By J.S. Porter   www.spiritbookword.net

for Marshall Soules, mentor and friend

 Among dead readers, recently

Clive James, Harold Bloom, George Steiner

And before them, Edward Said and Susan Sontag

Hugh Kenner died a while back, too

2003 to be exact

his last major work, The Elsewhere Community

Kenner as a young man went to visit Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan said let’s go visit Ezra Pound

whom Gertrude Stein called “a village explainer”

a man who also inspired an era of poetry

a fascist and an anti-Semite

a man who had spent time with W.B. Yeats

an early mentor

Even mentors need mentors

When they saw Pound at St. Elizabeth’s hospital

Pound said that it’s important to see the great men

of your time

He had the addresses, so off Kenner went

to see Beckett and Joyce

 and he would have gone

to see Hemingway in Cuba

but that seemed too far away

But what about the great women of his time

was that the trouble with Pound

There just weren’t enough women in the work

even though he was married to Mrs. Shakespear

 for a time