This one’s for the students: beat box

Hip hop, Write Like This

Move writing to the front burner:
Job apps, occupational tests, prefixes, suffixes, roots—
Write for Life!

Sentence complete, not the back burner, follow instructions.
Rise up—grammar trees in elementary?
Models in our schools;
kids with a hierarchy of needs.

Teach ye young artist
Write about your craft
Explain, expand your imagination.

Write for standards, 9–12
What’s the problem?

Premise 1, the real-world writer—
Understand your hard work,
your frustration,
your intrinsic reward.

The discourse,
why you write,
and POTUS
interrupt us.
Integrity
libel
slander
inflammability
the horrible example
the Donald, tweeting prez
gee whiz.

Learn to type, learn to write,
ten fingers, not two:
five times the value!

Like a list of standards—
Purpose and explain
express and reflect
inform and explain
evaluate and judge
inquire and explore
analyze and interpret
take a stand, propose a solution

Some good examples
to sample, with purpose
the source.

Premise 2, extensive teacher, real-world models—
Be a teacher! Model. Lead.
Investigative your experiences.
Encourage.

Writer letters
to CEOs,
human resource managers,
accountants,
engineers
each other..
Mom!

Model mentor texts
Examine the real world.
examples to sample
Low hanging fruit
and emulate.
You don’t have to be a novelist—
But How do they write?

Express and Reflect
sentence complete
save the free verse
symmetry
your poetry
for your journal, your diary
personal, reflective, shape yourself, are you a writer?

Express, reflect, shape—
Memoir Tweets? Get real..
Haiku and call it a day, eh?
Personal, reflective, shape yourself, are you a writer?

An alphabetized existence,
more interesting, compelling, and captivating
than a yawning timeline lesson.

Thirty-two favorite mistakes and the
Bucket List,
that neighborhood spot,
sentence starters,
the road not taken,
forgive my guilt,
reverse poems,
what my childhood tasted like,
childhood games,
a hard moment,
a watermark event,
your personality type,
a family photo,
Ask Questions!,
a treasured object!

What are your dreams?

Top 10 lists,
a so what paper,
birth order essay,
memory minutes.
Why should I care?
Reflect every day!

Burst the entertainment bubble with pen, paper, drafts—
skip the social media
typing is meditation—
inform and explain.

Write letters—all sorts:
advocacy, technical, marketing,
satire and sarcasm.

Your experience extends
beyond creating
a peanut butter sandwich.

My favorite words,
I was a witness,
don’t judge a book,
judge a book,
Facebook,
black sheep,
square peg and round hole,
unwritten rules—
stoke creativity

Think and share, meet the standards—
How does it work?
A leads to B

What is all this?
Free writing, AP course, composition?
In public high schools?
Still?
Finish your reading, prepare for creativity,
evaluate and judge,
make comparisons,
navigate consumer culture,
Write a review!

The real world of lit and back again.

Find the value
in narrative or essay;
read from your peers,
make big decisions.

Print ads,
flat screen commercials
propaganda techniques,
YouTube study,
Web site evaluation.

Teachers, set it up and break it down.

Ballot box.

 

 

Write Like This: Teaching Real World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Text

Kelly Gallagher.  Steinhouse Publisher, 2011

 

 

“Plan like hell, and then wing it”. Thomas Newkirk

1. “A strong writing teacher creates the itch to write.  It’s deliberate.”

 

Conversations with Leaders: Principles of Effective Writing Instruction.   Zumbrum, Krause (2012)

Bright whites, cherry color

Whine stains on my Jockey undershirt
straight out of the drier.
Now a bright red like subdued blood,
it’s a world of hurt.

If you were actual wine
and not soup spittle,
pasta splatter,
or a splash of pomegranate

you would be blue
like the sea
or fresh mildew
waiting

and calling for

a soak in the bleach
and then you disappear.

troubles de la croissance

Sublime like Pillsbury

Flakey like a croissant:
convenient, fresh, and even a little chewy,
there is no synonym for you.

Exquisite, not quite pristine,
wholesome, simple and almost sublime,
an ebb and flow of my youthful dream.

You disappear and slow your age
in life’s deep freeze
or surprise me,
smiling behind supermarket glass
like Saturday’s frozen custard
between sorrow and anger and next to despair.

At the bistro or the deli
smothered in marmalade, horseradish, beef
or stuffed with a nutty salad of chicken, tuna, Waldorf;
too haughty for some bland yellow mustard.

I’ll never know until your return
on the breeze of a summer day.
Oh, flakey croissant. I can’t take you seriously.

Sometimes we disappoint.

Every day heavy

Heavy heart

Eat my heart—just take it—
for it beets for you
in syncopation
with modern melody.
It wants you and
follows you.

Steal my heart,
win it,
just take it,
I don’t want it
because it finds pain
and reminds me
like the blood stain
of where I have been
and what I have seen,
felt, and shattered.

