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New Directions, or Deviations?

by Joseph S. Salemi

Many years ago I read an account of a discussion between Ezra Pound and an interviewer concerning his poetic career. I don’t recall where it was printed or the interviewer’s name, so I cannot give a reference, but I do know that the discussion took place during the 1920s or 30s. Something Pound said, however, has stayed with me ever since I read the exchange.

In the course of the discussion the subject of the modernist revolution in poetry came up, and Pound’s interlocutor asked the poet for some account of its history—how it got started, and how it developed, and why young poets had gone off in such fateful new directions. Pound replied (I am paraphrasing) as follows: “By 1900 or thereabouts, we were all asking ourselves this question: Where do we go from Swinburne?”

Pound was referring, of course, to Algernon Charles Swinburne, the amazingly gifted poet of the late Victorian period, author of the dazzling “Hymn to Proserpine,” “Dolores,” and many other powerful poems. I have always been a fan of Swinburne, despite his paganism and creepy sexuality. His command of language, meter, and rhyme, along with his sheer ebullient poetic genius, are second to none in Victorian English. I was turned off by the airy dismissiveness implied in Pound’s comment.

However, Pound’s answer to the interviewer struck me as a key to understanding what the hell went wrong with the entire modernist project. Despite the absolute brilliance and polished achievement of Swinburne, Pound and his fellow Young Turks felt they had to “go” somewhere, and do something different. Why was that?

I imagined myself at the interview, and interjecting this comment: “Ezra, we don’t have to go ANYWHERE! All we have to do is continue to write excellent poems! If you want to ‘go’ somewhere, just go the bloody hell back to Idaho and peel potatoes!”

The poetry of the late Victorians—George Meredith, Lionel Johnson, Coventry Patmore, Ernest Dowson, W.E. Henley, just to name a few—represented a profound level of achievement. This was the work of intelligent, highly educated, and culturally sophisticated men of the sort who are only rarely found now in the Anglophone world. By any criteria you care to apply, they were poets of the first rank.

Why did Pound insist that we go beyond them? Well, the first reason was pure orneriness—in Pound’s case, his boisterous, in-your-face “Ammurricanism,” and his compulsive bad-boy need to shake things up wherever he went. But there also was the factor of generational change, the impulse of younger poets to bad-mouth and ridicule the work of their immediate predecessors in the field. This is a recurring and cyclical process, but by the turn of the twentieth century it had become tragically linked with an entire range of revolutionary impulses in all of the arts, and beyond the arts in politics, religion, family relations, social thought, and cultural standards as a whole.

The great C.G. Jung also commented on this phenomenon late in his life, when an interviewer questioned him about the rise of Freudianism and other new theories of psychology. Jung asserted that the period from 1900 to 1920 was teeming with explosive and shocking new ideas, all of which were fueled by a desire to overthrow the past, to reject received opinion, to épater le bourgeois, to create a futuristic “renewal,” and that Sigmund Freud was merely one example of this general trend. Young persons were out to destroy and start anew.

The collective mania (in every single European nation) that welcomed the First World War as an invigorating “catharsis of blood” was the strongest and most damaging manifestation of this insanity. A century of general European peace initiated by the Congress of Vienna had ushered in a world of untold progress, advancement, wealth, and high civilization, unseen since the Pax Romana. The Concert of Europe had localized wars, and maintained a balance of power that blossomed in La Belle Époque, a brilliant flowering of Europe’s unquestioned supremacy and world domination. But by 1900, a demonic restlessness had set in, and the most impulsive elements of youth wanted destruction, revolution, and war—everywhere, including the arts. The modernist catastrophe in poetry was only a small side-show in this major collapse.

Where do we go from Swinburne? The question was both arrogant and uninformed. The poetry of the late Victorians might have been equaled, might have been bettered in minor respects, might have been used as models, and certainly might have been changed and developed in the course of time, as all sublunary things change and develop. Language and idioms change, as well as rhythmic preferences. But people like Pound weren’t talking about normal progression of that nature. They were talking about sundering and savage dislocations of culture, language, perception, and aesthetic norms. Pound didn’t want merely to “Make it new!” as he so fatuously urged. He wanted to raze all to the ground, as Carthage was razed. His manic command to “Simplify! Simplify!” was only coded language for a thoroughgoing trashing of the Victorian inheritance (Robert Browning excepted, of course), and the imposition of a vers libre counter-model for all future poetic composition.

