The Princeton Club of New York, usually a bastion of quiet networking, recently became the staging ground for a literary counter-revolution. On June 17, the Society of Classical Poets (SCP) convened its first symposium, not to deconstruct language, but to rebuild it. The mission was specific: resurrect meter and rhyme from the dusty corners of academia and return them to the public square.
Evan Mantyk, president of the society, opened the floor with a defense of structure. For years, formalists have faced ridicule from free verse peers, often dismissed as archaic or simplistic. Mantyk rejected the marginalization.
“You cannot categorically label our poetry ‘doggerel’ and write us off.”
The Hydra of Modernism
The conversation quickly turned to the state of contemporary letters. James Sale, a leading British poet with decades of experience running Poetry Carnival UK, took aim at the establishment. He questioned the appointment of Simon Armitage as UK Poet Laureate, noting the emphasis on climate change over the craft itself.
For Sale, the issue is not just stylistic but philosophical. He described the adversary of “real poetry” as a multi-headed beast.
“Who or what is the deadly enemy of real poetry? Like a hydra it has many heads, many names, post-modernism, for example, communism for another, but the key one is ‘Progress’. Progress of course does not mean progress; it means regress; it’s the ‘newspeak’ of George Orwell.”
The SCP aims to counter this formless ugliness by re-establishing the centrality of imagination and the discipline of form—a concept Keats once described as “negative capability,” the ability to exist within mysteries and doubts without grasping for fact.
poems The Rebirth of Poetry Is Here: First SCP Symposium Held
A Critique of the Mainstream
Joseph S. Salemi, a professor at NYU and Hunter College, brought a sharp, critical edge to the podium. A legend in the formalist community, Salemi did not mince words regarding the current state of mainstream poetry, comparing much of it to “nihilistic free verse oral diarrhea.”
His critique extended beyond aesthetics to the political climate of the literary world. He described a rigid, exclusionary environment where conservative views act as a disqualifier for workshops and publications.
“The world of modernist poetry has turned as politically rigid and uncompromising as the old Soviet Central Committee. As the poet Joseph Charles MacKenzie once very aptly said, ‘poetry has become the eunuch of the left.’”
Verse as a Weapon for Truth
The symposium wasn’t merely a grievance session; it was a demonstration of utility. Michael Charles Maibach of the James Wilson Institute argued that classical poems clarify purpose and deepen thinking in ways a library of prose cannot.
This power was illustrated by Adam Sedia, an Indiana-based attorney. He read award-winning verses exposing the grim realities of communism, specifically addressing the forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience. His words, directed at the Chinese Communist Party Chairman, cut through the room:
Do you not hear them, Chairman Xi? Victims tied for the surgeon’s blade, Their final shrieks of agony, Their hearts carved out and iced for trade? Hear them, hear them, Chairman Xi!
The impact of such structured language is palpable. Davey Talbot of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation noted that Sedia’s words carried the weight of ten times their number in prose, standing in stark contrast to the “disgusting homages to Stalin” written by figures like Neruda.
The Bryant Park Reading
The movement didn’t stay indoors. Earlier that day, poets Theresa Rodriguez, James Sale, Mark Stone, and James B. Nicola took their verses to the street. In front of the William Cullen Bryant Memorial in Midtown Manhattan, they read to a mix of listeners and hurried passersby.
The selection was a tour of the American canon—Poe’s “The Raven,” Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and Millay’s “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”—interspersed with their own works.
poems The Rebirth of Poetry Is Here: First SCP Symposium Held
The Next Generation
The event signaled a generational shift, or perhaps a continuity. Young poets like David E. Müller, Reid McGrath, and Daniel Devine represented the future of the form.
poems The Rebirth of Poetry Is Here: First SCP Symposium Held
Müller, reflecting on the evening, spoke of beauty not as a luxury, but as a cardinal reason for poetry’s existence. He argued that while one can have rhyme without poetry, and broken stanzas with pathos, true awe arises from the “harmonious marriage” of majesty and execution.
“To say that either of the values of meter and rhyme—the foundations of poetry by all reason—are sufficient in and of themselves, is as much a folly as to dismiss them altogether.”
poems The Rebirth of Poetry Is Here: First SCP Symposium Held
