You haven't read mad poets till you've read the mad poets of sci-fi: R.A.Lafferty, David R Bunch (whose Moderan explains the Bush Doctrine if nothing else can), & A. Merritt (where is the Pixar flick of The Metal Monster!!)... Clark Ashton Smith deserves a whole entry to himself; both his decadent-baroque poetry & his much better known short stories are excellent. (Later i realized i was slighting the other, non-mad, poets of scifi, so let me just mention Samuel R Delany, Cordwainer Smith, & Arthur C Clarke when he wrote Against the Fall of Night.)

The first Language Poem:

"There was an old man of Dunoon
Who always ate soup with a fork
  For he said, 'As I eat
  Neither fish, fowl, nor flesh,
I should finish my dinner too quick.'"

W. S. Gilbert

ALL the neo-formalisms: actually, there are as many ordering principles
as you want. pick any two contrastive features, & emphasize
one of them in a way that will be perceived as recurrence.
this is the figure, the rest is the ground. we are not
limited by the ones commonly collected by authors of
treatises on prosody: i have written poems, for instance,
in which all the letters of each line (A=1, B-2...Z=26)
added up to 365. or alternated lines in each of three
languages ABCABC... instead of rhyming, endwords could
be marked by reverse consonance (as a poet in the Phil-
ippines invented); or there could be a cadence of stresses
& nonstresses that repeats at irregular intervals within
a free verse poem. these are only just a few thoughts that
came to mind at the moment. but it seems to me that the
principle here is this: that you have some algorithm
which cuts across the spontaneous utterance & transforms
it, whether by compelling or prohibiting a certain element.
in a word: ASKESIS.

Reputations & the Ecology of Letters:
i won't dispute that the percentage of poestasters
surely has remained constant since the age of Homer,
but the situation has entirely altered for several
reasons: namely, the total population has increased
manyfold; the literacy rate, & especially the number
of those persuaded of writerly ambitions, has exploded;
finally, the total pool of writers in our language,
which is de facto the world's lingua franca, now
includes poetasters from Greenland to Patagonia--&
with the internet, it is all one very crowded small
pond indeed.
i'm not completely against this phenomenon, though
everything i know about literary tradition suggests
that it, like the world's ecosystems themselves, must
of necessity be irreversibly endangered by the brute
fact of overabundance. rather, i think we must start
anew from accepting these realities--& see what can
be done within an awareness of the "literary polyverse"
of almost uncountable subcultures. only that way, free
of pretending that reputation & prizes anymore reflect
anything like a true measure of what is being done of
worth (or even reviews, for that matter), can our
efforts escape the actual irrelevance of present-day
"stars" like Ashbery, Jorie Graham, et al--who in the
end (whether or not there is ever again a single literary
establishment to record it) are merely coterie idols
with the illusion of cultural clout.