New Formalism

According to William Baer, "Despite this environment, various younger poets of the baby boom generation, often in isolation, began writing in meter, forms, and rhymes." Many of the most influential poets were, according to Baer, university students being taught and encouraged by Yvor Winters at Stanford University, by Donald Stanford at Louisiana State University, and by Robert Fitzgerald at Harvard University. There was, however, "no true center for the gradually reviving Formalism, as many poets in various parts of the country began experimenting with meter and rhyme."[5]

Despite being unaware of this trend, Formalist poet Richard Wilbur wrote in a 1972 essay, "A good poem is a good poem, whatever it's technical means, and I cheerfully grant that much of the best work of recent years has been done in free forms. It does seem about time, however, to abandon the notion that free verse is daring and progressive, that it is peculiarly suited to conveying present-day experience, and that 'experiment' must consist of the abandonment of disciplines."[6]

In the early 1970s X. J. Kennedy started publishing the short-lived magazine Counter/Measures which was devoted to the use of traditional form in poetry. A few other editors around this time were sympathetic to formal poetry,[7] but the mainstream was against rhyme and meter.

According to William Baer, "So where does the revival begin? People can debate this endlessly. It's certainly significant that Rachel Hadas' first chapbook, Starting from Troy, was published by Godine in 1975; Charles Martin's first book, Room for Error, was published in 1978; and Timothy Steele's first collection, Uncertainties at Rest, appeared the following year."[8]

One of the first rumbles of the conflict that was to erupt between free verse and New Formalist poets, came with the 1977 publication of an issue of Mississippi Review entitled 'Freedom and Form: American Poets Respond'.

The 1980s, was, according to Baer, "the decade of formation for the Formalist revival". Between 1979 and 1983, Frederick Turner and Ronald Sharp served as editors of the The Kenyon Review, where they published both the poems and the essays of the new generation of Formalist poets. In January 1983, Brad Leithauser published the essay Metrical Illiteracy in The New Criterion."[9]

In 1980 Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell started the small magazine The Reaper to promote narrative and formal poetry. In 1981 Jane Greer launched Plains Poetry Journal, which published new work in traditional forms. In 1984 McDowell started Story Line Press which has since published some New Formalist poets. The Reaper ran for ten years.

Also during the early 1980s, the new literary movement in American poetry began to at last attract the attention of mainstream critics.

By 1983, Neoformalism was noted in the annual poetry roundups in the yearbooks of The Dictionary of Literary Biography,[10] and through the mid-1980s heated debates on the topic of formalism were carried on in several journals.[11]

The term "New Formalism" was first used in the article 'The Yuppie Poet' in the May 1985 issue of the AWP Newsletter,[12] which was an attack on what was perceived as a movement returning to traditional poetic forms. In the article, Ariel Dawson accused the New Formalist poets of social conservatism, yuppie-materialism, and consumerism.[13]

In a 2017 review of William Baer's Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets for the LA Review of Books, Patrick Kurp wrote, "Poets, critics, and readers on both sides of the form/free verse divide are frequently guilty of the Manichean heresy. Stated bluntly: Free verse, the more unfettered the better, is good; meter and rhyme, bad. Or vice versa. The schema turns political and nasty when form is associated with conservatism and free verse with progressivism, as though Ronald Reagan commanded poets to compose villanelles."[14]

Also in 1985, Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel published their award-winning essay The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time in the magazine Poetry.[15]

The essay discussed, according to William Baer, how, "modern science has discovered that regular rhythm actually induces the brain to release pleasure-creating endorphins."[16]

In a subsequent interview, Turner recalled that his research into the subject began when he had become involved with a sub-group within the International Society for the Study of Time. Turner further recalled, "Why do we find things beautiful? Why do we have the capacity to experience beauty? And why is this phenomenon so pan-cultural? Once we had the facts at our disposal, it was impossible to entertain any of these post-structuralist notions that such human forms and conventions are simply closed systems and culturally unique. In fact, it was clear that human aesthetic rose from human biology. Anyway, this subgroup got a grant from the Werner-Reimers-Stiftung, and we were able to involve even more interesting people from other disciplines ranging from physics to anthropology to music. So we began meeting over a nine-year period,and that was where our ideas about the neural lyre initiated."[17]