In this respect, Pound was no different from those of his contemporaries who wanted radically new politics (communism or fascism); radically new sex relations (free love, feminism, and easy divorce); and radically new architecture, painting, sculpture, music, dance, philosophy, psychology, and education. Pound himself fiercely championed the strange painting and sculpture of Gaudier-Brzeska, and George Antheil’s Dadaist-Surrealist Ballet Mécanique. His modernist agenda in poetry was part of a generalized gestalt that infected European thinking like some sort of spiritual encephalitis. We now live in the massive cultural devastation that this pandemic brought in its wake.

I no longer believe the retrospective apology of some modernists, who claim that the movement was intended to be a temporary expedient only, designed to give new writers a way out of the more restricting demands of Victorian style, approach, and diction. The modernist revolution, they argue, was supposed to be an emergency measure, not a permanent realignment of Western aesthetics. These apologists claim that no one planned for poetic modernism to become a new standard, and that its current hegemony is a sad but unforeseen historical consequence.

Bollocks, as the Brits say. The persons who pushed poetic modernism were as fanatical as Lenin in politics, as Dewey in educational theory, as Freud in psychology, as Picasso in painting, as the Bauhaus types in architecture, and as the Frankfurt School in social thought. The situation we have now is the situation that they wanted and worked for. Pound—who lived long enough to see the results of his youthful ardor—was remorseful at the end of his life. But it was far too late by then to cry over spilt milk.

Actually, I’d like to see us go back to Swinburne. We could do a helluva lot worse, poetically speaking. But then again, I’ve always been a ferocious reactionary.

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Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.

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25 Responses

  1. T. M. Moore

    Dr. Salemi:
    Thank you for this very helpful and affirming overview of the modernist movement in the arts. I’m wondering if this whole shebang, in all its forms (artistic, political, social, moral), was herded into being and slouched along its catastrophic path by the “background noise” of Enlightenment and evolutionary thinking. That is, it seems to me that complementary thrusts of these two movements – the elimination of God and the exaltation of autonomous man – were able to creep into the thinking of most people in the Western world because they made it possible (a) to be done with the “bonds” of religion and (b) to release their innermost passions and desires with few or no consequences. Only to discover that those passions and desires were a Pandora’s Box of moral, spiritual, social, and cultural disorder, disarray, and disillusionment. How can this ever be repaired? Only by exposing the folly of it, as your essay does so well, and asserting the contrary against it. As the old Celtic monks used to say, “contraries are by contraries cured.” The cure for our “under the sun” misguided modernism must be a firm, constant, eloquent, patient, and ordered advance of “under the heavens” living across a broad front of disciplines. Thank you again for a very fine article. T. M. Moore

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you for your comments, T.M. Moore. I do believe, however, that the poisons that afflict us go much farther back than the Enlightenment. After all, that is only an 18th-century phenomenon. Corrosive criticism of inherited beliefs and practices (both religious and social) can be seen in John Wycliff and William of Occam, Marsilius of Padua, the Italian radical Dolcino, and a whole pack of malcontents from the 14th century and earlier. The great Eric Voegelin made a very good argument that much of modern left-liberal gnostic utopianism could be traced back to Joachim of Flora in the 13th century. But then again, I was dealing with modern poetry, which is small potatoes compared to the larger cultural and political corruption that engulfs us.

      Reply
  2. Roy E. Peterson

    Dr. Salemi, this is a superior exposition of what happened culturally to infect all the arts including poetry. Modernism has no place else to go except into the trash bin it created, while classical poetry ultimately will remain triumphant, but then I am an optimist. Classical poets like us do not deserve the appellation, “reactionary,” but rather a categorization like “restorative.”

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Many thanks, LTC Peterson. I hope that the SCP, in its small way, will be recognized as a significant part of the counter-revolution in the arts.

      Reply
  3. Joshua C. Frank

    I agree with you about Pound and his contemporaries, and the reason behind what has happened to the arts. I saw a meme that said, “When you realize that beauty motivates men to greatness, suddenly a lot of modern architecture makes sense.” It showed a particularly ugly modern skyscraper in the background. I think this explains what has happened to all the arts… not to mention everyday things like the clothing people wear and the fact that cars mostly look alike.

