New Trad features contemporary poems written in archaic forms, from a diverse array of influences: Sapphic lyric, Dante’s terza rima, mediaeval alliterative verse, carmina figurata, the sonnet, Yu Xuanji’s classical poetry, liturgical music, Pindaric ode, the glyconic, the English ballad, the rubaiyat, the rondolet, and skaldic poetry.
The longest work is a previously unpublished extract from Bev Braune‘s wonderful epic poem Skulváði Úlfr. My involvement with the issue was as editor, rather than writer; as such, I wrote the introduction, ‘A Roll of the Dice’:
The predicament of contemporary poetry, as described at the outset, is its rampaging self-cannibalisation, its impatience with metrical form and structure, its destruction of the ground on which poetry has traditionally stood. How can today’s poets renew poetry, when the last century has been a blur of novelty-seeking? The conviction of New Trad—and it is, I will freely admit, more of an intuition than a fully conceived hypothesis—is that the future will only be won by reference to the past…
Our emphasis is not on the recent pre-modernist past. There are several venues already in existence for the rhyming, metrical poetry that immediately preceded the onslaught of free verse and has been maintained by the likes of Robert Frost; we have no desire to replicate them. Rather, we seek to revitalise ancient forms and traditions so long fallen out of use as to have become mere objects of scholarly study. What if we still wrote like the ancient Norse skalds? What if we had never stopped writing spells and invocations in the manner of the Akkadians? What if the Sapphic lyric or Horatian ode were still with us…what would they have become, for us—what can we make of it in our own era?