Of his research alongside Ernst Pöppel, who then worked for the Max Planck Institute for Neuroscience in Munich, West Germany, Turner recalled, "Now Ernst had already been a member of the time society, so we'd known each other for quite a while, and we used to hang out in the bar and talk about all sorts of things. At the same time, I'd already embarked on a serious study of world meter, and I'd noticed that all human societies had poetry, that it was always divided into lines, and that, even in pre-literate societies, all the lines were about three seconds long. Ernst had similarly noticed that humans have a three second cycle in which we hear and understand language... So there was clearly some kind of three-second phenomenon going on. Then we hooked up with a group of bio-genetic structuralists who'd been studying,for instance, the neurophysiology of ritual chants, and we'd examined the effects of ritual chanting and learned that ritual chanting produces significant changes in the brain waves, so we started to put a lot of things together, and we wrote that essay... Well, the whole thing has cascaded into many other areas, like the prosody of whale song, or the prosody of mother/newborn interactions - which also takes place in three-second cycles - or the prosody of deaf and dumb poets who compose in sign language - also in three second cycles."[18]

One of the major intellectual figures in the New Formalist movement beginning in the 1980s was Dana Gioia, a poet of Sicilian- and Mexican-American ancestry who grew up in a working class neighborhood in Hawthorne, California.

In 1986, Robert McPhillips witnessed a debate between Gioia and John Hollander over, "whether poetry was initially an oral or a written art." Gioia argued that poetry was originally oral, while Hollander argued that it was originally written.[19]

McPhillips later recalled, "In retrospect, I realize that I heard on that occasion part of what was to become a tenet of the New Formalism often articulated by Gioia: that poetry was first and foremost an oral form and rhyme and meter central elements of oral poetry; that these virtues were considered outmoded by a generation of free verse poets; and that these were poetic virtues that - along with narrative - Gioia and others of his generation saw as vital elements necessary to be restored to poetry if it hoped to reestablish something like the mainstream audience still enjoyed by serious writers of fiction like Oates, John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Jane Smiley."[20]

Intrigued both by the debate and by the sense of pleasure he had experienced reading the New Formalist poetry of Gioia and Vikram Seth, McPhillips began to research the growing controversy between Free Verse and New Formalist poets.[21] He later wrote, "When I first decided to write about the New Formalists, I discovered that there were essentially two schools of thought concerning them. One school consisted of the tenured free-verse poets of the nation's numerous writing programs who viewed the emergence of New Formalism as a politically conservative rejection of their 'democratic' mode, the other younger poets who were banding together with narrative poets to form a literary movement they described as 'Expansive Poetry'. What both groups had in common was that they were made up almost exclusively of poets; and they tended to talk in broad generalisations about what they perceived to be the strengths and weaknesses in each poetic aesthetic while seldom candidly assessing the relative virtues or flaws of the individual younger poets writing rhymed and metered poetry in the 1980s."[22]

1986 also saw the publication of Atheist and LGBT Anglo-Indian poet Vikram Seth's novel in verse The Golden Gate, which had a major effect on the New Formalist Movement. The anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms was published that same year.[23]

In his influential 1987 essay Notes on the New Formalism, Gioia wrote: "Literature not only changes; it must change to keep it's force and vitality. There will always be groups advocating new types of poetry, some of it genuine, just as there will always be conservative opposing forces trying to maintain the conventional methods. But the revival of rhyme and meter among some young poets creates an unprecedented situation in American poetry. The New Formalists put the free-verse poets in the ironic and unprepared position if being the status quo. Free verse, the creation of an older literary revolution, is now the long-established, ruling orthodoxy, formal poetry the unexpected challenge... Form, we are told authoritatively, is artificial, elitist, retrogressive, right-wing, and (my favorite) Un-American. None of these arguments can withstand critical scrutiny, but nevertheless, they continue to be made so regularly that one can only assume that they provide some emotional comfort to their advocates. Obviously, for many writers the discussion between formal and free-verse has become an encoded political debate."[24]

Frederick Feirstein's Expansive Poetry (1989) gathered various essays on the New Formalism and the related movement New Narrative, under the umbrella term 'Expansive Poetry'.

In 1990 William Baer started The Formalist and the first issue contained poems by, among others, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Justice.[25] The magazine ran twice a year for fifteen years, with the fall/winter 2004 issue being the last.[26]

In 1994, Feminist poet Annie Finch argued against the idea that New Formalism is not open to other political viewpoints. In the Introduction to "A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women", Finch wrote, "Readers who have been following the discussion of the 'New Formalism' over the last decade may not expect to find such a diversity of writers and themes in a book of formal poems; the poems collected here contradict the popular assumption that formal poetics correspond to reactionary politics and elitist aesthetics ... The passion for form unites these many and diverse poets. 'This is 'New Formalism'."

