 |
 |
Cheers Mark. Thanks for the view. Being a remote viewer of the spats and scraps, and then a brief participant during the summer of love in which I got a lot of blather outed and which led to where one is at present, cerebrally speaking: I can only guess and goof about; hoping to hoke in where happiness and poetry collide - by instinct. Funnily enough, one of the few third level courses founded on the Pound poetic, is Edge Hill University, in my home town of Ormskirk, Lancashire, which I graduated from in 2004 when the course was still BA Writing Studies (joint, with drama) rather than the Creative Writing it became the year after i left. Technically speaking, i could claim a bit more insight and understanding on 20C American poetry than the casual buff, and one thing I suppose it did impart to me, was a general chronology and the various major protaganists. I knew nothing of the course before i began, and only did so because - being my home town - it was convenient that i could live with my parents for three years. If there had been a faery-maestro granting my whims at the time of begining, I would probably have plumped to learn poetry at a university where the course was run by a big name from the lyric mainstream. It was only some time after leaving, that the brilliance of the three year experience percolated up and the intellectual efficacy from the altar of my first learning, poured into a well-rounded poetic wholeness. Left to my own devices, I would have started with Homer first, instead of Pound, and studied how to write metrical, rather than free verse. I did so anyway, just outside of the formal classes, spending about 50% of my total time pursuing a more traditional course, with the study of Irish myth and bardic history at the core - initiated by instinct. ~ I suppose it all boils down to who has the most persuasive definition of the eternal chestnut: 'what is poetry?' The answer for most of us of course, being: 'what me and my freinds write.'