Oh, postmodern love…

Sold on lies? Told you those three words in confidence, eternally, with feeling. I don’t need a response, but your actions indicate your beautiful inner soul. “I am not a good person to be with, I promise.” “What is it, what can’t you tell me?
Is there another boyfriend?
Are you psychotic?
Are you on drugs?
Do you have a disease?”

Same date of birth, different years.

Are you bipolar? Is bulimia a lifelong disease?
Would you prefer to be a figment of my active imagination?
I’ll always be here for you.

[ The applause of leaves during a steady downpour. ]

Do you not want to be loved, thought about, dreamed of?
I want to show you love.
Are you self-centered? Am I? Is there anything wrong with that?

Do you either want to be treated like dirt or to treat someone like dirt?

Please come with me.

Wandering Epic

The windows of my time and yours—
foggy and opaque, open and shut,
lost and gained, drafted, sustained.
Dried out mildew, over concentration at the frame.
Subdued… I hear and see
but can’t fully understand
you through the garden veil that remains.

Pound bits

Charles A. Watson / ENG 206 / April 30, 2015

Ezra Pound   A poet, translator, critic, essayist, and author—Pioneer from the West

• An editor by trade, an artist by nature, and a poet by no accident
• Although never contemporary in America, his contribution to this eternal moment in the history of American poetry represents a critical breakthrough in the literary struggle of the early Twentieth Century.
• Philadelphia, London, Paris, prisoner-of-war camp, trial for treason, 12-years in Washington D.C.insane asylum

Biography

• Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
  Born 1885 in Hailey, Idaho
• Deceased: Venice in 1972 at age 87
• Father: Homer Loomis, Register of the Government Land in Montana, Assayer at the Philadelphia Mint
• Mother: Isabel Weston Pound
• Grandson of politician Thadeus Coleman Pound, a Congressman from Wisconsin who had made and lost a fortune in the lumber business
• Wife: Dorothy Shakespear
• Ezra moved with his mother to Philadelphia for better opportunity when he was eighteen months.
• Revered more for what he said and published than for what he created in verse.
• Breaking writers from conventional Victorian and Romantic era literature.

Academe

• Studied literature at the University of Pennsylvania with poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle
• Bullied for eccentricities, finished his Arts degree at Hamilton College
• taught briefly at Wabash College in conservative Indiana. Left in controversy.

Working life before the World Wars

• Collaboration with friends and colleagues included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, and William Butler Yeats.
• Creative partnership with W.B. Yeats in 1908 London.
• 1912 Leader of a group of poets responsible for Imagism, a new school of literary thought that sought to pull poetry away from Victorian influence.
• Three rules for Imagism:
  • Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective
  • To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
  • To compose in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome like a musical phrase, as opposed to the predetermined pace of a poetic meter like a metronome.
• Published Blast, a London magazine of Vorticist views with an anarchic presentation, a variety of typesetting, and abstract illustrations.
• A leader of the Modernist movement in world literature with direct, realistic descriptions.

Politics

• Mussolini, charisma, and the developing middle class
• Even though he didn’t have the credentials of a diplomat, Pound could speak and write as one.
• His concern for humanity was in resource management “in the midst of plenty.”
• With his beliefs published and broadcasts on Italian radio, Pound was found to be supporting Fascist causes and later interred in an outdoor cage like a P.O.W. for three weeks
• Beyond the Italian radio broadcasts, Pound’s most outspoken views on money and economics were contained in six Money Pamphlets composed between 1935 and 1944. 

Explicata

• Canto One of The Cantos of Ezra Pound begins like Homer’s Odyssey,
  “And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the goodly sea”
• His Cantos ties together globally historical references, politicians, and players portrayed with shape-shifting symbolism in candid, epic form as caricature like Joyce’s Ulysses, thus lending to Pound’s controversial place in literature.
• Ripe with locations from a study of ancient Western Civilization and the Love Elegies, Pound provides a setting in the first stanza,
• Villanelle: The Psychological Hour
• Homage To Sextus Propertius – III
  Themes: trust his own shadow, submit to the bold hands of terror

Arrest for treason

http://www.poemhunter.com/ezra-pound/biography/

SUITABLE QUOTATIONS [   #ezraPound   ]

From an essay “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States”

“The true history of the economy of the United States… is to be found in the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, in the writings of Van Buren, and in quotations from the intimate letters of the Father of the Republic. The elements remain the same: debts, altering the value of monetary units, and the attempts and triumphs of the usury, due to monopolies, or to a ‘Corner’.”

http://archive.org/stream/AnIntroductionToTheEconomicNatureOfTheUnitedStates/AnIntroductionToTheEconomicNatureOfTheUnitedStates_djvu.txt

On writing and conduct:

“In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.”

“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.”

“Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention to the movement.”

“Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”

Two line Imagist Poem:
In a Station at the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

From my study: Homage to Sextus Propertius III

Bright tips reach up from twin towers
‘Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools

…

Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight…

…

“What if undertakers follow my track,
such a death is worth dying.
She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb,
She would sit like an ornament on my pyre.

….

May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage
Or may I inter beneath the hummock
of some as yet uncatalogued sand;
At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.

“I had overprepared the event—
that much was obvious.

…

Beauty is so rare a thing … / So few drink of my fountain;

…

“Speak up! You have danced so stiffly?
Someone admired your works,
And said so frankly.”

…

“Dear Pound, I am leaving England.”

“It is on his total work of literature that he must be judged: on his poetry, and his criticism, and his influence on men and on events at a turning point in literature. … Criticism like Pound’s is advocacy of a certain kind of poetry; it is an assertion that poetry written in the immediate future must … observe certain methods and take certain directions.”

– T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound

POEMS FOR EXPLICATION:

Homage To Sextus Propertius – III

Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress:
Telling me to come to Tibur:
At once!!
‘Bright tips reach up from twin towers,

5          ‘Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools.’
What is to be done about it?
Shall I entrust myself to entangled shadows,
Where bold hands may do violence to my person?
Yet if I postpone my obedience
10        because of this respectable terror,
I shall be prey to lamentations worse than a nocturnal assailant.
And I shall be in the wrong,
it will last a twelve month,
For her hands have no kindness me-ward,

15        Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight
And in the Via Sciro.
If any man would be a lover
he may walk on the Scythian coast,
No barbarism would go to the extent of doing him harm,
20        The moon will carry his candle,
and the stars will point out the stumbles,
Cupid will carry lighted torches before him
and keep mad dogs off his ankles.
Thus all roads are perfectly safe
25        and at any hour;
Who so indecorous as to shed the pure gore of a suitor?!
Cypris is his cicerone.

What if undertakers follow my track,
such a death is worth dying.
30        She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb,
She would sit like an ornament on my pyre.

aid, let not my bones lie in a public location
With crowds too assiduous in their crossing of it;
For thus are tombs of lovers most desecrated.

35        May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage
Or may I inter beneath the hummock
of some as yet uncatalogued sand;
At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.   (PoemHunter.com)

Villanelle: The Psychological Hour

I HAD over-prepared the event—
that much was ominous.
With middle-aging care
I had laid out just the right books,
I almost turned down the right pages.                                                     5
     Beauty is so rare a thing …
So few drink of my fountain.

So much barren regret!
So many hours wasted!
And now I watch from the window                                                        10
            rain, wandering busses.

Their little cosmos is shaken—
the air is alive with that fact.
In their parts of the city
they are played on by diverse forces;                                         15

I had over-prepared the event.
Beauty is so rare a thing …
So few drink at my fountain.
Two friends: a breath of the forest …
Friends? Are people less friends                                                             20
            because one has just, at last, found them?
Twice they promised to come.
“Between the night and morning?
Beauty would drink of my mind.
Youth would awhile forget                                                                      25
            my youth is gone from me.
Youth would hear speech of beauty.

II

(“Speak up! You have danced so stiffly?
Someone admired your works,
And said so frankly.                                                                                30
“Did you talk like a fool,
The first night?
The second evening?
“But they promised again:
‘Tomorrow at tea-time.’”)                                                          35

III

Now the third day is here—
no word from either;
No word from her nor him,
Only another man’s note:
“Dear Pound, I am leaving England.”                                      40
(Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, pages 39–41)

from Canto 37 (XXXVII)

“Thou shalt not,” said Martin van Buren, “jail ‘em for debt.”
“that an immigrant shd. set out with good banknotes
and find ‘’em at the end of the voyage
but waste paper..if a man have in primeval forest
5          set up his cabin, shall rich patron take it from him?
High judges? Are, I suppose, subject of passions
as have affected other great and good men, also
subject to esprit de corps.
The Calhouns” remarked Mr Adams
10        “Have flocked to the standard of feminine virtue”
“Peggy Eaton’s own story” (Headline 1932)
Shall we call in the world to conduct our
municipal government?

…
“To which end, largely increased line of discounts
90        1830, October, 40 million
May, 1837 seventy millions and then some.
Remembered this in Sorrento” in the vicinage of Vesuvius
near exhumed Herculaneum…
“30 million” said Mr Dan Wester “in states on the Mississippi
95        “will all have to be called in, in three
“years and nine months, if the charter be not extended..
“I hesertate nawt tew say et will dee-precierate
“everyman’s prorperty from the etcetera
“to the kepertal ov Missouri, affect the price of
100      “crawps, leynd en the prordewce ov labour, to the embararsement……”
de mortuis wrote Mr Van Buren
don’t quite apply in a case of this character…
(The Cantos of Ezra Pound)

