"A poem’s politics can’t be neatly deduced from its formal surface, or a poet’s politics from her chosen verse style. Claims to the contrary stem from many sources, some of them vital to the history of the art; but they are rooted, ultimately, in an American fixation on branding, packaging, and labels. The politicization of the “free” in “free verse” deserves scrutiny as an American marketing ploy: a cliché of the “free market” in the “land of the free.” The contrasting term “formalism,” applied to metrical poetry whether the poet likes it or not, deserves scrutiny as a misleading label: a term almost perfectly contrived to sound staid (“formal”) and ideological (“ism”)." Austin Allen LARB

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