I usually don't spend much time thinking about the "new formalism." Reading in Kasey's blog "Limetree" a response to Mike Snider's "formal blog" led me to reflect on this movement. The problem with much that goes under the rubric of New Formalism is not that it is metrical, but that it is not metrical enough. One mode I've seen is the "continuous pentamer." The poet writes steadily in iambic feet and simply hits the shift key whenever he or she gets to five. The enjambments are not justified; the lines are not "clean," to use Silliman's recent adjective. (I could see Kenneth Koch doing this for humorous effect, but these guys are dead serious.) There are other metrical sins: the padded line, the word used because it fits the meter even though it is not the right word, the forced rhyme, the unjustified caesura, the singsong rhythm, the line that can be scanned with some effort but doesn't sound good, the too obvious expenditure of effort, etc.... Whatever happened to "Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought / All our stitching and unstiching is for naught"?

I don't really care too much whether the formalists are politically conservative. My problem is with the amateurism. Kasey's own poem is hilarious, as is the web site "eratosphere," in which earnest amateurs get earnest advice on clunky sonnets about running over squirrels. It doesn't really bother me that poets write in strictly metrical verse. In fact I prefer Richard Wilbur to Donald Hall or Billy Collins. It's not that meter is itself conservative, but that conservatives prefer it because they think it makes them more virtuous. It's sort of a "protestant work ethic" approach that is quite foreign to the metrical tradition of Chaucer or Shakespeare or William Blake.

I like Frost and Hardy. The ideological use to which such poets are put, though, is another matter. As in, "Let's write like Thomas Hardy so we can forget that modernism ever existed."