ends from Ez

"Recomposition of Gaudier-Brzeska's Portrait of Pound" (c) 1988, by Anne Tardos, used as the jacket of Jackson Mac Low's book, Words nd Ends from Ez, published by Avenue B in 1989.

Jackson Mac Low

Thanks to the efforts of Anna Zalokostas, we at PennSound have now segmented every one of the readings by Jackson Mac Low for which we have recordings. Through this work we re-discover that Jackson read four sections of Forties at the Ear Inn in '92; that in 1995 at a Little Magazine seesion he read "This Occasion, a Poem for John Cage after his 79th birthday"; that at a Radio Reading Series Project session in 1998, he explained Forties and discussed how he applied the diastic method to Pound's Cantos; that he read "Baltimore Porches" at the Ear Inn in '82...and much more. Have a look at our newly revised Jackson Mac Low author page.

online variorum edition of Pound

Using Juxta in the digital variorum edition of Ezra Pound’s cantos. Mark Byron, University of Sydney (Australia), is building an online edition. Exciting stuff. Here's the link.

Ezraversity circa 1960

When Ezra Pound and Donald Hall converged.

rather than have his mind stop

My favorite literary photographer, Lawrence Schwartzwald, got this good shot at "Poet's Forum" at The New School in Greenwich Village yesterday. The topic was "Prosody in Free Verse." and here you see Frank Bidart (with Sharon Olds) getting animated when discussing an excerpt from Pound's Canto CXV, the different versions of the poem, the spacing on the page.

Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
     rather than have his mind stop...

Time, space,
     neither life nor death is the answer.

photo credit: (c) Lawrence Schwartzwald

which era is the era of The Pound Era?

Hugh Kenner's huge (and hugely important) book on Pound was published in 1973. A book of its time? Well, considering '73: maybe a book counter to the trend of its time. Ah, but never mind those assumptions. The book was first planned in....1960. Thirteen years earlier. As I learned yesterday when reading some Kenner correspondence in Chicago. Check out my 1960 blog for more.

illegible? must be modern

"Well, offhand, I'd say it was something by Ezra Pound." (Published in Laughs from the Saturday Review of Literature and reprinted in the August 6, 1949 issue of SRL.)

imagists on the web

Up at MIT Nick Montfort--embodying the perfect mixture of engineering and literary backgrounds--has his students do some serious web work in (I'm almost tempted to say) the old-fashioned put-it-up-on-the-web mode. One student project has been to make Des Imagistes of 1912, Ezra Pound's gathering of imagists, available for the first time ever on the web. They've done a beautiful job of it. And even the URL - www.desimagistes.com - is elegant. There it is. Gotta love that typeface, 1912's version of mod. "This website uses a font stack of 'Futura, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif.' Futura was designed between 1924 and 1926 by Paul Renner, and while Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus school of design, Futura is frequently used in connection with Bauhaus-related topics. The Bauhaus school was founded two years after Des Imagistes' publication, and its aesthetics harmonize well with the nature of imagistic poetry."

Pound's sound editor

The newest PennSound podcast show - 16 minutes long - is an excerpt from a longer interview I conducted with Richard Sieburth not long after he completed the major editing work on the complete sound recordings of Ezra Pound for PennSound.

Here is a direct link to the podcast. You can subscribe to PennSound podcast by going to your ITunes Music Store and searching for "PennSound" in the search box.

wide circulation

Our 12th PoemTalk show is being released this week. Here it is. You've not heard PoemTalk yet? Well, it's 25 minutes of talk about a single poem. Tightly focused talk at moments, but mostly rather loose. Which is why I say "a close, but not too close, reading of a poem." Some poems are left largely unsaid by us by the end, but for some few poems we're really able, it seems, to cover the ground. I think we cover most of the ground this time, talking about Ezra Pound's broadly satiric - and wonderfully performative - early poem, "Cantico del Sole." Give a listen and let me know (afilreis [at] writing [dot] upenn [dot] edu) what you think. The thought of what America would be like if PoemTalk had a wide circulation. (I don't flatter myself.)

the territorio libre of baseball

I'm not a huge fan of Lawrence Felinghetti's poems but I've always admired and enjoyed the early figure he cut. The poetry, especially later, is schticky. Well, if you're going to do irreverent liberationist schtick, why not turn the glance at baseball and modernism at once.

