other, where sunworshippers, splayed upon towels, appeared sacri¤cial,
bodies glazed and glistening like raw ¤sh in the market.For many years I wanted a child though I knew it would only illu-
minate life for a time, like a star on a tree. I believed that happiness
would at last assert itself, like a bird in a dirty cage, calling me, ambas-
sador of ®esh, out of the rough locked ward of sex.When we examine these models, we note that the line break, so central to
free verse in its early manifestations in the twentieth century, no longer has
the semantic function it exercised in poetry from Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams, to George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley and
Frank O’Hara, down to Clark Coolidge and Rae Armantrout. Indeed, in
these recent poems, all of them written in complete sentences, the attention
paid to sound structure or syntactic patterning is so minimal that one can
only conclude that the term “poetry” currently designates not the melopoeic
origins of lyric poetry or the page designs of visual prosody but rather an
ironized narrative or, more frequently, the personal expression of a particular
insight, presented in sometimes striking ¤gurative language: “desert ®owers
/ Taller than men,” “leafy ®akes melt round my footfall,” “Menial twilight
sweeps the storefronts,” bodies are “glazed and glistening like raw ¤sh in the
market,” “happiness” asserts itself “like a bird in a dirty cage.”^11
But since ¤ction can—and does—foreground these same devices, the same
“sensitive,” closely observed perceptions or ironic, parabolic tales—one won-
ders if “poetry” at the turn of the twenty-¤rst century isn’t perhaps expend-
able. Do we really need it? Or is “real” poetry to be found, as some people
now argue, in hip-hop culture or at the poetry slam? Or perhaps in New For-
malist attempts to restore the iambic pentameter or tetrameter to its former
position? Whatever our position on the New Formalism, close reading of its
exemplars suggests that, like the clothing or furniture of earlier centuries,
the verse forms of, say, the Romantic period cannot in fact be replicated ex-
cept as museum curiosities. Consider the opening of Wordsworth’s “Tintern
Abbey”:
Five years have past: ¤ve summers, with the length
Of ¤ve long winters! And again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,214 Chapter 11