A while back I posted a video I found while searching for Ezra Pound. It was funny. Better was the title. A version of that title is now the title of this post and the title of the team I was a member of at quiz night at Ben n' Nick's on Tuesday. Every time the announcer said the title about 2.5 per cent. of the bar chuckled quietly. They were the only people who knew who Ezra Pound was. Fifty per cent. of that small group knew that Pound did not write "The Wasteland." About 50% of them knew that Pound edited Eliot's piece of crap. The title is a bit nerdcore and pretentious, but that's perfect because Ezra Pound, the king of pretentiousness, said "swift perception of relations, the hallmark of genius," which, in case you don't get my drift, is very pretentious and nerdcore.
We won, and now the title of this post is on a pretty board in the bar. Very funny to me to have that name on a board in a bar. Irony, which should always be met with scorn, is pretty funny when it happens by accident.
The New Yorker coincidentally published an article this week about Ezra Pound by Luis Menand. It didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about Pound, but I enjoyed the article very much because it uses clear prose and subtle tricks. I think it's a great article. It also has a great picture. I think it is a the best picture I have ever seen of a poet. I will pay any amount of money within reason to any photographer who will take a picture of me like this. I want a picture of me to look precisely like this. Seriously. Email me. It's hard to see how it vignettes with a blur, but I can do all that with photoshop I guess. But it looks like a very long exposure with a pinhole. It would be incredible to do it all with old tech.
Does anyone else have trouble believing that a hardcore antisemitic fascist wrote this?
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
There are some other things by Ezra Pound worth reading, but any time people talk about his genius, on either side of the debate of whether or not he was one, this poem. . . this poem.
I wonder if Dusty Roads Veteto knows who Ezra Pound is.
2 comments:
yeah, it's weird that he was (i think) equally a beautiful genius and fucking monster.
it's hard to believe.
it's even harder to believe that that fucker was from Idaho.
what cool thing had EVER come out of Idaho other than potatoes and Built To Spill?
It's funny because many people in Idaho seem to be fascists or white people who don't like people who are not white. Big America scares me.
Many geniuses are monsters, I guess.
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