After New Formalism : Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition

by FINCH ANNIE (ED)

• ISBN13: 9781885266682
• ISBN10: 1885266685
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Consortium Book Sales & Dist

Summary

In recent years, the New Formalist movement has been growing and changing quickly, as poets from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives have found in formal poetics a tool of great potential range and power. The common perception of New Formalism's methods and goals, however, has altered much more slowly. After New Formalism is part of an expanding conversation on the formal possibilities of contemporary poetry and on the implications of formalism for poetic history, practice, and theory. Contributors include Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, David Mason, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock, and Adrienne Rich, among others. From the Introduction "Over the years the mission and focus of this book changed to include thoughtful essays by poets engaging with formalism from outside its confines, as well as by younger poets who came to formalism with a more theoretical bent than their elders. While some of the essays here come much closer than others to my own vision of a "multiformalism" that truly encompasses the many formal poetic traditions, including experimental traditions, now native to the United States, this collection of thoughts on form by poets contains fresh insights about the implications of formalism for poetic history, practice, and theory." Annie Finch is the author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Michigan), and the editor of A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Story Line, 1994). She teaches creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
Annie Finch
Traditions
Format and Form	1	(7)
Adrienne Rich
Owning the Masters	8	(10)
Marilyn Nelson
Wings of a Phoenix? Rebellion and Resuscitation in Postmodern American Poetry	18	(7)
Daniel Hoffman
Verse That Print Bred	25	(6)
Paul Lake
The Poet in an Age of Prose	31	(11)
Dana Gioia
Aspects of Robinson	42	(6)
Mark Jarman
Toward an Alternative Formalist Tradition: The Other Harlem Renaissance	48	(15)
Carol E. Miller
Poetics
Blues in Black and White	63	(7)
Carolyn Beard Whitlow
From Gilded Cage to Rib Cage	70	(9)
Molly Peacock
The New Formalism and the Revival of the Love Lyric	79	(10)
Robert McPhillips
Boundless Wealth from a Finite Store: Meter and Grammar	89	(18)
Timothy Steele
Other Voices, Other Lives	107	(10)
David Mason
Metrical Diversity: A Defense of the Non-Iambic Meters	117	(6)
Annie Finch
The Ghazal in America: May I?	123	(10)
Agha Shahid Ali
Calliope Music: Notes on the Sestina	133	(14)
James Cummins
Directions
Why We Need a New, Rhythm-Centered Theory of Poetry	147	(11)
Amittai Aviram
Feminist Formalist: A Critical Oxymoron?	158	(8)
Kathrine Varnes
Expansive Poetry and Postmodernism	166	(13)
Kevin Walzer
Psychoanalysis and Poetry	179	(9)
Frederick Feirstein
Playing Tennis in Asbestos Gloves: Women, Formalism and Subjectivity in the 1980s	188	(11)
Allison Cummings
The Inner Meaning of Poetic Form	199	(5)
Frederick Turner
An Idea of Order	204	(13)
Christian Wiman
The Trouble With a Word Like Formalism	217	(8)
Anne Stevenson
Contributors	225