New Formalism - Current Activity

Current Activity

Since 1995, West Chester University has held an annual poetry conference with a special focus on formal poetry and New Formalism. Each year the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award is awarded as part of the conference.

By the end of the 20th century, poems in traditional forms were once again being published more widely, and the new formalist movement per se was winding down. Annie Finch's edited essay collection, After New Formalism: Poets on Form and Narrative (1999), which moved formalist concerns into a wider and more diverse poetic context, may be seen as marking the end of the first phase of the movement.

Since then, the effects of new formalism have been observed in the broader domain of general poetry; a survey of successive editions of various general anthologies showed an increase in the number of villanelles included in the post-mid-'80s editions. The publication of books concerned with poetic form has also increased. Lewis Turco's Book of Forms from 1968 was revised and reissued in 1986 under the title 'New Book of Forms. Alfred Corn's The Poem's Heartbeat, Mary Oliver's Rules of the Dance, and Stephen Frye's The Ode Less Travelled are other examples of this trend. The widely-used anthology An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (University of Michigan Press, 2002), edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes, defines formalist poetry as a form on a par with experimental, free verse, and even prose poetry.

In 2001 the American poet Leo Yankevich founded The New Formalist, which published among others the poets Jared Carter, Keith Holyoak, and Joseph S. Salemi. The most significant new magazines devoted to formalist poetry are The Barefoot Muse and Umbrella.

Interest in the movement and in formal techniques continues, as the West Chester conference demonstrates, but the movement is not without its detractors. In the November/December 2003 issue of P. N. Review, N. S. Thompson wrote: "While movements do need a certain amount of bombast to fuel interest, they have to be backed up by a certain artistic success. In hindsight, the movement seems to be less of a poetic revolution and more a marketing campaign."