Formalism and Younger Poets

Back in 1960, Robert Lowell punned on anthropological terms to divide American poetry into the raw and the cooked: poets, such as William Carlos Williams, who sought the impression of spontaneity (on the one hand) and poets (on the other) who revel in plans and forms. You could, if you like, make the same distinction today, though you’d have to allow for the prominent elders (Patricia Smith, say) whose work falls in between, speech-like, brisk, but in fixed forms. You’d also end up noticing how many of today’s “cooked” poets choose structures that seem new, or avant-gardish, or recently popularized: lipograms, abecedarians, Golden Shovels, cascades of irregular and internal rhyme, erasures (so many erasures). And that’s fine. It’s modernist cuisine. Sometimes, though—being a Poetry Critic™—I get asked who’s cooking beautifully, right now, with traditional recipes, using forms that Tennyson might recognize. In 2023 I would have named poets my age, or older, or poets at work outside the U.S. Or both