THE BARDS
OF THE 'BURBS

         Does poetry matter? A maverick pair of supporters says it can--and they're shaking up the American literary scene from an unlikely base at West Chester University.

By CYNTHIA HAVEN

          I 've never read in front of so many smart people before!" the woman onstage coos into the microphone. "I usually read in front of stupid people," she adds, to laughter and applause.
          Clad in a slinky black dress lavishly decorated with red cabbage roses, the 40-ish brunette-who has two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and several published books to her credit-sports a tattooed chameleon crawling across her left bicep. A new look for modern poetry? Perhaps. But the face-lifting has less to do with Kim Addonizio's appearance than with the sonnet-yes, a sonnet-she begins to read:

          What happened, happened once. So now it's best
          in memory-an orange he sliced: the skin
          unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
          lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
          membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
          tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
          the way he pushed me up against the fridge-           

           Her reading entrances the audience, and not just because her poem is sexy, but also because it echoes with cadences that have been familiar to English-speakers for centuries. In a world where poetry has become almost irrelevant, Addonizio and the other poets gathered at the annual West Chester Poetry Conference want to return it to a general audience. Their weapons of choice? Traditional forms, rhyme and meter, those age-old tools of the poet's craft, which fell out of fashion in the last century but are making a startling comeback.
           Co-founded by a maverick California poet, Dana Gioia, and a local fine-press printer, Michael Peich, the West Chester conference is perhaps the largest such ongoing symposium in America, with more than 200 people attending in this, its sixth year. The Philadelphia Inquirer has decreed it "a true event, one of the most important such conferences in the United States." Over the years, it's pulled in such heavyweights as Richard Wilbur-arguably America's greatest living poet-and Anthony Hecht and Britain's Wendy Cope, among others. Together, Gioia and Peich have made this small suburban campus into an unlikely literary mecca.
           Not everyone is a fan of what the West Chester conference represents. The movement that gave birth to it-loosely called "New Formalism"-has been locked in a David-and-Goliath struggle with several of the more powerful institutions in today's poetry world. Notable among them is Philadelphia's prestigious American Poetry Review, which in 1992 published a blistering attack on it as "dangerous nostalgia" with a "social as well as a linguistic agenda." Another critic labeled the group "the Reaganites of poetry." And a recent issue of the American Poetry Review makes a dismissive reference to "neo-conservative formalism."
           Yet Kim Addonizio, in her plunging black dress, hardly looks like a Reaganite. Far from being a privileged conservative, the onetime waitress writes of lonely lives, one-night stands, and society's disenfranchised. A black woman poet in attendance writes, in formal verse, about racism. An eclectic bunch, the participants at this conference are united mostly in their conviction that modern poetry has become boring, self-absorbed and unmemorable-one attendee describes it as "the avant-garde of 1912." It's a trend they'd like to reverse.
           In his controversial 1992 book Can Poetry Matter? (which grew out of a 1991 Atlantic Monthly essay of the same title), conference co-founder Dana Gioia wrote that "poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms."
           Gioia notes that Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry went into print five times between 1942 and 1945; thanks to the power of general readers, who kept it on bookstore shelves. The only modern equivalent is the Norton Anthology, which is targeted for university sales. Gioia and others decry the loss of this general audience-the people who "buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films, serious theater, opera, symphony, and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals," as Gioia puts it. Where did they all go? In part, they were driven away, he argues, by a surfeit of flat-footed prose broken into lines to look like "poems"-and telling us entirely too much about the self-involved authors' lives.
           One way poets could re-engage modern readers, Gioia and others believe, is by returning to and reclaiming the old devices of rhyme and meter and recognizable forms-the tools by which poets once sought to delight the ear as well as the mind. That's why we can all recite Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"-and even Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat"-and not the greatly hailed poems of the past decades. (How many among us can recite even a line of John Ashbery or Adrienne Rich, two of the most heavily awarded, widely published poets of the latter 20th century?)
           The response was electric. Gioia's piece generated more mail than the Atlantic Monthly had ever received. Its editors, Gioia wrote in a follow-up article, "had warned me to expect angry letters from interested parties. When the hate mail arrived, typed on letterheads of various university writing programs, no one was surprised." Articles attacking and defending the piece were published in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Criterion, USA Today and the Washington Post, among others. The big surprise was the groundswell of enthusiastic public support. "Reporters phoned at the office for interviews," Gioia wrote. "Friends phoned with anecdotes about the article's impact. Strangers called to ask advice. And for months the mail continued."
           Gioia knew he was onto something. And he knew a bit about the general audience he wanted to attract, having been a vice president of marketing at General Foods, writing poetry on the side, before leaving the business world for a full-time career as a man of letters. Now he was in the business of marketing an idea. And through his friendship with an idiosyncratic English professor at tiny, obscure West Chester University-hardly a titan of the liberal arts-the ideas expressed in the book took on a different kind of reality.

