Ever heard that gobsmacking troubadourist Ezra Pound read his elaborate, funkified sestina, “Sestina: Altafore,” in a voice that is one part American-as-European, swilling-with-the-rolling-R’s accent and cantorian swoons and another part a sort of goofy Hailey, Idaho carnival barker? The nifty Open Culture website is featuring a recording on its blog right now. Check it out. It’ll put a smile on your face for a day.
Pound reads in the late 19th century style where the poet practically sings the poem. Yeats read this way. And: though he was a 20th century man, Dylan Thomas sort of. It was the sonorous Eliot and cozy-voiced Moore and Keystone State nasal-y Williams and especially that wad-of gravel-in-his-cheeks Robert Frost who wrested poetry recordings away from crooning and toward speaking.
Here is the poem “Sestina: Altaforte”
Loquitur: En Bertrans de Born.
Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a
stirrer-up of strife.
Eccovi!
Judge ye!
Have I dug him up again?
The scene in at his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur.
“The Leopard,” the device of Richard (Cúur de Lion).
I
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.
II
In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,
And the lightnings from black heav’n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God’s swords clash.
III
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour’s stour than a year’s peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!
IV
And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might ‘gainst all darkness opposing.
V
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.
VI
Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle’s rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges ‘gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”
VII
And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot black for always the thought “Peace!”
Subtracting the great passages from The Cantos, especially in the Pisan era, I consider this one of Pound’s better poems. Listening to Pound read it out loud (and did I mention the kettle drum beating in the background!?) makes me love the anachronism of this poem, love the historical record of this poem, and love the crazy poet in the attic-ness of this poem all the more.
But it also un-lures me from Pound’s poetry. It’s getting less and less contemporary and more and more lost to time. So isn’t it time to admit that we have skewed fantasies about Pound’s literary merit— even if, and here I should add, if even you can, ignore his violent fascism and anti-semitism. (Pound was a mess all right. How bad were those two political errors in judgment, you ask? A simple google search will land you, right now, today, on Neo-Nazi websites that extol Ezra Pound’s economic, historical, and political ideas as in sync with theirs. I’d give you the link but I don’t want to increase their filthy traffic. In the end, Pound’s understanding of history was tragic intellectually and disastrous for him personally, and that’s not just my view but also of his great protector, Donald Davie, who adored him.)
But, back to the poetry: Pound’s influence on the middle of the 20th century is without dispute. No Pound then no Bunting, no Olson, no Duncan, no H.D. And that group begat Levertov and McHugh and C. D. Wright. But there are influencers and there are poets. Pound is the former. Disagree? Please, I invite you to ake it up in the comments section below.
The most honest thing we could do today is reevaluate Pound’s poems in the spirit of a new century and several developing new poetics. That would be, shall we say, giving Pound the “Pound treatment.” As Pound called for reassessing contemporary poetry’s relationship to the Augustans and the Victorians, we ought to reevaluate our relationship to the Modernists. Not deny their existence as in the Collinsesque, Kooseresque fashion, but repudiate their chilly me-ism and vortexes.
Here’s one place I’m staking out: I’m done with giving lip service to writing as geometric patterning. What Pound called ‘vorticism’ has run its literary course. It’s tinny-eared, avant-traditional and, when handled by most poets, it’s a form of infantile rote transcription. Like a key made from a copy of a key, it never locks or unlocks quite like the original. The poetry of abstraction, the poetry of the disassembled, the poetry of mass, space, and volume has become not just unmemorable but hidebound. There. So long. I’ll remember the good times. We can only be friends now.
But one exception: Charles Wright, a poet I deeply care for, who ten years into his career publishing poems rejected the most abstract strata of Pound’s register in favor of a grounded form of mediation and spiritual questing while all the while turning geometric patterning into cohesive thought.
Should today’s poets be looking to Pound for their influence? Should our professional poetry teachers be using him to teach our emerging poets? Well, look where you must. But even Wordsworth’s poems (which I adore and revere) are less important to working poets today that all the poets influenced by him. And so it goes.
_____
Poetry Wire Sound Check: One of the great free audio resources on the Web is Penn Sound, curated by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis. It’s a fantastic archive. As is the audio archive at the Poetry Foundation, edited by Catherine Halley with archive editor James Sitar. (Know others readers should know about? E-mail me and I’ll post them in the coming weeks.)
11 responses
The vast audio archive of Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room deserves mention, not least because it is the source of this recording!
I don’t think there’s any skewing the literary merit of ‘Cathay,’ ‘Ripostes,’ or ‘Blast.’ Those are really good books, even if you despise the Cantos in full. ‘Cathay’ doesn’t feel dated at all, especially the translations about war and separation, which feel very relevant given today’s conflicts and heavy tours of duty. Do his political views corrupt these earlier works? I’m not convinced. People dismiss Paul DeMan for the same reason, but the man was a brilliant literary critic. Anyway, thanks for writing this–these questions need to be asked of all poets from time to time. But if Pound is overrated, then he’s going to be joining a long list of celebrated writers who are far less accomplished.
What do you really want to do here? Take Pound down a peg? Sound contemporary?
Do we judge a poet’s worth by his or her supposed influence? Or by their own poems? Do we say : “Well, Whitman wasn’t so great after all : look at all the lousy Whitman imitators at the turn of the [20th] century!” Yes, there have been a lot of “abstract pattern” poets in the last 30 yrs : but as a description of Pound’s Cantos, this is laughably insufficient. Pound chopped versification around in order to get the feel & sound of lived experience & many voices into our sense of history. Including the feel & sound of pounds & pounds of useless, decadent “literariness” (incl. his own). There is a lot of this light comedy in Pound (as there is in John Berryman). Self-aggrandizing, self-abasing at the same time. “the ant’s a centaur in his dragon world” – you call that abstract patterning? Be careful you don’t belittle American poetry while you make claims on its future.
Well said, Chuck. Sure, Ez was a crank, a crab and horribly wrong-headed, as he freely admitted to Donald Hall, in his anti-semitism. But Cathay holds up beautifully, as do many of Pound’s non-medieval lyrics (Ione, Dead the Long Year comes to mind). and there are passages in the Cantos more beautiful than any of the later poets mentioned in this piece could EVER hope to match. Nothing against Charles Wright but Ezra Pound wrote In a Station of the Metro. Puh-leeez. .
You miss the essential point of Pound – his ear. Also, his ubiquity. Yes, the poets you mention, and, famously, Eliot. The Yeats whom he annoyingly read like? Pound heard Yeats singing his verses through the chimney at Stone Cottage so he came by it honestly, he seemed to be listening to every chimney — even the plain-spoken William Carlos William, the preferred aesthetic implied behind these comments, was someone Pound met as an undergraduate. Amy Lowell. Gaudier-Breska. Windham Lewis. Joyce. How about Chinese poetry and its influence on 20th century poetry?
I too deplore his antisemitism, which can’t be overlooked (though his economic theory – mainly against USURY! and the alienation of the worker from their work is not so terribly off-the-mark). But listen to The Cantos aloud – his ear placed him at the center of the most influential moments of Modernism and is also the hallmark of his work – the writer of this piece should deal with the sound of Pound before attacking bad (and important) imitators of some stylistic elements.
Any reader whose heart isn’t wrung by perusing “The Pisan Cantos” might well be accused of lacking one.
Still, if pressed, I’d take Pound in his role of *il miglio fabbro* over poet: we wouldn’t have *The Waste Land* that still knocks us to our knees without Pound’s drastic excisions; one of my favorite books is the facsimile edition of the poem, with annotations mostly by Pound, but a few by Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Eliot’s first wife, the originator of the line “what you get married for if you don’t want children?”
Did someone really want to throw out all of the Cantos? I agree that I have a difficult time listening to Pound, find his reading disturbingly anachronistic (though I have friends that love it), but I find much of the poetry, much of the Cantos, and certainly the Pisan Cantos, absolutely marvelous. Yet of course one abhors some of his thinking in various places in the poems, and elsewhere. I’ll also take him, as Diann says, as *l miglio fabbro* and be glad for him.
In thinking of who takes Pound and goes elsewhere, somewhere usually more humane, I’m thankful we have Charles Olson, who breaks open the moment, the postmodern, etc., and is definitely a poet who stays. Yet not without some difficulties. I’ve also been thinking a lot abut Creeley lately, and how amazing it is to read his poems, which are like events, mental and otherwise, happening right as you read them.
“[E]ven Wordsworth’s poems (which I adore and revere) are less important to working poets today than all the poets influenced by him.”
This strikes me as an odd thing to say, the more so if (as I hear it) there’s a tone of “this is as it should be.” Poets have always tended to go elders, not merely immediate elders (Pound to Browning, Roethke to Yeats, Wilbur to Frost) but elders even in the distant past for models: Wordsworth himself to Milton; Keats to Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; Stevens to Keats, at least the Stevens of “Sunday Morning”; Eliot to the Jacobean playwrights; the early R. P. Warren to Donne and Marvell; the Lowell of “Quaker Graveyard” to Milton and of NEAR THE OCEAN to Marvell … and these are just random names that spring immediately to mind. Of course what Mr. Biespiel says may indeed be true, and if so, more’s the pity–which may be why it gets asked a lot nowadays: where are the big careers? Well, one of the bigger careers is that of Charles Wright, who wouldn’t exist without the Pound of “many surfaces, presented with great exactitude” (as Delmore Schwartz puts it as regards THE CANTOS), which give rise to epiphanies of apparent immanence–an irony not lost on Mr. Biespiel. And so it goes, but where does this irony leave us?
Well, it ought not to leave David Biespiel “quitting Ezra Pound”–much less today’s “working poets” quitting Wordsworth.
For 20 years I’ve been trying to get at what makes Ezra Pound so special, and in spite of all my attempts to weasel out what everyone else likes in his poems I only see and hear a cacophony of chattering teeth rumbling from the head of a syphilitic light house operator. I don’t care much for or about his brain dead politics, but I know he warned in his ABC of Reading against confusing dull books with good ones; I wish he’d taken his own advice.
I found him as prosaic and non-poetic as Whitman but although i dont like Walt i have always felt he had something to say. With Pound i simply cannot understand his prestige and fame. To me he is Just Eliot’s miglior favro. His cantos are Just too boring for me, when he “translates” those letters from Italian rennaisance or from the founding fathers i am simply sick, when 1/4 of verses are in other language and do not have in many ocassions nothing to do With the whole canto and disturb the lacking rythm of the poem i Just cannot understand a damn thing. He is extremely pedantic and overrated to me.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.