2006 will be the year I wage total war on poetry, of which there is way too much in Seattle and this region. A recent bad experience with a lady poet in Vancouver BC (she went on and on about her hurt, her void, her father—always her father) proved to be the last straw. Something must be done at once. Someone must stand up and stop this nonsense, this madness, this illness that gets worse by the hour. Before the battle commences (it will be a surprise attack in January), I shall regularly post on this slog some of the greatest poems ever written. Great poetry must be read and examined, but with the complete understanding that great poetry exists only in the past—not the present and never the future.

My first great poem is by mad Ezra Pound:

Portrait D’une Femme

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind—with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that’s quite your own.
Yet this is you.