[nyctom]

J. D. McClatchy, From "Twenty Questions" in Twenty Questions:

One has heard a good deal lately about the New Formalism. What's up?

It's one side of a wooden nickel. On one side, a real buffalo called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, a frivolous exercise in nonsense. On the other, a big chief with a feather in his hair: the new formalists, who claim to be restoring traditional values to poetry. Where mindlessness was, there shall rigor be; where technical sloppiness was applauded, it shall be driven out with a crisp quatrain or brisk narrative. Their aims seem noble, and are narrow. Worse, their practice is rarely above the second-rate. It's not that they write in verse; it's that they write bad verse--exactly the sort of plodding, inaccurate lines that versifiers have been blamed for down the centuries. If only Pope were alive, here's a new Dunciad to be written! The parade of pasty, pinstripe formalists and preprogrammed L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E cyborgs, all slaves of a single idea, the feministas, hip-hop end men, hollow-voiced cliff dwellers from the Southwest, every Boston poet in a straight line so that they may pat each other on the back, East Village tyros...Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS is restored.