The recent NY Times feature on Anthony Hecht produced an interesting confluence of responses (see these blogs: Lime Tree, Ineluctable Maps, Mike Snider's, and the discussion on form & avant-garde on the Poetryetc. list).

Hecht's question, "what makes it a poem?" - as he sits hieratically in his white-columned library in Washington DC with the mausoleum-like inscription from one of his own funereal poems written in gold around the walls - comes like the sphinx or the voice from the crypt, asking the style question that no one has been able to answer for the last 50 years or so. "I thought of a butterfly. . ."

For the New American Poets & their inheritors, the question to some degree has already been answered. Poetry has been ineluctably democratized. See Ron Silliman's blog entry for today: the exciting question is not "what makes it a poem?", but, "How will the irrevocable advance made by the New Americans grow and diversify?" This is a rather sanguine, untroubled outlook - avoiding the issue I raised earlier on this blog, that the various "oppositional" styles in US poetry tend toward fracture and balkanization, because they are predicated on denying the existence of a central, major tradition in poetry in English. Stevens: "How to confront the mickey mockers. . . What wine does one drink, what bread does one eat?" (I don't have the book handy - hope I have those lines correct.)

I don't have the answer to any of these questions. But this morning my thoughts are ambling toward a recognition that each poet's work, each poet's poetics, represents a way of apprehending and responding to the world. Often the surface tensions & trumpetings of group developments seem to provide the fascination, the critical handle on "progress in the arts"; but maybe we could look at these matters through a slightly different lens. Say, for example, we took what we consider the elements of style & form & various poetry traditions, and instead of looking at them in some sort of comparative, historical context, looked more closely at how individual poets were able to apply particular formal elements to achieve their own individual ends.

Thus, instead of looking at Hecht, just for one example, as a role-model or exemplar of a particular style-force in poetics - what if we examined very specific formal approaches & techniques used by poets like Hecht, and then looked at how they were used by other, very different poets, poets who do not represent the para-political aspects of New Formalism. I think we would find that there are poets out there who would fall into the "progressive, experimental" pigeonholes, who are nevertheless able to apply traditional techniques (rhyme, meter, stanzas, modal forms, allusion/imitation, and so on). The nonce forms developed by "experimentalists" might not be to the taste of the nostalgic conservatives like Hecht, yet the actual techniques used by both may not be that far apart.

Kasey Mohammad emphasizes how Hecht's biases seem to stem from an inability to imagine or respond, in poetry, outside the traditional & sanctioned forms of old. It's an "archival" approach. Yet I think we have to recognize our own limits in turn. The old geezers have a background in metrics & oral presentation, coming in large part from poets like Yeats & Hardy, through Auden, Merrill et al., which if they could respond to the world-view, might teach the younger generation a number of things about the unity of relations between style, rhetoric, subject-matter, and presentation. Somewhere in that unity of effect, it seems to me, lies the direction of the central, major tradition - not the much-maligned "mainstream" - which the representatives of oppositional poetics too often complacently dismiss.

Ultimately, the arena of the new lies paradoxically with the individual - the individual poet's ability to synthesize many impulses, techniques and verbal capacities, to correlate them all in the service of a worldview and an inimitable expressive force.