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I think the main reason for this lack of a cohesive connection is a lack of theory.  Rich and Levertov articulated a reason for women to write in free verse in the 60s; Iragary and Du Plessis, and the Language poets, articulated compelling arguments for women to write in experimental traditions in the 70s and 80s.  There is not yet, perhaps, a convincing body of theory for contemporary women writing in form, or for contemporary readers to reevaluate some of the demonized aspects of the largely female poetic tradition that I call the "sentimentist" tradition. 

In a recent essay, "Confessions of a Postmodern Poetess" (published in By Herself: Women Poets on Poetry, ed. Molly McQuade, Graywolf, 1999) I discuss this problem.  I am also coediting a book of criticism called Poetess Poetics, about the long-maligned "sentimentist" tradition of women poets, from Wheatley to Millay--and I am happy to see that dozens of new books and essays have come out recently that are finally taking the aesthetics of the women's formal poetic tradition more seriously.

R. S. Gwynn:  The definition of form that you used in editing AFFC was fairly eclectic, and you included poems that had formal qualities beyond, say, the traditional stanza forms and fixed forms such as the villanelle and sonnet. Could you comment on the working definition of form you used there and how it differs, if indeed it does, from the criteria you and Kathrine Varnes are using in your new anthology, An Exaltation of Forms?

Annie Finch:  Because my aim in AFFC was to encompass in a non-prescriptive way the kinds of formal poems that many women really were writing, my definition was based on a simple criterion of formal structure: "a formal poem is a poem structured (not decorated) by the conspicuous repetition of any language element." The repeating language element could be not only accent or metrical foot but also rhyme-sound (leading, for example, to free-verse sonnets,) word or phrase (leading to blues or chants,) etc., as long as the repetition structures the poem in a predictable pattern and is not incidental to the poem.