Hazel Smith, in her interesting book on experimental writing techniques, The Writing Experiment, said something which took me aback:

“[Traditional rhymed verse] now seems somewhat anachronistic because it was mainly predominant in pre-twentieth century poetry, though it is retained in some popular forms such as rap.”

By “traditional rhymed verse,” I suppose she is referring to poems employing full rhymes and fairly strict metre, and it’s true, I think, that most contemporary published poems I see written in rhyme and metre use slant rhymes and loose metre (including my own formal stuff).

But is this just a fad? Can full rhymes and strict metre make a comeback and succeed in feeling contemporary (unlike much ‘New Formalist’ Writing)? Or is the future loose and slant (with everyone sounding just a little like Paul Muldoon)?

The thing about Paul Muldoon, surely, is that many (perhaps most) of his rhymes aren't slant at all; that part of his genius is in his skill at finding surprising (and very often eccentric, even perverse) full and and almost full rhymes, despite the fact that our language has such a shortage of them.

As in the following examples, firstly from his sonnet Pineapples And Pomegranates (Moy Sand and Gravel):

To think that, as a boy of thirteen, I would grapple
with my first pineapple,
its exposed breast
setting itself as another test
of my will-power, knowing in my bones
that it stood for something other than itself alone
while having absolutely no sense
of its being a world-wide symbol of munificence.

and secondly his Medley for Morin Khur (Horse Latitudes):

The morin khur is a thoroughbred
of Mongolian violins.
Its call is the call of the stallion to the mare.

A call which may no more be gainsaid
than that of jinn to jinn
through jasmine-weighted air.

A call that may no more be gainsaid
than that of blood kin to kin
through a body-strewn central square.

and lastly this, from Symposium (Hay):

You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it hold
its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.
Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You've been sold
one good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.

A bird in the hand is better than no bread.
To have your cake is to pay Paul.
Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.
For want of a nail the sky might fall.

As for 'loose', wasn't it Muldoon who said: "Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini"? If it wasn't it should have been.

Sadly, I'm left marooned
by the verses of Paul Muldoon,
cold
by the rhyme and dum-di-dum of old.

Much harder and more fun to write, I find
the Latin hexameter, unrhymed.

:P

True enough! His rhymes are often so ingenious that I somehow imagine them to be slant, but they're not. I just checked through a whole book. So Muldoon is not slant, but he is very loose. He certainly represents one way of writing with full rhymes and still sounding contemporary.

One of the problems of using full rhyme and strict metre is that we're tougher nowadays on the conventions. Inversions to make the rhyme and/or metre work better are not acceptable any more, and that, together with the scarcity of rhyme-words in English and the need to sound modern, makes it very difficult. Add to that the fact that a considerable proportion of the critics will slag your poem off simply because it rhymes, and there's very little motivation for trying it.

Tony Harrison has often flown a defiant (and sometimes ragged) flag for full rhyme, of course.

The widespread wariness of full rhyme in contemporary formal poetry is something to do with avoiding all possible charges of appearing to be writing unsophisticated, perhaps overly-'public' poetry, as well as making damn sure no-one accuses you of doggerel, rhymesterism, being a poetaster and so on. Perhaps it is also a way of claiming that you are "playing with the net up" while still brorrowing some of the subtler machinery of non-formal verse.

I have a couple of hundred lines of (mostly) full-rhyme ABABetc. tetrameter (a triple crime, in some ways), forming a short narrative poem - I had been using 'V.' in a seminar, and thought it might be fun to try something similar, although the lines in V. are longer. While I have performed it a couple of times, I am stupidly embarrassed about adding it to a manuscript. I keep trying to break it down into something different, something disguised. Impossible, of course - you can disguise the various types of non-full-rhyme; their full-on cousins just shout out loutishly from wherever you bury them.

I'm not sure how serious you're being here Matthew. Critics may slag a poem for bad rhymes (e.g. obvious rhymes, such as what Beckett referred to as the "womb/tomb") or perhaps even for an excess of rhyme, but the kind of critic who puts the boot in "simply because it rhymes" isn't the kind worth bothering about.

