I'm juggling several projects right now, some on deadlines, and I lost a day yesterday to a dying (and now dead) external hard drive. It was a backup drive and I've been able to verify that the only files were lost were video clips still on digital tape, but the time's a different story. I can't write the rather long essay (lucky you!) I'd planned, addressing the issues raised by Josh Corey (here and here) and Tim Yu (here): fortunately for me, Chris Lott has been doing a bang up job on most of them (here, here, and here), and I can just point you to the picture caption on this page.
One thing Chris can't do is explain what I mean when I say that many opponents of contemporary formalism don't kow how to read a sonnet by Rhina Espaillat. Tim Yu responds by writing "you can't defend Rhina Espaillat--or, for that matter, Ted Berrigan--by saying that reading their sonnets is just different than reading Shakespeare's," and he's right. His next sentence is just as unexceptionable: "No one can write a sonnet in English without having that weight on their shoulders; Milton and Wordsworth knew it too." But putting them together begs the question of just why Milton and Wordsworth could nevertheless write sonnets and readers could read them without that "healthy dose of irony" Tim says is necessary for a contemporary sonnet. What happened, and when? Whatever it was, did it happen before Frost wrote the "The Silken Tent," which Jonathan Mayhew rightly praises? Before Larkin's "The Card Players"? Before Donald Justice wrote "The Artist Orpheus"? Is Rosanna Warren's 1993 "Noon" "post-rhetorical" because its pentameter is pretty loose?
High Summer. Plenitude. The granite knoll
thrusts through gray soil at the hill crest. Drought:
spring is fulfilled. I crouch on the warm skull
of New Hampshire. Spikes of parched grass jut
through the anthill at my feet, and the whole field
grates with small oracles the cicadas
scrape between thigh and wing. What do I hold
at bay? The idea of harvest, days that ooze …
From the valley rises the interstate's purr,
the whine of outboards from the lake, a child's voice
quarreling. Someone's hammer raps the air,
duet with its own knocked echo. Here is the precise
dead heart of the living day, the hollow core, the pit
around which light thickens, and we eat.
Of course, there's plenty of irony to go around in that poem, but does it have anything to do with "the task of adapting [or opposing] the slack, free-verse, post-confessional style"? Haven't sonnet-writers, since at least "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," employed irony as one of their chief rhetorical techniques?
The real problem, as I see it, is that Jonathan and Tim and Josh refuse to read a contemporary sonnet in the same way they would read a sonnet written even 50 years ago. They assume there are insuperable difficulties in writing a traditionally constructed contemporary sonnet and read expecting the writer to be crushed, and they're not disappointed: Jonathan reads watching to see how the poet can possibly get to the end of the line without breaking the meter, pouncing on imagined solecisms; Josh wants to see work, especially political work, extraneous to the question of whether the sonnet is a good poem; Tim places the poem in a tradition including Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer and asks why doesn't Snider do it that way?, as mistaken a question as asking why doesn't Mayer do it like R. S. Gwynn? Changes in the art of poetry do not display a linear progression, or any progression at all except that it gets bushier.
A footnote, of sorts. Of course the world has changed in significant ways since Wordsworth wrote, thanks in large part to democracy and relatively free markets: literacy is nearly universal; despite our horrific powers of destruction, two world wars, and the attempted genocides in the former Yugoslavia, a vastly smaller percentage of male deaths resulted from violence in 20th century Europe and the US than in any other time and place for which we have data (Pinker, The Blank Slate, 2002, pp. 56-57); most of our children, in all but the poorest parts of the world, live to adulthood. Is this the "dominant ideology" from which Josh would have poetry try to free us? At least he has to courage to admit that Marxism can't "point the way toward a viable polis, in poetry or elsewhere"—but only after praising it as a "nigh-irrefutable critique" of whatever that dominant ideology might be, and what does Marxism criticize but market economies?
I only wish the title Poet's Market weren't a joke. Gary Norris appears to wish the same: "I know what is different, though; from then to now, poetry has gone missing from the market." I'm not so sure poetry was ever a market commodity, but if it was, it wasn't "capitalist publishing houses" that sent it packing: what else could create such a market? I prefer his second explanation:
No wonder many folks leave poetry to Academia; many poets and academics are requiring pre-knowledge of poetics that the majority of readers don't have everyday access to because of the demands put on them just to earn a living. Such demands allow the majority of readers to excuse themselves from participation in poetry, which suits Academics just fine because it makes the competition less intense.
1:44:41 PM 
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