Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Jackson Mac Low
Subject: Pound etc.
Writing about EP is very painful & difficult. He introduced me to modern
poetry in 1938, when I was 15 or 16 & in my late 3rd year or early 4th year of
high school.
I discovered EP when I visited the University of Chicago campus, traveling
from Kenilworth, a North Shore Chicago suburb, to the South Side of Chicago,
to talk with my high school hero, Bertr& Russell. He was very nice when I
phoned him (when I got out there without having phoned him first!) but he said
I wasn’t able to see me. (No wonder! Some high school kid calls him up out of
the blue. -I met him several months later at a party on the South Side.) So I
went over to the U of C bookstore & found Culture, the New Directions 1938
version of Guide to Kulchur. I read most of it st&ing up at the book table. I’d
literally never read anything like it. Even though I was already "political"-a
pacifist & a democratic socialist-I may not have noticed the fascism-there was
so much exciting & new in it-or maybe I was already discounting the fascist
parts as nutty.
On the way home I stopped by at the main Chicago Public Library (where I had
a card on my father’s office address) & got out several of EP’s early books-
Lustra, Ripostes, Cathay, & possibly the earliest edition of Personae (the
aforementioned were eventually included in later editions). I read them in a
high state of excitement all the way home on the El & & North Shore Line
trains. That led me (with some assistance from George Dillon & Peter DeVries,
who then were the editor & assistant editor of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse) to
all the rest of the Modernists, except for Stein, whom I’d discovered in the
Marshall Field’s store in Evanston several years earlier, & who later became
my "favorite" of them all. I first read Pound, then Eliot, then Williams, then
most of the rest of the Modernists & many other American & British poets
writing c. 1900-1938. (About the same time that I discovered Donne, Herbert,
& the other 17th-century Metaphysical poets, & Shakespeare’s sonnets-I’d read
several of the plays, of course, earlier.)
By the spring of 1939, my later senior year in high school, I was , at my
English teacher’s request, giving lectures on modern poetry up through Auden
to our English class.