Like snapshots of history

Our new poet, Zukofsky, is by far the most complicated, but unlike Stein, not because of its simplicity. Zukofsky is an amazing poet, but I found his beginning works in "A" challenging, almost as though they were meant for elitists. I realized something, though, as we were plodding and struggling through these early readings. I made a comparison, an anology that helped me better decode this poet. Zukofsky has a Masters in English. He is obviously extremely well educated and very talented. He also grew up during a time of great change, through the early and middle parts of our latter century. He saw wars, struggle, invention. He knew history. Each of his poems are like a snapshot of some great detail he saw, heard or remembered throughout the course of his life. Veiwing and reading his works like this makes it a bit less challenging to decode this man.