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."
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