Correction, big time.  What's going on?  A senior moment.  How could i be thinking Ted Hoosier and write Ted Hughes.  Ted Hoosier is a former Poet Laureate of the United States.  Ted Hughes was a British poet, married to Sylvia Plath.  Our current Poet Laureate, appointed June 7 of this year, is Natasha Trethewey.  You can find out more about her using Google.  Sorry.

Tomorrow I'll be doing a Sunday School lesson at the First Broad Street Methodist Church in Kingsport, and in the course of my preprarations, I ran into an article that's worth sharing with poetry lovers everwhere.  On being asked to do a talk on "Poetry as Moral Compass," my first thoughts were, "How can that be when poetry now has no lay readers?"  "What about 'Howl'?  And so I was redirected.  I thought of Ezra Pound and found "New Approaches to Ezra Pound," edited by Eva Hesse, in the public library.  And in it, an essay by Leslie Fiedler, "Traitor or Laureate: The Two Trials of the Poet."  Fiedler is more widely know as the author of "Love and Death in the American Novel," very controversial when first published, but now an accepted standard.
     He too acknowledges that poetry in America lives only in the classroom or library, but he offers a valuable contrast between Pound and Robert Frost.  Robert Frost wrote and read a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy; Pound wrote and read propaganda for Mussolini.  After the war, he was for a time a prisoner literally kept in a cage in Pisa, while the Allies tried to decide what to do with him.   He was allowed a typewriter, and there wrote his famous "Pisan Cantos," which were awarded a very controversial prize.  Unwilling to bring charges of treason against this famous American poet, he was committed to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital just outside Washington.  Robert Frost was instrumental in getting him released a decade or so later.   He was allowed to return to his beloved Italy to live out his life there.
     Traitor or Laureate, that is the question.  Pound held court from St. Elizabeth's, encouraging John Kasper in his seige of the first integrated high school in the south after the Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional.  You need to see the documentary, "The Clinton Twelve," to get a taste of that era.  But we learned to love Robert Frost's poems in high school, though his darker poems were only in college anthologies.
    What we really need, though, is to find some way to make poetry welcome to the general public once again.  Ted Hughes, former Poet Laureate, has a weekly column introducing a contemporary poem.  It runs in the Chattanooga paper.  Maybe we need a write-in campaign to the Kingsport Times-News, to subscribe to that column.  It is already to be praised for publishing local "Poems by Readers."   But it could do more.   When's the last time you subscribed to a poetry journal?