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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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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.

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Ezra Pound: Canto XV


The Fifteenth Canto continues in that same profane, jeremiadic style now associated with Ginsberg that we saw in the previous Canto.

The fragmented, angry lines are filled with images of the body in decline (“Infinite pus flakes, scabs of a lasting pox“). Again, the target is the financial, best expressed by the line crying “the beast with a hundred legs, USURA” (I take “USURA” to be a reference to “usury”).

This Canto does a better job of bringing the “traditional” Poundian form to than the last one. The language is more erudite and reference laden, and even at its most vulgar, remains more measured and does not sacrifice aesthetics for anger (nor did Ginsberg, by the way – in case my words might be interpreted that way).

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Ezra Pound: Canto XIV


The Fourteenth Canto is something very new compared to the earlier Cantos – an enraged jeremiad against aspects of the modern age.

The particular aspects are dealing with financial dealings. Knowing what we know now, it is obvious that Pound saw the source of the corruption caused by finance and banking as being connected with Europe’s Jewish community (particularly the Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds).

But reading it while trying to hold off preconceptions, you would not be surprised to be told that the author was Communist or Anarcho-Syndicalist.

In addition, as a jeremiad, this Canto seems to lead in a direct line to Ginsberg’s Howl (though I couldn’t say whether Ginsberg specifically read The Cantos, though he was a well read poet).

Who disliked colloquial language,
Stiff-starched, but soiled, collars
                   circumscribing his legs,
The pimply and hairy skin
                   pushing over the collar’s edge,
Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with s–t,

Please note, it was Pound himself (or at least my edition of him) and not me that wrote “s–t” for “shit.”

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Ezra Pound: Canto XIII


Ok. The Thirteenth Canto  consisted entirely of a conversation covering some small section of Chinese history. While mildly interesting, it was not particularly poetic nor particularly innovative.

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Dire News for Book Publishing Industry?


Another day, another article about the death of book publishing due to e-books.

My main concern is how online only stores like Amazon and online only methods of purchasing and reading books like e-books reduce that old-fashioned activity known as browsing.

Especially for someone like myself, whose book buying habits lean towards niche tomes, I depend on various forms of browsing to discover new books. While some of those forms of browsing are online, the publishers themselves depend on dedicated booksellers in brick and mortar locations to keep them, if not in the black, at least marginally out of the red.

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Ezra Pound: Canto XII


The Twelfth Canto moves closer to modern times and certainly well away from Renaissance Italy. The focus is on finance (insurance, securities, speculation), specifically some speculation by a Manhattan firm in Cuba.

In one sense, this is enjoyable to read. Pound compares finance to more honest labor. But knowing what we know about Pound, this enjoyment is outweighed by a deep and nagging discomfort, knowing as we do that Pound’s bias against banking and finance was driven by a terrible and unforgivable commitment to anti-Semitism.