    Anyone who still thinks all this isn’t deliberate is delusional, and most likely by choice.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      A visceral hatred of aestheticism and of any manifestation of beauty is definitely a symptom of what ails us. It is certainly deliberate, and it is politically motivated. Anything at all that makes Westerners uncomfortable, or disgusted, or unhappy, or alienated is championed by our enemies, because they consider the West to be irredeemably guilty and therefore deserving of punishment.

      What is ironic is that men like Pound and Eliot and many other classical high modernists were able to create some excellent art, and appreciate the great aesthetic achievements of the past. But at the same time they were seduced by the siren-song of “change” and “newness” and “revolution” just like almost everyone in their day. The fact that Pound and Eliot and Yeats were politically far to the right is important to remember — these men (just like us) would have been utterly disgusted by the world that exists today.

      Reply
  4. Paul A. Freeman

    As always, a lot to take in and digest.

    As a strange coincidence, I’m reading the excellent ‘Dover Beach’ for the first time. Written in 1867, Arnold’s poem is traditional, though there are anomalies such as line lengths, stanza lengths (the first stanza is an irregular sonnet) and irregular rhyme schemes.

    Would you say this poem is part of the transformational phase from traditional poetry to modernism?

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Matthew Arnold was a transitional figure in Victorian poetry and the development of modernism. His poetry is normally regular, but he does allow variations in line length sometimes. Arnold’s problem was that he desperately wanted to be “modern,” but was born a bit too early for it. He tends to be gaseous, over-serious, and intolerably “moral.” He made the mistake of thinking that “high seriousness” was all that great poetry could be about.

      Reply
  5. Adam Sedia

    One of my favorite quotations comes from a contemporary of Swinburne’s the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: “The only thing new in art is talent.” I think that encapsulates the spirit of their age, and a much more realistic approach to art. Ultimately, it is individual talents that define art. Swinburne was not setting out to upend poetry, but just to be his own eccentric self.

    Eventually the obsessive quest for novelty wears itself out and even devours itself, but leaves the human soul with nothing. We are in the terminal stages of that obsessive quest, and I believe reaction is the only way forward as the only sane response.

    I would also add that in his obsessive quest for novelty, Pound imagined he saw something in Chinese poetry that wasn’t there and completely misrepresented it to the West. For that disservice alone he should be reviled.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Adam, thanks for your comments. Swinburne’s meter was so solidly based that he was taught by the Jesuits in my university days, even though the poet was powerfully anti-Christian. The priests were wise enough to know that a great poet is not defined by his ideology.

      Yes, novelty “wears itself out.” How ironic that when you look at the garbage art being produced and published today, the most glaring thing is “the sameness of it all,” as William Carlson (the editor of Iambs and Trochees) used to say.

      Pound depended too much on those manuscripts of Fenollosa, and he seemed to be obsessed with the Chinese written character as an ideograph that was a kind of parallel to his imagistic tendencies.

      Reply
  6. MMurray Alfredson

    Thank you, Dr. Salemi, for your brief remarks about Pound and ‘modernism. I am not fixed in my views on early 20th century English language poetry. And I write, not as a scholar of poetry (it was not my academic field) but as a practising poet. And in my formal education my background was in German, not English literature.

    I personally do not find ‘modernism’ to be a very enlightening label, as I also find its successor term, ‘post-modernism’ equally uninformative. ( where do we go from here? : ‘post-postmodernism’ and a long sequence of terms adding extra ‘posts’, like Australia’s dingo-proof fence.

    To me, the term to be more descriptively associated with Pound and the English language poetic movement of which he was part at the outset of the 20th century is ‘Imagism’. I must express both a positive and a negative view of Imagism. Its strengths were an emphasis on using sharp imagery in their poetry, and I have personally learned much in that regard. Negatively, I find them to have turned their backs, at least in their ex[licit poetics, on and rejected forcefully many methods of traditional English language poetry, such as rhyme, metre, and devices used to facilitate applying these graces, such as inverting syntax. If I remember rightly, Pound himself railed against the supposed ‘tum ta-tum ta-tum’ monotony of metre. In this he was definitely mistaken. English metric poets from Chaucer on have traditionally been anything but rigid in their application of metre. On the contrary they have varied their rhythms often departing from metre, to create a sort of interplay between predicted rhythm and actual rhythm. I have argued in an essay on metric and free verse using examples from Chaucer to Robert Browning, not only that ‘departures’ from strict metres are not only the norm for English (and also German) poetry, but that the play between predicted and actual rhythm is essential to the interest of free verse, that indeed, free verse needs to establish a predicted rhythm sufficiently firmly to avoid flaccidity.

