Top 6 - Timothy Steele

'New Formalist' is a phrase that once denoted some kind of poetic school or movement but is now, as far as I can tell, used exclusively in a pejorative way, as a term of abuse. In the last few years I've only ever seen it used as an insult.

It seems to have something to do with the School of Quietude, another phrase, it says elsewhere on the internet, used by Ron Silliman, that has come to refer to all the poetry that interesting, innovative and progressive poets (or so they would have us believe) find boring and are, in their opinion, writing poetry much better than.

It was ever thus, gang-making, manifesto-writing and generally being rude about each other. These movements are usually clung to by those in need of an identity and no self-respecting individual poet would really want to be included in any of them.

But, in the same way that the gay community reclaimed the word 'queer' from its derogatory intent and adopted it as a badge of pride, I think poets accused of 'New Formalism', any other kind of formalism or 'Quietism', can readily accept it and those who like these glib little labels can carry on using them perfectly happily in their small, small worlds.

Timothy Steele, author of two manifesto titles on the subject of versification and metre as well as his books of verse, is in some way the New Formalist of choice, although no doubt wouldn't want to be. His poems are often on the most apparently mundane of subjects and the verse the most metronomic one is likely to find these days, and even features some rhymes which look a little bit forced, as if to show that the demands of the discipline come before any attempt at naturalism. Except, of course, real life rises out of the fixed forms of art as it does in the poem Woman in a Museum.

Joseph takes the most domestic little scene and extends its scope in a widening last stanza; Education in Music is a self-consciously aesthetic meditation; Ethel Taylor is a longer memoir of a spinster who loved strawberries but couldn't eat them and so enjoyed seeing others do so; Advice to a Student is a considered essay on the most convincing excuses for a late essay and, because Steele did a tribute for Thom Gunn's 60th birthday, Vermont Spring gets the flexible sixth place.

With his last book being as recent as 2006, we might not necessarily be due another one just yet because they appear with reassuringly frugal irregularity, which is often another good sign.