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  #1  
Unread 05-23-2021, 12:16 PM
F.F. Teague F.F. Teague is offline
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Default A.E. Stallings on New Formalism

First, apologies; this is not a new article. But recently I've been wondering about what sort of poet I might be and I'm sufficiently intrigued by a few lines of the piece to ask a question on the 'sphere. Here they are:

'British poets who work in form and meter are apparently just being... British (that Modernism stuff was all very American and Continental after all), i.e., old formalists. New Formalists have to be American for some reason.'

Does this mean that British poets can't be New Formalists? Sorry if that's a silly question; it could be that A.E. is being tongue-in-cheek. There are a lot of interesting comments below the article; I spotted Susan and Mary. I suppose I'm just wondering where the movement is at the moment. Thriving? Dwindling? And only in the USA?

Best wishes,
Fliss
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  #2  
Unread 05-23-2021, 01:05 PM
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Maryann Corbett Maryann Corbett is offline
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Fliss, you might get as many opinions as there are regulars here, but this is my take: "New Formalism" has stopped being a noisy, of-the-moment movement. It's not The Hot Topic for argument now, so no one greatly cares, either in America or in Britain. Nobody needs a label in order to use whatever techniques generate good poems, and in Britain they never worried about it at all; they just wrote in form all along, which is all Stallings means.

So there's no label now. These days, there are just poets who prefer to write in form (Stallings, MB Smith, Poochigian, Gibson--it's a long list, and I guess I'm on it), and others who write in form sometimes (for example, there's a villanelle in Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars), and the rest of the world (and I enjoy those poems as well). I see plenty of form in The Dark Horse and PN Review, so I know British poets are writing it.

It's still true that there are relatively few journals that publish all form, or mostly form. But I think it's no longer true that journals turn up their noses at meter and rhyme. The UK journals I've submitted to have (mostly) taken my metrical poems.

Have I said anything useful? I hope so.
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  #3  
Unread 05-23-2021, 01:26 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Some thoughts from a now-defunct and mostly-Brit online poetry forum called Burgundy, circa 2002:

~~~~~

Clive Simpson:

Only in America are free verse and formal verse so polarised, and so heavy with political significance. Free versers genuinely believe they are still at the cutting edge, despite the fact that those most establishment of figures - State Poets Laureate - almost all write vers libre. Formalists feel besieged, what with the freeversistas controlling the university programmes, the poetry presses and most of the magazines - hence (to my mind) the obsession with exactitude of form and the minutiae of prosody. Any deviance would leave a dent in the Golden Calf.

It's all a load of bollocks, of course. Over here, the free and the formal have co-existed for years and long may they continue to do so.

~~~~~

MA Griffiths:

For me, it's all a bit reminiscent of the big debate between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Gulliver's Travels.
Doesn't matter to me, so long as the egg is fresh....
Regards,Maz
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Unread 05-23-2021, 01:43 PM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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The uk has seen some clashes (see for instance, the Movement vs., say, the poetry revival of the J.H. Prynnes and Barry MacSweeneys of experimentalism) but I think it has been most generally less of a hot topic than in America.

I personally prefer poets who do not completely adhere to one certain school, modernist or anti-modernist, free verse or formal. Poetry is an exclusionary business, and I wouldn't really want to exclude myself any more by taking sides in some theoretical argument. It is interesting to note though that there isn't much modernist formalism. There isn't much surrealism in iambic couplets; or fragmentation in trochaic quatrains. There's some, but much less than in free verse.

Last edited by W T Clark; 05-23-2021 at 01:46 PM.
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Unread 05-23-2021, 02:00 PM
Chris O'Carroll Chris O'Carroll is offline
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Stallings is serving up her insights on wry, riffing on some of the absurdities that crop up in contemporary discourse on rhyme and meter.

Being a New Formalist isn’t like being a Teamster or an Equity actor; there’s no membership card. So when she says that British poets can’t be New Formalists, I think she means that Brits haven’t tended to claim that label for themselves the way Yanks have, or haven’t been so hot and bothered about a free verse vs. formal verse culture war. Ann Drysdale and the late John Whitworth are two British poets much admired among American formalists, who would be happy to claim them as members of the gang.

Regarding the co-existence of free and formal verse, one of my poetry heroes is E.E. Cummings, who is probably most famous for vers libre and typographical hijinks, but who published more than 400 sonnets.

