[stephenspower]

Formal poetry, as a craft, requires the use of a scheme to create a work, usually one long accepted or a recognizable variation on one of those "traditional" schemes (as most of those long accepted schemes, such as the Shakesperian sonnet, once were themselves).

Does this mean that conceptual poems are also formal? They require the poet to follow a scheme. That scheme is critical to the effect of the poem (indeed, in the pure conceptualism discussed here, the scheme is more important than the poem itself). And that scheme is repeatable by others to different effects, which may be the scheme's most necessary formal quality.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Don't be disappointed if this debate doesn't take off like a house afire. But you never know--it's August and that's a month when persistent heat or even ennui can self-combust and lead to amazing conflagration.

Conceptual poetry has been discussed in this forum to the pit of fatigue. This is only a partial list of the threads. I remember others which can likely be turned up by doing a search for representative key names.


Poetry (July/August) & Flarf debate
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=7974&highlight=conceptual 6 pages

Your shopping lists might be publishable
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=14704&highlight=conceptual 7 pages

Keith Waldrop and Experimental Poetry
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=9398&highlight=flarf 3

Conceptual literature redux
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=17576&highlight=conceptual 2 pages

The logical next step
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=20596&highlight=conceptual 3

forum for poems/fiction that suck
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=8277&highlight=flarf 3 pages

[Roger Slater]

The answer is actually pretty simple. The term "formal" when applied to poetry is a term of art that simply means metrical (often but not always in rhyme, and often but not always following a traditional form). It is not the opposite of "casual"; to say that free verse or conceptual verse is not "formal" verse is not to say that it is loose, poorly thought out, unanchored, amorphous, casual, or unserious. It is just to say that it is not metrical.

[arkava das]

good question but done to death like ptd out. going by oed, formal is an adjective which means

having a conventionally recognized form, structure, or set of rules

now conceptual poetry has been hyped so much it is the new convention. it's like a serious polite swordfight w/ sticks. this stand off. everyone plays their parts. the formals sneering at the not so new brigade and the not so new brigade responding w/ awful invocations of the avant garde .

so the answer is a clear yes/no. a massproducd yes/no

[Michael Cantor]

What Tuco said.

[John Whitworth]

What is conceptual poetry? I've never heard of it. Should I have? Come on, Michael.I know you are a fount of wisdom. In simple words of not much more than one syllable. My ear is open like a hungry shark.

[Jesse Anger]

Ask Walter, John. He straddles the divide with grace.

[Richard Epstein]

Like most questions predicated on definitions built into the query, these have not been useful. They seem to conceal a private agenda, as though the questions you really want to ask are too blatant for you. Let me help:

1. Must poems vote where they reside?
2. Would I let my daughter date a conceptual poem?
3. Does a conceptual poem require a corsage?
4. Has anyone ever inadvertently learned a conceptual poem by heart? If so, where does he reside?

RHE

[Roger Slater]

And, if conceptual poems are formal, what happens to them on casual Fridays?

[Brian Allgar]

Well, if you're a Catholic and you post them online, they turn into phish.