–by Christopher D. White, Editor-in-Chief, Rager Media

I would like to qualify a purposely provocative attitude that I am prone to take about the legendary American poet William Carlos Williams. I admit that, at his best, he has written some beautiful poems, including "To Elsie" ("The pure products of America go crazy") and "Danse Russe", to give two examples. I am going to invoke Ezra Pound here: but I want to state first, for the record, a thing or two about my general opinions regarding Pound. I probably repeat myself when I point out that Pound's own warnings about "the supreme weeder" being needed if the garden of the muses is to flourish. I think immediately of the way Pound lopped off large parts of Eliot's "The Wasteland" to make it a much stronger poem (I have always associated it in my strange mind with Whitman's image "tied to the surgeon's table,/What is removed drops horribly in a pail…"). And yet Pound's own admonishment against neglecting the task of weeding applies no more appropriately to the work of Pound himself, who was alternative profound, innovative, and full of unrestrained verbosity punctuated with long passages of half-crazed rantings on the most tangential subjects, a reflection of his lifelong affliction with manic behavior and a chronically short attention span.

And yet Pound's critical writings are essential reading for anyone who calls himself a creative writer in the 21st Century. I am skeptical of poets who call themselves professionals, and yet haven't read the major critical works of Pound. To me, this is something like a composer for the keyboard being unfamiliar with the piano sonatas of Beethoven (The New Testament of piano literature) and Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier (The Old Testament of piano literature. Incidentally: A klavier, or clavier, is a generic term for any hammer-based keyboard instrument, including the piano or the harpsichord).

Among Pound's most important achievements, I believe, are that he encapsulated and propounded some the most important aesthetic principles of his day and ours. He was not always the originator of the ideas–though he had no shortage of original ideas–but he was the one who most effectively brought them into focus for generations of English-speaking poets and writers. At his best, he was able to elucidate the most profound aesthetic insights in bursts of brilliant, spasmodic passages. The most impressive quality, to my mind, of Pound's best prose, is its ability to state that which is immediately obvious once considered, even if that obvious thing was not apparent before having it pointed out. In one of his cockiest moments, Pound makes such a series of observations, followed by the statement "and all of these things are very obvious." This, to me, is almost as cocky as Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself." I believe that Pound derived some of his critical powers from the fact that he wrote such prose grudgingly, and out of perceived necessity, resentful of the fact that one would still need to write such rudimentary things about art as lately as The 20th Century. He would rather be writing poems himself, not writing essays in defense of basic principles which he thought ought to be assumed and widespread by then. And yet his words (the essays, not the poems–the poems aren't necessary for a contemporary poet to read, by and large) continue to be essential to anyone who aspires to be a writer of note.

Certainly Pound must have been irritated to think that one would need to insist upon the freedom of verse from rhymed forms several hundred years after Milton's introduction to "Paradise Lost" should have put the whole matter to rest forever. And yet, despite Milton, Whitman, and a handful of other notable practitioners, it was Pound that put the bullet between the eyes of the tyranny of rhymed forms forever. It's characteristic of Pound that he began to turn against his own original support for Vers Libre, or Free Verse, not long after he began to champion it, because he was horrified to see how sloppy free verse had already become in his day. For Pound, the notion of freeing oneself from rhyme only increases the poet's responsibility to master the prosody more intensively. For instance, without rhyme, one has no excuse not to pay much closer attention to word choice, or diction. Without a metronomic line, a poet must suddenly pay closer attention to the principle of line break, which now becomes an aesthetic decision which is completely independent of the meter. As Pound put it, poetry is not "bad prose broken into arbitrary line lengths." Well, not poetry that serious critics will ever respect, anyway.

Even though Pound is known for his obsessions with poetic traditions of the past, he was also the Archmodernist, and even in the cases when he attempted to rouse the dead with his incantations from defunct idioms, he also understood the need to "make it new." In other words, though one may resurrect that which has fallen out of use, it will never return in exactly its original form, nor should it. I think of the gawd-awful resurgence of clothing fashion from the 1980's that we're seeing now–it may be throwback gear, but these are updated versions of those looks.

But Ezra Pound also understood the importance of always knowing what's being written by one's contemporaries. In other words: if you're not reading poetry that's less than twenty years old, then how can you possibly discern what's on the cutting edge, and what's not? So the idea here is to maintain an ongoing relationship with the spirit of the past, but not at the expense of the relevancy and vibrancy of what's brewing around you in the present zeitgeist.

This is why I think that William Carlos Williams gets way too much play. He's freakin' dead for crying out loud. Why does he need to be read so extensively, and yet someone like, say, T.R. Hummer, a contemporary practitioner who makes Williams look like an awkward amateur by comparison, labors in relative obscurity? Donald Hall, I grudgingly admit, has written some spectacular poems. But he also writes a bunch of very boring and forgettable poems, and after all of his awards and acclaim, does his work really need to take up space where the work of a lesser-known, but equally or more accomplished poet could use some ink?

So to me it's about making way for the talented, though underexposed young, and talented-but-overlooked old. The appointment of Ted Kooser as U.S. Poet Laureate is one such cause celebre. In the person of Kooser, we've got a poet who has operated on the perimeter of poetic culture, constantly risking obscurity. He didn't go the common route of creative writing at a university. Like Wallace Stevens (insurance exec) William Carlos Williams (physician), and T.S. Eliot (bank teller), Kooser joins the ranks of great American poets whose day jobs are decidedly unpoetic. Much has been said about Kooser being a poet of "the great plains" region, which has irritated me to no end, as it implies that he's some kind of podunk eccentric prairie sage, and such assessments run the risk of minimizing his accomplishments, and "ghettoizing" his work as some having some kind of limited and hyperlocal appeal; when, in fact, it is nothing of the sort. Personally, if the reason he was named U.S. Poet Laureate has anything to do with the fact that he lives in prairie land, therefore making the selection of Poet Laureate more geographically representative, then fine, whatever. I just hope that people will see past the political considerations to know that Kooser does, very much, deserve the title of Poet Laureate. The appointment of Kooser and Charles Simic to that post has done more for my faith in the future of poetry than anything else I can think of in recent times. Now it's time for Akron's own (but New Orleans-born) Elton Glaser to be named U.S. Poet Laureate. If Glaser is not named Poet Laureate within the next five years, I will be surprised. If he's not named Poet Laureate within the next TEN years, I will be downright shocked, and extremely disappointed in the poetic establishment.