Well, I wouldn't bother about them if there weren't so many of them! Certainly I was told off in the TLS (I think) for including a villanelle, a sestina and a pantoum in my first book, even though the 'pantoum' wasn't one. The implication was that no one would attempt these forms seriously, so they must be technical exercises which had no place in a published book. Then there was the American poet who gave a talk at Southampton University in which he explained that it was absolutely wrong for any poet to use rhyme and metre. And another American poet on a poetics mailing list who always addressed me with a kind of sick disgust because I had argued that it was OK to use them sometimes. It was as if I had said that I didn't know much about art but I knew what I liked - you just didn't say that in the circles he moved in. And the editor who turned down a poem in form saying he liked it but of course I realized he couldn't publish it? And so on...

But it wasn't the TLS telling you off, was it? Surely it was just someone writing an article/review for the TLS, which the editors of the magazine accepted for publication. And the American Poet - was he a Godlike Authority, or did he eat and s*** the same as everyone else in the room? As for the editor who couldn't publish the poem, was there a particular reason why they couldn't (or perhaps more accurately wouldn't) perform this act? Had someone threatened to murder their firstborn child if they ever dared to publish a poem in form?

Opinions, etc ...

Matthew, I am with Rik here. Who ARE these people? Never mind. Whoever they are, fu*k em.

It's all very saying f**k 'em, but I think there is some reality-base to the idea that if you write rhymed poetry, you will get a hostile reaction from a number of people (and in the tiny world of poetry, it doesn't take many people for even a small number to appear intimidating). Though I think the hostility is much greater Stateside, where my sense is that to use strict rhyme and metre is to automatically ally yourself (or be seen to ally yourself) with the forces of colonialism and patriarchy.

I've just done a rough check on the latest Magma (39) - about 10% of the 60-odd poems in there have a strict rhyme scheme. Some of them, in my view, are very good poems, some not, but what I notice myself is how much more questioning i do of a poem with an obvious rhyme scheme - I really ask whether the rhyme scheme is intrinsic to the poem, that it supports the address, tone, argument etc., or whether it's there - a la Felix Dennis - to show that this is a "proper" poem, and not one of those new-fangled so-called "poems" that are just cut up prose blah blah.

Someone I respect as a writer said that she felt half-rhyme had gained prominence over full-rhyme in UK poetry as a reflection of the uncertain and shifting times we live in; that to use full-rhyme (or rather, full, end-stopped rhyme) carried a sense of certainty and assuredness that just wasn't appropriate, either in terms of the world as a whole, or in terms of poetry's fragile relationship with mainstream culture. It's as if poetry didn't feel it could risk being so definite in such a fractured, post-modern environment. I think there's some mileage in that.

I also think that the argument sometimse gets polarised around rhyme v non-rhyme, which doesn't do justice to the immense variety and range of sound effects that fall under the heading of rhyme, and that all good writers use to some degree. Just in terms of end-rhyme, there is a huge amount of grading that can be done around both fullness of rhyme and level of emphasis. (To blow my own trumpet, Magma 37 has an English sonnet in it by me where the hidden nature of the rhymes reflect the argument of the poem perfectly, in my not-so-humble opinion).

Another issue to throw in the pot is that whereas someone like Tim Turnbull is highly skilled in both his use of rhyme and his live delivery of his poems, a lot of people who would call themselves performance poets are guilty of really awful scansion and rhyming, and of poems that hammer you over the head with their meaning. People who want to write poetry that plays around more with ambiguity / polyvalency may shy away from too much obvious rhyme as a consequence, though I believe they miss a trick (and a very good one) if they do - rhyme, after all, can set up a relationship between two words that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Enough. Beginning to ramble, and I have Sunday things to do...

It takes me back too. If the commentator chooses only to notice rhymed verse in rap then all it says is that she's chosen not to read any of such poetry of which there is lots.

This tireless historical accounting is one of the worst elements of soi-disant "innovative" poetics as bundled up.

