At 02:23 PM 1/17/00 -0500, Burt Hatlen wrote:
>Has anyone other than Pound written a good poem in a manner shaped by
>the
 
Hmm, anyone who attempts a book-length poem can hardly be unaware of
the Cantos looming over their shoulder.  In the last decade I've read
two book-length poems that I consider to be very good: Vikram Seth's
"Golden Gate" and Derek Walcott's "Omeros".  Both are influenced only
very little in *form* by the Cantos; they are mostly monoglot and mostly
adhere to formal structures in their verse.  I think the influence shows
heavily in the occasionally-enjoyably-out-of-control discursions in both
poems; Seth invests pages in the mechanics of plucking olives and
distilling oil, and in antinuke rallies; Walcott takes us far afield from
the poem's home in the Caribbean to episodes in New England, Mid-America,
and other more exotic locales.  In neither case is the material really
integral to the, er, dramatic unities of the underlying work; in
both cases (Seth more than Walcott) it's hard to imagine the work
really working with the discursions excised.
 
Of course in the Cantos, if you excised the discursions, what would
you have left?  Snicker. -T.