Thomas Lux on modernist poetry

"With modernism came this new notion that poetry is something that is not as direct or accessible, and poetry became something that needed to be deciphered, a kind of riddle.

And, of course, a lot of people are put off by this. A lot of people read poetry, and they don't understand it and it makes them feel resentful. They also tend to think if they don't understand it that means it's good poetry because you're not supposed to understand poetry.

You can have poems that are clear enough, accessible enough, that people can understand. The best of these are not going to be any less original than those poems that are obscure."

Thomas Lux

Good sense from Mr Lux, whom I'd never heard of until today. He's a year younger than me - which only tells you something if you know how old I am. I wonder what he'd say about postmodern poetry...?

On another tack altogether, I wrote about how my old geocities website had been demolished, and that I'd decided to kind of revive it over at jimdo. The only problem is that jimdo doesn't seem to get googled; so far nothing I've put on there has turned up in any searches I've done, while geocities was very visible in that regard.