This is not Pound related, but it's wonderful.  For those who like Kurt
Vonnegut, you should not do anything else until you read this brief
interview from "In These Times" magazine:

http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=38_0_4_0_C

On a side note, not to start any kind of venomous bloodbath, I can't
quite see what it is about Billy Collins that rankles so many.
Honestly, even before he became po-it lauriat, his poems caught my
attention.  I remembered his poem "Marginalia" from its original
appearance in _Poetry_ a few years ago, and was quite glad to read more
of his work.  I grant that it resembles Frost more than it does Pound
or Ashbery, but it doesn't seem to me that "plain" diction in a poem,
or obvious rhetorical intentions to engage readers at a non-specialist
level are by themselves sufficient criteria to damn an entire creative
enterprise.  Collins has a humorous and surprisingly penetrating
manner, and his fame is not at all undeserved.  Russell Baker said
once, "I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it
began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a
hostile world", and for the most part I absolutely agree with him.  For
that reason, I was thrilled, actually, to sell Collins' work back when
I worked in a bookstore here in Oak Park.  My customers appreciated it
often, the few ones who would ask about new poetry, and there was a
troup of lovely old women who worshipped his every syllable in a way I
found infectious.  Honestly, there's nothing facile about Collins (just
as Frost is only deceptively homely and "of the people"), and a poem
that doesn't sound alienated in the way Baker suggests is valuable for
lots of purposes.  _Picnic, Lightning_ for my mom on Christmas: $13.95.
  The look on my mother's face when she understands a poem I've asked
her to read: priceless.

Sure, Collins is accessible and popular and funny and good at appealing
to the writing teachers among us -- so why are those things insipid,
again?

Please no severe flames -- I have but my meager opinions, and have
disposed of my asbestos suit for health reasons.  It might simply be
that the "typical" reader of Pound enjoys a palette that tends to
reject Collins-like straight-forwardness.  Where Pound writes
double-black-diamond poems, Collins takes time to lay out some nice,
steady greens for newcomers.   Everyone knows that expert skiers do not
waste their time on the bunny slopes, but they shouldn't begrudge the
gentle slopes their gentility.

Regards to all -
Jon