Does the World Need Another Sestina?

Bloody, bloody Ezra Pound I never got my head around his magnum opus: The Cantos I’ve tried so hard but goodness knows he didn’t intend it to be easy for me or his mate Mussolini. Perhaps obscurantism was his policy or perhaps it was not the meaning but the sound. Whatever it was I went to ground thinking: “Is this poetry or prose?” Mascagni would never have him write librettos not for all the tea in Chinee. I carried his Cantos everywhere with me and read them aloud to anybody who happened to be around. Who may have liked the sound and would have, maybe, tapped their toes to some missed arpeggios. Perhaps if I had a (Roman) nose for this formidable prosody it would be so much clearer to me. I could tell my friends that I have found more meaning than the pints I had downed before the barman called a close. I’ve read the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and I propose the these cantos are harder than any of those scribes who spend their lives de-meaning poetry so it is devoid of mystery (though it still is likely to confound the loftiest don of an Oxbridge mound). I’m sure they were written to astound – filled with tales of forgotten heroes (Americans, Chinese and some Latinos). And The Cantos made way for ‘A’ by Zukofsky (a much better poet as far as I can see). Now there nothing more for me to expound. Except to tell you that my hound, whose taste improves much as he grows, has now eaten up my sole copy.