Sleeping on the Wing Challenge: Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

[UnderYourSpell]

Hush honey I understand

 

[AnonAndAnon]

High School Theatricals

"I'm gonna so pan it in my blog," goes my brother,
And he tells me to shut up
When I can't stop singing my numbers.
My dad calls it "no beauty in the least"
And's a total shit and pest
Over its alleged multiple plot failures.
My mom goes on about how I looked so pretty
And how the mike made my high notes sound tinny.
But as for me, for me, oh for me...

I pause over each picture that I post,
I look at the girl, so made up,
Her dress so clean, so blue, so pure,
"So like a deer in car headlights
About to be toast," goes my stupid brother.
And I don't really recognize her,
Though I totally remember each instant,
Feeling so tightly wound I hardly existed,
From the preview performance for pictures
When each flash froze the rush of time
(Why did it have to get restarted?)
Through each instant in the four shows
And all other time was and is just waking sleep.
No, these pictures aren't real in the least,
Yet they're the only real things I have to keep.

Here're some courtesy of my Dad,
Of me in a kindergarten performance,
Wearing a glittering pink dress-up gown,
I think I'll leave 'em out.
There I am, I've totally lost my crown
And've gone under the risers to hunt it down.
I've no memories of that at all, it's gone.
And Oh my God there's the Beast! Such a little Beast!
He and some other boys are waving banners,
I'm sure like three fourths of us at least
Are on that stage somewheres.

I know nothing like this'll happen again.
In college there'll be too much competition
And the cast and crew can never've been twelve years together.
Though only a few of us are like close friends,
We've all come to work so well together.
And it's over.

So who are these pages for anyways?
My friends list? My aunts, my uncle?
Oh I don't know.
Maybe for myself 40 years down time's drain?
Maybe I'm waving a banner
So she can recall and perhaps regain?
Oh I don't know.
That 58 year old's a total stranger
In fact, I care so much less for her
Than I do for my Grandmother,
Who I love and see most days.
So who're these really for?
Who'm I addressing these words to in my head?
To me, to me, oh to me.

 

[Angeline]

Letter...
​

Enjoy,

Senna Jawa​

PS. When Angeline obsessively writes anti-Semetic, half of the time she means antiseptic, and the other half: anti-semantic. E.g. In his anti-semantic statements, Ezra Pound is not exactly antiseptic.

Stop picking on my spelling!

The letter is wonderful. Very you.

Maybe you could suggest an exercise for a Polish poet. Wisława Szymborska, maybe? Someone else? Any exercise?

 

[unpredictablebijou]

A Letter to Wallace Stevens

Why aren't we
evangelists?
We know the divinity first hand,
the way the universe is defined
in the first eidelweiss,
the wheelbarrow, the crow,
this stone wall, softened by fog.

If it is god, if we have found
that face in the single streetlight,
in the leap of a dog
after a rabbit, if this
reveals Truth, then why
are we not shouting it
with our last, our deepest breath?

Why don't we post handbills
and hold free tent meetings
and shout to crowds
exhorting them to see, truly
the hosts of daffodils?
Why aren't we collecting for
billboards that teach haiku,
why are we not getting arrested
like revolutionaries
for painting our poems on brick walls?
why aren't we shouting them
at drunks in alleys, or bang a drum
to sonnets on street corners?

You and I know that if we save
one single soul in a city
God will spare it from the fall.
Why do we meet only with other believers
and baptize each other wanly
in back corners, where no one
can find us?

Come with me to the streets
and point madly at the new white buds
on the Bradford pear trees
and the spears of new grass, miraculous
from the ground,
and we will shout
Look! Look! Is it not
God? Let us go door to door
with copies of Song of Myself
and anthologies of sonnets
and convert the masses. Their life
depends on these small things
we know this, you and I.