Since 1995, West Chester University has held an annual poetry conference with a special focus on formal poetry and New Formalism.

In an interview with William Baer, Dana Gioia recalled how he and fellow poet Michael Peich came up with the idea for the conference. They were having dinner at the home of Gioia's parents in Sebastopol, California, when they both realized, "that although there were,at that time, over 2,000 writers' conferences in the United States - several of which I was involved in - there was not a single place where. a young writer could go to learn the traditional craft of poetry in any systematic way. Having just finished a bottle of Pinot Noir, it occurred to us that it would be a wonderful thing to start such a conference. So we did, even though we had no budget, no staff, and no other visible means of support.

"We drew up what we thought would be a model curriculum - classes in meter, the sonnet, the French Forms, narrative poetry, etc. - and next to each subject, we put the name of the person we thought would be the best younger poet to teach that course. We felt that it was important that these techniques be taught as living traditions by younger writers who were actively using them. We also wanted to honor our elders, and so we decided to recognize, as keynote speaker, some writer who we felt confident had an enduring place in the canon of American letters. We invited Richard Wilbur to be our first keynote speaker. We had no money to pay our faculty, so I called each of them up to explain why it was important that we all do this, and everyone said, 'yes.'

"Initially, we thought that the conference would probably be a one time only thing, but when it was over, nobody went home. People stuck around because they'd enjoyed themselves so much, and we realized that we should do it again."[27]

Since 1995, the West Chester Conference has expanded it's classes to included such subjects as blank verse and dramatic monologue.[28]

Rhina Espaillat, a Dominican-American poet of mixed Afro-Caribbean, Spanish, French, and Arawak descent, attended the first conference and later recalled, "I was the only Hispanic there, but I realized that these people were open to everything, that their one interest was the craft. If you could bring something from another culture, they were open to it."[29]

Espaillat subsequently took charge of, "teaching the French Forms and the forms of repetition," but also made sure to teach classes in, "the Spanish and Hispanic examples of the forms" such as the décima and the ovillejo."[30]

Due to Espaillat's teaching and encouragement, the ovillejo, particularly, has become very popular among younger New Formalists writing in English. While being interviewed for a book about her life, Espaillat gleefully commented, "On the internet and in the stratosphere, everybody loves it."[31]

Every year at the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award is awarded, "for a lifetime contribution to the study of versification and prosody."[32]

In a 2017 review of William Baer's Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets for the LA Review of Books, Patrick Kurp wrote, "Among the many reasons poets choose to write formal poetry in the 21st century is an intuitive distaste for the imitative fallacy. To write about chaos, one need not write chaotically. It’s only a minor paradox to say that discipline and constraint unlock freedom."[33]

In 2001, the American poet Leo Yankevich founded The New Formalist, which published among others the poets Jared Carter[34] and Keith Holyoak.[35]

Even as the new millennium dawned, the movement continued to have it's detractors. In the November/December 2003 issue of P. N. Review, N. S. Thompson wrote, in a throwback to the attacks by tenured professors during the 1980s, "While movements do need a certain amount of bombast to fuel interest, they have to be backed up by a certain artistic success. In hindsight, the movement seems to be less of a poetic revolution and more a marketing campaign."[36]

After its last issue in 2004, The Formalist was succeeded by Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, which is still published biannually by the University of Evansville.

Writing in 2006, Robert McPhillips commented, "In the past quarter century, the literary landscape has changed much from when the New Formalists began to publish their earliest work. The New Formalists have become firmly established in the canon of contemporary American literature. There is an entry on the movement (by myself) in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English (1994), edited by Ian Hamilton, as well as individual entries on many of the movement's poets. An anthology of poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996), edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason, established a Canon of some of the strongest poets in the movement. Further anthologies of poems and essays continued to give the New Formalism at once a broader and more cohesive identity than it could have had in 1989."[37]

McPhillips continued, "The New Formalism remains for me a generational movement concerned with purifying poetic diction without ridding it of it's inherent lyricism and rendering it more prosaic. By championing a shift back to form, the New Formalists have returned poetry to that wide audience of readers that had abandoned free-verse poetry because it had failed to mirror and trigger their deepest human sympathies."[38]

However, in a 2007 essay titled Why No One Wants to be a New Formalist, A.E. Stallings wrote, "People debate over who gets to be in the church of the Avant Garde — who gets to be among the Elect, who gets to be in the Canon Outside the Canon. It is clearly a privilege, a badge of honor." Stallings added, however, that no one, herself included, wants to be dubbed a New Formalist, which she likened to the kiss of death. Stallings continued, "People come up with other terms: Expansive poet, poet-who-happens-to-write-in-form (and 'I write free verse, too', they hastily exclaim), formalista... If I have to be labeled, I myself prefer the term Retro-Formalist, which at least sounds vaguely cool, like wearing vintage clothing and listening to vinyl, something so square it’s hip."[39]

