So I will try to address again these two points & answer Socky at the same time; I have the feeling that if I can carefully define the idea of "metaform" it might deal with both issues.

Originally I proposed this notion of metaform as a critique of New Formalism - against the assumption that "forms" are all there is. But my point refers really to any emphasis on technique in isolation, whether by the formalism of traditionalists or the anti-formal formalism of innovators.

Form is the building design. Metaform is the actual building, in the open air, in its environment. Moshe Safdie on a hilltop seeing his 10 or 15 structures scattered around Jerusalem.

But poetry persists in a different kind of environment, differently social, conceptual, performative. Its atmosphere includes the intellectual & cultural context, the surrounding climate of its time. Thus for example part of the "metaform" of Wordsworth includes the climate he helped instigate - a new focus on "ordinary speech", folk music & balladry, "romance" in the medieval sense, and, most importantly, a spiritual doubt & questing around the foundations of received religion & 18th-century Enlightenment received ideas.

However, if we left it there, we would not be talking about poetry, but about the "form" of social & intellectual history in general. As I tried to point out earlier in this blog with reference to Mandelstam: metaform, in the context of poetry, has to do with a process of internalizing & creative re-making - the transmutation of cultural metaform into the inimitable aesthetic form of a new poetry.

We could think of metaform in terms of a process of a poet's development. It could be seen as a kind of oscillation or circle: first, the beginning poet practices & becomes practiced at received forms (in the technical sense of form - free verse, sonnet, etc.). After gaining a certain confidence, she or he applies this talent & newfound technique - seeks to engage with the culture at large through creating interesting, relevant works & offering them to the public. This is indeed a period of trial, as any poet knows who looks back at rejected poems of a long time ago or just yesterday: all those poems that fall short, either from lack of energy or shape, or from trying too hard to "sound like" poetry - and ending up sounding inauthentic: it's not really THEM speaking, it's an unconfident imitator of something already done before. If the poet persists, however - and through luck or effort or destiny discovers originality - the process of interiorizing the cultural metaform(s) of her time & place begins: the inimitable poems are made which exhibit an aesthetic, intellectual & human integrity. Often the late poems, at the end of this struggle, are the most beautiful. Occasionally the Rimbaud will arise whose originality short-circuits the whole process. But this originality is the cultural metaform, reflected in & transmuted into poetry.

OK, how does this relate to the 2nd issue - the assertion that "oppositional" poetics exists in a sort of dialectical or symbiotic relation to a larger tradition?

American ingenuity, starting with Whitman, Dickinson & Poe, valorized originally by Emerson & Thoreau, set in motion a certain cultural landscape or metaform. American poetry would be absolutely original, experimental & new in relation to the poetries of old. This idea was not developed in isolation, but in the context of more traditional poetics of Longfellow, Tennyson & others - it instigated a creative tension. It exploded into view with the Modernists of the first 2 decades of the 20th century. However, it was (fortunately) never "resolved". Both Eliot & Pound, for example, but primarily Eliot, revealed a Janus-faced approach to innovation, and as time went on, the traditionalist Eliot came to the fore - pressing the notion of a single European Christian culture and a poetics aligned with the Renaissance & Dante. Eliot had tremendous influence on the critical & pedagogical developments represented by New Criticism & the southern poets, Ransom, Tate & others. Their influence, in turn, was so strong that when Lowell broke with them in the 50s and began writing confessional free verse, it seemed to mark a sea-change in American poetry. But that was only the beginning. The 50s & 60s brought on a multifaceted expansion/revolt in US poetry activity. The revolt was aimed against both cultural and aesthetic norms. "Aesthetic norms" - when crystallized in prescriptive or traditionalist poetics & pedagogy - seemed like an oxymoron, when the essence of lyric poetry seemed to involve spontaneity, openness, a rejection of social controls, and dream-work or surrealism.

So, by the 1970s and 80s, the US had produced a smorgasbord of different approaches to poetry-making, along with an academic "creative writing" industry. At this late date, in this conflicted environment, how can one possibly suggest that there is a "tradition-at-large"?

During the same period, of course, there was an effort through translation & anthology-making to expand the vistas of tradition & possible models. But their is a difference between translating or anthologizing on the one hand, and creating a new poem or work of poetry on the other. The cultural metaform - whatever shapes & boundaries it may exhibit - must be interiorized and recapitulated in new aesthetic forms & works. In the Middle Ages, poetic mastery was represented in the model of the "wheel of Virgil": the poet's movement from lyric contingency, to didactic purpose (the Georgics), to epic vision - in the process producing a world-image or culture-image - a reflection of the culture as an entirety.

Lyric contingency (or receptivity, openness), didactic conscience or purpose, epic or religious vision - these impulses perhaps underlie the application of the whole variety of technical approaches, specific forms & genres, etc. The US context or heritage is marked by a conjunction of extremes: the extremity of Emerson, Whitman & Dickinson's revolt against British norms; the extremity of Eliot's reassertion of traditionalism. Extremity lends itself to "scene-making": young poets are influenced by the notion that a particular technical approach, idiom, or cultural attitude is a momentous commitment. In a sense, it is: but the decision to follow a particular model is only the beginning of the process of making original poetry - the process leading from form to metaform & on to new form which I outlined above. This is a fact which is often lost to view.

If we take into consideration something like the underlying impulses behind the Virgilian wheel - and add to it a consideration of the developmental process (form/metaform/originality) - we may begin to recognize the outlines of a "tradition-at-large": the character of poetic making as experienced at all times & places. This perennial character might serve to set the US experience of extremes in a new context. Within this context, perhaps we can approach what's been done and is being done - as readers and critics - with an eye not only toward the influence of idioms & scene-makers, but toward how individual poets have interiorized & re-presented both the materials of poetry per se, and the "metaforms" of the surrounding culture. Keeping the underlying impulses in mind, we might be more ready to recognize new lyric poetry, new didactic poetry - and eventually the challenges of poetic & social vision implied by epic.