There was a generation gap in rhymed-and-metered poetry when I came on the scene, and, as noted in my linked article, more than a bit of a whiff of conservatism, both aesthetic and political. What conferences like West Chester, as well as editors like Bill Baer did for me, at least, was to give me a foil to which I could relate way more than whatever ex-post-avant-something-or-other was in mainstream fashion at that particular moment. If "New Formalism" was in some ways something to define myself against, it was because it was at the same time close enough to what I was doing in many ways to make the juxtapositions meaningful. (And I've said more or less all of this into microphones in some form or other at West Chester. Sometimes even with Dana Gioia present.)
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