    The absurdity of this program against traditional devises of poets in English can be seen in a fine Australian poet, Geoff Page, having felt it necessary to ‘excuse’ Matthew Arnold in ‘Dover Beach’ for departing from ‘normal’ English syntax in his phrase, ‘tremulous cadence slow’.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Mr. Alfredson. I think academics started to use the terms “structuralism” or “post-modernism” or several others for a political reason. Many poets and their academic apologists were enraged at the right-wing beliefs and attitudes of several key figures in the early modernist movement, and needed some way to reclassify themselves, as a form of separation. I myself prefer to use the designation “classical modernism” or “high modernism” for the early practitioners and their followers, while generally ignoring the flood of sloppy, confessional, and freaky material that came after 1960.

      And I’m happy that you have called out Pound for his silly condemnation of standard meter as “monotonous” and “ta-tum-ta-tum.” He even criticized some of his contemporaries for writing lines that were “too penty.” As you rightly point out, English meter has always allowed for substitutions and variations and wiggle-room, and such meter is totally acceptable and perfect, regardless of the definitionist fanaticism that denies it.

      I can’t see what the hell Page is talking about when he has to excuse or apologize for Arnold’s “tremulous cadence slow.” Surely Page is well-read enough to know that departures from “normal” English syntax have always been in the tool chest of poets! I surmise that Page said this just to stay in the good graces of the current Poetry Establishment.

      Reply
  7. James Sale

    Thanks Joe – a great read. And I particularly like your penultimate paragraph: “Bollocks, as the Brits say. The persons who pushed poetic modernism were as fanatical as Lenin in politics, as Dewey in educational theory, as Freud in psychology, as Picasso in painting, as the Bauhaus types in architecture, and as the Frankfurt School in social thought.” So thanks for thinking of the Brits, but more significantly the parallel with Lenin is so apt because he more than the others exposes what ideas lead to: mass murder basically. At the root of all the formlessness is a moral anarchy, and whereas it was once seen for what it was, it’s now lauded as ‘progressive’. Great piece of work.

    Reply
  8. Joseph S. Salemi

    James, many thank for your appreciative words. I learned the word “bollocks” in the U.K., and the Kentish poet John Whitworth was fond of it.

    One of the most promising signs of an intellectual resurgence today is the growing realization that a huge number of malignant things in politics, law, the arts, religion, social relations, sex, psychology, and education are traceable to the same poisonous source: left-liberalism’s sheer hatred of the West. Lenin and the Frankfurt School are brothers.

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Ha ha ha!!! I am an admirer of Whitworth’s poetry – and FYI come from Kent myself, as does Susan J Bryant. It’s a fertile breeding ground for poets!!!

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Perhaps it is because you are all Jutes, and not Angles or Saxons.

  9. Brian A. Yapko

    An excellent essay, Joe, with much to ponder. You offer important history regarding post-Victorian literature with strong application to the present time. I knew that Ezra Pound was an important literary figure who guided poetry and poetic criticism into a new aesthetic but you describe him as even more important: emblematic of his age and its peculiarly anarchistic zeitgeist. Your paraphrased quote of “Where do we go from Swinburne?” is a short-hand query of how our literary forebears perceived a problem where none existed. You discuss Pound but I would probably add in James Joyce, E.E. Cummings and a few others here.

    You are hard on Pound and I believe I understand why. He represents a force that is almost capriciously and narcissistically destructive. I might be a little easier on him simply because I think it’s human nature to hit boundaries and then try to figure out how to flex those boundaries into a frontier wherein one might find new glory as an exploring pioneer. Sometimes this is good. This is the impulse that allows Beethoven to write music unprecedented in his Fifth Symphony, or Einstein to conceive of physics beyond that of Newton. But, as you suggest, sometimes this impulse is nothing more than destructive iconoclasm. The literary equivalent of toppling statues or throwing pudding at fine art.

