Summer 2000 / The Dark Horse / 133

NEW FORMALISM: A U.K. VIEW

by Helena Nelson
After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative and Tradition
edited by Annie Finch (Story Line Press, 1999);
New Expansive Poetry: Theory. Criticism. History
edited by R.S. Gwynn (Story Line Press 1999)

HOSE WHO name poetic movements should be wary of calling them new.

Like new improved washing powder or, in Britain, the New Labour Party, the
word itself carries the smack of a commercial jingle. It creates a problem for acolytes
too, who may, within a couple of decades, be consigned to the neo-new or post-new
status of afterthoughts. But New Formalism New Expansive Poetry New
Narrative these three connected entities still lay rm claim to newness of both
name and aesthetic in the recently published essay collections from Story Line Press.
I picked up the two volumes with interest, thinking they would probably
help me draw up a kind of idiots guide to New Formalism, a movement we
havent had in the UK, unless I have somehow slept through it. In Britain we
seem to have just emerged from a century during which formal poems and free
verse texts remained constant, if uneasy, bedfellows. However, it seems that
free verse achieved complete dominance over formal poetry in the United States
some time between 1950 and 1970, to such a degree that new formalist poets
writing in metre and rhyme were able to regard themselves as rebels. One
essayist here, Frederick Feirstein, even refers to the dissident essays of new
narrative poets.
Rebellion. Dissidence. Poetry Wars. Conict in the arts is always
interesting: without contraries is no progression. I set out to determine the battle
lines, but very quickly foundered over nomenclature. The term Expansive
Poetry was, I learned, coined in 1989, as a kind of three-for-the-price-of-one,
subsuming New Formalism, New Narrative and a new aesthetic. The last
of these promised greater accessibility with the avowed aim of winning back
poetrys lost audience. These movements are sometimes spelled with upper
case, sometimes lower, and the choice of upper or lower is (albeit with small
p) political. Confusing.
At rst I preferred the name New Formalism it seemed to make a
kind of concrete sense I could relate to. Later, I realised that Expansive Poetry
actually rather suited the exaggerated claims of its original progenitors, Frederick
Feirstein (New York psychoanalyst and poet) and Frederick Turner (poet and
professor), whose brainchild actually appears here in revised form, with Gwynn
as new editor. I am not in a position to judge how the poetry of Turner and
Feirstein compares with their theories, since little of their writing is well known
here, but of one thing I am certain: they can write essays. And this is equally

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true of many poets closely or marginally associated with New Formalism. Only
one essay in each of these Story Line publications is by a non-poet Robert
McPhillips (doctoral teacher of English at Iona College). This fact is interesting
enough to make the reader turn to McPhillips rst, but alas, his two essays are
not compelling. They do, though, reect attitudinal preferences common to
many of his fellow essayists.
McPhillips dislikes the intellectual lite of academic poets, prefers
middle ground to Black Mountain. He welcomes the fact that New Formalists
are as likely to be found in the business world as they are in the university. He
deplores the frequent hysteria of the Confessional poets, a stance shared even
more vituperatively by Feirstein. He applauds, however, the love lyric which,
he claims, has undergone a renaissance in the hands of the New Formalists.
Unfortunately, this is not borne out by his choice of illustration and I can only
hope that his quotations, cited out of context, do not reect the best work of poets
such as Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Ill take my seat with minimal complaints.
/May you sit in the company of saints / And intellectuals and fabulous beauties
/ And not forget this constant love of Trudes) and the apparently painfully
coy Mary Jo Salter (Darling, if youll untie / your shoes again and lie / for a
moment, while the sun turns all to gold, / I may grow very bold.
The essayist who, in both volumes, best claried my understanding
of what all the stushie, as we say in Scotland, was about, was undoubtedly
Dana Gioia. I have forgiven his (ironic) reference to the British using rhyme
and meter in their quaint, old-fashioned way and the Irish in their primitive,
bardic manner because his discursive style is so good. He argues cogently, has
a sense of provocation and fun and a lightness of touch which other writers,
particularly in the Gwynn volume, notably lack. His prose writing is good
enough to make one want to read his poetry. Above all, he sounds sane: Soon,
I believe, the central debate will focus on form in the wider, more elusive sense
of poetic structure. How does a poet best shape words, images and ideas into
meaning? (Notes on the New Formalism.) Gioia asks condent, signicant,
rational questions. He doesnt claim to have all the answers.
Others in the same volume are not so modest. Yet it was some of the
insanely assertive essays which gave me particular pleasure for quite the wrong
reasons of course. The Neural Lyre: Poetic meter, The Brain, and Time by
Frederick Turner and Ernst Pppel, should be prescribed reading for all students
of literature or creative writing as a warning of what can happen to those
who drink so deep of the Pierian Spring as to risk complete intoxication. Turner
and Pppel timed how long it took to speak a typical line of poetry written in
Latin, Greek, English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian,
Hungarian, Uralic, Slavic, Celtic and Ndembu. This experiment allowed them
to draw the remarkable conclusion that the three-second line is not only