All those faces in the crowd, sitting down with Ezra Pound

Charles A. Watson
ENG 206
Pound: Draft three
April 25, 2015

Ezra Pound: A poet, translator, critic, essayist, and author—Pioneer from the West

 

An editor by trade, an artist by nature, and a poet by no accident, Ezra Weston Loomis Pound is revered more for what he said than for what he created in verse. One might consider his poetic work in the mysterious “Station at the Metro” or the voluminous Cantos. Pound is more known for his artistic vision and committed attitude to breaking writers from conventional Victorian and Romantic era literature. His working life, among the World Wars played a major significance in shaping his Imagist and Vorticist vantage for prose and poetry. Beginning in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho, an ending in Venice in 1972, his life took him to Philadelphia, London, Paris, a prisoner-of-war camp, a trial for treason, and a mandatory stay at an insane asylum before he passed away in Venice in 1972 at the age of eighty-seven. As the grandson of politician Thadeus Coleman Pound and son of Idahoans Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound, Ezra moved with his mother to Philadelphia for better opportunity when he was eighteen months. His father moved later and they traveled regularly, giving the young Ezra a worldly socio-political perspective.

This lens would lead to collaboration with friends and colleagues including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, and William Butler Yeats. Much of his notoriety came from editing T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and steering the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Eliot said “Mr. Pound is more responsible for the Twentieth century revolution in poetry than is any other individual.” Influenced by Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, the writings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, Japanese Noh dramas, and the ancient poetry of Sappho, these epic moments in literature fueled his passion for publishing and commitment to this art. He responded to acclaimed modern and ancient artists and poets through his published work.

Ezra Pound studied literature at the University of Pennsylvania with poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle. Bullied for his eccentricities, he left Penn and finished his Arts degree at Hamilton College, later teaching at Wabash College in conservative Indiana. At Wabash, his controversy and less-than conservative personality forced him to leave after he allowed a local actress to sleep in his apartment. His distaste with American convention would ignite his journey to London in 1908. Arriving alone and friendless, Pound worked tirelessly to network and eventually joined into creative partnership with W.B. Yeats.

By 1912 Pound was the leader of a group of poets responsible for Imagism, a new school of literary thought that sought to pull poetry away from Victorian influence. He acted as Yeats’ secretary and together they forged new modernist ground with an anthology of new poets. Through this meeting, Yeats recalled a young Irish writer named James Joyce who had written some polished lyric poems (Ezra Pound, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce).

In his 1912 critical essay “A Retrospect,” Pound had three rules for Imagism: The direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective; to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; to compose in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome like a musical phrase, as opposed to the predetermined pace of a poetic meter, which he compares to the steady clicking of a metronome.

His Imagist poem “In a Station at the Metro” resounds effortlessly with its stand-alone portrait of a bygone era with a robust curiosity, like a piece of modern art that will remain modern: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” An imagist work, the two lines speak for themselves as art like Edvard Munch’s Expressionist Scream. Poets aren’t described as Expressionist just as artists aren’t described as Imagist. This was Pound’s contribution to modernism and its poetry—establishing the visual setting or telling details and leaving more to the objectivity of the reader.

Along with Yeats, James Joyce, and Eliot, Ezra Pound was a commanding figure of the Modernist movement in world literature with direct, realistic descriptions. Although never contemporary, his contribution to this eternal moment in the history of American poetry represents a critical breakthrough in the literary struggle of the early Twentieth Century.

At the age of 28, Pound published Poetry magazine and introduced a series of three “Salutation” poems satirizing high society of the early 1900s. These playful and poignant works reminded Londoners to appreciate life as a gift and rise above the petty complaints of Victorian Era logic. Along with creative partner Wyndham Lewis in 1914 London, Pound abandoned Imagism to publish Blast, a magazine of Vorticist views with an anarchic presentation, a variety of typesetting, and abstract illustrations.

New artistic ideals met distrust in the establishment of global politics during the era of World War I, as newly industrialized societies struggled in the new global arena of democratic, socialist, fascist, and religious principles. In their utopian visions, Italian leader Benito Mussolini and German Adolf Hitler weighed on the inhuman and cruel possibilities of modernism. This design would reflect their politics and Pound had a voice and power with the press—he was dangerous. The tension rose with the model of charismatic leader, Mussolini. Pound had something to say as a proponent of the youth, the people, and the developing middle class.

In his Cantos, a body of free verse that covered decades of his distinguished life, Ezra Pound qualified himself like an objective real-time historian. Before World War II, the Cantos supplied little reference to Mussolini. In Canto 38, Pound mentions the inevitable draining of the Italian marshes. In Canto 41, he describes the dictator in some greater detail “before the aesthetes had got there,” comparing the leader, who compromised his country to further its culture, to Malatesta, an Italian anarchist. Evidence followed: the draining of the marshes must always come first; cultivated land and new jobs were provided for the unemployed; with public works instituted by a benevolent government.

