[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by racehorse

who do you mean by formalists in poetry?
there are a number of different schools.
the russians, for example, are by and large fantastic. i'm not sure we are thinking of the same formalists, as the formalists were a very, very progressive group, demonstrating that poetry does not always have to "BE ABOUT" but it can be "MADE OF". they were some of the first writers to actively deconstruct the lyric and to have preoccupations with LANGUAGE. this move is to a certain extent mirrored in painting, with the emergence of abstract painting. in abstract art the subject is the paint itself, and the russian formalists thought along these lines, i.e. the WORDS themselves are the important tools in poetry, and so they sought to analyse them using sound-based techniques as well as exploring the ideas of collisions of meaning (though this came later).

no no, i like the russian formalists, and the prague school that succeeded it (jakobson was a god), i was referring to contemporary formalists like the "new formalists" that insist on writing with meter-- which is nice, and it works when the poet is good, etc, but most people are just eghhhh. i was originally speaking in the context of conceptual art, toko mentioned formalists and i misunderstood what he meant, thinking he was referring to some (unknown to me) formalism derived from duchamp, seeing as how formalism can be a form of platonism (the word has too many meanings and it's confusing), so i asked for a clarification.