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.
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