I'd bang my head on the wall of the obvious: I think if it is being written now then it's contemporary!!!! No element of culture practised now is anachronistic, and if it is called so then those statements can be studied for their own social positioning & the needs of invented histories (which are all histories etc).

Trying to claim that what some people write and others enjoy in the present has actually died out x decades ago is an act of..., well, it annoys me. At the lightest I'd call it snobbery. Why not just say, I don't like it

But that aside, the "feeling contemporary" which Rob mentions is the question - it interests me how poets speak of this kind of thing, the "you can't write that now" which Matthew reports. Isn't this the edge of the/a group asserting itself and its points of trespass?

Whilst I agree entirely with those observations, Edmund, I do think that it's a little more complex than that; some practices do die out.

Those writing Anglo-Saxon or Latin poetry today do not really construct a living language and art.

But lest I digress, my point is that this argument (that anything practised now makes it contemporary) conflates poetry with its practitioners rather than with its consumers, and I think there's an important distinction to be made about this. The poetry of an age must be understood in terms of its consumption, not its production, and our judgement probably will be one of degree, one of prevalence. It's only in this light that we can understand poets, whose readership may not be contemporary at all, and who might become the poetry of an age a generation later.

I completely agree with your sentiments though, where this kind of argument is really about power and authority, about hegemony and heresy, and of course about patronage and prestige. I think these kinds of debates have become distorted by the strikingly poor knowledge we have of poetry readerships. As if what a poet would have to say on this matter was of much importance at all to most general readers.

Well, exactly. If there is a readership for Robert Frost or Richard Wilbur, does this make the readers anachronistic?

Isn't the argument really a complaint that poetry readers have somehow failed to modernise themselves? Or failed to follow a particular aesthetic? Or failed to educate themselves to a level capable of understanding academic literary theory? How annoying!

This idea pre-dates post-modernism by some time, though - it's an early 20th Century idea, particularly where it concerns the 'adequacy' of poetry to its world. Hence the idea that a fractured, less-perfectly-wrought poetry is more effective than the well-wrought box, clicking shut etc. This undoubtedly influences some of the distrust of full-on rhyme and metre, where this distrust exists.

It's perfectly reasonable (and has been for many decades) to hold the theoretical view - as writer, reader or editor - that poetry should abandon traditional form, to varying degrees. This isn't necessarily a judgement on how well-made the poem is, but is a judgement more like the one made by some about, say, representational art.

It's not one I hold myself (at least, not any more). But it's only a critical/theoretical viewpoint, when all is said and done.

I was having a look through books on shelf to see whether certain authors employed mainly slant rhyme or full rhyme. Most do use a lot of slant rhyme but turn exclusively to full rhyme for specific poems e.g. Don Paterson, Marilyn Hacker, Michael Schmidt, George Szirtes, W. N. Herbert. I guess the critics who believe full rhyme is outdated would have no time for these poems, but it does show that full rhyme is used effectively by successful, critically-acclaimed, fairly liberal writers. If they can do it without being written off, why can’t everyone else who feels like it?

The point about the relationship of poetry to our fractured, uncertain culture is interesting. Perhaps Tony Harrison’s full rhymes could be seen as a deliberate criticism of that very mindset? He often wants to be very definite about things.

Alan B’s point about questioning whether a rhyme scheme is intrinsic to a poem also makes sense. An integration of form and content is probably a prerequisite of successful contemporary formal poetry. That’s even when the form comes first e.g. if the poet decides to write in terza rima and moulds the content to fit the form. Done skilfully enough, the reader will never know whether the poem originated with form of content, even if the poet knows.

I heard Michael Schmidt speak at the Scottish Poetry Library a year or so ago. He spoke on submissions he receives for Carcanet and PN Review and said that one of the most common submissions was the “Muldoonian” (not sure if I’ve remembered the term he used accurately, but that’s the gist of it). I’m not sure if was just referring to poems that seemed obviously influenced by Paul Muldoon, or if these poems also contained full end-rhymes. In any case, I got the impression that such submissions were routinely rejected (that doesn’t necessarily reflect Schmidt’s view on Muldoon himself, by the way, only on the “Muldoonian”). That could be a problem for poets trying to combine full rhymes with a post-modern mindset – how to shake off Muldoon’s massive influence on the genre.

