Yep, definitely Pound. In my opinion he's the best thing before, during and since sliced bread. He's most accurately described as Modernist, being at the centre of that movement (if it can be called such), but having said that, he was publishing for around sixty years so his work covers a lot of issues and he can easily be seen to exemplify some of the principal qualities of post-modernism.
Personae covers up till 1920, and goes from fairly "normal" poems to his 20 or so page poetic sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberely which is pure genius. It's *fairly* experimental (more in terms of form and idea then in terms of weirdness), and was certainly so for the time, but I wouldn't call it experimental in relation to later work by himself or anyone else. It's my favourite poem though, and was the first Pound I read.
Basically from then on Pound wrote only cantos, which you can buy in one volume now, or you can get cheap selected versions. That's where the real experimentaion is. Pound was an extraordinarily well-read man, and his allusions cover the literature, language and mythology of many cultures. The way in which he deploys this information which he deemed necessary to present his vision ranges from regular references to reasonably well-known classical figures, to slabs of translated text to 2 inch tall Chinese characters in the middle of the page. He published them in sections as he went, and never went back to revise "it" as a whole, and so the whole issue of whether The Cantos is a long poem, or simply a collection of vaguely related poems of varying styles, has a long history and has spawned much debate, which is something integral to most experimental poetry, in terms of to what degree they conform to expected notions of what poetry is, or how it should be presented/packaged.
Some other large modern/post-modern poets also wrote long poems, as it seemed to be the thing to do, but to be honest I don't like much of it. Am trying to remember names now, but it's been 2 years since I've had access to my books and I'm drawing a bit of a blank. Charles Olson published a tome called The Maximus Poems which I think is a steaming pile, William Carlos Williams published Paterson which I think is okay, but fairly average really. Louis Zukoksky's A I also thought very little of. But then I'm a cranky reader and I don't like a lot of what I read. All these folks have plenty of stuff written about them, so somebody likes 'em. |
