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Langpo, Pomo, Newfo Does the fact that a poet is challenged by writing in an old form rather than by inventing a new form make any key change in the experience of writing or reading? Is Joan Retallack’s procedural elegy “AID/I/SAPPEARANCE,” where several letters of the alphabet disappear from each stanza until only the letters y and o remain, a form just as much as a ghazal is a form? It’s certainly possible to argue that there is no difference, or at least no clear line of demarcation between today’s exploratory form and tomorrow ’s received form. The examples Mike Magee cites in his essay “Formalista!” make this clear. Rhymed couplets and ballads are some of the most ancient forms, but the new ballads and couplet poems that Magee quotes by Eugene Ostashevsky and K. Silem Mohammed, not to mention Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen, are inarguably of the postmodern moment. And why not? As Ron Silliman has remarked, “work as diverse as Bob Grenier’s and Lee Ann Brown’s and Bernadette Mayer’s can certainly be read as a new formalism in the most literal sense.” Nonetheless, if 99 percent of the formal DNA between new formalists and exploratory poets is the same—as it is between a human and a chimpanzee—or even 98 percent—as it is between a human and a banana—there is still that 1 or 2 percent difference to argue over. And the smallness of that difference, the closeness between the two sides, has helped to feed the bitterness of the argument. For the exploratory poet, the 1 or 2 percent distinction is a crucial one; the important difference is a matter of recognizing and foregrounding the materiality of the signiAer, of respecting the artiAce of form and not trying to naturalize or normalize or fetishize the form, not to use it transparently as a mere decorative device. So, the crucial difference between exploratory poetics and 18 new formalism may lie not in the area of formal patterning, but rather in the area of syntactic coherence. A graduate student of mine, a young poet, recently turned in a brief essay on the topic of what kind of poetry she likes. She opened her paper with a by now familiar wish list: “For me, poetry has value when it foregrounds language as object, subverts grammatical and contextual rules, and allows the reader to become an active participant rather than passive consumer.” For her, as for most postmodern poets and critics, these three qualities are unavoidably intertwined; in fact, the Arst and third qualities—foregrounding language as an object and allowing the reader to become active—are usually assumed to depend utterly on the second, the subversion of grammatical and contextual rules. Is the subversion of syntax the only way to foreground and complicate poetic language? Recent language poetry (including work by Charles Bernstein) and post–language poetry (including work by Lee Ann Brown, Jennifer Moxley, K. Silem Mohammed , and Lisa Jarnot) shows that metrical poetry can easily coexist along with the subversion of grammatical and syntactical conventions. Yet meter in itself offers a way to render language opaque and to render the reader active, within the conventions of language as commonly used. Meter and other formal techniques offer a unique potential for poetry to become simultaneously subversive of unitary meaning and accessible, opaque and non-elitist. I think this is one of the main reasons that some postmodern poets now hunger for formal poetry: poetic form, with its kinetic and nonverbal power to defamiliarize words, can, when used with talent and skill, charge ordinary language beyond meaning, defamiliarize language without making it syntactically inaccessible. As a graduate student years ago, I remember confessing to Marjorie Perloff that I just wanted to write in form. This was after years and years of admiring much experimental writing, studying theory, coming to understand myself as a feminist, and distancing myself from the post-Romantic tradition. Though I somehow felt that all this should have neutralized, or at least tempered, my desire to write in form, none of it did. The goal to “form” my poems was a visceral desire I could not repress any longer. I remember Marjorie standing under one of the cloistered avenues of the Quad, urging me, “Then do it!” Regardless 19 of what she might have said, I had absolutely no choice but to do it. The ramiAcations of that doing were more than I ever could...

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