Isn't it [merely] the case that rhyme and metre are just more tools at the disposal of the poet, and it only becomes tiresome when it becomes programmatic and adversarial? Some poets find their saying within form, some find the form doing the saying, others may want the bare rock face of formlessness to search for footholds and handholds. I can't recall a Muldoonian submission at Salt, though it's harder to characterise what comes in these days. It's very diverse. One thing for certain, good writing shines out from whatever range of practice it defines, no practice determines it, but it's startlingly obvious when someone can write well (and good writing comes from all quarters).

One thing I have noticed though is that it's harder to sell formal work (by a considerable ratio). Why that should be I don't know! But I think that's true. I suspect that's more to do with readers finding form getting in the way, or discomfiting them, but I've no evidence for that. I am however very wary of trying formal poets out on Salt's market(s). I'm just not sure it really sells.

I certainly think that all readers are naturally dissenting in their approach to poetry; thank god. The last thing we need is a regulatory approach to the art.

Inevitably, this sent me to my file to see how my forthcoming issue compares. In Magma 40, I also have 60-odd poems. Of those, I'd consider 31 to be 'formal'; of those, 22 use rhyme; of those, 13 have an identifiable rhyme scheme. There are a few other poems you might call formal (a couple of prose poems) and several others which have definite 'form' (eg set out in 6 tercets of equal size) but which are not 'formal' in the sense of metre and rhyme.

But there is another idea, arguably true of such Modernist formalist works as Eliot's quatrain poems, that the formal 'perfection' sets up an ironic contrast with the imperfect reality that the poem describes. Alternatively, you could claim that any formal constraint, such as rhyme / metre, pushes the poem into imperfection, slightly skewing what the poet intended to say. Certainly this is what I've found when I've experimented with forms such as the word-limited syllabics I described on another thread. They change the language I use, pushing me out of my natural style, making me use weaker than normal line-endings for example. When this happens to a great extent, it's a sign of bad craftsmanship; when it happens less obviously, I enjoy the fact that the poem carries within itself a reminder of its own artifice. Maybe the problem with the traditional forms is simply that we've all got used to the ways in which they do this, that they no longer skew language in an interesting way, only in a conventional and easily ignored one.

An argument for any formal patterning is that potentially it helps the poem be more itself, that the demands of the emergent form of the poem start to move it away from simply what the poet is intending to say. Or, put another way, the demands of form occupy the left brain (as you might distract a guard dog with a piece of meat), thereby allowing more unconscious / right-brain creative activity.

My analysis of Magma 39 was done very hurriedly - I only picked out those poems where the rhyme scheme was very obvious. I'm sure that more than the 10% would fit into some formal category.

alan i love your guard dog / meat analogy!

permission to use © buckley 2007?

tc

I seem to recall Derek Mahon saying: "I rhyme in order to think."

Yes, I think that's also true - I wasn't so much stating my own position, just accepting that such a view could exist. It's a blessing that the use/non-use/partial use of formal constraints can all serve the poem and its purpose, and in various ways. As a reader of poetry, I'm interested in how a poem seems to be positioned relative to its world and its experential material, and get part of my pleasure from that 'angling'. As a writer of poetry, I'm restlessly uncertain about whether I am getting that right - whether the poem is 'adequate' in the sense discussed here.

And that is ignoring the whole question of music, which is probably more relevant to the original question.

Um, I tend to try a formal scheme on a poem when the FV draft is a failure. And vice versa, of course. Only after the third iteration will I admit to myself that it's probably my idea for the poem that's crap.

re this "post-modern mindset" thingy: how much does one cost; how long does it last on average; and would it be worth my while picking one up secondhand from eBay?

[To Matthew] London Magazine loves formal poems at the moment. Take refuge there. As for these 'American poets' who proclaim the rules from on high ... :angry:

It's OK to pick one up second-hand, provided you make it new.

