Poetic Form

I like poetic form, with meter and stuff like that. I’m a “formalist”, as people say nowadays (the older word was “poet”). We live in a free verse age, so I’m out of the mainstream—although near enough to have plenty of company.

Formalism is a matter of taste. Some formalists like to challenge the taste of the mainstream, perhaps hoping to change it. To challenge is also a matter of taste. For my part, I don’t particularly care. Let the mainstream flow where it will. If you do care, I suggest that talking about it is not your first job. Instead, follow these two rules of form: 1. Vote with your feet! 2. Write well!

There is a formalist movement (or more than one, if you want to look at it that way), called New Formalism. I don’t see myself as belonging to it; I am an independent. For my take on New Formalism as of 2007, see these poems:

• New Formalist Manifesto, First Draft
• New Formalist Manifesto, Second Draft
• New Formalists

A Continuous Tradition

Formalists often portray themselves as reviving an interrupted tradition, and complain that skills have been lost which they are still struggling to recover. I see myself as belonging to a continuous tradition going back to Chaucer. I worked hard on formalist poetry as a teenager and gave myself a solid grounding. I didn’t notice any interruption to my tradition—because I wasn’t paying attention!

There must be other poets in the language besides me who have ignored the mainstream and grown up with a good formalist education. There was never any barrier to it. The material is all right there. What matters is where you spend your attention.

Free Verse

“Rhythm must have meaning.” — Ezra Pound

Verse is never free, at least not if it’s any good. In a manner of speaking, every poet is a formalist, because every poem has a form. I think most people understand that. So I reason that the current purpose of the term “free verse” is to obscure the nature of free verse by refusing to draw distinctions among its varieties.

That can’t be healthy.