One of the most remarkable moments at the Sonoma Country Day School Teaching Poetry Conference, held in Santa Rosa July 18-21, 2001, was when the distinguished poet, X.J. Kennedy, burst into passionate, unaccompanied song. Kennedy was delivering the keynote speech, which dealt with the curtailment of childhood. He ended his speech singing:

X.J. Kennedy had come to Sonoma Country Day School at the invitation of poet/critic Dana Gioia. In his introduction to Kennedy’s speech, Gioia said that Kennedy represented “the values that this conference is founded on. He is a writer of extraordinary skill...He has written magnificently in a way which does not exclude people but includes them. He’s also done that extraordinary balancing act of writing poems both for adults and for children.” Kennedy is, in addition, a wonderful performer of his work. For these reasons alone, he was an excellent choice to kick off a conference on teaching poetry. But there was much more to it than that. The conference ranged widely over many subjects, extending from the practical teaching advice of poets David Mason and Diane Thiel to my own philosophical suggestion that “mind itself is a medium--or the postulation of a medium--and that it is only by analogy with mind that media exist.” When I mentioned to one of the organizers of the event that I had accepted Dana Gioia’s invitation to present a paper on the condition that I wouldn’t have to wear a tie, she smiled and said, “Oh, we’re not very formal here.” She meant by that of course that no one had to dress up for the conference--and I was very happy to hear that. But the lack of formal dress did not mean that other kinds of “formality” were absent.

In 1991 Dana Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. The essay received an extraordinary amount of response. In the following year Gioia’s piece appeared as the title essay of his book, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture.  In that book was an essay called “Notes on the New Formalism.” “Twenty years ago,” Gioia writes, “it was a truth universally acknowledged that a young poet in possession of a good ear would want to write free verse. Today one faces more complex and problematic choices”:

While the overwhelming majority of new poetry published in the United States continues to be in “open” forms, for the first time in two generations there is a major revival of formal verse among young poets. The first signs of this revival emerged at the tail end of the seventies, long after the more knowing critics had declared rhyme and meter permanently defunct. First a few good formal books by young poets like Charles Martin’s Room for Error (1978) and Timothy Steele’s Uncertainties and Rest (1979) appeared but went almost completely unreviewed. Then magazines like Paris Review, which hadn’t published a rhyming poem in anyone’s memory, suddenly began featuring sonnets, villanelles, and syllabics. Changes in literary taste make good copy, and the sharper reviewers quickly took note. Soon some of the most lavishly praised debuts like Brad Leithauser’s Hundreds of Fireflies (1982) and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986) were by poets working entirely in form.

Gioia goes on to argue that “the revival of rhyme and meter among some young poets creates an unprecedented situation in American poetry”:

The New Formalists put free verse poets in the ironic and unprepared position of being the status quo. Free verse, the creation of an older literary revolution, is now the long-established, ruling orthodoxy, formal poetry the unexpected challenge...The return to tonality in serious music, to representation in painting, to decorative detail and nonfunctional design in architecture will link with poetry’s reaffirmation of song and story as the most pervasive development of the American arts toward the end of this century.

In 1996, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason, appeared from Story Line Press. Among the poets included are Dana Gioia, Frederick Turner, R. S. Gwynn, Phillis Levin, Julia Alvarez, Brad Leithauser, and Molly Peacock. In their preface the editors write,

These younger poets grew up in the era of rock music, the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights Movement, birth control, drugs, and feminism. Not only was the America they inhabited radically different from that of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, when many of their teachers came of age but the literature that surrounded them had few ties to tradition. The very word “tradition” became routinely associated with some of T. S. Eliot’s personal views, and was dismissed out of hand as anathema...Out of need and affection, they rediscovered the inherent power of measured speech, even rhyme, and the power of narrative to convey experience, including minority or marginalized experience. They understood as well that an entire realm of pleasure was being denied to them by much contemporary poetry. Some of these younger poets were taught by Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop at Harvard, Yvor Winters and Donald Davie at Stanford, Allen Tate at Sewanee, John Hollander at Yale, and J. V. Cunningham at Brandeis. But a great many younger poets wholly without the advantage of such training sought out information about meter where they could, instinctively feeling that techniques common to popular music, for example, still had valid uses in poetry.

The Teaching Poetry conference at Sonoma Country Day School is in many ways an affirmation of the complexity and energy of New Formalism. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry remarks about the keynote speaker, X.J. Kennedy, that he “likes to refer to himself as ‘one of an endangered species: People who still write in meter and rime’”; Kennedy’s selected poems, Cross Ties, “includes everything from limericks to sonnets, as well as epigrams, elegies, heroic couplets, and villanelles.”