           I 'm a reader, I'm not a poet," admits Michael Peich, who decided to found the conference with friend Dana Gioia late one night after a bottle of wine. "My few feeble attempts at poetry resulted in disaster."
           But as a printer of poetry, the 56-year-old Peich is top-of-the-line. Adjacent to the fifth-floor stacks at West Chester's Francis Harvey Green Library are the offices of Aralia Press, an award-winning fine press he established in 1983. Here Peich creates his labor-intensive books, setting type by hand, letter by letter. The room is crowded with drawers and drawers of old-fashioned typefaces-for example, one called RomanČe, from 1920s Holland. "An absolutely gorgeous type; very little made its way into this country," says Peich enthusiastically. "I bought it at a bargain-basement price-but it's priceless. When it wears down, that's it." Nearby sit a double-dolphin "nipping press" from the late 19th century and the Vandercook "proofing press" from the 1960s, salvaged by Peich, that performs most of Aralia's day labor.
           Peich and his wife, Dianne, were inspired by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's home-based Hogarth Press, which published new and experimental work from a range of outstanding authors including T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke and Katherine Mansfield.
           Peich's longstanding love of book-collecting and fine presses had led him to interview K.K. Merker, one of the preeminent fine-press printers of our time, who told him, "If I can make books, you can make books." Peich began an apprenticeship with John Anderson in Maple Shade, New Jersey. Anderson was a highly skilled and regarded craftsman, but he had two habits that appalled the meticulous Peich: He was a chain-smoker, and he loved bourbon. Peich managed to swallow the bourbon to please his master, but he resisted the cigarettes.
           The magic of creating the printed page took strong hold: "I will never forget the first moment I pulled a sheet from the press," says Peich. Since then, he has achieved distinction in a very rarefied field. In 1996, Aralia received an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts for book design for Poems for the New Century, a book of up-and-coming poets produced in conjunction with the New York Public Library. Laid in a silk-covered clamshell box, the 48-page book costs $100.
           While a few other universities offer classes "book arts" at the graduate level, West Chester, thanks to Peich and Aralia, gives undergrads the opportunity to set metal type by hand, design pages, print single sheets on a hand press and do simple book-binding. Aralia's published titles have included works by Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Rita Dove and Philip Levine, as well as by famous names from the past, like G.B. Shaw and Paul Valery.

