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There are so many levels & degrees of focus to these issues of form. It's clear that when New Formalists OR avant-gardist postmoderns are attacking "mainstream free verse", they are talking about the particularly ingratiating, technically adept & powerful brand of formica being produced for the last 25 years in the US, and NOT to the free verse produced in Europe for the last 100 yrs. It also seems to me that when Creeley & Olson, for example, argued that "form is only an extension of content", something was lost: the specific MOTIVE for experiment in form practiced by the early modernists. This motive, it seems to me was an impatience or frustration with older methods & forms - the need to find new technical means to express (or shape) experience. I don't think of this so much as a programmatic campaign but as the individual recognitions of individual poets, that they needed some new, more satisfying ways to express what they felt & understood. What Creeley & Olson's reduction leaves out is the uniquely aesthetic nature of form. Toward the end of the century it seems that the attention was so focused on ideological issues & theoretical notions of language & the status of knowledge, that form as a specifically aesthetic phenomenon was no longer recognized. Postmodern experimentalists, mainstream free-versers, new formalists occupy completely separate compartments, speaking different languages. I like poets like Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Zukofsky - who absorbed the experiments of their immediate predecessors (Eliot, Pound, Joyce) but retained this capacious sense of form - in which new forms are instigated by new approaches to material, but which have to justify themselves aesthetically, in the deep shadow not only of the earlier modernists but of all preceding poetry. It's been shown, for example, how Crane consciously re-worked some tropes of Virgilian pastoral in a section of The Bridge. These are kinds of formal echoing for contemporary purposes. This seems like a fresh feeling of engagement with form at a more macro level, which folds metrics into broader purposes & approaches. Lind & Gioia & the New Formalists, if they limit their calls to "traditional forms & narrative techniques" (I don't know if they actually are that limited - I haven't read all the NF books & manifestos) - they miss the vigor & opportunity offered by that early modernist invention of new-old forms. & again, I think it's a mistake always to think of experiment as a "movement" or a program: I think real inventiveness stems mostly from a sense of lack, need, frustration, insufficiency - a need to "formulate" experience with new kinds of metaphorical shorthand. (My complaint can be summarized as this: the contemporary avant-garde dilutes or avoids the aesthetic dimension, while the New Formalists miss the irreplaceable function of INVENTION in their trumpet-calls for a "return".) My Berrigan-Berryman style "sonnets" in the sequence Island Road (in Mudlark: www.unf.edu/mudlark) are an example, one of my own stabs in this general direction... cheerio, Henry