Take 10 Seconds to Read This Ezra Pound Poem. Think About It All Day

In a Station of the Metro By Ezra Pound

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
    Petals on a wet, black bough.

Thanks, I hate it.

I hate the slant rhyme. Emily Dickinson uses them to great effect, but here it just looks lazy.

Petals don't grow on boughs. Leaves grow on boughs. Yes, some trees have flowers, but I don't get a strong visual off of individual petals on trees. That's an image that goes with flowering plants, not trees.

The pronoun "these" without an antecedent isn't just ungrammatical. It looks pompous, trying to pass off vagueness as depth.

I hate attempts at haiku in English. In Japanese, the form has a very long tradition and a ton of rules. Fitting into it brings a ton of associations and meanings. Without that it falls flat.

Would I hate it less if I didn't also know that Pound was a Nazi? Maybe. But this kind of exercise ("Think about it all day") feels like more of what made me hate poetry in high school: the sense that I was being handed great art and I was a lesser person for failing to like it.

And that kills me, because there is so much to love about poetry. I perform a ton of Shakespeare. I have made people laugh, cry, and pretty much every other emotional reaction you can get. I've spent hours looking at every word, every sound, from every direction, until I've found something that feels so important that I want an audience to share that feeling with me. And they do.

Instead, we've got this dick cranking out 14 words and hoping that by saying less we'll imagine he had more. Whatever.