In a 2017 review of William Baer's Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets for the LA Review of Books, Patrick Kurp wrote, "Baer collects interviews he conducted with first- and second-generation New Formalists, most of whom are squeezed into another convenient pigeonhole, baby boomers: Wyatt Prunty, Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele, Rachel Hadas, Brad Leithauser, Charles Martin, R. S. Gwynn, Frederick Turner, Mary Jo Salter, David Middleton, Dick Davis, Rhina P. Espaillat, and A. E. Stallings. The oldest is Espaillat, born in 1932; the youngest, Stallings, in 1968. The rest cluster between 1942 and 1954. Reading the interviews sequentially, the reader comes to appreciate that the New Formalists do not constitute a monolith. None is an ideologue. None believes a formal poem is automatically superior to its free verse cousin, and some write free verse themselves. But most agree that adherence to form enables them to express what they wish in the most efficient manner."[40]

Kurp further wrote, "The poets interviewed by Baer are a notably un-bohemian, well-behaved, independent-minded bunch. None is out to be countercultural."[41]

Since the beginning of New Formalism, the Movement has advocated a return to more traditional practices of literary translation.

In his 1987 essay, Notes on the New Formalism, Dana Gioia sharply criticized the then common practice of translating Formalist poems into free verse. He commented, "...although the past quarter century has witnessed a explosion of poetic translation, this boom has almost exusively produced work that is formally vague and colorless. Compared to most earlier translation, these contemporary American versions make no effort whatsoever to reproduce the prosodic features of their originals. One can now read more of Dante or Villon, Rilke or Mandelstam, Lorca or even Petrarch in English versions without any sense of the poem's original form. Sometimes these versions brilliantly convey the theme or tone of the originals, but most often they sound stylistically impoverished and anonymous. All of the past blurs together into a familiar tune. Unrhymed, unmetered,and unshaped, Petrarch and Rilke sound alike."[42]

In a subsequent essay criticizing free verse poet Robert Bly, Gioia further wrote, "What can one say about translations so insensitive to both the sound and nuance of the originals? By propagating this minimal kind of translation Bly has done immense damage to American poetry. Translating quickly and superficially, he not only misrepresented the work of many great poets, he also distorted some of the basic standards of poetic excellence. His slapdash method not only ignored both the obvious formal qualities of the origibals (like rhyme and meter) and, more crucially, those subtler organizing principles such as diction, tone, rhythm, and texture that frequently give poems their intensity. Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale and Machado, not onlyall sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not Robert Bly at his best. But as if that weren't bad enough, Bly consistently held up these diminished versions as models of poetic excellence worthy of emulation. I promoting his new Poetics (based entirely on his specially chosen foreign models) he set standards so low that helped create a school of mediocrities largely ignorant of the pre-modern poetry in English and familiar with foreign poetry only through oversimplified translations. Bly's weaknesses as a translator underscore his central failings as a poet."[43]

In the years since, many New Formalist poets have taken up Gioia's challenge.

Poet Charles Martin has published literary translations of the ancient Roman poet Catullus and of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Martin has also produced literary translations of the sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, who wrote, "over twenty-seven hundred sonnets, and all of them are about the people of Rome, all written in different voices... It's a kind of polyphonic symphony of sonnets about Rome and the people of Rome. But he's not easy to translate because he wrote in a Roman dialect."[44]

Another acclaimed New Formalist verse translator is Anglo-American poet Dick Davis. Davis, who lived in Iran during the reign of the last Shah, taught English at the University of Tehran, and married an Iranian woman in 1974, decided to begin translating Persian poetry after the Islamic Revolution turned him and his wife into refugees. In 1984, Davis translated and published, with his wife's assistance, an English translation of Attar of Nishapur's The Conference of Birds. Since then, Davis has published literary translations of a collection of medieval Persian epigrams in 1997, Ferdowsi's The Shahnameh in 2006, Fakhruddin As'ad Gurgani's Vis and Ramin in 2009,[45] and Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz in 2012, a collection of the poets of Medieval Shiraz, including Hafez, Jahan Malek Khatun, and Ubayd Zakani. According to Patrick Kurp, "Dick Davis has virtually invented Persian literature for contemporary English readers."[46]