I Never Really Liked Ezra Pound
A lot of people I know like Ezra Pound. I never really liked Ezra Pound.
posted by Ginger Pennebaker @ 11:38 PM
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21 Comments:
I never really liked Ezra Pound either.
Oh my, such insightful, snarky commentary! C'mon Ginger, you can do better than that!!!
This site's really lost it's edge.
You're up at 2:00 am surfing blogs. Maybe you're the one using your edge. Hmmm....
i never really liked onions. a lot of people i know like onions. i never really like onions.
I never really liked a lot of people that have a name in poetry. Let's face it, the guy is not much besides a name. He's sort of the rasputin of american poetry, a lot of missionary wackiness but ultimately producing nothing standoutish from a literary point of view. It seems like he stuck with poetry because all other fields would have kicked him out upon quantifying his meagre contribution. But in our dear poetry universe there is a looooot of room for ambitious, miscellaneous lightweights.
Whoa. That was *snarky*. OUCH! Take that, Ezra!
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Not a bad image...can anyone here do better???
Well, I never really liked Jews.
Supersoggy:
I think you meant "losing your edge" -- must be all that blog surfing at 2 am.
even my cat creates -
golden eyes filled with apprehension
as the contractions soar up my arms,
and the first kitten emerges.
But the beauty is not the madness, though my errors and wrecks lie about me . . . and I am not a demi-god, I cannot make it cohere . . . who will carry the great ball of crystal? . . . can you enter the great acorn of light? . . . .
"can you enter the great acorn of light? . . . ."
fucking brilliant. a plague on all your critics, living, dead, or yet to be born, master
That's "acorn" as in "kernel," "germ," a point of origin -- and actually, taken in the context of Pound's later "Drafts and Fragments" from which the above is excerpted, it IS a fucking brilliant image.
Eliot had Ezra as his Editor for the Wasteland, now if only Ezra had a good editor for his Cantos...
You are funny Adam as usual. EP would have chewed you up and spit you into the dust without a moment's thought. It's a different plane altogether. Admit you do not have the noggin for it. Don't cry about it, just accept it bro. You don't have the attention span or the ability. The Cantos just aren't for you.
But keep that fist in the air! I love you best like that.
Adam Hardin is a bit of an overzealous twit (twat?), but I have to agree with him on this one.
Ezra Pound as an historian of poetry, culture critic and champion of modernism? Absolutely.
Ezra Pound as a "great," or even a "really good" poet? I don't buy it.
Nevertheless, Pound had a cool goatee beard and I hear that he once ate a marigold flower at a dinner party.
The Real Anonymous
If you are reading this and you are 21, remember kids:
Poetry Ain't Cool.
Poetry is what happens when you have a really bad case of ADD coupled with Dyslexia, and a Narcissistic disorder.
Poetry is what happens when your Academic Adviser says that a major in Communications may be too hard, and your face ain't pretty enough for broadcast journalism.
Poetry is what happens when Law School
is out of the question and Medical School never was a question.
Poetry is what happens when dumbasses believe in themselves.
On Ezra:
At least he was educated. You can't say that about M.F.A. graduates.
How About Those Bad News Bears
by
a M.F.A. Poetry Student
Walter Mathau/plays a coach/black hair before/he played Einstein/Tatum O'Neal was the girl/pitcher/it was/the ERA decade/Tatum was a drug addict/as a child/marries John McEnroe/who throws rackets/Billy Bob Thorton/reprises the role of the coach/the movie/come out/ July of 2005.
Pound was certainly educated, but he could also be a bit of a poseuer. I could be wrong, but I doubt he could do the following with any level of mastery:
1.) Sight read Ancient Greek.... OK, maybe some Homer.
2.) Play patterned music on a handmade instrument.
3.) Compose a letter in Chinese.
4.) Write a novel or even a short story.
On the other hand, he was a fast and loose creative scholar, and that makes him something that's quite rare and interesting. He was the Terence Mckenna of his day.
It should always be noted that Ezra Pound in his late career lacked an ethical backbone...in fact, he was downright evil. Well, at least you could say he was an asshole.
To close: The majority of "Poets" these days are just idealistic losers from good families. Most prose writing (fiction and non-fiction), movies and music are infinitely more interesting than what passes for "poetry." In other words, "The Bad News Bears" has more redeeming qualities to it than most of the poetry that will be written in the year 2005.
Get a job!
Sincerely,
The Real Anonymous
Love or Hate Ezra. The fact is he came closest to his life's ambition: To know more about poetry and poetics than anyone else. I think it will take 50 years to recognize his contemporary counterpart. The only thing is, Pound was so good at what he did, everyone knew he knew more than them when he was still alive. Hell, they knew it in 1948. Too many people make the mistake of not keeping the poet and the economist seperate from each other.
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