An ecumenical review of what sounds like an ecumenical book. Very boring.
But then again, pretty much everything non-ecumenical written about the free vs. formal verse debate is outrageously stupid. Some of the stuff in The Poetics of the New American Poetry is okay, but only because it's in response to outrageous things said by the formalist rearguard of the time. And if you drop this excuse and simply take it at face value, what the poets in that book say about form in poetry is... outrageously stupid.
So, boring or stupid—those seem to be the choices, if we insist on having this debate.
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