“Mussolini is said to have jailed businessmen who wanted to subtract their customary cuts from government contracts. The main implication of this Canto, besides its other parts, is that the Italian leader stood out against the forces of special privilege, and the usurers could not control him. He is the man who tries to do today what Jefferson and Adams had tried to do and had partially accomplished in their own day.” (Davis, Vision Fugitive).

Even though he didn’t have the credentials of a diplomat, Pound could speak as one. Whether or not his principles were achievable in the sphere of politics was complicated and more than a global issue. One could say that Ezra Pound was pro-union as he saw the end of liberal capitalism, the economic system that emphasized the individual profit motive, that collective interests could be achieved “through the corporate system which is based on the self-regulation of production under the aegis of the producers … (and the) workers: “The economic objective of the Fascist regime is greater social justice for the Italian people. What do I mean by greater social justice? I mean the guarantee of work, a fair wage, a decorous home, I mean the possibility of evolution and betterment” (Davis).

Pound’s philosophy did not make him popular among conservative thinking for how could science be tied to management of wealth? His concern for humanity was in resource management “in the midst of plenty.” With his beliefs published and broadcasts on Italian radio, Pound was found to be supporting Fascist causes and later interred in an outdoor cage like a P.O.W. Returned to America and tried for treason, he pleaded insanity and lived in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, DC, for twelve years. After his release, he left America for Venice with his wife, Dorothy, and two other women. In silence and regret, he never returned to America.

Beyond the Italian radio broadcasts, Pound’s most outspoken views on money and economics were contained in six Money Pamphlets composed between 1935 and 1944. “The true history of the economy of the United States… is to be found in the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, in the writings of Van Buren, and in quotations from the intimate letters of the Father of the Republic. The elements remain the same: debts, altering the value of monetary units, and the attempts and triumphs of the usury, due to monopolies, or to a ‘Corner’” (C. David Heymann, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower).

These essays fed his long work, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the first of which begins “And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the goodly sea” (page 3) and proceeds to depict Homer’s Odyssey, with references to Circe, Perimedes, Eurylochus, cadaverous dead, Anticlea, Tiresias, Aphrodite, bearing the golden bough. Cantos ties together globally historical references, politicians, and players portrayed with shape-shifting symbolism in candid, epic form as caricature like Joyce’s Ulysses, thus lending to Pound’s controversial place in literature. In 37, Pound evokes the colloquialism, the accent, and portrays the Midwestern speak of economics. He responds with thoughts on hokey American politics. The senator’s grandson had historical facts set to memory and wrote his greatest satire while, fittingly, caged for freedom of speech on toilet tissue. This polyphonic and random free verse syntax lends itself to parataxis and is not meant for coherent memorization; as artist, Pound had no fear. Canto 37 (The Cantos of Ezra Pound) begins as a commandment for an immigrant from a President Van Buren (1837–1841), a conversation of presidents and early American political figures, dignitaries of American democracy, and supposedly ministers of freedom:

The Calhouns” remarked Mr Adams
“Have flocked to the standard of feminine virtue”
“Peggy Eaton’s own story” (Headline 1932)
Shall we call in the world to conduct our
municipal government? (lines 9–13)

John C. Calhoun, a secretary of state and vice president under Monroe, represented South Carolina and stood for slavery, war, limited government, free trade, a distrust of democracy and the majority, and saw the northern politics as untrustworthy. Vivacious Peggy Eaton, noted for her beauty and wit, was married to U.S. Senator John Henry Eaton and had a role in the Petticoat Affair that disrupted the cabinet of Andrew Jackson. Pound alludes to men of wealth decrying government credit who control the currency and paper in order to feed the spoils described with a stately American drawl in a complex portrayal of irony:

“years and nine months, if the charter be not extended..
“I hesertate nawt tew say et will dee-precierate
“everyman’s prorperty from the etcetera
“to the kepertal ov Missouri, affect the price of
“crawps, leynd en the prordewce ov labour, to the embararsement……”
de mortuis wrote Mr Van Buren
don’t quite apply in a case of this character… (95–103)

His Cantos were only part of a life’s work from his worldly study and travels; he also had an open mind to the greatest of muses and how to beckon them. To understand ancient Greek and Roman society, one must have pondered the collections of masters like Sextus Propertius (55 BCE–16 AD), a Greco-Roman poet known for Love Elegies, which Pound had spent considerable time interpreting. In his 1919 “Homage to Sextus Propertius III” (PoemHunter.com) the poem begins classic in classic free verse (“Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress”) is followed up with an iambic tetrameter: ‘Bright tips reach up from twin towers / ‘Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools’ (4–5). Ripe with locations from a study of ancient Western Civilization and the Love Elegies, Pound provides a setting in the first stanza, ekphrastically, of ancient Greco-Roman civilization set in their original purpose. After a vague inquiry to trust his own shadow, Pound’s character ponders to submit to the bold hands of terror for it could consume his mortal being. “Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight…” (15). Read like prose, this understated, modernist, Vortistic, and ironic stamp from Ezra Pound is not perfect form, but does suggest dactylic pentameter. Propertius walks safety protected by Aphrodite, Cupid.

