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On the Power of Ideas


But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

– John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

I rather hope this is true. Though Keynes notes the possibility of truly insidious ideas taking root (just look at the misguided, deeply discompassionate, and un-Christian values of the current leaders of the Republican Party), I do believe that ideas have value and can create positive change if disseminated.

Who knows? Maybe even Shelley will be proved true and poets will become the world’s unacknowledged legislators alongside Keynes’ economists and political philosophers.

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Ezra Pound: Canto XVIII


The Eighteenth Canto opens with Marco Polo describing the use of paper money and letters or credit in Kublai Khan’s empire, which reminds me of that wonderful book by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

The rest is dedicated to describing incidences of manufacturing – plus a funny little anecdote about Napoleon.

Though lacking in lines that are traditionally poetic, I very much enjoyed reading this Canto though I couldn’t tell you why or what it is that appealed to me.

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‘The Book Is Dead’? Let That Myth Rest in Peace – The Atlantic


I just wanted to link to this hopeful sounding article from The Atlantic.

The piece looks at the same information reported here, but sees not just a silver lining, but an unbroken tradition of humans reading. For cuneiform to e-readers, as it were.

As the author (Peter Osnos) states: “My view is that books are being read, but the means of delivery are changing.”

I pray he speaks the truth.

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Ezra Pound: Canto XVII


The Seventeenth Canto is a beautiful poem. It opens with the wonderfully evocative line, “So that the vines burst from my fingers.” For the first time thus far, Pound has almost written a pastoral poem (not strictly speaking, “pastoral” as being about shepherds, but more like Wordsworth’s The Excursion or Virgil’s Eclogues). He even manages to write about man-made structures in the loving terms usually reserved for nature.

”                    There, in the forest of marble,
”                    the stone trees — out of water —
”                    the arbours of stone —
”                    marble leaf, over leaf,
”                    silver, steel over steel,
”                    silver beaks rising and crossing,
”                    prow set against prow,
”                    stone, ply over ply,
”                    the gilt beams flare of an evening”

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Indie Booksellers’ Thirteen Favorite Books Includes Two Books of Poetry


The thirteen finalists of the Indie Booksellers’ Choice Awards happily include two volumes of poetry.

The first is a book, I have to confess, I had never heard of – David K. Wheeler’s Contingency Plans. But, despite being ignorant of it, I am excited by it, not in the least  because it’s a first book of poetry and it’s good to see how independent booksellers are pushing and supporting collections by new poets.

The second is that wonderfully erudite and experimental assemblage, Anne Carson’s Nox. If you read or care about contemporary poetry and don’t know who Anne Carson, I hardly know what to say. Look her up. And read her. For heaven’s sake, read her. She’s fantastic.

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Kathy Castor Draws a (Potentially) Top Drawer Opponent


Soon to be termed Republican State Senator Mike Bennett (R-Bradenton) says he will file to run against Congresswoman Kathy Castor as soon as tomorrow.

Bennett thinks that the newly drawn 11th Congressional District will include his home in Manatee County. I am somewhat doubtful of this – partly because I actually believe that voter approved redistricting reform will survive the GOP’s self-interested attempts to overturn and otherwise ignore the will of the people of Florida. My suspicion is that district will wind being entirely in Hillsborough County (it currently contains parts of Pinellas and Manatee). Bennett is betting that new 11th will contain less Hillsborough (and probably no Pinellas – on that we agree) and more Manatee. If the Fair Districts Amendment overwhelmingly passed by the voters of Florida is respected, I would read it as being implicitly supporting NOT having district cross county lines when not absolutely necessary. In other words, that the 11th (or some equivalent to it – the numbers may change) would be a purely Hillsborough district. That said I am happy to hear differing opinions.

Regardless, Bennett intends to run no matter what and says he and his wife will move if the new district doesn’t contain his current residence, though technically he doesn’t need to live in a particular congressional district in order to run for that seat.

Bennett could be a top tier recruit for the GOP, if the district is reasonably competitive after redistricting (right now, it really isn’t).

He’s the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, which doesn’t actually mean that much (the Senate Majority Leader is real power in the upper chamber), but you easily see a scenario where he overcomes the first hurdle to becoming a significant challenger – fundraising.

