Roger

il miglior fabbro built a ruin, which is what might happen if you fall
for Roman fantasies.

He's best remembered for his most inventive years, about 1912-1920,
and those cracked duce-hailing Cantos do have those moments of of
oddly-Emily Dickinson like perception, of the ants and the birds on
wires like a stave etc, and a grandiose ranting grandeur that would be
tragic if it weren't both poisonous and ludicrous though off-key
musical. The idea of culture he desperately defends is more Odeon
classic than Athenian. He was three parts pasticheur to one part poet.
He didn't understand that those lying Greeks bought their culture from
Levantine salesmen in the first place. I wonder if he understood
Joyce's Ulysees at all.
Those Aryan warrior princes who his generation thought brought culture
from their horseproud sky-god steppes were mostly farmers really, and
he should have realised that, being at least born in the mid-West.
Ungaretti, a real Mediterranean, and very much a fascist too, stays
with us not for his politics but for a half-dozen or so almost perfect
short poems. You don't need to know, or want to know, that he actively
worked with Mussolini. His poems are his better testament. And Pound
too has entered the language: but for a two-line poem on the metro.
With the Cantos you can't avoid the politics, unless you train
yourself how not to read, but those racists on that website are the
desired result Pound's poetics aim at, they're not aberrations, the
Cantos aim to make you a devotee of  the Master, that's their
technique, you have to let Pound's mind into your own. And I certainly
don't want to become a proxy member of the Aryan Brotherhood, than you
very much. Or not read what you are reading, and I suspect that's
what's happens in most cases, so people say it does not mean, but just
is. If it were the voice of a character in play, yeah, ok, that's how
I have to read it, as if Pound, the real historical man, were a
fiction. If he didn't put himself so much in the forefront that
wouldn't be a problem: the tradition that Shakespeare played Adam in
As You Like It and that the top of his performance was as the Ghost in
Hamlet is a sound tactic for any writer to take towards their own
work. Language is always trying to explain about poetry to us, if we
only listen.
As for England, it's a long river in time, with many turnings.



