I've been vaguely aware of Mary Kinzie as poet for a long time, since long before I stopped drinking the free verse kool-aid, and that's probably why I've never paid much attention to her writing. In those days I despised obvious artifice, justified my interest in traditional form by the silly notion that "one had to know the rules in order to break them" (try that to get out of a speeding ticket), and thought the height of skill in rhyming was to hide it from the reader. Kinzie's "The Rhapsodic Fallacy" (1984, reprinted in Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry and in an expanded version in her own The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose : Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling) nails those attitudes and ties them together with strands from Wordsworth and (especially) Poe:
"… stylistic dullness is … a brotherly symptom of, and in fact a technical support for, the assumption … that the aim of poetry is apotheosis, an ecstatic and unmediated self-consumption in the moment of perception and feeling. The flat style is thought of as a kind of private charm that protects the writer against falsehood, insuring his sincerity.
Kinzie argues (and I'm inclined to agree) that one of the results of that inhuman [my term, not hers] set of assumptions has been the withering of genre, form, and rhetoric in poetry: no more "formal satire, familiar epistle, georgic, and pastoral," no more "allegory, philosophical poem, epic, and verse drama and tragedy," nothing "but a kind of low lyrical shrub whose roots are quick-forming, but shallow. … [R]hetoric has been flattened to the standard of idle conversation in an era in which the art of conversation has been scrubbed clean of art and gentleness."
As much as I agree with the above, it wouldn't have kept me awake. What excited me was Kinzie's discussion of what she calls the Mixed Ironic Style, one of her three principle embodiments of prosaic-rhapsodic poetry:
To write a poem [in the Mixed Ironic Style], one selects the electronic chip that programs the work into a stylistic agitation that at first feels rich, sensitive, conscious, attentive to response. But in fact the Mixed Ironic Style is conscious only of its own circuitry; immediacy and confidentiality are themselves disguises.
For Kinzie, the paradigmatic poet of this style is John Ashbery, and she articulates what I've been unable to in my own reaction to his work:
His art is at once sprightly, and depressing; he has subjected the hopelessly prosaic to his uncanny radioactive energy, while at the same time he undermines feeling by an irony so tight and dispassionate that it, too, is nightmarish. This is T. S. Eliot's "extinction of personality" carried out in the service, not of a great literary heritage, but of a tawdry and dangerously sterile commercial commonplace. Ashbery is the passive bard of a period in which the insipid has turned into the heavily toxic.
That's exactly it: Ashbery's poems are children of Gertrude Stein's Oakland.
The two major contrarian movements in late 20th century American poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and the New Formalism (or New Expansive Poetry, as some prefer), are both reactions against the results of the Rhapsodic Fallacy, and both turn to formal strategies as a way out. The New Formalists (and Kinzie) intend to recover what's been lost, to broaden the scope of contemporary poetry and expand its audience beyond the academy. Whether such goals are possible, and if so, whether any of the New Formalists and their allies are good enough poets to accomplish those goals, is still unknown. On the other hand, Language poets (and ain't it a hoot that Ron Silliman gets his mythical "School of Quietude" from Poe?) appear to feel that the destruction is incomplete, that even the crippled, monotonic persona of the prosaic-rhapsodic poem retains too much "humanity" — in scare quotes because, for them, as in the Marxist and post-modern thought which guides them, humanity is always a social construct, and in this case a corrupt product of late capitalism. It's safe to say the New Sentence will fail to remake human nature as surely as did Mao's Cultural Revolution. Luckily, no one's likely to be murdered this time.
5:35:56 PM 
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