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.
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