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InFORMing an Audience—Poetry on the 'Net - By Renee Roberts Susquehanna Quarterly ( www.susquehannaquarterly.org) is a widely respected online magazine for formalist poetry. by Renée Magriel Roberts To begin with a quick question, how many of you have a "favorite poem" that you can quote at least some portion of from memory? Most of you? I thought so. And I'd be willing to bet good money that in virtually every case this particular poem is rhymed and metrical. Good poetry sings to us, and memorable poetry sings very well indeed. The human brain seems to be wired for rhythm, for beat, for meter. It always has been, and this doesn't, on the evidence, seem to be changing. So what happened? How did it come to be that the vast bulk of poetry published and reviewed and lionized in "serious" magazines and anthologies in the latter three fourths of the 20th century is poetry written in "open forms"? How did it happen that one of the core subjects of a formal education, poetry and prosody (the structure of poetry) fell by the wayside? How did we end up with vast quantities of irregular, unmelodic "verse" that (based on sales figures) nobody much wanted to read swamping all our publications and choking the popular lifeblood of the poetic impulse in the reading public? That's a huge topic, and not one that can be easily explored in an essay of this length, or indeed of any length. Still, one thing's clear -- poetry took a strange turn in the twentieth century, and doing so it lost the confidence of its erstwhile readership. Vers Libre, Concrete Poetry, Imagist Poetry, L-a-n-g-u-a-g-e Poetry, and various other subsets of "experimental" verse became the accepted norms of poetic expression in English, with the impetus of the academic establishment and without the consent of the reading public, and poetry became a bad joke to most otherwise-educated readers. "I like to read, but I'm not good with poetry; I don't understand it," became a commonplace. In the meanwhile, a significant core group of highly-talented poets who chose to write in relatively traditional forms and metrics were essentially pushed off to the sidelines, ignored by the academic and publishing establishment both. This was not only occurring with "form"; a certain, hugely-influential genre of traditional poetry, the Narrative Poem, was also getting extremely short shrift at the hands of the various schools of "modernism." In other words, not only were we being offered up very few ballads, villanelles, sonnets, and the like; we were no longer seeing works of the type exemplified by, say, "The Divine Comedy" or Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", a great novel-in-verse.
InFORMing an Audience—Poetry on the 'Net - By Renee Roberts Poet Rhina Espaillat. Had some impetus died? Had some force that, over the centuries, had informed and motivated virtually all the great poetry in the Canons of literature suddenly atrophied and died off in the 20th century? Based on the evidence of what got published in the last 75 years or so, this might be a valid assumption. But it would be wrong. "Traditional" poets still existed; they just couldn't find a significant marketplace for their work. They were out of fashion with the arbiters of taste, who have not lately seemed much in tune with the public, and they wrote, if they wrote much at all, in virtual isolation. However, in the last two decades of the 20th century, two things happened; the internet was born, and form-loving poets began coming out of the woodwork and clamoring to be heard. How connected are these events? I'm not sure, but they certainly are coincident. The 1980's saw the rise of two closely-related movements back towards poetry's roots; the "New Formalists", and "Expansive Poetry." Both groups (I use "group" in the loosest sense) advocated a return to poetry's roots, and explicitly claimed their right to use whatever poetic traditions or devices suited their own, personal work, without regard to modern "trends" that tend to throw the literary baby out with the bathwater. The internet has provided these poets (and indeed all poets of whatever stripe or persuasion) with something that had been sorely missing in our fragmented times; a sense of community. For most of the 20th century, the only place where poets could get together to discuss and advance their craft was in the academic environment, and as a natural outgrowth "theory" began to take precedence over what we might call the human poetic impulse. The goal was to create something "new", something "different", a "better way" of singing the human condition. These academic communities were essentially limited gene pools, where the cross-fertilization of ideas was limited to a few intellectual theories that were in no way congruent with the human needs of readers on a large scale. Poetry was being written for an audience of other poets, and it's a sad commentary that it was literally true (and arguably still is) that the number of practictioners of "modern poetry" grew larger than the number of readers attracted to the genre. Now, with the maturity of the internet, there are thriving poetic communities in terrific abundance. Poets write together in online workshops, critiquing each others' work and discussing the principles of their craft. Prosody, no longer being taught seriously even in MfA programs for writers, had begun making a comeback. Little magazines, "e-zines", are cropping up everywhere. And what we're seeing is that more and more the "formal" poets, the "traditional" poets, are being heard and appreciated. They're not writing quite like the "old masters" did, of course; there's not much of an audience, thank goodness, for regurgitated Elizabethan or Victorian excesses. But the best aspects of the formal feeling are seeing a revival, with excellent work in a modern idiom that still inhabits the finely-wrought continuum that is the historical arc of poetry in English finally receiving its due, and making a comeback even in the "serious" literary magazines that as little as ten years ago almost never published poetry in metrical forms. Tim Murphy, David Mason, A.E. Stallings, Wiley Clements, David Anthony, Diane Thiel, Catherine Tufariello, Rhina Espaillat, Mike Juster, and countless others are being published widely in print and on the 'net, and their work is wonderful and moving to read.
InFORMing an Audience—Poetry on the 'Net - By Renee Roberts Wiley Clements' new book, Yesterday, or Long Ago, published by Clock & Rose Press. Want to see more? Take a look at two of the most highly-regarded sites for formal poetry online: http://susquehannaquarterly.org : The Susquehanna Quarterly is a recently-revived online magazine that publishes exclusively poetry in form. They publish some of the best formal poets writing in English today. SQ id published by Clock & Rose Press, Inc., a small publishing house that just made its first foray into publishing original poetry with Yesterday, or Long Ago, a finely-designed book of poems by Wiley Clements. Many of SQ's poets workshop at: http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/Ultimate.cgi : Eratosphere, the workshop associated with Able Muse, an occasionally-published magazine of formal verse, is by far the best workshop on the 'net for serious, metrical poets. Browse their forums, and see how poets discuss their craft in an extended online community. The archives in "Musing on mastery" and the "Poet Lariat" threads contain some amazing, in-depth materials.