I don’t mean to create the impression that the Teaching Poetry Conference was the creation of a small faction of embattled poets. The poets who participated in it were for the most part associated with New Formalism, yes, but some--Kay Ryan and myself--could hardly be called New Formalists. I felt that the conference was an indication of the genuine interest and influence of these writers. New Formalism has definitely arrived. And, beyond this, the conference manifested a powerful, infectious love of poetry--not of a particular kind of poetry but of poetry. These are some excerpts from Dana Gioia’s speech, “Why Poetry Matters: Poetry and Education”:

I’m going to start off by talking about the vision of this conference. I think you’ll see as the next few days unfold that the faculty of this conference, while being quite different in a lot of ways, having their own emphases, share certain values and assumptions about poetry and literature. I thought I would articulate the three key ideas that went into this conference. The first is that poetry is one of the central and indispensable human arts. It is, with song and dance, a primal art that goes back to our most ancient origins. It is an art, like song and dance, created originally out of the human body--the voice, the ear--to articulate what it means to be human, what it means to be mortal. 

The second assumption is that, for a variety of reasons, poetry is not generally well understood in our society nor well taught in our educational system. Our society has very little room for poetry except in schools. The public culture of newspapers, television, radio and popular entertainment hardly mentions poetry, especially when compared to the things it considers important: sports, finance, politics, entertainment. Poetry still exists in our educational system, but it seems to play a smaller part than it did fifty or a hundred years ago. Many students and a surprisingly large number of teachers find poetry an intimidating subject either to study or to teach. The third assumption behind this conference is the most important one: it is that one great teacher can change your life. I’m going to offer no proof for this assumption other than to ask each of you to remember your own life, remember how a particular teacher opened up some decisive new possibility in your life that has made it, in retrospect, a rather different journey. In the case of the people in this room, I bet that we’ll be remembering an English teacher or a language teacher, one who instilled the pleasure and passion for poetry (or for fiction or for drama or for literature as a whole). Let me take this last idea and play with it for a second. If one great teacher can change your life, what can a room like this full of great teachers do? Culture is not made up of institutions: they are just the vessels of it. Culture is human energy. And the same is true of education, though I don’t think legislators and administrators understand that. The educational system is only as good as the teachers in it. Education is powered by human energy and is based on the interaction of you and your students. 

So let me restate these three assumptions in a slightly different way to say what the vision of this conference was. If poetry is an indispensable and important human art, and if it were more widely used and better taught in our schools by those great teachers who can change your life, then think of what we all might accomplish. All of that human energy, that cultural energy, could in some perhaps small but nonetheless extraordinarily significant way change the society in which we live. One of my key personal beliefs is that we should all try to create the society in which we want to live. So in that spirit I welcome all of you here, and I honor you as the teachers who have, at probably some considerable personal trouble, picked up your lives and moved them onto this campus for a few days. We’re glad to see you here.

While Dana Gioia was addressing the adults who had come to the conference, X.J. Kennedy was speaking to a room full of 5^th to 9^th grade children brought to him by teachers Chryss Yost and Dan Stone. Kennedy discussed how his “Brats” poems began:

I wanted to tell you something about the “Brats” poems and how they started. I’ve been unfairly given credit for inventing the “Brats,” but, between you and me, I don’t think I did. There was a poet named Harry Graham who was writing back around 1900. He did a book called Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. You know, ruthless--meaning merciless or cruel. In it Harry Graham invented a character called “Little Willie.” The “Little Willies” were so popular that a lot of other people wrote them, too. You know that great unknown poet “Anonymous.” When you don’t want to sign your name to a poem you’ve written, you sign it “Anonymous.” There are a lot of anonymous “Little Willie” poems, too. “Little Willie” poems are about this nasty brat who is always doing something terrible; and, always, something terrible happens to him. And the terrible things that happen to him are so awful--and some disgusting--that these poems became famous. I think that when I did the “Brats,” Little Willie was in the back of my head. To give you a sample of Little Willie: They used to put mercury--that silver stuff that runs around and collects into little balls if you drop it--on mirrors. And, because it was sensitive to heat, they would use mercury in most thermometers. I don’t think they do anymore because mercury is poisonous. But in those days they would speak of “the mercury is climbing” when it got hot or “the mercury is falling” when it got cold. So there is one Little Willie poem by Harry Graham that went like this:

Little Willie from a mirror
Licked the mercury all off,
Thinking, in his childish error,
It would cure the whooping cough.
At the funeral, Willie's mother
Sadly said to Mrs. Brown,
"Twas a chilly day for Willie
When the mercury went down."

Isn’t that awful!...You had a tough job, you know, those of you who wrote these things. You only had five samples to go by and you had to figure out how to do it yourself. I wonder if anybody would like to read one that you’ve got. I would love to hear it! [Children share their poems.]

When you have two lines with a rhyme on the end, and they both rhyme, that’s called a couplet. These little Brat poems are made out of couplets. I try to keep them very short--maybe four lines. Sometimes I let them go to eight lines. I think about the longest I ever did was about twelve lines. That’s pretty long for a Brat! I think, if they’re short, there’s a certain punch to them. It’s good to try to have a surprise of some kind turn up in the last line. You know, you don’t always have to have something bad happen. If you want to let the brat get away with something, you can do that too. Nothing bad happens to the brat in this one:

Over Mom's piano keys
Franklin drizzles antifreeze.
Hasn't Mom the hottest keyboard
On the entire eastern seaboard?

I love it when you get some letters that go together with other letters, like “drizzles” and “antifreeze”--the z sound there. Oh, man, I didn’t plan that. You can’t plan poetry too much in advance. But when things turn out that you like, you gotta grab ’em and keep ’em.