Expansive Poetry is a movement in United States poetry that began in the 1980s. It is an umbrella term coined by Wade Newman for the movements of New Formalism and New Narrative, and the term is controversial even among many of the writers it purports to describe. Although more New Formalism and New Narrative poets have gained prominence in recent years, as evidenced by the number of books and anthologies they have published and the rapid expansion of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the term "Expansive Poetry" is increasingly rarely used.
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Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.
A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.
Terza rima is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhyme for the first and third lines in the tercet that follows. The poem or poem-section may have any number of lines, but it ends with either a single line or a couplet, which repeats the rhyme of the middle line of the previous tercet.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Louis Aston Marantz Simpson was an American poet born in Jamaica. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At the End of the Open Road.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
Mark F. Jarman is an American poet and critic often identified with the New Narrative branch of the New Formalism; he was co-editor with Robert McDowell of The Reaper throughout the 1980s. Centennial Professor of English, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of eleven books of poetry, three books of essays, and a book of essays co-authored with Robert McDowell. He co-edited the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism with David Mason.
Robert Samuel "Sam" Gwynn is an American poet and anthologist associated with New Formalism.
Molly Peacock is an American-Canadian poet, essayist, biographer and speaker, whose multi-genre literary life also includes memoir, short fiction, and a one-woman show.
Keith Maillard is a Canadian-American novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. He moved to Canada in 1970 and became a Canadian citizen in 1976.
The Reaper was a United States literary periodical which played an important role in establishing the poetry movements of New Narrative and New Formalism. It was founded in 1980 and ran until 1989; a double issue of numbers 19 and 20 was the last. The Reaper was founded and edited by Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman. It was started at Indiana State University. For the earlier issues the art director was Michael K. Aakhus; for later issues Thomas Wilhelmus served as fiction editor.
Annie Finch is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet’s Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.
Alfred Corn is an American poet and essayist.
Rachel Todd Wetzsteon was an American poet.
The paradelle is a modern poetic form which was invented by United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins as a parody of the villanelle.
Andrea Hollander is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Blue Mistaken for Sky. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, FIELD, Five Points, Shenandoah, and Creative Nonfiction. She was raised in Colorado, Texas, New York, and New Jersey, and educated at Boston University and the University of Colorado. From 1991 till 2013, Hollander was writer-in-residence at Lyon College. She was married from 1976 to 2011. Hollander lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing workshops at The Attic Institute for Arts and Letters and at Mountain Writers Series.
Colleen J. McElroy is an American poet, short story writer, editor, memoirist.
Alma Luz Villanueva is an American poet, short story writer, and novelist.
Jane Greer is an American poet. She founded Plains Poetry Journal, a quarterly literary magazine that was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement, in 1981, and edited it until 1993. Her poetry collections include Bathsheba on the Third Day (1986) and Love like a Conflagration (2020).
Paul Lake (1951-2022) was an American poet, essayist, and professor at Arkansas Tech University. Another Kind of Travel won the Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence. In addition, he won the Richard Wilbur Award for poetry in 2006.