The New Formalism
How American Poetry Found Religion Again
Welcome to The Trochaic Dispatch,
a newsletter where I discuss whatever unedited nonsense is on my mind.
Today’s nonsense is the New Formalists.
First, some terms: most folks are familiar with the term “free verse,” that is, unrhymed and unmetered verse. Verse that does use a combination of meter and/or rhyme—whether in a poem established internally within the poem or imposed upon the poem through an established form like sonnet structure—is called “formed” or “formal” verse.
If you have even the vaguest interest in poetry, you’re likely familiar with free verse. Most of the American poetry written since 1950 is in free verse. Most of contemporary poetry employs free verse, regardless of the poet’s subject matter or school of thought.
What’s wild about this poetry fact: free verse is the babiest of babies among poetic norms. Whitman was arguably the first American free verse poet, and he wrote in the 1850s. During every prior century, poetry stuck to form, for reasons I’m exploring in my 25-page masters thesis, a project I’m procrastinating on to write this newsletter.
After WWII, American mainstream and ivory tower poets both switched over to free verse exclusively. No one wrote in form for twenty years. No one published it, anyway. Free verse, once the rebellious teenager, was now a full grown adult, poetry’s new status quo.
Other art forms saw this progression as well. I have a friend with an MFA in textile arts whose primary interest is the study and preservation of historic textile design. She’s told me about how, during her studies, she was the only student in her cohort at a prestigious arts institute who identified as a formalist in her field—someone who studies and uses traditional methods to construct her pieces. We’ve talked at length about this phenomenon of deconstruction in art post-WWII—it happened in theater, in the visual arts, in film, in literature. Artists collectively decided that form couldn’t be trusted.
Why did this happen? The answer is complex, but from what I’ve studied so far, a lot of it boils down to collective disillusionment with tradition for tradition’s sake. The answer was to throw “rules” out the window. That meant bringing in new rules, of course, because folks just can’t live in a vacuum or either air or guidance. For poetry, that meant free verse became the new orthodoxy.
I want to be abundantly clear that I love free verse poetry. Writing a good free verse poem is hard. Without a formal skeleton to attach poetic muscles to, there’s a lot of building from the ground up, a lot of painstaking attention to line length and internal sound devices and even whitespace around individual words or phrases. Free verse allows for innovation and candor in ways that formal verse prohibits sometimes. I’ve written formed and free verse, and both are challenging and rewarding in equal measures but for different reasons.
Free verse is a form, though, in a way—once it became the norm, poets went from using a plethora of traditional forms to using just this one newish one. Free verse became tradition. It wasn’t until the 1970s that American poets started to break with tradition again—by returning to form.
My first question when studying the New Formalist movement of the 80s and 90s (or, as they’d prefer to be called, the Expansive poets) was “Why didn’t poetry just get less structured over time?” If the arts are supposedly devolving with time, as some have argued, when why hasn’t all poetry followed in the wobbly incomprehensible footsteps of Finnegan’s Wake?
One school of poetry that rose to prominence during the 60s and 70s was the Confessional Poets. This group had the greatest influence on today’s free verse poetry—their poetry was personal, pulling from the poets’ lived experiences, and often plunging into depths so personal that they became obscure. The confessional poets—including Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsburg, W.D. Snodgrass, and others—took poetry to a place that divorced poetry from its original use and purpose: communal communication. Poetry turned from speaking to universal experience or storytelling and towards communicating the essence of the individual.
Nothing wrong with that—there’s plenty of excellent poetry that sprang from the confessional impulse. But readers got tired of it. Poetry became too obscure for the common reader to enjoy or analyze. Confessional poetry, to many readers, looked like no more than an artistic airing of grievances in stanza form.
Enter the New Formalists. Poets that came of age in the late 70s and early 80s started writing in form again—poets like Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Molly Peacock, Marilyn Nelson, Mary Jo Salter, Timothy Steele. These poets started pouring their subject matter into formal molds—sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, villanelles, and all their friends appeared in their published collections. Their subject matter is modern—Dana Gioia has a notorious poem about listening to the Beach Boys set in rhymed iambic pentamer—but the forms were not.
They didn’t ask for the label “New Formalists.” Dissenters gave them that title. The free verse establishment quickly equated the return to form with a conservative (or at least anti-progressive) bent—if free verse is the voice of rebellion and progress, then its opposite must be the voice of conformity and regress. The New Formalists themselves are the first and loudest to say this isn’t true—there’s hardly a single political conservative among them. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a literarily conservative streak in the group, or even a religiously conservative one—several of the movement’s boomiest voices are Dana Gioia and Mark Jarman, are both Christians, and more than one essay I’ve read by a New Formalist carried a distinctive note of snobbery in discussions of modern verse. Snobbery and religion aren’t confined to the ranks of formalists, however—there’s plenty of both in academia and publishing at large.
The New Formalists eventually joined ranks with New Narrative poets (poets who decided that, hey, maybe poetry should tell stories again) under the umbrella of Expansive Poetry. This name they chose for themselves. There’s a collection of essays by key expansive (expansivist?) poets called Expansive Poetry that sums up what they think of themselves and their poetry. My favorite of the bunch is an essay by Dana Gioia, Expansive Poetry Poster Boy, called “Notes on the New Formalism.” This essay breaks down the history and motivation for the movement in the accessible, easily-read prose of most poets. He says in this essay that the main impulse towards form came from a desire to see poetry spread to a wider audience than just academia. As a poet who believes poetry is for everyone, I agree, whether or not I’m wholly convinced that form is the best way to do that.
It’s not the most diverse group of writers—mostly Caucasian fellas steering the ship and building the form-centric lit journals with a few notable women and poets of color—but then again, most of the chronicled poetic movements don’t always list every poet working under a given influence, and as we know, not every poet gets the same opportunities to be heard. Yet one of my favorite articles I’ve read about poetry after Modernism was an article by Rita Dove and Marylyn Nelson entitled “The Black Rainbow: Modern Afro-American Poetry.” In this 90s essay, these two iconic poets give a detailed history of Black American poets and poetry, naming names not often anthologized and ending the article with a list of Black poets to watch, people they identified as rising stars, formalist and non.
Form and free verse live in a weird kind of harmony, now, and form is seeing another resurgence among poetry’s biggest current names: Jericho Brown, 2020 Pulitzer winner, invented a new form called the duplex which appeared in this collection The Tradition. Poet Ashley M. Jones, the newest poet laureate of Alabama, said this about form in an interview with Pleiades Press:
“Yes, I’m intentionally playing with form. There are, of course, poems which adhere exactly to their specific form, but breaking those forms is a political act. Like Phyllis Wheatley, I’m showing the oppressor, the ivory tower, that I am fully capable of speaking their language, but like Gwendolyn Brooks, I’m breaking their standards of art by writing about my people instead of fair maidens. I’m breaking their standards by literally breaking the forms open to make space for more kinds of writers, which is my ultimate goal in this life and this writing life—opening the canon for those of us who have been shut out of it for far too long.”
Form is back, and it’s here to stay. Form will encase new ideas alongside old anthems; the rhythms of the past are pounding out the future of a poetry that raises every voice.
Dana Gioia and his generation are entering their 70s—still active, still lecturing, still writing. They wanted to bring poetry back to the national conversation, and I think they succeeded—I hope they see it that way. Time will tell where poetry will go next. Poetry is part of a big wheel, ever rolling forward, even if the spokes never really change.