2008/6/13 Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>:
> I thought we'd double-dug this ground again and again and again. If
> you want to continue raising this again and again and again it
> probably says more about you than anything else. All because you wish
> to forget my previous posts in order to summon the slur of politician
> is your own problem. Do you  want some sense of "triumph" that bad?
>
> I've admitted in the past in posts to you that I know Pound is the
> worst kind of everything. Yes he supported Il duce. Yes he was
> anti-semitic. Yes he sometimes wrote bad poetry (has anyone ever
> written a completely clean sweep of fantastic poetry - bits of
> Shakespeare appear suspect, parts of the Prelude are shite). Yes, yes,
> yes, blah fucking blah.  Feel better now? But in spite of all you say
> - or *because* of what you say drives me back to re-consider and
> remember the better bits of the Cantos -  some bits of Pound still
> have the power to hold me whatever you raise. I believe  and have used
> the techniques he used and helped create, he wanted to make it new, to
> break the pentameter, creating collage and fragmentation in Poetry,
> introducing fragments of prose in to poetry, removing the I. These are
> the things Pound put forth, things I cherish, things I continue to
> believe in.  Actually, you never answered Jon Corelis' post from a
> long time about this but then I think your head is far up your own
> arse with regards to Pound the Demon, Pound the Evil ... that chasing
> Pound's personality has blinded you to any sensible discussion of the
> techniques he imported into poetry via Apollinaire and the cubists.
>
> Painters talk a lot about making a break from the Renaissance,
> particularly with regards to perspective. I think Pound - along with
> others - was trying to do the same thing. A break from the past, a
> breaking of the mold, of the aspic I think we English find ourselves
> continually caught in. A way out of our cultural constipation, a way
> forward to the Republic I want to see happen.
>
> I agree with Annie and Dominic in all the things they say. I don't
> even think the Italians actually knew what Pound was on about, even in
> his war-time broadcasts. I doubt Pound today is even a blip on
> anyone's radar outside of the few specialists and fans such as
> ourselves.
>
> Roger
>
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 7:44 PM, David Bircumshaw
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Roger
>>
>> you avoid any questions I raise about the inextricable relationship of
>> Pound's politics and his writing. Those are the tactics of a
>> politician.
>>
>> I have no intention to 'go hang ' nor am I going to descend to the
>> level of personalised insult.
>>
>> Saint-Saens apparently had some strange characteristics, they don't
>> appear in his work. Pound's are splattered all over his. You have to
>> find out what Pound's weirdo ideas were to have any notions of what
>> he's referring to in much of his stuff (that in itself is an artistic
>> failure: Pound most of the time really +isn''t+ a very good writer);
>> you don't have to research Saint-Saens' peculiarities.
>> I can well imagine that many of the people who pay lip-service to
>> Pound's reputation don't even understand much of what he's saying.
>> After all, if the famous passage in The Pisan Cantos was widely
>> praised as Pound finding a kind of humility when in actuality its a
>> rant worthy of a Shakespearean villain about the American soldiers
>> being mixed race then I suspect that incomprehension is the order of
>> the day among many.
>>
>> yours
>>
>> sad git
>>
>>
>>
>> 2008/6/12 Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>:
>>> These are my last words on the subject. You can go hang after this.
>>>
>>> You remind me of that sad git on Buffalo Poetics who used to regularly
>>> post about Ginsberg's unsavoury aspects, about Ginsberg's demonization
>>> of a poet at a retreat, about Ginsberg's alleged love of small boys.
>>> But whatever this guy said never detracted from the impact that Howl
>>> had  - has - on me. Not one little iota. Howl still sends shivers down
>>> my spine. I can still read it aloud and it's raw energy and power will
>>> carry me  away. When I read some of Pound's stuff, I get a similar
>>> shiver. I really couldn't give a monkeys if Pound roasted kittens and
>>> ate them for Sunday tea whilst dressed in leder hosen and singing the
>>> Horst Wessel.
>>>
>>> My relationship with Shakespeare is complex: I detest the edifice that
>>> he has become in English society, literature and learning. He has
>>> become totemic for the right. He is kept afloat by a lot of public
>>> money. I remember once proposing that a moratorium be called on
>>> teaching and performing his works for a generation or two. I am still
>>> of that opinion. Let the English find their own songs and stories to
>>> tell, rather than rehashing meaning from stories for dead people. On
>>> the other hand, Shakespeare informs my writing. I admire his work but
>>> I do find him suffocating. The writing - when I do read him - I can
>>> warm to.
>>>
>>> Roger
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:51 AM, David Bircumshaw
>>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>> Nothing to see here, move on. Old news warmed over for adolescents.
>>>>>
>>>> That's a very good definition of Pound.
>>>>
>>>> The site +is+ a out and out racist oasis and Pound is one of their
>>>> literary gods.
>>>>
>>>> Pound, like a lot of writers of  1875-1914-ish gestation was caught up
>>>> in the myth of Aryan supremacy, of eugenics and the horsemen from the
>>>> Northern Steppes who brought down their rule. It derived from many
>>>> sources, notably Galton, that very flawed genius, and was popularised
>>>> by HH Chamberlain, from where it gained wide currency. Social
>>>> Darwinism influenced it too (Darwin did +admire+ without endorsing his
>>>> cousin Galton's work.
>>>> Psychologically it's linked with attested adolescence, with
>>>> self-fascination that fails to establish adult relation to the
>>>> feminine: Pound gets stuck somewhere between the Venus and Adonis and
>>>> the Rape of Lucrece stages: hence his splatter gun violence, his
>>>> sexlessness, his facetiousness.
>>>>
>>>> The Big Boys of male poetry, Roger, are the one's who learn to grow
>>>> out of that, like that Mr Shakespeare you so detest.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 2008/6/11 Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>:
>>>>> Nothing to see here, move on. Old news warmed over for adolescents.
>>>>>
>>>>> It occurs to me that, just like Crowley, it's Pound's fascism that
>>>>> makes him interesting. If Pound was a card-carrying member of the
>>>>> jesus cult, then he'd be just another untermensch slaving for an
>>>>> imaginary friend.
>>>>>
>>>>> Roger
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 8:28 PM, David Bircumshaw
>>>>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>> what Pound and some of the other English language modernists were
>>>>>> really about, underneath the rhetoric, have a look at the below, which
>>>>>> includes an interesting summary of Vorticism. Have a look at the site
>>>>>> it's on too, oh boy
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://library.flawlesslogic.com/pound.htm
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> David Bircumshaw
>>>>>> Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
>>>>>> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
>>>>>> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
>>>>> "I began to warm and chill
>>>>> to objects and their fields"
>>>>> Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> David Bircumshaw
>>>> Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
>>>> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
>>>> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
>>> "I began to warm and chill
>>> to objects and their fields"
>>> Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Bircumshaw
>> Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
>> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
>> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>>
>
>
>
> --
> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> "I began to warm and chill
> to objects and their fields"
> Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
>



-- 
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk