624 The American Century: Literature since 1945Robinson. What they have in common, along with a dedication to the use of meter
and traditional forms like the sestina or the sonnet, is a desire to shift the emphasis
from the writing to the reception of poetry – and, in doing so, to recapture an
audience they see as having been lost to poetry. This, as Gioia explains in his 1991
essay “Can Poetry Matter,” is not the “mass audience of television and radio” but
those members of the public who enjoy “serious novels, film, drama, jazz ... and the
other modern arts.” The New Formalists have seen themselves as fighting against the
tide: against abstruseness of expression and alienation of feeling in favor of clarity of
word and emotion. “Rather than be bards for the poetry subculture,” as Gioia puts
it, “they aspire to become the poets for an age of prose.” And, in fighting against that
tide, they have not been afraid of controversy. Gioia, in particular, has drawn fire
for his often dismissive attacks on contemporary poetic fashion: something
he acknowledges in “Can Poetry Matter” when he refers to those who, he suggests,
are inclined to see meter itself as a throwback to fascism, “artificial, elitist,
retrogressive, right wing, and ... un-American.” Certainly, the privileging of sound
and meter, making formal exactitude or beauty the poetic end, may run the risk of
writing in social isolation. The editors of Rebel Angels, in their introduction to that
anthology, talk about placing a “premium not only on technique, but on a larger
cultural vision that restores harmony and balance to the arts”; and the other, darker
side of that vision may be the social decontextualization of poetry, the separation of
the arts from the problems and possibilities of multicultural America. But to venture
beyond New Formalist polemics to the actual poetry is to discover how risky such
critical generalizations can be. The New Formalists cover a lot of territory. They
engage with mass as well as high culture, the Beach Boys (“Cruising with the Beach
Boys” by Gioia) as well as Byron and Pushkin (Golden Gate (1986) by Vikram Seth
(1952–)). There are both strict and loose meterists. They are from many different
backgrounds and have a wide range of personal and social commitments. Beyond a
few (not always) shared aesthetic assumptions, and a (not always sustained)
commitment to certain metrical principles, they are, in fact, as diverse as any other
loose community of poets – and perhaps more diverse than most.
Resisting the notion that New Formalism is a predominantly male movement are
such varied poets as Marilyn Hacker (1942–), Annie Finch (1956–), Mary Jo Salter
(1954–), Molly Peacock (1947–) Rachel Hadas (1948–), and Gjertrud Schnackenberg
(1953–). Hacker, a lesbian and social activist, has consistently resisted the notion
that formalism is a masculine poetics. In her sonnet sequence Separations (1976) she
even confronts her use of traditional forms. Rhyme, she suggests in one sonnet, is
her “homely lover” and meter the noise of her lover’s boots as they “scuff up the
stairs.” In turn, her “Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found” (1985) shows her reclaiming
an ancient poetic form and, in particular, offering a self-consciously feminist
response to François Villon’s poem “The Ballad of Dead Ladies.” In response to
Villon’s rehearsal of the theme of ubi sunt (“Where are they now?”), Hacker suggests
that the women she names have always been here, not dead but lost because they
were ignored and marginalized. The act of naming them is an act of rediscovery, a
way of reinserting them in the world. Finch is, if anything, even more adventurousGGray_c05.indd 624ray_c 05 .indd 624 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM