This week’s poetry Thursday prompt is “what we avoid” and in being true to the spirit of the idea, I’m revisiting the one poet for whom I have a serious and active loathing:
The last semester of my senior year of college, I took an advanced poetry writing course, in which we were inflicted with a variety of unpalatable modern poets. (Why, no, I didn’t much care for the class.) Most of them were forgettable, or at least I have forgotten them, but my knee-jerk dislike for Pound has lingered on.
So I’m going to give him another shot and see if — 10 years later — I can get something out of the experience. If any of y’all like his poetry, I’d sure appreciate a pointer to what and a bit of why, too.
Update, Oct. 20: I poked around the internets looking for various things by Pound; some of the notable bits are now in my ezrapound tag in deli.icio.us. I think I’m going to stick by my judgement of 10 years ago: mostly pretentious, snobby, self-referential crap. But there are a few gems, when he gets out of his own way. But I’m not finding that I’m inspired to write anything of my own, either way.