Poetry, we know
is contained in everything
so why aren't we walking
shouting poem, poem, poem with every step
like madmen dancing in ashes? Let us
take rhyme like the sacrament
count the beads of syllables
like rosaries, write them on our hearts
pressing flesh against the page
and bind it to our foreheads and our arms
and wear it in sewn leather charms
strung on necklaces with our own bones.

Let us roll out the mat
five times a day and kneel
to press our faces against words
against all the names for colors
lists of the flowers and monuments,
alphabets, the sacred shapes
of letters.

We will rise, singing
Look! Look! Notice one thing,
one bright color and you will see
the face of god. Paradise
is all around us. It shimmers
in this single stone,
this rosebush over a small grave,
these three women dressed darkly
sharing an umbrella at a bus stop,
this old white horse who stands
with his head over a fence
his nose into the new breeze.

 

[Eluard]

Ah! Ezra Pound — my third poetry love. As a teenager I started out with Yeats, then moved to Eliot, then moved to Pound at the beginning of University. The poems that first captured me were his Pisan Cantos, the continuation of the Cantos composed when he was imprisoned in a cage in Pisa, exposed to the elements day and night, by the occupying American forces. For once Pound’s fragmentation of thought was put to serious use: a mind deteriorating in the heat and confusion of a war that he had lost by choosing to back Mussolini when that was obviously a bad idea. Pound makes his own fragmentation mix in with the fragmentation and ruin of Europe and the world, making a kind of collage of his own mental breakdown. The Pisan Cantos are where the Cantos actually rise to become poetry.

When I came to reading the rest of the Cantos I was pretty disappointed, so much of it has degenerated into economic ranting. There are good patches but they are swamped by the tedious pamphleteering.

Pound wasn’t really an anti-Semite. Jewish friends of his testified that he showed no personal animus towards them. Pound’s anti-Semitism was entirely of the theoretical kind, the Jewish banker’s conspiracy kind. It was not personal, it was world-historical. Pound believed that the world was being destroyed by credit — and he saw Mussolini’s Fascism as the only way to stop it. Credit was the original sin — forcing people to borrow, to get what they need, and then putting up interest rates in a credit squeeze and seizing their assets. It was the moneychangers in the temple that he wanted to drive out. Pound begged to see Mussolini to ask how he could be of use, and Mussolini sized him up immediately as someone he could manipulate — a naïve poet meddling in affairs that were beyond him. See the film Mephisto for an exact analysis of Pound’s folly (though it is not directly about him).

But it was only imprisoned in a cage at age 60 that Pound really became a poet with his own voice. Before then he could only write when he was either translating or in competition with others — with Yeats, with Eliot, with Joyce, above all — and he never has anything of his own to say; he is quintessentially empty. With the Pisan Cantos Pound finally had a tragedy that was equal to the talent that he’d kept in reserve — a tragedy entirely of his own making.

‘And Tovarish, blessed without aim, wept in the rain-ditch at evening.’

 

[Eluard]

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
. . Let the wind speak
. . . . that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
. . . .have made
Let those I love try to forgive
. . . .what I have made.

 

[Angeline]

Ah! Ezra Pound — my third poetry love. As a teenager I started out with Yeats, then moved to Eliot, then moved to Pound at the beginning of University. The poems that first captured me were his Pisan Cantos, the continuation of the Cantos composed when he was imprisoned in a cage in Pisa, exposed to the elements day and night, by the occupying American forces. For once Pound’s fragmentation of thought was put to serious use: a mind deteriorating in the heat and confusion of a war that he had lost by choosing to back Mussolini when that was obviously a bad idea. Pound makes his own fragmentation mix in with the fragmentation and ruin of Europe and the world, making a kind of collage of his own mental breakdown. The Pisan Cantos are where the Cantos actually rise to become poetry.

When I came to reading the rest of the Cantos I was pretty disappointed, so much of it has degenerated into economic ranting. There are good patches but they are swamped by the tedious pamphleteering.

