Pounding In My Head: A Literary Narrative

"station... faces"              "black"        "wet, black"                     "crowd...bough"

          "the apparition"                           "wet, black bough"

     "metro... petals"            "petals...wet"                                "faces... these faces"

                                             "bough. Pound"

These words are the most fulfilling words I know.  Each character counts -- from the very pieces of the title to the sounding boom of his last name.  Each element is used to its total capacity.  Every last bit of wordy juice has been squeezed into this picture til not a drop of meaning remains unused. The whole is so, so complete.

I live for endurance and quality and fullness.  They are emotions I experienced as a reaction to "In a Station of the Metro."  I was 22 and sitting in the back of my American Literary History class, unprepared, inattentive, and disinterested, when I accidentally paid attention to this poem on the classroom projector screen.  I have no idea what my professor said that day -- in fact, the  poem and the way it shook me are the only things I distinctly remember about American Lit (side note: my unwillingness to invest myself in this particular class is the biggest regret of my college career).

My very lifestyle is a response to this poem and the mechanics of it -- the minimalism, the "less is more" approach, the quality over quantity, the eloquence and harmonization of the music these words together create.

Example: I own one bowl, one plate, one fork, one knife, one spoon.  That's it.  Because that's all I need, and I will use them 'til they break.

This poem was the turning point of my English experience.  It's when I realized what words could do, and how much potential they had.  Moreover, I realized how many words had been used frivolously when just one single word could have captured a particular meaning.  It's not just picking a word.  It's taking consideration for the symbols of it, for its etymology, for all the possible associations with that word, for the physical nature of the word in terms of the length it extends to and the curves and lines it is made up of.

One of the most beautiful things I know is that hardly any word means exactly the same thing as another, and this I recognized the more I understood how meticulously Pound crafted this piece. It changed my entire perspective on literature because it was the starting point for allowing me to take pride in -- not just enjoy, but feel actual pride for -- a literary piece that somebody else created.