poems *Starting from Sleep.* I promise you will love it.

Well Paul, we'll have to agree to disagree on the recent Supreme Court decisions--they gave me great hope, as nothing else this Presidential admininstration has done--but gosh darn this country was founded on the right to whine and to disagree, wasn't it? I mean, John Adams was considered nothing less than a crank by many in his day, wasn't he?

But yes, I have been a member here for 1.75 years and I have always maintained the following:

--Poetry and the poem first. Free verse versus formal verse is an artificial distraction, analagous to Elizabeth Bishop saying gender is an artificial distraction at the highest levels of Art;

--People should learn meter and rhyme the same way that musicians learn scales or painters and sculptors learn about light and anatomy. It's the foundation for everything else;

--Everyone should have the right to disagree, to whine, to be a crank if they so choose. I would be hard-pressed to find good art that doesn't revolve around a conflict of some kind. Disagreement won't kill you.


I would be very interested in reading a copy of your thesis. Are there copies available?

I will look for a copy of the Charles Martin poem. Thank you for suggesting it. I have pretty much stopped writing in meter because I am fed up with new formalists and new formalism. The last thing I was working on was a parody of Longfellow: "Stonewall, or The Midnight Uprising of All Those Queers." Maybe I'll get back to it one of these days.

Thank you for the very interesting and civilized discussion.

Tom

PS I must admit I am getting a huge kick out of being a legal sodomite!

[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited June 27, 2003).]

Tomas, mi Hermano,

I MUST applaud!

You DO present so handsomely when you don the dashing (to my eye) formal wear of scholarly logic and self-composure, heightening the effect immensely by the casual insertion into your lapel of that wildly vibrant orchid that is so... YOU!

Between you and Paul, that's about as well-stated and civilized a debate as I've seen in any environment like this. I applaud you both!

(robt)

I don't think anyone would disagree if the Supreme Court had struck down a law saying that consenting adult men and women are required to limit their sexual intercourse to the missionary position in the privacy of their bedroom.

Imagine if religious fervor took over a state, and the democratically elected leaders said that anything but the missionary position was "immoral", and they legislated accordingly. And let's say the test case before the Court had been a happily married, monogamous couple of 30 years who had been fined for having sex with the woman on top.

Would anyone be surprised if the Supreme Court said that government simply doesn't have the power to deny a married couple of the liberty in question? Or would the Court, in so ruling, be "taking sides in the cultural war"?

The fact is, it's simply not a legitimate subject for cultural warfare in our culture. It's entirely shocking to me that anyone would think that Rick Santorum should be able to have people thrown into jail because his own so-called "morality" recoils at the idea that other adults may enjoy sexual activity that he claims not to enjoy, or that a certain number of priests and puritans disdain.

I would have added to the Court's ruling my own opinin that the law in question violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of association, and also violated the separation of church and state since it enshrines a religious belief that God is offended when two men have sex.

And the three dissenters should be ashamed of themselves, and will be mentioned by future generations in the same breath as the Dred Scott justices who also didn't want to get involved in any cultural debates over such matters as whether certain human beings were in fact human beings, or had been stripped of that status because other human beings claimed to be holding a bill of sale. Sanctimonious pigs, in my view, with deeply flawed and hopelessly naive and result-oriented views of the Constitution.

There was also a cultural divide over segregation once upon a time, but which of us is willing to say that Brown v. Board was a wrong decision? People were forced to get used to the humanity and equality of blacks thanks to the Court's leading the way, and God willing they will be forced to accept the humanity and equality of gays in the same fashion.

To say it was undemocratic, of course, is to miss the point. Our democracy has democratically decided to have a Supreme Court that protects the rights of the minority against the overreaching of the majority. Brown v. Board was undemocratic, too, but it was one of the proudest moments recorded by American democracy.

Tom, I think we're largely in agreement over the Supreme Court decisions--at least the one striking down the sodomy law. The decision that I alluded to that enshrined political correctness as the law of the land was not the sodomy decision, but the two Michigan cases on racial preferences. We may indeed disagree on that one. I don't think public institutions should discriminate on the basis of race, ever.

As to formal verse, don't give up on its possibilities. Do check out the Martin poem "How My Queer Uncle Came to Die at Last." I tried and failed to find it on line, so you'll have to check the back issue of the Hudson Review or the poet's Selected Poems.

I reject the label New Formalists. Tim Steele said "The only New Formalist in English is Geoffrey Chaucer." The only "new Formalists" I would categorize as "conservatives" are Lake, Juster, Krisak, Murphy and Sullivan. We are a tiny minority of the poets writing in form. Most of us are Democrats, although the excesses of the Left have turned the likes of Anthony Hecht, a liberal Jew from New York for heaven's sake!, against the Academy and its prejudices.

I cannot quite conceive of being the son of Charlie Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, nor of being the heir of the McClatchy Newspapers empire. I can readily imagine such grandees condescending to the hoi polloi who are bringing form back into the swift current of contemporary poetry.

I left the Democratic party in the middle of Clinton's first term (after having voted for nothing but Democratic presidential candidates from McGovern to Clinton 1) to become an Independent, driven, like Hecht, away from the leftist excesses of the academy and their political henchmen in the Democratic party.

You may have to add Dana Gioia, a Republican just appointed by a Republican president to head the Endowment) and probably Frederick Turner--in regard to some of his political thinking, at least--to the list of "conservative" formal poets. A better defininition of some of us would be classical liberals who stood their ground when the polical landscape skidded leftward beneath them.

Still, as Tim suggests, "conservative" formalists are a distinct minority.

[Idiodic comments deleted]

[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited July 06, 2003).]