I'd be curious to see a "crash course" in modern poetry just so I could decide whether I'm an unedcuated heathen with no appreciation for the finer things or whether I am an educated heathen with no real taste for modern poetry.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of people feel this way and with good reason. I mentioned some familiarity with painting as being helpful, as even within movements there is a lot of variation, especially on the surface. To use your example, of Jackson Pollock is considered to be an Abstract Expressionist, as is Mark Rothko, in the same way that Ezra Pound and Archibald MacLeish are considered Modernists and yet very different in subject matter and style.

Anyway, you might find simply that you like one writer's work over another, even while liking or disliking the movement they are associated with as a whole. It does bug me a little that poetry is placed on a pedestal, as it has resulted in making it seem unapproachable and unfathomable, instead of another way that humans experience the world.