Pound evokes the spirit of Sextus Propertius in this interpretation. The lover could haunt the speaker for a year. But she would guard his tomb for eternity. She loves him so much that she would protect his very soul from the corruptions of the public in his afterlife. “What if undertakers follow my track, / such a death is worth dying. / She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb, / She would sit like an ornament on my pyre” (28–31). In a modernist shift from first to third and back to first person, Pound first paints a mortal, immortal, then mortal scene, showing the only escape from one’s fears is one’s own living conquest in the poem’s only organized quatrain with a hint of rhythmic iambic pentameter and near rhyme on the b-lines with dying and pyre.

In its shadows, “Homage” contains themes of distrust “Where bold hands may do violence to my person?” (8); personification when “The moon will carry his candle / and the stars will point out the stumbles” (20–21); protective metaphor as “Cupid will carry lighted torches before him / and keep mad dogs off his ankles” (22–23). Pound eludes to Greek goddess Aphrodite and also a fresh water crustacean in “Cypris is his cicerone” (27). Pound offers another way of describing the sensible-advice giving guide.

Pound relies on the geographical and terrestrial to give Sextus Propertius a guiding path. Specifically, he gives a snapshot of Scythian coast (19) with flowing the Greco-Roman “’Anienan spring water” (5), and Via Sciro (the way to Sciro, 16). Unsettled, uncounted for his hour, and a humble soul adrift for purgatory or hell, his character yearns for rest at a knoll. “May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage / Or may I inter beneath the hummock / of some as yet uncatalogued sand; / At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road” (35–38).”

He once wrote in a preface to the poems of Rhymers’ Club member Lionel Johnson, “The villanelle … can at its best achieve the closest intensity … as with Dowson, the refrains are an emotional fact, which the intellect, in the various gyrations of the poem, tries in vain and in vain to escape.” Pound answered the pre-modernist contributions of short-lived Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) with his own “Villanelle: the Psychological Hour” (Ezra Pound, Selected Poems) and published it in the December 1915 issue of the modernist journal Poetry: A Magazine of Verse:

“Pound’s own free-form poem stands in opposition to his casual defense of the villanelle, and is probably a more accurate index to his attitude.” an experiment in logopoeia, that is poetry of the word, of memory, and part of the subjective and internal Vorticism representation. “… even the designation “psychological” and the pun in the second line indicate that the poem explores mind and word.” (Amanda French, Refrain Again: The Return of the Villanelle)

The Psychological Hour is a frightening Emotional fact suggested by its opening stanza. “I had overprepared the event— / that much was obvious (lines 1,2).

Pound provides an aesthete through ritualistic fashion and demeanor for a muse, only to be rejected for the night, a day, a week, or just for that psychological hour of misunderstanding—that zone, perhaps, during which the muse is cast aside for the ego in crisis mode: “I had laid out just the right books, / I almost turned down the right pages. / Beauty is so rare a thing … / So few drink of my fountain. (4–7); with an exclamation of wasted purpose through parataxis: “So much barren regret! / So many hours wasted!” (8–9).

The mnemonic metaphor of “fountain” is an avenue for sharing intellect and aesthete. By setting this phrase in italics as a thought, Pound gave it an eternal quality, like the choir of all life before us. Beauty is youth while the blossom unfolds to discover its role in spring’s fountain. He is older and his friends speak in more complicated, symbolic terms like the voice in italics and parentheses: “(Speak up!…. tomorrow at tea-time)” (28–35). Naturally, a near rhyme describes their communication: “Speak up! You have danced so stiffly? / Someone admired your works, / And said so frankly…” (28–29). In the end he receives no actual correspondence from his friends, but he does find an ironic note from friend: “Dear Pound, I am leaving England” (40). This could be one of a number of Pound’s literary comrades in a complex modernist poem on the fragility of humanity and its hard work that sometimes goes unappreciated.

A study of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and many other major works of the Modernist era should require a sampling of the breadth of the work of Ezra Pound. His role as an artist and leader of Imagism and Vorticism are his living legacy to world literature. There was a time when I read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and found it depressing. At that time my knowledge of Ezra Pound was but a station at the metro.

“It is on his total work of literature that he must be judged: on his poetry, and his criticism, and his influence on men and on events at a turning point in literature. … Criticism like Pound’s is advocacy of a certain kind of poetry; it is an assertion that poetry written in the immediate future must … observe certain methods and take certain directions” (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound).

The internal battles of Pound, his relationships, his breadth knowledge and life experience are impossible to unwrap in a short study. To understand his function in the sphere of poetic history is useful in understanding the weight of his quotations to current study.