Pound wasn’t really an anti-Semite. Jewish friends of his testified that he showed no personal animus towards them. Pound’s anti-Semitism was entirely of the theoretical kind, the Jewish banker’s conspiracy kind. It was not personal, it was world-historical. Pound believed that the world was being destroyed by credit — and he saw Mussolini’s Fascism as the only way to stop it. Credit was the original sin — forcing people to borrow, to get what they need, and then putting up interest rates in a credit squeeze and seizing their assets. It was the moneychangers in the temple that he wanted to drive out. Pound begged to see Mussolini to ask how he could be of use, and Mussolini sized him up immediately as someone he could manipulate — a naïve poet meddling in affairs that were beyond him. See the film Mephisto for an exact analysis of Pound’s folly (though it is not directly about him).

But it was only imprisoned in a cage at age 60 that Pound really became a poet with his own voice. Before then he could only write when he was either translating or in competition with others — with Yeats, with Eliot, with Joyce, above all — and he never has anything of his own to say; he is quintessentially empty. With the Pisan Cantos Pound finally had a tragedy that was equal to the talent that he’d kept in reserve — a tragedy entirely of his own making.

‘And Tovarish, blessed without aim, wept in the rain-ditch at evening.’

Thank you, El. I'm glad someone who knows more about Pound than me is posting in this thread. If anyone has info to share about any of the poets we're using in this challenge, please, please do. It's helpful and interesting!

And remember, this part of the challenge will "unstick" tomorrow, and we'll move on to someone new.

 

[Eluard]

Europe after the Rain

You my purest water,
. . . ... .My unscaleable air.
. . . . . .. . . . .Dove sta amore.

Your honeyed cunt, shaped like a single candle flame: feel my breath
. . . . Inches away.
This is the unrenormalised time of history —
. . . . . . . . . ..You grow silent at its red door.

. . . . . . . . . ..Here are
. . . . . . . . . ..secret messages for you to read
Full of an unspeakable, impossible love that drove me to the edge
Of lovelessness.

Read them
As the dark widens, as the night increases, your tears are all for me.

This emptiness that we call poetry
. . ..Is a god-shaped passage
. . . . ..In which I can come to you once more.

Our shadows cross like swords.

 

[Tzara]

Europe after the Rain

You my purest water,
. . . ... .My unscaleable air.
. . . . . .. . . . .Dove sta amore.

Your honeyed cunt, shaped like a single candle flame: feel my breath
. . . . Inches away.
This is the unrenormalised time of history —
. . . . . . . . . ..You grow silent at its red door.

. . . . . . . . . ..Here are
. . . . . . . . . ..secret messages for you to read
Full of an unspeakable, impossible love that drove me to the edge
Of lovelessness.

Read them
As the dark widens, as the night increases, your tears are all for me.

This emptiness that we call poetry
. . ..Is a god-shaped passage
. . . . ..In which I can come to you once more.

Our shadows cross like swords.

Oh, El.

I am tempted to proclaim myself your love slave, but that frankly isn't much appealing to me, nor even more so, I suspect, to you.

I am jealous, though. Wowzer poem.

Quibble: "unrenormalised." What the hell does that mean? Like not renormalized? Like, how it is right now? Unnormal, but not cycled back again to normality?

I'd also complain some about the spelling, but refrain 'cuz you am'nt American, and so is prolly spelling things coreckly.

Man. I do like that poem, though. Good job, bud.

 

[Tzara]

Pound wasn’t really an anti-Semite. Jewish friends of his testified that he showed no personal animus towards them. Pound’s anti-Semitism was entirely of the theoretical kind, the Jewish banker’s conspiracy kind. It was not personal, it was world-historical. Pound believed that the world was being destroyed by credit — and he saw Mussolini’s Fascism as the only way to stop it. Credit was the original sin — forcing people to borrow, to get what they need, and then putting up interest rates in a credit squeeze and seizing their assets. It was the moneychangers in the temple that he wanted to drive out. Pound begged to see Mussolini to ask how he could be of use, and Mussolini sized him up immediately as someone he could manipulate — a naïve poet meddling in affairs that were beyond him. See the film Mephisto for an exact analysis of Pound’s folly (though it is not directly about him).

