Is it fair to consider everybody writing poetry on some level "a formalist."
??
I begin to feel that's the ultimate embrace of Annie's argument.
When is poetry not a "form"??
Or a simple and/or elaborate "counter-form" ?
Why is the proposition offered as "form" versus some - perhaps - demonic
formless other. Or, is that implied other meant as "experimental" or "avant"
writing? 
Why can't the two concepts have fun playing off one another under the same
umbrella called "poem"? In the way that jazz improvisers will send up a
formal melody and then riddle and explode it into something (an extensive
and counter form that way beyond its original formal terms? Indeed the
resonances against the original often give the improvised work a multiple
prong.  
Anyway I find myself bristling about a statement(s) that - on the surface of
it, even with its liberal embraces of any kind of twist on the metric -
appears to want to declare victory for the revival of Formal meters, and by
extension as the primary means to secure a more authentic verse.

I guess it's because among my contemporaries and forebears - of those I read
closely - I tend to find few that write with a dedication to serving and
exploring formal metric patterns.  Alice Notley, Beverly Dahlen, Fanny Howe,
JoAnne Kyger, Tom Raworth, Lyn Hejinian, Frank O'Hara, Jack Spicer, Jackson
MacLow and on and on. Creeley, I would say, is one who writes with a very
well trained 'formal' ear. Someone like Zukofsky - who determined his lines
by the number of words, not accents and syllables. (A formalist of his own
kind!) These are but a few examples. No doubt each of these writers had
heavy doses of metric training that was valuable. But they have produced
languages that turn on a different sense and use of feet.
Indeed, I would say, each these writes enact their work with a deep sense of
measure - pragmatic and exploratory - and "not" intentionally proscribed by
a particular form, unless they choose to do so as a kind of exercise. Even
the results - like Ted Berrigan in The Sonnets -  often end up both serving
and defying the form.
I am more taken by those who explore form as an option, rather than become
conceptually enslaved to it. (I confess, when I read Theodore Roethke, I can
still be sucker for it all).
In the middle of reading these paeans to Form this afternoon, my rebellious
self begins asking,  "Is Cindy Sheehan a formalist", "Is George Bush a
Formalist", "Is Judge Roberts a Formalist", "Is Nelson Mandela a Formalist".

When one raises the specter of Form, one must also ask whether it is a
repressive shield against the Real, or a means to its embrace. Over time I
think we have seen plenty of both.

By the way, a good, wonderfully written book on the role of improvisation
and the creation of literature is Mike McGee's Emancipating Pragmatism.
Which, in part, is a beautifully written exploration of great American
writers - from Emerson through Baraka and O'Hara - and these writer's
arguments with 'received' language (political, social and what have you).
University of Alabama Press

Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com


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> Thanks all for fascinating nuggets--that Jennifer Moxley read Spenser
> aloud is just perfect--and I really enjoyed Richard's description of
> writing blank verse.    I've heard great things about the In Fine Form
> anthology but haven't seen a copy yet..the renewed interest in form in
> the air in the US now is pretty clear--the feeling and reaction of
> people is much more sympathetic than it was 12 years ago when I
> published my first anthology, of formal poetry (A Formal Feeling Comes:
> Poems in Form by Contemporary Women)--at that time there was clearly a
> thrill of the illicit taboo about form (especially feminists writing in
> form) and now everyone seems more used to the idea.  My understanding
> is that In Fine Form is more like an anthology showcasing contemporary
> formal poetry, whereas An Exaltation of Forms is a textbook put
> together by 50 different poets, each taking a different form or meter &
> discussing it & choosing examples, and it includes poetry from all
> centuries, not just contemporary...
> 
> Randolph, I think you are right--though I also think that most people
> who are into scansion easily accept that there are different and
> equally good ways of hearing the scansion of many lines. That's why
> it's so interesting to me that there are, in fact, just a few "rules"
> that linguists have settled on, which do tip a line over the edge and
> out of a meter.  I recently struggled with a 12-line poem in
> amphibrachs (a bear of a meter that I got really hooked on), taking
> months to get it right. I showed it to a friend who is a professor of
> linguistics at Berkeley, a true "prosodist" (linguists, by the way, are
> the real prosodists, and most of the ones I know have hearty contempt
> for the clumsy way poets talk about scansion!  they use Chomskian trees
> and things like that, which I personally find pretty much
> incomprehensible).  In that poem she found three syllables that by her
> definition proved that amphibrachs exist.  Something to do with
> phrasing.   Then there's Derek Attridge, who has a new footless system
> based on expected accent, demotions and promotions.  There is a lot of
> good in that system, and some real problems.  The old-fashioned system
> of feet seems to stand up pretty well when it comes to teaching people
> how to write lines recognizable as particular meters.
> 
> I've recently begun distinguishing explicitly between three kinds of
> accent when I scan a line (as when teaching), and it's helped:
> 
> lexical stress (dictionary syllable-stress on words of more than one
> syllable)
> phrasal stress (common customs of stressing nouns more than articles,
> etc.)
> performative stress (emphasis by an individual person or situation)
> 
> there's not much point arguing over the first kind of stress and very
> little in arguing over the third, as far as stresses go.  It's the
> middle ground between fact and opinion where people like to argue.
> And then there is the way the stresses configure into systems--fertile
> ground for crackpots to come up with their own "better way"-=There are
> so many odd systems proposed by poets and others--Sidney Lanier, Edgar
> Allen Poe, & Shelley were among those to propose their own
> systems--some are timers, some are stressers--That kind of tempest in a
> prosodic teapot isn't to my taste, personally.
> 
> Basically it seems to me that meter is one of those things that people
> recognize when they hear it...I just like to look at individual lines.
> Here are three of my favorite lines of blank verse from Hart Crane:
> 
> inevitable, the body of the world
> weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus
> that winks above it, bluet in your breasts.
> 
> to me, awareness of how each of these lines is based in the same meter
> accentuates exquisitely the differences between them.  They scan quite
> differently, and the way they stretch sounds limits is magnificently
> varied (by assonance, consonance, caesura, enjambment, phrasal stress),
> yet each of them scans perfectly without breaking any of the basic
> prosodic rules of iambic pentameter.  The meter is like a face on which
> these amazing expressions move.
> 
> peace & poetry,
> Annie