Mnemonic recall and gold in every grave

Charles A. Watson
ENG 206
Hirschfield Readings
April 15, 2015

Reflection on Jane Hirschfield’s Essays:
“Poetry and the Mind of Indirection” and “Poetry as a Vessel of Remembrance”

Refrains, choruses, call and response, enchantments, the repetition of the final lines of a sonnet: all are methods of remembering verse and adding to our Western language. Though undocumented through printed word, a primitive language is built upon the same. In Hirschfield’s “Poetry and the Mind of Indirection” I was presented with the history behind the mnemonic device, a critical tool for memory and my appreciation of language.

Mnemosyne (Remembrance), was the earliest born Greek goddess, mother of the Muses, and also of the poem (176). Through the mnemonic, a person learns to teach himself and construct a bank of intuitive clues and reminders that he no longer needs to think about, such as Every Good Boy Does Fine to learning a musical scale. This is important to visual, aural, tonal, and tactile processing and how we recall and remember. Taste, sound, smell—these remind us of joyous, melancholy, or even traumatic events in our life. Naturally, we gravitate to or retreat from them for various reasons. We can’t escape, like Odysseus’ men to the sirens. We can turn our back at the mere utterance of that which discomforts. It is our developed choice.

What was a person’s introduction to poetry and at what age? Who was the teacher, the enabler, who opened this fountain of sensory knowledge? Virtually all language emerges from metaphorical thinking (110). Thus, as linguists, poets, and readers, our gift at understanding and communicating is largely based on what we remember through symbolism and creating metaphors for our individual processing mind. Verse … is language put into the forms of remembrance (177).

One major lesson of infancy is “that what goes out of sight does not cease to exist” (177). Children learn to trust this instinct through signals and symbols—the smell of dinner cooking means that mom has gone around the corner and will return. The sound of running water, a washing machine, the car’s motor and exhaust system, a flat screen tv … cats, dogs, birds … shouting, banging, arguing. These are all actions that might occur when mom (or dad) is out of the room and, even though the other living being is gone for an unspecified time period, the self continues to exist because the self is sensing.

Sound is relative to the individual, subject to one’s individualized decoding, and shaped by one’s own memory and sensory experience. This becomes learning strategy—to think memorable thoughts—and to assemble into a mental form that itself will be an aid to memory. The most universal is the call and response of repetition within variation … with meter or rhyme.

Hirschfield claims that the poet’s gift comes through silence, exile and cunning (109), so the “rhapsode” can weave a story to a new audience. But it’s not his original idea and never was meant to be. It’s his mnemonic, his muscle memory, the cadence of his being borne from craft and study and human interaction. Like the vaudeville director, aged rock star, renowned news correspondent, the poet hopes to convey through the muse to new readers.

“The earth itself, in many traditions, is a sacred utterance, the singing of the gods” (179). I’m not sure if Hirschfield crafted this conversation starter on her own, but I will borrow it in the future. In setting up to untangle some works of Ezra pound, I found a marvelous example of a poet demonstrating an aesthetic quality through ritualistic fashion and demeanor for his muse, only to be rejected for the night, a day, a week, or just for that psychological hour of misunderstanding—that zone, perhaps, during which the muse is cast aside for the ego in crisis mode:

“            I had laid out just the right books,
I almost turned down the right pages.                                       5

Beauty is so rare a thing …
So few drink of my fountain.

So much barren regret!
So many hours wasted!”

( “Vilanelle: The Psychological Hour” [SOURCE])

I will remember this poem just as Pound sifted the mnemonic metaphor of “fountain” as an avenue for sharing of intellect and aesthetic. So often beauty is unnoticed because it was not contained or packaged in a refrain to be shared by more than one. Thus, by setting this phrase in italics, Pound gave it an eternal quality, like the choir of all life before us. Beauty is youth while the unfolding blossom is set to discover its role in spring’s fountain.

Hirschfield begins “Poetry and the Mind of Indirection” by describing the conscious intention to which a poet is related to a poem. “Virtually all language emerges from just such metaphorical thinking” (110). This craft requires silence, exile, and cunning—kind of like James Joyce’s character Stephen in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as he leaves Dublin for exile and to explore new aesthetic from somewhere else. We craft our aesthetic based on sensory experience: in the kitchen, the yard, sound recording studio, or science lab. The aesthetic provides an avenue for the poetic chemistry to percolate. Are these mixed metaphors? Hardly not. The essence of the study of poetry is not to become a poet, but to mix what we love and stew it into new forms.

Hirschfield, Jane. Entering the Mind of Poetry. “Poetry as a Vessel of Remembrance” and “Poetry and the Mind of Indirection.”

