The movement that achieves the form  

David Yezzi has a piece here bemoaning in the movement away from form in poetry over the last century. As someone who likes to play with poetic forms, I'm somewhat sympathetic, but at the same time I think there's something small about equating form with meter and rhyme (which seems to be his direction in the article). I guess this is because I think of sonic and visual effects in poetry as formal elements as well -- and certainly these continue to play a powerful role in contemporary poetry, metrical or otherwise.

A friend of mine is a composer (actually he's the one who composed this), and occasionally I've asked him whether he considers a piece of contemporary music to be tonal or not. His response is always to explain that the definition of tonal has really expanded. It's more now than just whether a piece makes use of the same harmonic structures as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; instead tonality has come to mean any system that uses sound to create context, expectation, release, etc. Tonality in this expanded sense could therefore be about foregrounding texture as the main expressive element rather than rhythm or melody.

I think it's probably worth adopting the same sort of expanded view of form when we're talking about poetry today. Poems written without meter or rhyme can still have great formal complexity because their sonic, visual, or structural effects can contain implications that strengthen, subvert, color, or confound their meanings. This is not to say that all contemporary poems make meaningful use of these kinds of formal effects, but surely the best ones do. And in this they have something in common with the best metrical and rhyming poems of the past, which found a way not just to satisfy those formal constraints, but to incorporate them meaningfully.