Rebel Angels: New Formalism and Blandness

One pretty obvious problem with much New Formalism is the tendency to marry the worst feature of free-verse (i.e. vapid conversationalism) with the precision of formalism. Words empty of sentiment are so much more painful when you realized that someone wasted their time ensuring plodding meter and clunky rhymes. Perhaps it's too easy to peruse the anthology to find its weakest link, but anthologies should be the best of the best. So why does a poem like Tom Disch's "Bookmark" end up in this book. It begins:

Four years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I'm past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I reach the end. I will
Slog through. It can't get much more dull that what
Is happening now

Well, I would have to agree with this last point. Very dull indeed. Disch's reflections are not particularly stunning, so the high formalism and the low content mix into a strange and seemingly unintentional bathos. The poem almost parodies itself, but it's especially hard to take in light of the polemical preface that announces for New Formalism special access to "an entire realm of pleasure [that] was being denied to them" (xvi).

Strangely, one of the topics that New Formalists seem intent on exploring in their careful ways is sexuality. I say strangely because the ragged, breathless, and contingent process of free-verse seems more conducive to frank sexuality. (The agony of restrained desire, on the other hand, is more fitting for the strictures of formalism). And yet there it is. Charles Martin's "Satyr, Cunninglinguent: To Herman Melville" begins:

Twining her fingers through
His hair, fingertips drumming,
At last she brings him to
The sweet verge of her coming:

Her passion at its flood
Overwhelms all measure;
On articulation's bud,
Inarticulate with pleasure

About the only thing to appreciate in this poem is the next line: "She flops like a caught fish / Straining to be human." I appreciate it because it is at least an interesting and imaginative figure. For the most part, the poets collected in Rebel Angels avoid metaphor, personification, and symbolism. It's almost as if the labor of cementing everyday English into rhyme and meter is more than enough effort. But to return to Martin's fish...it is also, of course, a rancid simile for two obvious reasons. First, the blunt spondee "caught fish" serves to comically belittle the female orgasm. Just as important, however, it stinks as a simile. In my experience, caught fish struggle to return to the water. They've had enough of human air, thank you very much. It's this surprising lack of care and aesthetic concern that makes many of these poems ring hollow.