09-05-2023, 07:40 PM (This post was last modified: 09-05-2023, 07:48 PM by TranquillityBase.)
(09-04-2023, 05:48 AM)rowens Wrote: Actually, there is no divide.
I'd have to disagree. I experienced it in real time, reading Stevens, remembering Pound. I no longer see it as a "my team vs. your team" because all poets are on the same team, us against an indifferent world.
I can enjoy Pound, I can enjoy Stevens with the same brain. Stevens doesn't come naturally to me, like Pound does, but I'm getting there.
I now see Hart Crane more clearly (at least I think I do, will have to read him again and find out) thanks to Stevens.
I also find it funny that Hugh Kenner used Edward Lear to insult Stevens' poetry. Lear is on our team too. In fact, one of the best of us.
But all fun must come to an end. Sun comes up, burns away cool, sweet darkness, leaves me trapped in this damned forever summer. Time to open a book and escape the Real.
Right above James Merrill, on my chart, is Pope and Auden. And I add Byron there, too.
There has always been a late August glow into September about James Merrill, for me. And reading him has always entered me back into early '90s, my grandma's spooky house, and her relatives for family get-togethers on the porch and in picnics in the front yard.
There's a sharp yellow light about it. Slightly pale orange.
So many feelings/memories that reading James Merrill evokes.
Come to find out, James Merrill's middle name is Ingram. And the family on my mom's side, the people from those memories, were all Ingrams.
I was offered a job at Harvard in 2004. Some cheap job. Not quite janitorial. They were doing me a favor while I was locked up in McClean's. Not McDonald's. Mclean. I wasn't having it.
I've liked a lot of stuff that comes out of Yale. Seems to be more available online.
We can't forget one famous alumni from Yale . . . Rory Gilmore.
And the last season, one of Rory's two friends, the girl who plays Jessica Jones in Marvel Comics stuff now, with her long legs and babydoll dresses.
No wonder, huh?
I always refer to college compounds and university campuses as the Land of the Round Rump Beasts.
I've started reading Daniel Swift's The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound. I've only just gotten past the introduction, but I can see already that it's going to be an eye-opener for me. I don't think that I'll reach the conclusions that the author proposes, such as (not a new proposition) that The Cantos are, in the end, a failure, and his life a betrayal of not just his home country, but of his poetic project. But it's making me see Pound in a whole new and not very comfortable way.
If you ever feel like a weak, loser, coward, you can make yourself feel better by reading the biographies of John Berryman and Charles Baudelaire.
Morality is no easier than being the heavyweight boxing champion, no more essential or the natural state, no matter what the good-natured sociologists and egg-breaking religionists say.
The Satanic and the Mad and the Deviant are the best guides to a world that's a hidden chaos. The creepers, trolls and cringe are for the amateur masses. The bad, the mad, the repellent and the embarrassing are the lengths between the christmas lights, the places that aren't dream, sleep, wake or death. And you'd better buy their books and admire their skill, and be glad it wasn't directed beyond their art, though it most surely is.
09-09-2023, 08:39 PM (This post was last modified: 09-10-2023, 05:50 AM by TranquillityBase.)
Update on The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound.
From what I've read so far (about half the book, up to midway in his time in the asylum), Pound did not so much take refuge behind an insanity defense as just continue to be himself. Psychiatrists had no idea how to judge him. They settled on describing him as paranoid. He spent the first period in captivity translating Confucian Odes, then Greek tragedy. As he began to publish new works while in captivity, there were those who questioned why a man who could publish was considered too insane to be tried for treason.
In the beginning, he was just one of many (mostly former soldiers) driven mad by the war. Later, military patients were transferred out to Walter Reed. Once he was transferred out of the ward for the criminally (and violent) insane, he spent his days and nights, as far as they bothered with observing him, singing to himself and typing. No one much bothered with what exactly he was typing. Treatment (for most patients) consisted of lots of activity (gardening, making objects in workrooms), quiet and protection from the outside world. Pound didn't participate, but he was happy at his typewriter, so they left him alone.
The book focuses on particular visitors. Charles Olson is discussed first. Olson decided he was faking, turned against him, though not in a public way. At the same time, Laughlin at New Directions was reissuing many of his early works, avoiding entirely his incendiary prose work. Then comes William Carlos Williams, Eliot, then comes Robert Lowell. I did not realize Lowell (someone I'm unfamiliar with) was pretty crazy himself. Most of these visitors (the ones who wrote about the visits, usually much later) are quiet about exactly what their conversations consisted of.
I am now at the point where he resumes working on the Cantos (those that came after the Pisan Cantos, which were published to acclaim after he'd been at St. Elizabeths for three or so years).
It’s a remarkable and balanced study of Pound’s life and work post-WWII. I think, here on the forum, I’m a minority of one in my enthusiasm for Pound, but that’s OK, that’s what a forum is for.
It’s also led me to a determination to read Robert Lowell and John Berryman, both reluctant acolytes of Pound.
The book enormously informed and transformed my view of Pound. So I want to thank Rivernotch for bringing it to my attention.
Final verdict: there’s no doubt Pound was a dedicated, never reformed believer in fascism. He was released finally because he was pronounced incurably insane, the views on how to treat the insane had changed, and he was by then a broken man and a danger to no one. As to the treason he committed, it’s hard for me, a non-patriot, to get too worked up about it, especially now, after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, just to name a few of our country’s misguided crusades.
At any rate, that verdict of insanity, that willingness to support a fascist worldview, will forever hang over The Cantos.