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a world-wide poetic norm, but also less obviously perhaps the length of
the human present moment. On the basis of this scientic discovery, the two
writers conclude that projective verse (as developed by Olson) and many other
free verse systems are devoid of objective validity. This extraordinary logic
goes so far as to posit that metrical verse (the three-second line) makes the brain
function better: it promotes bio-physical stress reduction (peace) and social
solidarity (love). Free verse, on the other hand, is nicely adapted to the needs
of the bureaucratic and even the totalitarian state.
It struck me as possible that Turner and Pppels neural lyre was a
gigantic, neo-Orphean send-up. After all, Pppels own term, monocausotaxophilia
(the love of single causes that explain everything) describes the whole essay
beautifully. The three-second line explains everything: its neural rightness
is used to prove how metrical verse is natural and healthy, not to mention
morally and politically preferable. Remembering though that Turner is, by his
own declaration, one of the founders and spokespersons of the Expansive
movement, one feels uneasy. Turning to Feirstein, the co-founder, provides no
comfort.
After reading Psychoanalysis and Poetry in the Finch volume, I am
absolutely sure that if I ever feel a burning need for psychoanalysis, Feirstein
will be my very last choice of therapist. Like Turner, he draws on the apparent
objectivity of science (the recent work of neuroscientists and dream researchers)
to prove that the unconscious mind if healthy obeys rules uncommonly
like those of formal (and preferably narrative) verse. Sick people express the
truth of their traumas in clichs which, with the help of an insightful analyst
such as Feirstein, can be turned into true metaphor. Penetrating to deeper
and deeper levels of our psyche is, according to Feirstein, a good thing to do
and metre and rhyme can help us get there. The ultimate goal of analysis,
avers the poet-analyst, who himself writes long narrative poems, is to help
people achieve self-cure by helping them become better narrative poets.
Narrative poetry, therefore, acquires a mysterious association with mental
health, just as the three-second line is connected with effective brain function.
This reects another feature characteristic of many essays in the two volumes:
a tendency to polarise not only types of poetry, but qualities associated with
them. I found myself drawing up a list of words belonging to opposite camps,
though some of them mysteriously jumped from side to side, depending on the
perspective of the essayist. Broadly though, I found New Formalist/New Expansive
Poetry to sit on the same side as health, freedom (true freedom), accessibility,
richness, time processes, love, the common reader, civilisation, moral values,
instruction, narrative and newness. This contrasted squarely with Free Verse
and its associated hysteria,obscurity, subjectivity, solipsism, confessionalism, style
which was new once but is now denitely old hat, bankruptcy, single moment
stuck in time and, last but not least, metrical illiteracy.

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The idea of metrical illiteracy is seminal to the New Formalist movement

and forms the main focus of a Brad Leithauser essay in the Gwynn volume, an
essay which, the editor tells us, has been inuential but hitherto hard to nd.
Certainly its central tenet that todays poets have either forgotten, or never
known how to write metrically is echoed by other essayists, notably Gioia,
Maillard and Feirstein. What is particularly interesting, from a British point
of view, is the complementary idea that young poets are taught how to write
metrically or otherwise in workshops. Creative writing programs in this
country have not yet acquired the status of sole (or even partial) Poet Trainers.
In fact, I think the British generally assume that most poets learn how to write
poetry, as they have traditionally done, by reading and imitation. Thankfully,
much of the last several hundred years of published verse is still available and,
since the lions share of it is metrical, there is still ample opportunity to have
ones metrical ear trained by what Leithauser nostalgically (because he thinks it
is lost) calls the steeping process.
But all is not lost. Some of the essayists included, especially in the
Finch collection, are able to bridge the New Formalist/Old Free Verse divide.
Annie Finch herself has a vision of multi-formalism and even feels that the
long hegemony of free verse has cleared our ears and opened the eld for
metrical verse. Gioia writes both formal and free verse (hurray!); and Anne
Stevenson wants us freely to admit to liking or disliking actual poems without
labelling them rst.
Of the two essay collections, on balance, I preferred the Finch volume.
Gwynn, I suspect, had the harder task revising Feirsteins previous issue.
However, the revised editions adjustment of the early volumes alleged exclusive
interest in white male poets achieves only limited success. The main essays
are all, save one, by men. The added female voices are a wholesale import
from the verse anthology A Formal Feeling Comes the prefatory statements,
mostly very short, of twelve women poets, extending over in total 16 pages. (A
single essay by Timothy Steele spans 23. ) I was also uncomfortably aware of
a tendency in Gwynns introduction to connect women writers in general with
their reactions to the patriarchal authority which some of them apparently
feel traditional form represents.
The Finch collection offers a better balance. It includes essays by women
writers on other aspects of poetry than gender issues. There is also a better
variety of tone: a sense of delight in Carolyn Beard Whitlows wonderful blues
essay; a sense of glorious disrespect in Agha Shahid Alis piece on The Ghazal in
America: May I?; a sense of the innitely technical in Timothy Steeles analysis
of metre and grammar; and a great sense of relief to arrive at the rational and
signicantly-placed nal essay by Anne Stevenson The Trouble with a word
like Formalism.
Nevertheless, I cannot do full justice here to either collection. Each

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represents careful thought and selection by its editor. Each contains more that
is interesting than dull; more provocation than accommodation. I have not even
mentioned Wyatt Pruntys The Emaciated Poem in the Gwynn volume a
gem of an essay and one which shares concerns also articulated on this island.
Just as Prunty remarks on the shrinkage in margins that has produced a stylish,
highly marketable thinness, so Tim Love, based in Cambridge, England has
recently remarked on the short-line block poem which follows the visual
imperative to look like a poem without a viable logic to justify its shape or
line breaks (Able Muse, The Legacy of Form). There is a shared feeling on
both sides of the Atlantic, it seems, that some apparently modern free verse is
very hide-bound, sticking to old poetic conventions but without underpinning
rationale. There are many possible reactions to this situation. One is to re-assert
formalist techniques; another is, as Love suggests, to abandon the one remaining
distinguishing feature the line break and to reformat some poems as
prose. A third option is to focus critical observation on those examples of free
verse which do work and work well. To many writers the battle between
prose and poetry, or formal and free, is less signicant than the energy of the
text itself. And it is an interest in text which makes both these essay collections
worth reading. The essay, after all, is an art form too.