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Uche: I haven't been following this thread, just dipped into it yesterday, so forgive me if this seems out of left field. I'm not aware that there's been a formal/free-verse battle going on anywhere in the past several generations (not in languages I can read, at any rate), except in the minds of a very few neoformalists. When the topic comes up folks of my persuasion will talk about the difficulty of working in open form within the constraints of predictable rhyme and meter, but I don't know anyone who considers that difficulty an impossibility--Coleridge and Wordsworth seemed to manage it. The battle, such as it is, is between those who work in open and closed form. One can write closed form free verse--lots of people do. The distinction isn't about the techne of the poem but about what one expects a poem to do, what one means when one says "poem," and perhaps as well about different ideas about how a life may be lived. It's also not, I think, an argument about what "poem" has meant in the past. Best, Mark >What I've been trying to do is be really careful about the distinction >between the formal/free-verse battle and the simple understanding that there >is good and bad verse. Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press). http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland "Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The Nation