On my web-site I label myself a "neo-formalist" poet, having stuck the label on myself before anyone else can do so. I'm probably atypical - a friend just refused to use the n-f term of me and said I was "Marshalline". Well it's difficult for me not to be that! Here's my self-definition from the web-site:
"I am best known as a neo-formalist poet, though I dislike the term. It does not mean that I think the clock stopped at 1900. It means that I am not afraid to use form, or elements of form, with which to make poetry. I write all kinds of poetry in fact, from the most formal to the most free. Both forms and free verse make good servants but bad masters, and my aim is to take whatever elements I need to say what I have to say. Nothing illustrates this better than my attitude to writing haiku, which I see as a natural and momentary balance between discipline and freedom."
I could have said "forms, free verse, and everything between or even beyond".
I accept, broadly speaking, the definition of neo-formalism as given here by the Academy of American Poets, and I note the criticisms referred to. Ira Sadoff's apparently comprehensive critique (The American Poetry Review Jan/Feb 1990), however, leaves a lot to be questioned. I'm not going to tackle the whole thing, but I just need to get one or two salient points off my chest.
Sadoff's point about Blake's attitude to vision in poetry, that "vision is neither theme nor content: it inheres in the dialectic between language and perception" is a point well taken. It is something which needs to be stated about poetry as a whole. There is plenty of visionless poetry in the world. If, as one ought with any art form, one widens the definition as far as possible, then the worst form-less poetry and the worst formal poetry - the most visionless of either - are contained within the art form. Form does not equal vision; plenty of greeting-card doggerel can testify to that. Lack of form does not equal vision either, as the most trite piece of teenage cut-up-prose can testify. The point of poetry is always that it one ought to strive to make it (or allow it to be) the vehicle of that vision.
Sadoff accuses neo-formalists of a "dangerous nostalgia", ignoring the fact that language itself is nostalgic, being built on what has passed, what is already known, what is recognisable, otherwise it fails as a medium of communication. Even today's argot will be tomorrow's nostalgia. Form has passed from its argot stage, but it remains in the body of the art; it's there, it can be used, in whole or in part, depending on how the poet feels the need to express the vision. As such it is not the Latin or the Anglo-Saxon of poetry, but a part of poetry's functioning language - if you want to use it.
Another criticism by Sadoff is that "the dominant stance of most neo-formalist poetry is elegiac". Well, I could say "Guilty as charged"; but on the other hand if one wants to write a poem that is elegiac, and a formal approach works, and that is how the expression of the vision seems to work for you, then you're entitled to use the available ammunition in your magazine. I have read poetry devoid of form that is nonetheless elegiac - it worked, it worked fine.
Where the stance both of neo-formalism, and of its critics, is most flawed is wherever it seeks to limit the art-form. There I too am in a Catch-22 situation. I have my own view of what poetry is, and what it is for; I am convinced that it exists so that language (in the hands of us bards!) can be used to express what the mundane tongue cannot. But unless I accept the doggerel and the cut-up prose as part of the art form, I am simply building a wall round myself and pulling up the ladder.
In the end, Sadoff's criticisms of neo-formalism boil down to something one could level at anyone who tries to define the boundaries of poetry - that the very definition kills it.
A postscript: Do I define, and therefore kill, the art form simply by writing poetry? My poems are full of my own rules, my own definitions, they are written the way I want to write them. I write something, I am satisfied with it, I present it, saying "Here is a poem, a complete work of art". Does that statement negate everything that lies outside the poem? My friend who described me as "Marshalline" regularly defines another poet as "perfect"; does that kill by definition? If I have raised more questions than I have given answers all well and good. It is 3am, and what I needed to say is now off my chest.
Adding your comment:
...sorry couldn't resist, but i think the neo-formalists got lost in their own long-winded diatribe and missed the key point- 