Like Mike Haridopolos, he could use his position in the state legislature to shake down corporations and lobbyists to make the maximum legal donation to his campaign. While that influence will basically die this time next year, if he stockpiles enough cash early on, the money will keep flowing (fundraising success begets more fundraising success – it’s the nature of how money flows).

He will also face a problem that a lot of other legislators have faced, and that is the fact that surprisingly few people actually know who they are. This is less of stumbling block in a Congressional race than in a statewide race (that’s why Dan Webster was able to win a Congressional seat, but couldn’t even make his way out of the primary for the U.S. Senate), but there is a good chance that most of his current legislative district (along with the majority of voters who might actually know who he is) will remain in what is currently the 13th District, represented by Republican Congressman Vern Buchanan.

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Ezra Pound: Canto XVI


The Sixteenth Canto has some shifts in tone and meaning within it. The section opens up with a continuation of the earlier focus on the degradation and infection of the body:

And I bathed myself with acid to free myself
                  of the hell ticks,
Scales, fallen louse eggs.

It then seems to return to a focus on Renaissance Italy (Sigismundo reappears), but then it becomes clear that the real subject has become the First World War. He name drops Wyndham Lewis and Earnest Hemingway and Pound’s friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier who died in the war.

The put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench
               dug though corpses
With a lot of kids sixteen,
Howling and crying for their mamas,

There are long stretches in French, including the tragic phrase: “Liste officielle des morts 5,000,000”.


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How Systematically Reading Pound’s Cantos Has Changed My Opinions


Words, lines, fragments, stanzas of surpassing beauty.

Hints of his anti-Semitism.

His introduction of Asian (mainly Chinese) history and literature into Western writing (Asian visual arts had been influencing artists like Gustav Klimt for years before Pound began translating Chinese poetry).

Long stretches of boring recreations of history (I don’t say that history is boring; it’s not, besides which, it was my major in college; but often Pound’s imaginings of history are quite boring).

But what does it all mean? Do I still think Pound is a genius? Do I still think he’s one of the most important poets of the twenty-first century?

As to the first question, what it all means, I simply don’t know. The answer to the other questions is still yes, absolutely yes.

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W.S. Merwin at the Library of Congress


As his last official act as our nation’s Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin read at the Library of Congress (inside the Thomas Jefferson building – the beautiful one, not its sterile and practical siblings).

Though I still have doubts about his poetry and his appointment as Laureate, I enjoyed his opening remarks greatly. He remains dedicated, in both his life and work, to the style of eco-poetics developed early in his career. The Lice is still the best collection of eco-poetry out there. Unfortunately, that was published in 1969 and it feels like he’s been imitating himself ever since (except for his follow up to The Lice, called Carrier of Ladders, which is a great work of political, anti-war poetry).

In person, Merwin is a small man with a thick white comb over and voice that was both clear and quavering. His opening remarks were pleasantly political and he attributed to Thomas Jefferson a wonderful quote, “The only excuse for government is the good of governed,” which came as a rebuttal to the knee jerk small government rhetoric which is so uncritically spouted by so many these days.

The poetry he read was good, but as I suggested before, three quarters of the poems he read sounded too much like each other. I also felt an urge to grab him by the collar and shout, “Yes, we get it, you live in a tropical paradise in Hawaii and your life is so super awesome compared to ours.”

I brought a copy of Flower & Hand to be signed. Merwin generously spoke to everyone in line. Unfortunately, the line was incredibly long and it took me more than ninety minutes to reach him (I was one of the first folks to line up) because he spent so much time with everyone who walked up. While very considerate in many ways, not so muc.h in other ways

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The Primacy of the Author vs the Recipient


I was reading Alan Kirby’s article The Death of Postmodernism in that most accessible (to laypersons like myself) of philosophical journals, Philosophy Now.

The title is a misnomer – no doubt picked for a certain spectacle and shock value, rather than a true reflection of the content – as the article is more an effort to describe what has following/is following/will follow post-modernism than a post-mortem on the post-modern.

The distinction he makes strikes me. Even in post-modernism, when a book was printed, an artwork created, it existed irrespective of any consumer of that book or that artwork. But Kirby posits that the more purely electronic and ephemeral products of post-post-modernism only exist in the reception by a viewer. They have no existence beyond that (does an email, hanging in cyberspace, exist if the recipient never opens it?). As for ephemerality, versus the relative solidity of a printed book, well, let me just suggest you try to find your Facebook status updates from four years ago.