In social theory, postmodernism is now dead and has little currency. Bauman is perhaps the most eloquent on this. I've puzzled over the vocabularies of social theory, critical theory, cultural studies and so on, and the seemingly wide range of "false friends". I don't know anyone serious about avant garde writing who remains comfortable with the idea of postmodern literary theory. Maybe Edmund can help here. From my scant knowledge, postmodernist practice can't be assumed to mean an absence of formal procedure. In fact, much avant garde writing is hyperformalist and largely instructed by play and procedures, structures and form. I suspect that a proper interrogation of modernist writing would navigate these approaches to formal pattern. I heard a lecture once from Trevor Joyce when touring with him briefly in the US about his work with Chinese models, where the formal strictures of rhyme in three directions on the page called for a highly developed form of innovation which made US neo-formalists look rather simplistic. The practice of neo-formalism seemed to me at that time like a largely feminist practice in the US, I saw it as a voluntary form of corsetry, a bit like young women saying they're liberating themselves from the male gaze by wearing burkhas. It seemed like a form of constiction in the US. Hazel Smith is a Brit, of course, now an Australian.

In literary theory, I have the impression postmodernism was a term that was kicking around for several years looking for a meaning. Then it seemed to get hijacked by the people who earlier had been calling themselves poststructuralists. I was disappointed by this, as it did not fit well the idea of postmodernism that I had arrived at, which was that all the old conventions and forms would continue to exist with a changed meaning, simply because they were juxtaposed with all the other conventions. Everything became ironic because everything existed simultaneously. The kind of postmodernism I had in mind was something you didn't sign up to or believe in, but something you were automatically part of by virtue of living in the postmodern age. Then it suddenly became a faction like any other, and you could get accused of not being postmodern enough. Incidentally I notice that the Firefox spellchecker is refusing to acknowledge the existence of the word at all, so you must be right, Chris - it has had its day.

Let's hope so, Matthew. I think where theory is concerned, practice makes perfect.

Sorry Tom - I can't claim this one. I nicked it off Julia Copus.

Postmodern criticism associated with a weak relativism came to seem bland at some point, or anemic.

But a postmodernism in the strict terms of Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (late 70s) and "Note on the Meaning of 'Post-'", his reading of Kant and the sublime onrush of a condition which out-runs our ability to make concepts, - this is something that lots of poetics & criticism are addressing still - never-ending critiques of representation, which circuits to "radical" openness....


For "tireless historical account" in previous post, it would be better to say "tirelessly evolutionary account".

The funny thing about terms like "formalism" is that they seem to get attached to certain practices such as rhyme and meter, as if that was all there was to it. But is a poet who uses Oulipean techniques (Christian Bok in Canada, for instance, or our Mathew Francis sometimes...) or who uses the various anti-absorbtive techniques of LANGUAGE poetries, any less of a formalist? Or someone like myself who uses cut-n-paste, various forms of restrictive language and such like; am I not a formalist in a sense? Anyone who doesn't just write the first thing that comes out of their head onto paper is a formalist of sorts.

I don't tend to use rhyme and meter too obviously myself, though I'm constantly aware of "how I sound", read my poems aloud etc... as part of the writing process. I find too obvious rhymes slightly painful to my ear anyway; even Muldoon occassionally makes me wince. But that's me, and I wouldn't want to universalise my own dislikes onto others. But it's probably why I can't like Betjemen or Wendy Cope.

Yes, I'm never sure why formalism has to be equated with tradition. There are so many other ways of giving poems a structure that have hardly been tried yet. For example, Georges Perec used a form where you simply give yourself exactly sixty (or eighty, or whatever) characters to the line, to include punctuation, spaces between words etc. I have tried it (in a poem about Perec himself) without great optimism because I thought a purely typographical constraint of that kind would have no music to it, but to my surprise it worked.

Jane, thanks for the recommendation. I don't have any formal poems (or any poems at all) to send out at the moment, but I'm considering a big project that might or might not be in traditional rhyme and metre, so that's why I'm agonizing over the issue.