In "Baseball Canto" Ferlinghetti runs through a crude analogy between the racial and class undersides of baseball and the kind of poetry and poetics that might stand against the exclusivist epic-oriented modernism inherited from Ezra Pound. The analogy only works in a superficial political sense: Tito Fuentes and Willie Mays, beloved by the grungy populace in San Francisco's bleachers, surely hate usury. Poundian modernism becomes an imperialism. It's fast and, as I say, very rough. But funny and fun.

I've made a RealAudio recording of Ferlinghetti reading this poem. If you don't have a RealPlayer on your computer, I apologize. (You can donwload one from Real.com.)

Click here to listen. And here's the poem's text:

Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem,
with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers,
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little
black caps pressed over their hearts,
Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender,
and all facing east,
as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to
appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776.

But Willie Mays appears instead,
in the bottom of the first,
and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes
off, like a footrunner from Thebes.
The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him
as he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic.
And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointy shoes.
And the right field bleechers go mad with Chicanos and blacks
and Brooklyn beer-drinkers,
"Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito!"
And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that don't come back at all,
and flees around the bases
like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company.
As the gringo dollar beats out the pound.
And sweet Tito beats it out like he's beating out usury,
not to mention fascism and anti-semitism.
And Juan Marichal comes up,
and the Chicano bleechers go loco again,
as Juan belts the first ball out of sight,
and rounds first and keeps going
and rounds second and rounds third,
and keeps going and hits paydirt
to the roars of the grungy populace.
As some nut presses the backstage panic button
for the tape-recorded National Anthem again,
to save the situation.

But it don't stop nobody this time,
in their revolution round the loaded white bases,
in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics,
in the territorio libre of Baseball.

arranging poetry on your shelf

Robert Hillyer, known now (if at all) because he led the attack against Ezra Pound in 1949, was more generally an enemy of modernism. He wrote a regular column called "Speaking of Books." In the August 3, 1958 piece he noted the revival of interest in Alexander Pope in the 50s. From there he went on (for the nth time) to celebrate the timelessness of poetry. He observed--as if this were evidence rather than an effect of such a belief--that on his on bookshelves he arranges his poetry books in alphabetical rather than chronological order. All his other books are arranged chronologically. The alphabetical arrangement of poetry permits him to see and derive pleasure from the ahistorical juxtaposition of poets such as Matthew Arnold and Conrad Aiken, such as William Plomer and Ezra Pound. William Plomer and Ezra Pound!? Say what?

There it is again: the bright line separating poetry from everything else.

Yet there's a glint of arbitrariness in Hillyer's otherwise natural history of poetics. Plomer and Pound share in common nothing but a first initial. Now that's language, not meant as Hillyer would normally like, but there only on his shelf at home. In the hard-fought poetry wars (Hillyer was a battalion chief on the "we mean what we mean" and "great poetry is timeless" side), this is one of those moments of ideological crossing I cherish. The Plomer-Pound connection, made of a personal alphabetical fiction, is more something I imagine someone like Bern Porter would find on his shelves.

ideas one thing, acts another

In a summer 1951 editorial, Ray B. West argued against political writers - writesr who chose the active life. "What...has happened to the artist who has blushed into the open?" He mentions Picasso (joined the Communist Party and ipso facto, says West, botched both the politics and the art), and Malraux (foolishly attaching himself to a political leader). His examples are all on the left.

But then the clincher. "Would the cause of art or our political causes be better served if T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Faulkner were to be forced into immediate political activity?" I do know what West, who was a sympathetic liberal, was trying to do here: he wanted to give us three reactionary writers and make us thank our lucky stars that they didn't get involved in politics.

But, wait! It's 1951 and he's asking us to be happy Ezra Pound never engaged in immediate political activity? Had he forgotten or suppressed the fact that Pound had gone on fascist radio in Italy, bespoken Mussolini's cause and railed against Roosevelt and the Jews? Or is possible West didn't count this as immediate political activity?

"The fact is," West's "The Act versus the Idea"* concludes, "most intellectuals have little talent or taste for action."

* in the magazine he edited, the Western Review, published in Iowa City.

the Confucian side of Disney

Q.: Do you think that the modern world has changed the ways in which poetry can be written? A.: There is a lot of competition that never was there before. Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. MORE...