Olson

Avant garde, post-modernist poetry can be either brilliant, unintelligible crap, or pretentious slop. Unfortunately, most of it is pretentious slop ... but then again, most poetry written is pretentious slop, to take Theordore Sturgeon's law into a new age. However, questions of poetry always comes down to one rule: message is irrelevant--first and foremost, it is always about the sound of the language. It's true for a great work if trochaic meter, like Poe's "The Raven," or something as sprawling as the work of Charles Olson: