12-31-2025, 10:15 PM
"I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine."
The Pound poem sums up "Modern" life, that is art, passing strangers and acquaintances, translation of other cultures, speed and brevity produced through technology. The impersonal face. Art and poetry as what you see in it. The profound as simple shrug. The urinal in the gallery. The importance of the critic and the curator to make decisions of public taste.
With a sense of security comes a sense of anxiety, and safety with anxiety produces art, and more art creates more room for critics and curators as serious artists of taste in their own right.
Sensibilities and understandings are curated, and poems like this can be looked at from different angles and elaborated on. The brief image is accessible and quick to read, the critic can use it to make points and anchor positions. It's an Ezra Pound autograph in poetry, which is particular to him: making an Eastern Form into a Western Form and describing Modern Life. Blurring of people and days, fleeting wet and solid.
I am a specialist in Modern Poetry. It is the poetry of making sense in the sense of making things up and using those things to make sense itself. I think H. D. said that.
"The World Is Quiet Here."
H. D. didn't say that.
But we must not say so.
For the lit candle wanes no less for being wax than the moon on any or another personal holiday.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine."
The Pound poem sums up "Modern" life, that is art, passing strangers and acquaintances, translation of other cultures, speed and brevity produced through technology. The impersonal face. Art and poetry as what you see in it. The profound as simple shrug. The urinal in the gallery. The importance of the critic and the curator to make decisions of public taste.
With a sense of security comes a sense of anxiety, and safety with anxiety produces art, and more art creates more room for critics and curators as serious artists of taste in their own right.
Sensibilities and understandings are curated, and poems like this can be looked at from different angles and elaborated on. The brief image is accessible and quick to read, the critic can use it to make points and anchor positions. It's an Ezra Pound autograph in poetry, which is particular to him: making an Eastern Form into a Western Form and describing Modern Life. Blurring of people and days, fleeting wet and solid.
I am a specialist in Modern Poetry. It is the poetry of making sense in the sense of making things up and using those things to make sense itself. I think H. D. said that.
"The World Is Quiet Here."
H. D. didn't say that.
But we must not say so.
For the lit candle wanes no less for being wax than the moon on any or another personal holiday.