fascinating fascist

Ezra Pound: the dicta dictator.

fascist poetics

Pound’s fascism should have been evident by the certainties in which he propounded his poetics.

the visual or the musical

…whether we should finally compare Pound’s free verse to ancient musical notations, as if it indicated the placement of varying scales, tones, or, on the other hand, compare it to sculpture, as does Donald Davie, seems a question worth asking, though not worth answering. After all, if Pound did not trouble himself to choose either the visual or the musical as modernist poetry’s sister art, I see no reason why readers should have to make the choice on his behalf. Still, by listening to Pound’s Imagist poems (no only reading, analyzing, interpreting, source-hunting), one may hear the music of the twentieth century having “just forced, or forcing itself into words.”

—Alex Shakespeare, “Poetry Which Moves By Its Music,” Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence (UNO Press, 2013), edited by John Gery, Daniel Kempton, and H.R. Stonback.

pound for pound the best poetics

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)

The safest general characterization of the Modernist poetic tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Pound.

singular

Make it one.

luminous detail

Ezra Pound makes the distinction between “multitudinous detail*” and “luminous detail” in a poem, the latter being that image that suggests so many others because it is connected somehow to the world, the universe, the collective experience of any number of people. We can make a list of all the images we remember from eighth grade, and try to fit as many possible into a poem (the multitudinous method), or we can try for those few that glow with connections, that suggest others (the luminous method). So many lasting poems are made of recollected, luminous detail.

—David Citino, “Tell Me How It Was in the Old Days,” The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002)

*Ezra Pound, Selected prose, 1909-1965, William Cookson ed., New Directions, 1973, 22.

mystery and mastery

[Re: “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour” by Ezra Pound]

The poem sustains its sonic composure in the face of an onslaught of inexplicable experience, and the shock of the final line, in which Pound shatters this tone by naming himself, depends on the fact that the information presented earlier in the poem feels inadequate or even irrelevant. If we knew what event had been overprepared, if we knew the identity of the man and the woman, if we knew where there had been dancing, then the uneasy thrill of the poem’s most blatantly referential line would disappear.

     Dear Pound, I am leaving England.

As we process that line, our experience of the poem mirrors the experience described in the poem. We feel intimate with what we do not fully comprehend—a feeling that is commonplace in human life, conspicuously in dreams, but rare in our experience of art because we expect to be the master of the poem we read. Mystery, says the poem, is a far more human condition, than mastery. And mystery, which depends on clarity, is the opposite of confusion.

—James Longenbach, “Less Than Everything,” The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2013)

cliché critique

When criticizing common expressions or themes, too many critics/reviewers are quick to cue that commonplace dictum of Pound’s: “Make it new.” Shouldn’t the critic/reviewer abide by the same standard and make his/her case without resorting to a cliché quote?

first the prose then the poetry

Pound is the kind of poet whose poetry is perhaps better when first approached through criticism (his own and that of others on his work) rather than starting with reading the poetry itself.

[n.b: Of course I was reading a book about Pound’s poetry when I jotted down this thought; and then a few minutes later coming back to a chapter I’d skipped over, I ran across this Eliot quote: “…And of no other poet can it be more important to say, that his criticism and his poetry, his precept and his practice, compose a single œuvre. It is necessary to read Pound’s poetry to understand his criticism, and to read his criticism to understand his poetry.” –T.S. Eliot, introduction to Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Faber, 1954)]

dictation

Pound, being too ready with a dictum, may have betrayed some of the dictator within him.

the cant in cantos

In certain sections Ezra Pound really put the cant into The Cantos.

kitchen sink songs

Just another kitchen-sink Cantos.

needed a Nietzsche

Whether poetics needed a Nietzsche or not, it got one in the form of Ezra Pound.

descant / disgorge

Only an Ezra Pound could have descanted/disgorged The Cantos.

new improved tide

Some people say Ezra Pound first said “Make it new.” I’m pretty sure that Proctor & Gamble had that slogan long before he did. There is the ring of ersatz capitalism in that ‘make it new’ dictum.

blasted into little pieces

Prior to The Great War (WWI), Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis put out their Vorticist magazine aggressively called BLAST. After the war they were publishing in The Little Review. The titles of the two publications are telling: Nothing like the reality of trench warfare to put one’s art into perspective.