The Dark Horse is very open to (good) stuff in trad forms:

http://www.gerrycambridge.com/darkhorse.html

Orbis takes good stuff that uses rhyme and metre, as does Ambit sometimes. Fiona Sampson said (at an Edinburgh launch of Poetry Review) that Poetry Review would take it, but she doesn't receive much of any real quality.

David Harsent and John Haynes both won major prizes in the last few years with collections in which rhyme and metre featured strongly (and neither seemed any the less contemporary). So such poems must have their advocates, whatever certain critics say.

I agree that "formalism" ought to extend beyond traditional forms. Indeed, Hazel Smith makes that point in her book. She was keen to encourage poets to create new forms, often using experimental techniques. It was only her dismissal of traditional forms as a valid vehicle for contemporary poetry that surprised me.

Steven, I'd agree, but it kind of goes against a previous argument of yours (via Ron S) about the term surrealist, doesn't it?

And others are very protective about other terminology - see 'WN Herbert experimental?', 'Todd Swift innovative?', 'Wendy Cope the avant garde of formalism?' etc etc (see various boards / mags passim!)

I'd guess these books were prized relatively more for their political subject matter than their formalism.

I contradict myself? So I contradict myself.... :P

And I don't see what it has to do with Ron S. Though if he agrees with me, then bully for him... It's rather more to do with Max Ernst. It's just that I don't like "a bit odd" to equal surrealist. All poetry's formalist, if it has any kind of shape to it. But not all poetry is surrealist.

Or to put it another way:

All poetry
is poetry
only
if it's poetry.

Rob, as to your original question, I think there's a real danger in conflating the UK and US attitudes to different kinds of writing. And by "writing" what I mean is "orthodoxies in attitudes towards different kinds of writing." The fact is that int he UK we don't, nor do we need to, suffer the same kind of narrowness they have in the USA around rhyme and metre. There are all kinds of backstory and other conditions over there that work towards that narrowness, which would be far too long to go into here, but it is a very stupid distinction which I feel is ruining American literary art.

And by the way, Hazel Smith's quoted judgement on rhyme in rap is so spurious that, were I reading it, I would cease to find her judgement on anything compelling. Whoever she is.

Even at that, in the US they have these different camps - like everything else in that place you seem to have to decide which camp you're in and then not like anything from the other camps, it's just like high school in that way. But the big secret is - and you can see it if you simply refuse to align yourself and instead keep hold of your overview - there is good work being done in all the camps.

Not as much as there could be, of course, because merely by aligning themselves to camps, poets compromise their work. And this leads to your comment, Matthew. How do you expect to write good work if you're afraid some ar****le with a review commission won't like it for whatever reason? Surely I thought the whole point in producing art - and there is so little money in poetry that we of all artists can be as pure in our intentions as we like - was to produce the best, the most beautiful and truthful art you know how? So how come you're scared of some American guy who comes over and makes some pronouncement?

Of course metre and rhyme can sound modern. LOTS of poets in the UK use them and sound modern. Muldoon uses full rhyme, but not "the full rhyme & metre"; James Fenton, Cope, Khalvati, Sean O'Brien, Paterson, Farley, Donaghy of course, Duffy, Armitage, all dip in and out of rhyme and metre. And Ian Duhig just wrote a book based on a flipping medieval French Romance, and it sounds more modern than what a lot of American "New Formalists" are producing, because they are stuck. Of course, I'm confining myself to a "mainstream" list because that is what we're talking about, right - the main stream, those who sound contemporary without being on the edge, innovative, avant garde, experimental, LANGUAGE, whatever.

I would counter that you are yourself (yourselves) labouring under such orthodoxy that even when you saw something that looked contemporary but used full rhyme, you had to tell yourself it wasn't full rhyme!

Muldoon, by the way, uses rhyme and metre - as well as the many other tools in the box - in fresh ways. And that is the key. The reason the Modernists gave up on the old tired ways of writing (and remember both P & E, at least at some stage, wrote largely in rhyme and metre!) was because it was tired. THAT is the reason "New Formalism" can't work. It's based on a going-back, a wanting to write in an old way. People can turn out all kinds of beautifully-crafted poems, even beautiful poems saying something real, but if they're just sort of tired they'll never really work.