It's true that Pound was apparently more theoretically anti-Semitic than personally so. His friendship with Zukofsky, for example, argues that it was some kind of conceptual position rather than a personal one. That does not excuse it, of course.

Pound's post-war reputation in the USA, though, suffered more, I think, from his arguably treasonous activities during WWII. The blow-up that ensued from his being awarded the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos while under arrest for treason is what really mucked up his reputation as much as anything.

 

[Eluard]

It's true that Pound was apparently more theoretically anti-Semitic than personally so. His friendship with Zukofsky, for example, argues that it was some kind of conceptual position rather than a personal one. That does not excuse it, of course.

Pound's post-war reputation in the USA, though, suffered more, I think, from his arguably treasonous activities during WWII. The blow-up that ensued from his being awarded the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos while under arrest for treason is what really mucked up his reputation as much as anything.

It's worth adding that even though his anti-Semitism was not personal (and none of his Jewish friends ever turned on him) what he said in those radio broadcasts from Rome was rabid and nutty in a way that beggars belief. But then he had always expressed himself in the strongest possible terms.

Interestingly the far more treasonous broadcasts of Jane Anderson from Berlin ("the Georgia Peach") — totally mad — were not punished. She was set free after the trial was abandoned and she decamped to Franco's Spain.

 

[Eluard]

Oh, El.

I am tempted to proclaim myself your love slave, but that frankly isn't much appealing to me, nor even more so, I suspect, to you.

I am jealous, though. Wowzer poem.

Quibble: "unrenormalised." What the hell does that mean? Like not renormalized? Like, how it is right now? Unnormal, but not cycled back again to normality?

I'd also complain some about the spelling, but refrain 'cuz you am'nt American, and so is prolly spelling things coreckly.

Man. I do like that poem, though. Good job, bud.

Ah almost missed this! Thanks Tz!

'Unrenormalised' is a term from quantum field theory, where the value of some property is infinite until some very dubious subtraction brings the value back to a proper finite value. So that time was infinite, while now is brought back to the finite. But — I know you got it already.

As fer the spellin — we owned it first! AND we want our tea back!

And I'll say no to the love slave thing — a manly slap on the back'll do swell.

 

[Tzara]

And I'll say no the love slave thing — a manly slap on the back'll do swell.

Um, OK. Hang on a sec.

WHACK!

So. Well. I think that was pretty manly, warn't it?

So, uh, what are you drinking, bucko?




Oh get out of here with your quantum theory. I was an effing psychology major. Multiple regression analysis was hard enough for me.

And don't be bringing up any spooky action at a distance. I'm just telling you.

 

[Eluard]

Um, OK. Hang on a sec.

WHACK!

So. Well. I think that was pretty manly, warn't it?

So, uh, what are you drinking, bucko?

Well, it's Easter Sunday, so ecclesiastical tradition has to suggest port and a cee-gar.

Cheers!

 

[UnderYourSpell]

My mind (and it must be admitted part of my body) went into overdrive at "feel my breath inches away" !!!!!

 

[AnonAndAnon]

i've been reading some other poems by Li Po this morning, they're very nice. it's clear that what Pound said about the importance of translations is true.

other translations of the river merchant & the chinese original are at:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/othertranslations.htm

there's a whole pile of translations about drinking with the moon at:

http://clatterymachinery.wordpress....lone-with-the-moon-his-shadow-32-translators/

and these letter poems are really daunting. you've got the writer who comes with an agenda, even if its only to amuse themself, then you've got the speaker, who though they're really a puppet has to be have a life of their own or it doesnt work, then you've got the addressee who's thankfully somewheres off stage, and then there's the subject matter which needs to have dramatic interest and then this all has to come out in 3 or 4 paragraphs. its a good thing letters have become passee.