Michael Snider has a correspondent who maintains that formalist poetry ‘treats the reader as a ‘blithering idiot,’ particularly when compared to poems from the avant garde.”

Well, I’ll bite. How so? And does this argument extrapolate to the “School of Quietude” as well?

Speaking of the New Formalists, the contention would thus be that employing a linguistic device that is more or less immediately recognizable is somehow pandering. I can’t help but hear in this the same arguments made by Silliman and others about how the SOQ poets are just doing the “same old thing” and being inauthentic, disingenous and lazy because they are not employing new forms and techniques in their poems.

What is it with this cult of the new? In my job, working with technology and education, I have a fundamental rule, a prime directive that states: thou shalt not put the technology first. There may be many ways to do many things, and they may have intrinsic attraction, but in the end the technological tools only exist in this context as means to an end.

Writing is no different, whether in the rarefied air of poetic pursuits or in the trenches of technical documentation and proposals. There are myriad tools and devices available to be used, but in the end the only thing that matters is whether the poem conveyed something to the reader, not whether its method of doing so had been used once or a thousand times or never before. Being different from what has been done confers no automatic value whatsoever. None. Nada. Zilch. Zip. My Petrarchan sonnet in Klingon is new, but of no artistic value, while Thom Gunn’s “The Man with Night Sweats” uses familiar rhythm and rhyme but is an undeniably powerful and valuable work. The Christina Mengert poem I and others wrote about a while back is not particularly good despite being “different and “new” in its approach.

Is it pandering, then, to write about earthly objects? In English? Using the familiar alphabet? Using proper spelling?

I’m actually beginning to think that some of the poets and readers in blogland really believe that there is some intrinsic value in the mere newness of approach. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t likewise value poems that do something new– they just have to do so while going about the “old” business of being good poems. Nor do I mean that a poem must be immediately accessible to every reader without any thought, effort, or a reasonable amount of attention. It’s good to be demanding, but finding those demands in the naked form or approach is as weak and lazy as SOQ shorthand references scrabbling to create an emotional response based on familiarity– they are both distinctly trivial.

Which leaves us with the old tar baby of perception, figuring out how a poem works, and judging whether it works, which is dependent upon an arbitrarily complex web of personal engagement and aesthetic community that makes any kind of distinct synopsis, grids, graphs and criteria as unworkable and foolish as their authors are adamant about their application. They are only wortwhile as long as those using them recognize how insufficient they are.