You can't, though, simply confuse "rhyme and metre" with "tired writing." Not that I use much full rhyme & metre, myself, but it does come in handy sometimes, and you have to absolutely not cut yourself off as a reader or a writer. Like anything else, it's what you do with it. ("Muldoonian" surely, Rob, means "so clearly influenced by Muldoon that there is no point in reading it as it is not doing anything on its own terms"? Chris, you seem spot on when you say, "One thing for certain, good writing shines out from whatever range of practice it defines, no practice determines it, but it's startlingly obvious when someone can write well (and good writing comes from all quarters)".)

I also agree with this question: "Isn't it [merely] the case that rhyme and metre are just more tools at the disposal of the poet, and it only becomes tiresome when it becomes programmatic and adversarial?" This is the big thing.

When I first came to the UK all those years ago, as a teenager, I was struck, frightened, given a shock, by one thing. It was the Faber Book of Modern Verse. It was so completely different from the American orthodoxy I'd just left behind that I practically didn't know how to read it. It was full of British poets no one I new would have read - they'd have seemed too "hard," all out of whack with the hippie Beat sensibilities I'd grown up with. I'd never heard of half of them, and it absolutely didn't fit my blinkered little view of "what the sixties (& thus the whole modern world) were all about." I didn't even realise I'd been in an orthodoxy. I had read (on my own steam) widely. But "widely" in an American suburb, even among intellectuals as I was, didn't include many midcentury English poets - who simply got sloughed, I suspect, for not feeding into the whole counterculture thing, which is an adolescent fantasy that still rules American letters.

And that, I'm afraid, is the key. America is still full of kids growing up wanting to be like Kerouac or Bukowski, thinking it's all about looking "cool." One critical element of that American "cool," which is a much worse straitjacket than any string of anapests, is the fact that you must never ever look as if you tried. The Beat thing was a negative, rejecting thing, and it never really made its own claim on any actual territory, not really. It takes a grownup to see that the "cool" kid is usually either troubled, which isn't in fact glamorous, or else is just thick.

But the mythos is strong, and now it's too late: generations of American poets can't even see beyond it, and they can't write in rhyme and metre even if they wanted to, because they don't know how.

And this is not even counting the whole American university system, which is so different from over here. Anyway, I never came up through the universities, and thank God for that! I'm a free agent.

Don't you think Berryman sounds contemporary?

I mean, guys - Rob, I know you spend a lot of time still on those online workshops, and I think one danger inherent therein is that the local orthodoxies are spread worldwide at the click of a mouse. Those conversations they have on Eratosphere, you get an Australian and a Yank and a Brit all talking, and they're all at cross-purposes - but the one thing they all say is, "why does everybody" (whinge) "hate formal poetry?" Well - they don't! But, being brutally frank here, a lot of people on the boards aren't terribly active outside the internet, which means they are ripe to absorb the kind of spurious orthodoxy they encounter therein. And they can't see the orthodoxy because they're in it. And they're all on the internet in the first place because they want to belong, and one way of belonging is to have a little cohort protecting itself from the ravaging hordes (of prejudiced editors, in this case).

Let's just not stand for it. Poetry in the UK is marvellously heterogeneous, and the work individual poets are producing also is. So Fiona Sampson says she doesn't get high-enough quality formal work at PR. Well, she may be labouring under the same orthodoxy - but this is England, and I'm sure if she saw something that really felt fresh, she'd take it. By all means send to Gerry Cambridge, and I'm sure there are loads of other editors who would take really fresh, contemporary work incorporating rhyme and metre.

Sorry - a rant. But really.

PS - Chris, I'm surprised if it isn't easy to sell formal poetry - I'd have thought most poetry-friendly non-poets would prefer it in some degree. I know loads of people who say they love Wendy Cope. (So do I, btw: I think she is profoundly good at what she does, and when I was writing about her I was depressed by how much damning with faint praise I had to listen to.)