           At the same time he was launching Aralia Press, Peich was discovering his passion for poetry. But much of what was being written was no longer speaking to him. "I was tired of reading Ginsberg and Denise Levertov-I started going back to Robert Frost," says Peich. (Frost, you may recall, famously compared free verse to "playing tennis without the net.") "I started going back to very basic formal structures. I had been right out there with confessional and lyric free verse. It began to bore me, frankly. I was looking for something different. I began to ask, 'Is anyone writing in form today?'"
           Then came a phone call out of the blue. Dana Gioia had been tipped off by a book dealer that Peich was interested in the neglected poet Weldon Kees, whose work Gioia was collecting and editing. The synergy was immediate; they talked for two hours. "If we were doing a buddy movie, I would be Mel Gibson, he would be Danny Glover," says Gioia.
           Gioia, 49, is of medium height and wiry, with a voice that carries like an actor's. Peich, tall and stately, with silver hair, contains his enthusiasm. While Peich is thoughtful and diplomatic, Gioia is boundlessly energetic and self-confident, a one-man dynamo who tends to pull people into his wake-but "I don't cow Mike," Gioia says. "Mike and I work as equals."
           Gioia became Aralia Press's unofficial literary editor. Following the example of the ČmigrČ publishers of Paris in the 1920s, such as Sylvia Beach-who published James Joyce's Ulysses-Peich was able to satisfy his ambition to publish writers "who deserved and needed an audience."
           Gioia and Peich came up with the idea for the West Chester conference one night over a bottle of Sonoma wine. They wanted to forge a third path for poetry, one that ran between the dry excesses of academic literary analysis and the raucous, flashy poetry slams that were becoming increasingly popular. They had no inkling of what lay ahead. As Gioia has put it, "Any idea sounds more plausible after a bottle of pinot noir." A few days later, they received some advice from a friend with experience in similar ventures: "Don't do it. You have no budget, no staff, no lead time."
           With only seven months to pull it together, they forged ahead. The first conference, in 1995, ran on a shoestring, with eminent faculty working as unpaid volunteers. The gap the conference was trying to fill is obvious. "Although there were over 2,000 writing conferences in the United States," says Gioia, "there was not one where a young poet could learn the traditional craft-meter, rhyme, stanza, fixed forms and narrative. Formal technique is wonderful, but you can't do it half-assed. It helps to have some training -just like music."
           This year, West Chester has announced that it plans to raise $1.65 million for an endowment to support the conference and Aralia Press. "West Chester was properly suspicious of us at first," says Gioia. "But now that they have seen that the conference is the most influential, intellectual event the university has ever hosted, they have announced that they will raise the funds to support us. The first six years, Mike and I kept the conference running without any institutional support whatsoever."
           You'd hardly know it. This past June, the halls of Sykes Union buzzed with poets rushing to and from private conferences and seminars on blank verse, stanza and pattern, and poetic line. While some attendees are fledgling writers, others have a few books behind them but feel their craft is lacking. Great things have started at small, off-the-beaten track colleges in the past. The Black Mountain Poets of the 1950s, for example, were associated with Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina.
           In London, where free verse never had quite the death-grip it has enjoyed in the land of Whitman, the Times Literary Supplement wrote approvingly in Spetember 1999, "America may be the enterprise culture sans pareil, but it manifested its literary side in West Chester in a spirit of collaboration, honoring mentors and fostering the talents of its diverse participants."
           Beyond the leafy 1960s-era West Chester campus, however, the debate rages. Much of America's mainstream poetry world hasn't bought the "New Formalism" despite a decade of hard selling. Philadelphia's own Stephen Berg, who founded the American Poetry Review 28 years ago, professes to know little of the large gathering taking place a mere 25 miles away-even though one of his assistant editors is on the West Chester faculty and serves as an administrator for the event.
           "I don't know what the New Formalist movement is-nobody knows what it is. It's just a name," he says brusquely.
           ("Now you know what we've been putting up with for years," Gioia tells me later.)
           The "Reaganites" label has had legs, but it's a charge that doesn't stick. For one thing, the New Formalists aren't all that formal; one has suggested renaming the movement the "Few Normalists." And calling metrical poets "Reaganites" is akin to claiming that ballet dancers must be right-wing and modern dancers left-wing -or that performers of Mozart are all conservatives, while Stockhausen fans are all liberals.
           The New Formalists at West Chester may have already won the bigger war. Free verse is no longer the unshakeable orthodoxy it once was; the invincible wall has been cracked. One indicator is a renewed national interest in the art of versification -the past six years have seen an avalanche of prosody handbooks, and a healthy crop of blank verse, villanelles and rhymed quatrains. Mainstream poetry journals-including Poetry, the most prestigious such publication in the nation-regularly run works in formal meter, which many considered unthinkable two decades ago. So in a sense, Berg is right: While many poets know little about the movement, they are now experimenting with form, and writing within it. It's akin to a familiar political situation: While many women reject the "feminist" label, they still want equal pay and subsidized day care.
           Addonizio herself has reservations about the "formalist" label: "I guess I'm happy to be considered one if it gets my work out there to people," she says. "But I really consider myself a poet. I don't want to be ghettoized. Identity politics is useful-but ultimately, you want to move beyond it."
           Even Ira Sadoff, who published his angry screed in the American Poetry Review all those years ago, seems ready to admit defeat: He now describes himself as "one poet among a decreasing minority who is trying to resist the return to formalism, the sterile, conservative, aesthete academicism of the 1950s."
           Gioia, as usual, loves a fight: "It doesn't surprise me that an older poet like Sadoff is less interested in form than younger poets, who seem to be quite excited by it," he snips. "He doesn't realize that he is on the far side of a new generation gap. Is rap an extension of formal academic poetry of the 1950s because it uses rhyme and meter? It's a silly argument."
           Regardless of the sniping, this year's opening banquet is attended by more people than attended the first few. And the audience in Sykes Auditorium is oblivious to charges that they are turning back the clock. They listen as Addonizio croons her haunting lyrics about drinking, tough neighborhoods and lost love. She reads the rest of her sonnet into the microphone:

           Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
           that didn't last, but sent some neural twin
           flashing wildly through the cortex. Love's
           merciless, the way it travels in
           and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
           we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
           on the table. And we still had hours.


          Cynthia Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and has written for the Washington Post, Civilization, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. E-mail: mail@phillymag.com


          Reprinted from Philadelphia, November, 2000.
          Photograph by Bill Cramer