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
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