The title of this poem proves that Elizabeth Bishop is a monomaniac. Ezra Pound is like Cyclops in the X-Men, he's the leader and he plays an important role, but he's the least interesting of the group. However, a movie about his mid to late life starring Robert Downey Jr. would be a gem.
Visits to St. Elizabeths
Elizabeth Bishop
This is the house of Bedlam.
This is the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the time
of the tragic man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a wristwatch
telling the time
of the talkative man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the honored man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the roadstead all of board
reached by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the old, brave man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
These are the years and the walls of the ward,
the winds and clouds of the sea of board
sailed by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the cranky man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
beyond the sailor
winding his watch
that tells the time
of the cruel man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a world of books gone flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
of the batty sailor
that winds his watch
that tells the time
of the busy man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is there, is flat,
for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
waltzing the length of a weaving board
by the silent sailor
that hears his watch
that ticks the time
of the tedious man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to feel if the world is there and flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances joyfully down the ward
into the parting seas of board
past the staring sailor
that shakes his watch
that tells the time
of the poet, the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the soldier home from the war.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is round or flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances carefully down the ward,
walking the plank of a coffin board
with the crazy sailor
that shows his watch
that tells the time
of the wretched man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
(09-13-2023, 01:57 AM)rowens Wrote: The title of this poem proves that Elizabeth Bishop is a monomaniac. Ezra Pound is like Cyclops in the X-Men, he's the leader and he plays an important role, but he's the least interesting of the group. However, a movie about his mid to late life starring Robert Downey Jr. would be a gem.
Visits to St. Elizabeths
Elizabeth Bishop
Thanks for sending this. The author mentions it more than once. Now I don’t need to hunt it down.
The first time Bertrand Russell came on screen in Tom & Viv, I thought it was Robert Downey Jr. playing Ezra Pound.
You could write a poem, with the refrain: If Ezra Pound had no Ideology. The poem could roll on, building in intensity as it goes. And the stanzas before each refrain could get gradually longer and have less to do with the subject matter previous. That would be something with Modern sensibilities playing by Modern rules.
Anne Sexton is frowned upon.
Robert L. has family in the BiZ.
Pound is dry. Explain to me why is not dry.
Anne Sexton was a cute girl in the pod that spawned Plath out of Bert Lowell.
This is society. They were cute girls. Hughes, not Howard, that other guy, he laid his pipe. S. Plath became the feminist god.
Still god, mindyou. Not a goddess. The Daddy-Killer.
Robert Lowell was a freckle of sisters
among a face of ghylserine.
John Berryman picked up the still attached cerebral scalp.
This is mental illness going straight into verse, post-freud.
And at McClean, artistic therapy was endorsed, with Robert Lowell taking up professor there.
Eliot and Pound were Tradition. Are.
The new thing was the Confessionalists. Maybe Eliot and Pound were the star-setters, in their minds.
You had full-on with Ginsberg and people of that ilk.
The Northern intellectuals taking on the poetic dreams of their foreskins.
And the vulgar South. James Dickey and Red Warren, and others, the Poe of Place.
All registered gangsters of the same tantalizing legality.
Now, you mix up these words of these poets named here, and you have a fiesta.
(09-15-2023, 09:46 AM)rowens Wrote: Pound is dry. Explain to me why is not dry.
Pound is a godsend for scholars, so if that’s what you mean by dry, Yes, he’s dry.
But I think we need scholars, since we no longer have alchemists. And being a bastard scholar myself, I love having to look stuff up, so my next project will be Charles Olson.
A u was placed in the pond of Ezra Pound, a You, spelled out, over a lifetime, to exhaust
a u into a pond, a you that made and makes Ezra, an Ezra Pound.
So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
go over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost themselves oceanward
Over the bleached and broken fields
I moved my feet and turning from the wind
that ripped sheets of sand
from the beach and threw them
like seamists across the dunes
swayed as if the wind were taking me away
and said
I am Ezra
As a word too much repeated
falls out of being
so I Ezra went out into the night
like a drift of sand
and splashed among the windy oats
that clutch the dunes
of unremembered seas
A or an Are R
Amens
Ammon
An or Are.
Anne Sexton.
I like her.
She gets a bad rap.
You have to realize, before you can use language, before you can use allusions, that you are in the same boat as the and all that, artfully or just people, around you are,
and look at the water.
The poets, they see Ezra Pound as dry. His thing, in poetry, is that he is dry.
You can't, though you can, wake up in the morning and be dry.
Oh Freud!
The moisture he was kneading. Needing.
The moisture was in Robert Lowell's head.
In Elizabeth Bishop's heart. Dry as she is.
The Poets are Gods, in America. Like the Gods were bullies in Ancient Greece.
Sod off, Ezra Pound.
Bukowski needs a hangover. Dream Song 16:
John Berryman
Henry's pelt was put on sundry walls
where it did much resemble Henry and
them persons was delighted.
Especially his long & glowing tail
by all them was admired, and visitors.
They whistled: This is it!
Golden, whilst your frozen daiquiris
whir at midnight, gleams on you his fur
& silky & black.
Mission accomplished, pal.
My molten yellow & moonless bag,
drained, hangs at rest.
Collect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay,
in Sealdah Station some possessionless
children survive to die.
The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris
withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room
and one told the other a lie.
An alert on the bottom of the site said that you, TB, are 69.
That makes you an Honorary Cancer in the Stars for the Year.
A Cancer like me and CRNLSM and Hespolian.
You shouldn't have paraphrased with the word funny.
