[New-Poetry] Eratophobia: fear of poetry (& the end of Nat'l Poetry Slag ...

[JforJames at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/5/2007 12:58:54 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
Opus40-01 at opus40.org writes:

don't  think, for Turco, that it's at all strange for a division, that 
being an  issue that's so important to him.





Turco talked a bit about the 60s and 70s when he felt like an outsider (as  a 
formalist) in the poetry community. He spoke about how he got into  compiling 
The Book of Forms. He said there wasn't any comparable book  available at the 
time. I'm not sure if he was exagerating on that point.  Probably he meant 
his guidebook was to be morre comprehensive than anything else  available at the 
time. Some of the formally inclined on the list could probably  shed some 
light on the dark ages of  formalist poetry, when versifiers were  hiding the 
catacombs and writing their poems on winding sheets of the dead. 
 
Someone else might know whether Turco's books contain a mix of free  and 
formal poetry? If they do, then it strikes me as very odd to separate out  the two 
modes in one's corpus. I think if you're going to publish both kinds  then 
you should see them as complementary in some way and not something  to 
quarantined apart. I would think that it'd be desirable that one's  readers could 
encounter a villanelle on page 98 and turn to an  unmetered, sans rime narrative on 
p.  99, and so on through the  collection.
Finnegan 



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