Reading

This is the time of year I am blessed with a little time to read, so I've been plowing through Greil Marcus's Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 and a bit of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I'm about to start John Hodgman's That Is All. While reading each of those things, two passages in particular caught my eye.

With Marcus, the early stuff is really hit or miss, but starting in the 90s everything is magical. He elucidates late Dylan as well as anyone, and he has the strongest handle on Harry Smith that I know of, which is his true strength. The part of the book that really stuck out for me, though, was from a book review of a memoir by the Clash's least important member, Vince White. Marcus quotes the following passage from White:

"...a bus wasn't a bus. It was an obscene red metal object that moved down the street carrying blank faces that had come from nowhere and were going absolutely nowhere."

Of course, he's talking about buses -- literal buses. What he insists on, though, is that the bus, no matter how real it is, is really just a sign, and it signifies all sorts of things -- nostalgia, pollution, and a whole bag of other shit, but mostly social stratification. What this passage reminds me of is perhaps Ezra Pound's most famous poem, "In A Station of the Metro":

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

The faces, moving so fast though the subway station, have features he can't make out in the dim light. They become, then, less-than-human once robbed of their individual identity. They are anonymous, with nothing to differentiate one from the other. Their life is that of the drone. White, most likely unintentionally, just gave the best interpretation of Pound that I've ever read.

The other bit I noticed when reading was in Whitman's "Song of Myself," section 20. Whitman has a greaty line that says "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones." This is very similar in diction and content, and somewhat similar in syntax, to the like "I'm looking for that sweet fat that sticks to your ribs" in Dylan's "Cry Awhile" on "Love and Theft."

National Poetry Month: Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound has long been criticized for his anti-Semitism, and in a way rightfully so. Pound should have been smart enough not to rely on cultural assumptions and stereotypes about Jews. That said, I don't think Pound hated Jews outright. Certainly, he did support Mussolini, but it seems as though he supported fascism because fascist leaders were interested in nationalizing specific industries and in restructuring banks, something the far left also takes an interest in. Specifically, Pound was railing against usury, the loaning of money at inordinate interest rates, such as is done by banks and credit card companies. The cause of usury is greed, and looking at the current economic state we can see where that got us. Banks weren't content to simply charge outrageous interest rates that made it difficult for working families to put a dent in the principle, but they also loaned out to everyone, figuring they could earn more money that way, and when they loaned out to even those unable to pay their rates, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. In Pound's time, the attitude toward Jews was that they mostly made their money off of usury. Pound should have been able to see through that, but the impulse to be against usury was a good one.

As a critic, he came up with better ideas, and expressed them in a more direct way, than almost any other writer I can think of. From editing Ernest Fellosa's "The Chinese Character As A Medium" to The ABC of Reading, Pound's theoretical work is fascinating, infused with wit and consistently thought-provoking. As a poet, hiw work is also strong. "In A Station of the Metro," arguably Pound's most famous poem, was cut down from dozens of pages to just two single lines, two contrasting images that form the verbal equivalent of an Eisensteinian montage.

Pound's "translations" of Chinese poetry recreated their ideas and feelings using his own ideas of how Imagism should be practiced. The peak of this, perhaps, is in "River Merchant's Wife," when the wife's entire emotional complex is embedded in the line "the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead." Later, Pound's Cantos were revolutionary as intertextual creations, like an extended Wasteland that effortlessly represents a plurality through blending multiple systems of linguistics. They are among the most challenging poems in any and all languages, but all the more rewarding because of it. And to hear Ezra read them, with one of the most intense recorded voices in history, is to be shaken straight out of your bones.