    Just because a boundary can tempt one into finding ways to push through it doesn’t make it right or useful or helpful or beautiful. It’s one thing to say “Where do we go from Swinburne?” and then create a new type of beauty – say the way the French Impressionists moved on from the Romantic paintings they had grown bored with. But there seemed to be a bitterness attached to that impulse with Pound and his peers. The period after the Belle Epoque – especially in the wake of the Great War – was a period of innocence lost. Poison gas. The Bolshevik Revolution. Anti-religious movements. The primary of technology over humanity. The legitimacy of Social Darwinism. Fascism. Economic confusion. Europe had gone through a spectacular period of art and thought in the 1880s through to World War I. America had its own Guilded Age. But all the while desperation was creeping in. The desperation of people who were now being taught that their lives mattered in some vague way but who were deprived of religion or even humanistic ethics to justify that premise. So what do people do? They live angry lives and make every effort to be noticed. Unions. Planned Parenthood. And spitting on all that has come before.

    Ezra Pound undermines the beauty and achievements of the literature that has come before him but he does so without offering something better. He seems to simply want to be noticed. . Does he not do that for the same reason a freakishly unhappy person in the year 2024 dies its/their hair pink, spends its/their welfare money on tattoos and marches in protests and tries to force bakers to create cakes celebrating their abortions? People are indiscriminate in what they do to get noticed so long as they get noticed. Pride without spiritual temperance is an ugly thing.

    In the olden days we had God to allow people the comfort of knowing that their lives had meaning. They didn’t need to take hormones and dye their hair. But the Great Minds of the 19th Century succeeded in divorcing people from faith and if that didn’t create anarchy, it certainly accelerated it. Beauty and meaning no longer mattered – as today where they are dismissed as arbitrary social constructs. A pity because we are reaping the bitter harvest of what they sowed.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Brian, many thanks for these reflections. They are quite on the mark, and help to unravel the tangled history of how a major watershed in modern poetry was reached.

      I may be hard on Ezra Pound in some ways, but I am also convinced that he was a colossal poetic talent. As Margaret Coats (see below) will agree, some of the work in Personae is absolutely beautiful, even if not always in regular rhythms. The Cantos are very often impenetrable, but in some parts close to sublime. When he wanted to write in recognizable meter, he could and he did. He had an amazing command of the English language.

      But I think you are correct — the narcissistic need “to be recognized,” or “to start a new trend,” was Pound’s demonic temptation. He was an indefatigable self-publicist and networker, an impresario, a mentor, a master of ceremonies — and he latched onto a wide range of important persons in the literary world like Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Amy Lowell, as well as publishers. The guy was what we used to call “a live wire” here in the states. No one could prevent the bubbling revolution inside him.

      Naturally he was noisy and overenthusiastic. His fixation on theories like “Social Credit,” his championing of Mussolini, his absurd decision to make those useless broadcasts during the war — all of these show a man who could not control his impulses, and who failed to stop and think for a minute before jumping into the flames. But that, I think, is what was exactly the problem in that fateful period from 1900 to 1930. Too many people at that time were crazy in the same way. We don’t remember that when world war broke out in 1914, nearly everyone in Europe was in an ecstatic frenzy. A young
      Adolf Hitler fell to his knees and thanked God effusively for letting him live in such a heroic period; Lenin rejoiced that now Marxism would conquer the world; Italian Futurists celebrated the coming slaughter as a necessary catharsis of blood that would reinvigorate a decadent culture. Even an elderly Sigmund Freud in Vienna cried out “All my libido is given to Austria-Hungary!”

      This was an epidemic of international psychosis on a grand scale. It spread even to America, where warmongers like Theodore Roosevelt and the “Preparedness” Movement angrily champed at the bit to get us into the battle.

      You mention religion. It was quite forgotten at that time, except as a source of pious sloganeering. An appalled Pope Benedict called for a truce or negotiations in 1915, after the wanton bloodshed had reached staggering levels. But he was ignored or laughed at by both sides. Everyone in the war saw no reason for it to end, if the end meant no victory for them.

      When I ponder these matters, I begin to wonder whether the disputes in today’s poetry world are of any importance at all. What we complain about here is merely a small symptom of a generalized cultural suicide.