InFORMing an Audience—Poetry on the 'Net

- By Renee Roberts

Susquehanna Quarterly ( www.susquehannaquarterly.org) is a widely respected online magazine for formalist poetry.

by Renée Magriel Roberts

To begin with a quick question, how many of you have a "favorite poem" that you can quote at least some portion of from memory? Most of you? I thought so. And I'd be willing to bet good money that in virtually every case this particular poem is rhymed and metrical. Good poetry sings to us, and memorable poetry sings very well indeed. The human brain seems to be wired for rhythm, for beat, for meter. It always has been, and this doesn't, on the evidence, seem to be changing.

So what happened? How did it come to be that the vast bulk of poetry published and reviewed and lionized in "serious" magazines and anthologies in the latter three fourths of the 20th century is poetry written in "open forms"? How did it happen that one of the core subjects of a formal education, poetry and prosody (the structure of poetry) fell by the wayside? How did we end up with vast quantities of irregular, unmelodic "verse" that (based on sales figures) nobody much wanted to read swamping all our publications and choking the popular lifeblood of the poetic impulse in the reading public?

That's a huge topic, and not one that can be easily explored in an essay of this length, or indeed of any length. Still, one thing's clear -- poetry took a strange turn in the twentieth century, and doing so it lost the confidence of its erstwhile readership. Vers Libre, Concrete Poetry, Imagist Poetry, L-a-n-g-u-a-g-e Poetry, and various other subsets of "experimental" verse became the accepted norms of poetic expression in English, with the impetus of the academic establishment and without the consent of the reading public, and poetry became a bad joke to most otherwise-educated readers. "I like to read, but I'm not good with poetry; I don't understand it," became a commonplace.

In the meanwhile, a significant core group of highly-talented poets who chose to write in relatively traditional forms and metrics were essentially pushed off to the sidelines, ignored by the academic and publishing establishment both. This was not only occurring with "form"; a certain, hugely-influential genre of traditional poetry, the Narrative Poem, was also getting extremely short shrift at the hands of the various schools of "modernism." In other words, not only were we being offered up very few ballads, villanelles, sonnets, and the like; we were no longer seeing works of the type exemplified by, say, "The Divine Comedy" or Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", a great novel-in-verse.

