A local bookstore was going out of business and what with prices being slashed on everything, I took the opportunity to pick up a copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (also Anne Carson’s Nox).

I mentioned Pound during my review of cummings – though I failed to write how deeply (yet also superficially) Pound influenced me and my writing.

Deeply in that reading Pound for the first time as a teenager was like a bag of bricks falling from the clear blue sky and cracking me on head – staggering me and forcing me to look up and ask the question, “Where the hell did that come from?”

And where did it come from? Well, as Hamlet said, “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” My literary world was mostly bounded by Poe and by a large collection of pulpy science fiction and fantasy writers (not dismiss those – I am currently going through a big of personal archaeology as I actively work to rediscover those writers). Pound opened my eyes and showed me the way to this stunning, erudite place – also known as High Modernism – that is still one of my favorite temples.

But my appreciation was also superficial. It was actually his earlier, Imagist poems that had so struck me. But his magisterial work – The Cantos – was still mostly unknown to me. In truth, only now, for the first time, am I systematically reading through this massive poem. Before, I was, as much as anything, struck by the idea of Ezra Pound.

And certainly, my idea of Pound glosses over his the reactionary, right-wing political sentiments that caused him to side with the Fascists in World War II. In that vein, let me admit openly, I do not know what one should do about his politics – his odious, anti-Semitic remarks – anymore than I know how exactly to read Martin Heidegger.

Right now, I am only some 20 pages into the poem. There’s a lot more to go. All I can say, besides commenting on how delicious the language sounds and feels, is that Tiresias (the blind, prophet who lived both as a man and – for seven years – as a woman), who featured so prominently in the heavily edited by Pound final draft of The Wasteland) does not appear in nearly enough contemporary poetry (paging Anne Carson!).