Friday, June 25, 2004
First Post
My first post, I of course don't know who might read such a thing (how would any find it?), but one for one--why not Pound? He's a popular guy in these parts. Besides, his "In a Station at the Metro," "The River-Merchant's Wife" and the one about the sardines which ends "at that I was slightly abashed" were, along with Auden's "Law Like Love" (though the Auden more than the Pounds) the poems which first made me want poems, in seventh grade english class. Of course, five minutes into Mike S--'s class presentation on EP he read some examples of his radio broadcasts and I thought that that meant his poems were lies. But I still liked the Auden. (They are an interesting pair, aren't they, each self-exiled in the other's land?)
How's that for an "American" experience of poetry? There is the full-press Americanness of Pound in his crackpot ear for people and silver ear for words. I still don't like much of him, I think it has something to do not only with his fascism, antisemitism, willingness to see people as ideas, but also with Mike S--, who himself seemed a little unsavory. But that wildness, the American unfixedness-in-self which allowed Pound his peculiar profundities, is ^so^ anti-Auden, and a turn to the Old World ahiding itself in the New World from, really, itself in a way, on my part, is American too. I don't think it, as a reflex, has helped my poetry much, and I start this blog starting a serious rethink of not my poetic but my implementation of it as such. That is, to quote from the "Interzone" of last night, "I reserve the right to replace the legs and arms, legs and arms. The legs and arms, not lunacy--that is, method, not motivation."
Other titles I was thinking of for this site, are "Whisper'd Me," "Vales of Har," "Like Love," and "Standing before some Stalagtites of Time."
How's that for an "American" experience of poetry? There is the full-press Americanness of Pound in his crackpot ear for people and silver ear for words. I still don't like much of him, I think it has something to do not only with his fascism, antisemitism, willingness to see people as ideas, but also with Mike S--, who himself seemed a little unsavory. But that wildness, the American unfixedness-in-self which allowed Pound his peculiar profundities, is ^so^ anti-Auden, and a turn to the Old World ahiding itself in the New World from, really, itself in a way, on my part, is American too. I don't think it, as a reflex, has helped my poetry much, and I start this blog starting a serious rethink of not my poetic but my implementation of it as such. That is, to quote from the "Interzone" of last night, "I reserve the right to replace the legs and arms, legs and arms. The legs and arms, not lunacy--that is, method, not motivation."
Other titles I was thinking of for this site, are "Whisper'd Me," "Vales of Har," "Like Love," and "Standing before some Stalagtites of Time."
