Playing on the similarity of “casting a ballot” (submitting a vote) and “casting a ballet” (hiring dancers for a production), Boris Dralyuk (b. 1982) writes a sonnet about the showtime of his life. It’s a Shakespearian sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet) with a slightly irregular rhyme scheme, each quatrain differently arranged: abab ccdd effe gg. And along the way it builds a surreal sense of aging as an ever-enlarging ballet production: the dancers milling, the curtain dropping, and through it all the strange sense of the absentee ballet promoter. 

The author of the poetry collection My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022), Boris Dralyuk is an American writer, born in Soviet-era Ukraine, who has edited such books as 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016) and translated volumes by Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, and many others. The former editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he has had his poetry widely published in America’s premier poetry outlets.

But perhaps it’s most fruitful to notice that Dralyuk belongs to the later generations of New Formalists — to understand that he is part of a younger group of poets, writing in rhyme and meter, who began to appear in the early 2000s and have been writing blithely in the two decades since.

Even formalist poets just a few years older are still caught by remembrance of the Poetry Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, still responding to the old attacks on meter and rhyme: a bitter manifesto-driven era in which the forces that controlled the nation’s college writing programs attacked formal verse as the product of fascism, while, they said, the America-dominating late-20th-century styles of free verse were intrinsically democratic.

A curious thing happened along the way, however, for the New Formalists triumphed in their effort to revive formal verse. Kind of. Actually, the war mostly petered out, and formal verse did not manage to rout its opponents. But it did at least claim a portion of the battlefield. Suddenly one started to see sonnets and odes, all the old metered and rhymed forms, in major poetry journals alongside free verse — as though free verse were just another form in which a poet might write, not a claim of moral and political superiority.

And for subsequent generations of poets, these Newer Formalists, the use of form just doesn’t seem an issue. They write an iambic-pentameter sonnet — like Boris Dralyuk’s “Absentee Ballet” — just because they appreciate the sound and feel of it, too young to remember the days when you risked your academic life and poetic reputation by daring to rhyme.

Absentee Ballet
by Boris Dralyuk

Today I cast my absentee ballet.
Recast, I mean. It’s in its umpteenth season.
I’ve added parts. I add parts every day.
The house lights dim and the new dancers breeze in —
so like the wispy, skeletal remains
of fallen leaves, those bare and brittle veins.
They take position, pirouette, jeté.
How could I turn a single one away?
And so it grows: a cast of thousands now.
The stage boards creak beneath tiptoeing figures
of memory. I whistle to the riggers:
the curtain drops. Time for a final bow.
Each day I scour the papers for reviews,
but find obituaries, crosswords, and old news.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.