David Caplan’s Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford University Press, 2005) is a good and necessary book that teaches or reinforces some vital lessons about poetry and poetic form. According to Caplan, his book is a necessary corrective, a check on “our current understanding of poetic form, especially contemporary metrical verse” which Caplan describes as emerging from the ever-perpetuated, and perpetuating, over-simplified binaries of the poetry wars—open/closed, Language/New Formalist—and which Caplan labels simply adequate.”

Originally published in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and used with permission.