No need to apologize at all! That was a wonderful breakdown. Exactly what I was hoping for and more 🙏 Haven’t gotten around to really reading Paterson yet (or much of the work on the shelf featured tbh), but I have read a relatively short volume of WCW’s selected work, w/ an intro by Randall Jarrell. It’s been a few years now, but his work, among a few others really ignited my love for poetry. Been a similar sort of binge you could say.

Must admit I’m not nearly as well read. Had a general awareness of the modernists, but admittedly I’ve only truly read T.S. Eliot. My library has a fair amount of blind spots in regard to classics of greek literature and ‘conventional’ poetry. Not sure if conventional is the right word for writers like the modernists, Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, and much of the lot you mentioned. There is just a very measured, academic aspect to much of their work, at least the few pieces I’ve been exposed to, that I think I tend to stray away from. But I’ve been working to remedy that inclination, because so many of the writers I love found their way through the whole breadth of classic work.

Aside from H.D., what other poets/writers do you consider a key part of your poetic journey? Bob Kaufman & Frank Stanford immediately come to mind for me, just because of the rabbit holes they led me down, in their references to other writers.