Final Submissions for 2015 Design Annual

by Charles Allen Watson

Mean Wile, Back at the School Yard

I heard them again at nearly midnight
under the ink of a moonless starry sky.
Scuffling southbound in a hurried gang,
like a happy pack of children laughing
and playing, yelping, dancing, and singing
as an unbound one without fear of mile-marking gravel.

No cares for they ran altogether – orderly –
but not single file; a moment we have duly prepared
for hundreds of years.

And I thought: When we build the new school
to reflect and bridge new beginnings
at the infinite easement on this patchwork plain
of needs, wants, and desires, where
the outward jam of our sandwich
meets the pups of the frontier; in the night,

hours after the foot traffic of lunchtime
in the breeze of dumpster stench,
a call to order on the slivered tire chips
playground, where litter rolls and
Little Debbie wrappers drift like spent leaves,
coyotes chant and sing
proportionally – orderly –
CB, AC :: AC, AB
the chorus of the living, longing to achieve;

We build and design to show them the signs
to transmit, to send, to yield, and to bend;
to eat not with their own soiled hands
so innocently clean at the free-will machine
in shadows of American dreams.

They charge on invisibly in the carbon black of night.

(January, 2015)

Shoe Horn

To make them fit a Big Dipper,
a L’il Dipper, all those heels,
the clogs, the clomp-clomp-clomp,
of free-ranging nanny goat.

Patent f-me pumps that
you wore to work on a Friday –
Ursa Major, Ursa Minor –
how wondrously they hurt sometimes!

The trouble with those heels,
that collection there you see:
in the closet, behind the mirror, at the stairwell,
in your Subaru backseat;

is how you put them on,
day after day – your favorites,
your sentimentals, your unmentionables –
obstacles for your path.

Digging
Arching
Aching–
the forms that lift you up will tear you down.

Pumps and heels, lifts and deals
Graceful leather ornaments
except for that boot, mateless,
on the shelf by itself in the dark.

That waiting glimmer of
Arcturus Alpha Bootis,
the brightest star,
a link, that mere spark.

(May, 2014)

Her : OS / Y

Futuristic, diagnostic, Scarlettistic
and genuinely altruistic. It reads and listens,
an unsightly beauty, exquisitely unseen.

A virtual stay-puff creature to submit to his fashion,
the cool sets, and all that L.A. feng shui;
an investment like coin-operated symposium.

Wears his ear device
for the high-maintenance OS
to honor its emotions, its impatience;

Dons his glasses, his mustache
for the program and its random
silly spectacles;

Dates his OS
and conquers his real emotions,
I.T.’s emotions, Her emotions;

Sells thy soul
in a feast with his system.
Duped or dumped, she loved the philosopher anyway.

(December, 2014)

 

How their faces fit

What comes from a hug,
a longing full embrace,
a meandering hand?

Anticipate the pressure
volupté beholden.
Greet her magnificent teeth
in this arrangement of galactic gases
of some divine interplay.

With fresh lipstick like tomato paste,
she reminded him to go easy–amoré!
Benefits for both:

strong, firm, intact, belief, disbelief.
Oh wondrous sea!
a mist in the middle,
a shroud of possibility.
Can’t we be free?

A perfect nose, a subtle touch,
’Oh stealthy one.
To press again and live one more time.

(May, 2014)

Toxicodendron Radicans and Some Impatiens at the Forest Edge

Symbiotic and perennial, you wait
through summer until September,
not deceiving,
with patience, always there.
 So obvious, never alone
where the sun meets the shade
at the edge of the forest.

Under the fertile terra, under my skin,
you shoot and you surface – dig you out at your roots!
Bloom and weep – a renewal, a reminder
of where we have been.
Honor you dig you don’t scratch you – ratchet!

Like a sniffy hound or a shifty squirrel,
I always know where to find you.
So glad you’re in love
so happy for your love
user friendly, just for me.

’Twill run your course in a few weeks or so
with Mother Nature’s approval, yes –
an upheaval, but never an evil.
This June reminder, this bleeding heart
this respect in retrospect.

I know where to find you
and you know where to find me,
just like poison ivy.

(June, 2014)

Blink: When Photopositive Meets Negative (Eyelid Media)

Awaken to a morning light
through closed panes of clear glass
consenting leaves on yonder May timber.

A silent chill meets the window,
a barrier for the morning chatter:
No dove, no cardinal, ’oriole yet;
cackling grackles, ravenettes.

The phone buzzes a hazy, lazy conscience
and opens our eyes – just for a blink!
our pupils receive this treat:
Silhouettes, fixed like shadows,
or negative prints.

The frames of the panes
resolve onto closed lids –
these membranes – for a new game of empty squares
in shadow, they dissolve.

The stairs await us –
Go!
stares
photogenic.

Our eyes obscured by panes for vision,
panes that help us view,
an immeasurable force field.
We hold a stare with time
on this parched earth, this solid ground,
and tomorrow, we start over.

(May, 2014)