Last edited by Chris O'Carroll; 05-23-2021 at 02:26 PM.
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  #6  
Unread 05-23-2021, 03:46 PM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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I think Maryann has it about right when she says “Nobody needs a label in order to use whatever techniques generate good poems.” As to the UK, I think it is true that, during my own writing life (that is, from the mid-1960s on), the issue has generally been less contentious than it has sometimes seemed to be in the US. On the other hand, I don’t think it is true that over here we “just wrote in form all along”: over the same period (and indeed before), I am aware of much greater diversity than this remark suggests. For myself, it has been most uncommon for me to set out to write in a particular form. What almost always happens is that words begin to offer themselves, and (however much of an illusion it may be), they seem to discover for themselves the form (metrical or non-metrical) they need to take in order to exist. Of course, though this is the process, it cannot in itself guarantee the worth of the result. So, with Maryann, I say again: “Nobody needs a label in order to use whatever techniques generate good poems.”

Clive
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Unread 05-23-2021, 04:31 PM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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That quote from Maz is so perfect.
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  #8  
Unread 05-24-2021, 07:05 AM
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Rick Mullin Rick Mullin is offline
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My take: Way back, let's say in the 1950s, one was not allowed to paint representational or figurative pictures. One could not write in form. Of course, there were keepers of the flame and the ship has righted itself since. New Formalism was a reaction to the "free verse" edict. It served its purpose a long time ago, getting a little out of hand and created its own problems before becoming inconsequential in and of itself. Now you can paint still lifes, portraits and landscapes without being heckled too much.
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Unread 05-24-2021, 11:36 AM
Bill Carpenter Bill Carpenter is offline
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In 1996, Dave Mason and Mark Jarman published an anthology titled Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism. Their picks were Elizabeth Alexander, Julia Alvarez, Bruce Bawer, Raphael Campo, Tom Disch, Frederick Feirstein, Dana Gioia, Emily Grosholz, R.S. Gwynn, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, Andrew Hudgins, Paul Lake, Sydney Lea, Brad Leithauser, Phillis Levin, Charles Martin, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock, Wyatt Prunty, Mary Jo Salter, Timothy Steele, Frederick Turner, Rachel Wetzsteon, and Greg Williamson. Quite a distinguished roster, but no shame on anyone for not being included.
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  #10  
Unread 05-24-2021, 01:37 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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It's a simple fact that far more people are interested in writing poetry than are interested in reading it. So when discussing practitioners of formal and free verse, I think a distinction should be made between poets whose work is likely to be read in respected journals, by people who actually care about reading contemporary poetry, and those poets who are simply churning out the type of poetry they personally like to write, who don't necessarily give a damn about what anyone else either writes or reads.

Most poetry editors' guidelines are directed at the latter, out of self-preservation.

I think it would be a great service to formalism if formalists could unite to combat the still-widespread notion that the sonnet is inherently "the highest form of poetry"--a superlative that, rather predictably, attracts narcissists who want to believe that writing the best poetry is a matter of conforming with some instantly recognizable, objective criterion, rather than on actually doing the work to evaluate what techniques are best suited for conveying a particular mood or concept, on a case-by-case basis.

And of course that is precisely why dethroning the sonnet as inherently "the highest form of poetry" is a pipe dream. Still, it should be obvious that
dutifully filling out the sonnet (or villanelle, ballade, etc.) template will not magically transform tedious observations and abstractions into something that stirs the soul.

Formalism is also burdened by an annoyingly conspicuous contingent of narcissists with persecution complexes, who specialize in rhymed and metered laments that editors won't publish their stuff due solely to prejudice against rhyme and meter. Generally, it's not difficult for the casual observer to come up with several other possible reasons for the rejections that these poets keep experiencing.

Of course, free verse has its share of narcissistic poets, too, who think that even their most pedestrian passing thoughts and feelings must be fascinating, simply because they sprang forth from Magnificent Moi. But just with regard to attitudes toward people who feel differently than themselves about using received forms, free verse practitioners' narcissism tends toward contempt and dismissiveness, rather than combativeness and self-pity. They make quick cracks about the shallowness of Hallmark card verse, and then they move on--probably because they are kept busy by the large number of other venues to which they can submit when they get rejected.

Practitioners of form are more likely than free verse practitioners to have difficulty getting published somewhere else after they've been told no by their top-tier picks. (What narcissist doesn't start with Poetry and The New Yorker and the like?) So formalists tend to be the only ones trotting out endless variations of the They've Done Me Wrong Song. And these are almost invariably characterized by a less-than-masterful use of rhyme and meter, which seems far more likely to reinforce prejudicial distaste for rhyme and meter than to demolish it.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 05-24-2021 at 01:53 PM.
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