InFORMing an Audience—Poetry on the 'Net

- By Renee Roberts

Poet Rhina Espaillat.

Had some impetus died? Had some force that, over the centuries, had informed and motivated virtually all the great poetry in the Canons of literature suddenly atrophied and died off in the 20th century? Based on the evidence of what got published in the last 75 years or so, this might be a valid assumption. But it would be wrong. "Traditional" poets still existed; they just couldn't find a significant marketplace for their work. They were out of fashion with the arbiters of taste, who have not lately seemed much in tune with the public, and they wrote, if they wrote much at all, in virtual isolation.

However, in the last two decades of the 20th century, two things happened; the internet was born, and form-loving poets began coming out of the woodwork and clamoring to be heard. How connected are these events? I'm not sure, but they certainly are coincident. The 1980's saw the rise of two closely-related movements back towards poetry's roots; the "New Formalists", and "Expansive Poetry." Both groups (I use "group" in the loosest sense) advocated a return to poetry's roots, and explicitly claimed their right to use whatever poetic traditions or devices suited their own, personal work, without regard to modern "trends" that tend to throw the literary baby out with the bathwater.

The internet has provided these poets (and indeed all poets of whatever stripe or persuasion) with something that had been sorely missing in our fragmented times; a sense of community. For most of the 20th century, the only place where poets could get together to discuss and advance their craft was in the academic environment, and as a natural outgrowth "theory" began to take precedence over what we might call the human poetic impulse. The goal was to create something "new", something "different", a "better way" of singing the human condition. These academic communities were essentially limited gene pools, where the cross-fertilization of ideas was limited to a few intellectual theories that were in no way congruent with the human needs of readers on a large scale. Poetry was being written for an audience of other poets, and it's a sad commentary that it was literally true (and arguably still is) that the number of practictioners of "modern poetry" grew larger than the number of readers attracted to the genre.

Now, with the maturity of the internet, there are thriving poetic communities in terrific abundance. Poets write together in online workshops, critiquing each others' work and discussing the principles of their craft. Prosody, no longer being taught seriously even in MfA programs for writers, had begun making a comeback. Little magazines, "e-zines", are cropping up everywhere. And what we're seeing is that more and more the "formal" poets, the "traditional" poets, are being heard and appreciated. They're not writing quite like the "old masters" did, of course; there's not much of an audience, thank goodness, for regurgitated Elizabethan or Victorian excesses. But the best aspects of the formal feeling are seeing a revival, with excellent work in a modern idiom that still inhabits the finely-wrought continuum that is the historical arc of poetry in English finally receiving its due, and making a comeback even in the "serious" literary magazines that as little as ten years ago almost never published poetry in metrical forms. Tim Murphy, David Mason, A.E. Stallings, Wiley Clements, David Anthony, Diane Thiel, Catherine Tufariello, Rhina Espaillat, Mike Juster, and countless others are being published widely in print and on the 'net, and their work is wonderful and moving to read.

InFORMing an Audience—Poetry on the 'Net

- By Renee Roberts

Wiley Clements' new book, Yesterday, or Long Ago, published by Clock & Rose Press.

Want to see more? Take a look at two of the most highly-regarded sites for formal poetry online:
http://susquehannaquarterly.org : The Susquehanna Quarterly is a recently-revived online magazine that publishes exclusively poetry in form. They publish some of the best formal poets writing in English today. SQ id published by Clock & Rose Press, Inc., a small publishing house that just made its first foray into publishing original poetry with Yesterday, or Long Ago, a finely-designed book of poems by Wiley Clements. Many of SQ's poets workshop at:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/Ultimate.cgi : Eratosphere, the workshop associated with Able Muse, an occasionally-published magazine of formal verse, is by far the best workshop on the 'net for serious, metrical poets. Browse their forums, and see how poets discuss their craft in an extended online community. The archives in "Musing on mastery" and the "Poet Lariat" threads contain some amazing, in-depth materials.