      As for getting attention, Pound certainly did achieve that goal. His work was published and honored. By 1940 he was recognized universally as the leader and chief promoter of the modernist movement in poetry. After the war he received a major award from the Library of Congress, and he was also widely hated as a traitor for his broadcasts. He will never be forgotten. As for those various freaks dyeing their hair pink, and getting facial tattoos, and marching around with placards in street demonstrations — well, they are just forgettable vermin. At least Pound actually had real talent.

      Reply
  10. Margaret Coats

    A huge topic, Joseph, even if you confine it to “small potatoes” of modern poetry. I too appreciate much of Swinburne’s very large output of poetry, but little of Pound’s. My undergraduate thesis was on Pound’s earlier and more appealing “Personae.” Once he tried getting into the Orient by way of Fenollosa, he didn’t know where he was. In other words, he moved beyond the realm of intelligence, education, and cultural sophistication that you note as features of the Victorian poets. Having at random opened Pound’s Cantos (published by New Directions), I come across, “I favor balance,” followed by the Chinese character for “center,” and then by gibberish.

    Moving on from Pound, but remaining within the bounds of poetry, I think the observed destruction or pandemonium derives from excessive favor to power over art in creation. Both are necessary and desirable, but how often do we hear “powerful” as the emphatically positive critical term for a poet or his works? Sometimes the value of “power” excludes all else. And without artistic discipline, force has nowhere to go but deviation (as in your essay title), leading to chaos in all new “creations” poetic or social or political. Too reductionist a perspective for the perceptive outline you have laid out, and for which I thank you.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Margaret. Your point about the primacy of power over art in today’s thinking is well taken. I have noticed how editors will show me some horribly amorphous piece of garbage submitted to them, and when I comment on the gross flaws in it, they will reply by saying “Yes… but LOOK AT THIS! It is so POWERFUL!” And they will point to some strange grotesquerie in the poem which has struck their fancy.

      When people like this talk of “power,” what they really mean is some aspect of the work that shakes them out of their normal complacency, or that surprises them, or that prompts them to think that their readership will be titillated or struck dumb by it. Issues of poetical structure mean nothing to them, and neither does beauty. For them, aesthetic concerns are replaced by the desire for something freaky and weird.

      Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection at all to poems that deal with unpleasant or ugly situations, or with unorthodox opinions, or frightening subject matter. But they have to be dealt with aesthetically, and have to be made into recognizable fictive artifacts. These people who are so hopped up about “power” in a poem will eventually start sticking pineapple grenades onto a page of poetry.

      Reply
  11. Cynthia Erlandson

    I, too, really appreciate this essay. I love your phrase “demonic restlessness”. It seems to me that a perverse desire to be different, just for the sake of being different, and the accompanying inability to take joy in the work other artists who are excellent, is simply a manifestation of the deadly sin of pride.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Cynthia. I agree that pride can be the source of “a perverse desire to be different,” but so can a frustrated envy. The need to do something new and outrageous and freaky all the time may be the real engine behind incompetent poets who are desperate for some kind of attention. I believe this is what lies at the root of “slam” poetry, and “improv,” and “lang-po.”

      We all suffer from pride on occasion, and the giants of Classical Modernism had a lot to be proud of, even if we might wish that they had taken different paths for aesthetic expression. But the second-raters (like William Carlos Williams) were eaten up with envy for the achievements of Eliot and Pound.

      Reply
      • Cynthia Erlandson

        “Lang-po” — wow — that’s a new one on me! 🙂

  12. Joseph S. Salemi

    Short for “language poetry” — some new absurdity that emerged from deconstruction and critical theory. The Poetry Foundation website has a short explanation of it.

    Reply
  13. BDW

    E. P. Owed
    by B. S. Eliud Acrewe

    He was so right. It was not wanted—structured poetry.
    And yet he tried to do his best—Hugh Selwin Mauberley.
    Of course, it wasn’t good enough. How could it ever be?
    The World demanded, still demands, so much…to do and be.
    And yet, despite the mess he made of his accomplishments,
    there still remain, despite the sa/l/vages, astonishments.
    We are all flawed, and yet we strive to reach a better place.
    We have to struggle—after all, we live in outer space.
    We know the suffering of Troy—our own as well unhurled.
    We can’t give up, we must strive harder in such a hard World.

    Reply

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