Salemi and the Little-Lettered

I've been surfing tonight, looking in on the various, as they say, form-friendly sites, trying to find something that I find exciting in a world too often dull and pretentious. And I came upon an interesting essay. So this is the kind of tripe that make some cringe at poets who wish to work in form. From:

TYPOGRAPHICAL TICS: SOCIAL CLIMBING
IN THE NEW FORMALISM
by
Dr. Joseph S. Salemi
Department of Classics: Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.

I'll just cut and paste the main argument. Sentences and paragraphs have been omitted, but the argument is in tact. Believe me. If not go here.

Many poets in the New Formalist movement have proven themselves to be cowards, some in major ways, others in minor ones. The range of their fears is extensive and varied. They are afraid to follow metrical patterns precisely. They are afraid of perfect rhymes. They are afraid of literary or historical allusions. They are afraid of elevated vocabulary, or similes, or metaphors. They are afraid of being called conservatives, or worse, reactionaries.

The source of this cowardice is anxiety about social status. Like most Americans, formalist poets are desperately worried that their betters will look down upon them. Who are "their betters"? Why, the poets and critics in the Free Verse Establishment. These are the people who control the funding sources and and major publishing outlets for poetry in America, and who utterly dominate poetry's academic rear-echelon, which provides poets with captive audiences, bulk book orders, and sinecures.

I shall limit my discussion here to two minor but significant typographical practices that mar much New Formalist poetry, and which I believe are due to this anxiety to conform.

The first is the practice, common among many New Formalist poets, of beginning a line of verse with a lower-case letter rather than the traditional capital.

It is a most excellent and useful practice, since it makes for a clear, neat, and regular-looking page of text, and it is also an unmistakable visual marker that what is on the page is poetry, not prose. What caused the shift, in some New Formalist poets, to the absurdity of omitting these initial capitals? Without a doubt it was the influence of free verse models.

The second practice is the useless innovation that I call "the split-level line." This is the habit of typographically dropping the end section of a verse to the level of the subsequent line when its first section contains a full stop.

Let me give a parallel case from the sociology of race relations. For formalists, the split-level line and the uncapitalized first word are comparable to the practice of some black persons in past decades who used various chemical agents to straighten their hair, or to bleach their skin. These things were done as a kind of homage or accommodation to European standards of physical beauty.

The consistent use of the split-level line and the lower-case initial letter suggests that a poet is not committed to formalist verse for its own sake, but merely as a vehicle for the advancement of his career.

This man is in dire need of a great awakening. He is so tied into the concept of form and the evils of modernity that he can't think in any rational fashion. That's right Mr. Salemi, and there are two more evils that we need to address while we're ridding the world of lower-case letters and split-level lines: fire and the wheel. God knows we did fine without that hot stuff in the past before Prometheus got it in himself to steal what rightfully was not his. Look what it's led the human race to: nuclear annihilation and worse, the suburban cult of barbeques. And the wheel? Don't get me started. I'd roll on all night.