version

Well-known member
bradpittintrueromance.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
Now Ezra Pound on the poetic image: "...a radiant node or cluster;...what i can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.
A patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologicallly stable; subject to variations in intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words."in decency one can only call it a vortex.....Nomina sunt consequentia rerum"
For the vortex is not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.

A patterned energy made visible by the water. Pound did not chance upon such a conception lightly. Patterns made visible has occupied him when he wrote in 1912 of "our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock," having "about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive": man being "chemically speaking... a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of figleaf," but capable of having his thoughts in him "as the thought of the tree is in the seed." "energy creates pattern"
...Thirty years later, in Pisa he closed the 74th canto with a double image ofpatterned energy: the magnet's "rose in the steel dust" and the fountain's sculptured flow through which passes renewing water, tossing a bright ball. The same passage mentions the winds Zephyrus and Apeliota, moving energies so stable they have names, and cites Verlaine's comparison of the soul's life to the fountain's....
 

jenks

thread death
Just have the fragments left to read. I found Thrones quite hard going - lots of repetition of his ideas and the obscurity (for me) of his references- I’ve been using the Cookson Guide to the Cantos. Also the poetry itself seemed less rhythmic- more like lusting and strange shorthand. There were a few beautiful flashes but less than I had hoped for.
 

woops

is not like other people
Just have the fragments left to read. I found Thrones quite hard going - lots of repetition of his ideas and the obscurity (for me) of his references- I’ve been using the Cookson Guide to the Cantos. Also the poetry itself seemed less rhythmic- more like lusting and strange shorthand. There were a few beautiful flashes but less than I had hoped for.
wow well done
 

jenks

thread death
I wish he’d left more of the later ones as fragments because I enjoyed that final section - quite wistful in places and the sense of a leavetaking in a paradise of his own making. Also he put the economics to one side and concentrates on nature, beauty, the past and his own stupidity.
I’ve really enjoyed the experience but I shall be glad to put the great red brick away now.
 

jenks

thread death
Interestingly David Keenan is a big fan of the Cantos - he just replied to something I put on Twitter which ,bearing in mind the general tenor of this thread, I think most agree with.
 

version

Well-known member
The chapter on Gaudier in The Pound Era's sad and frustrating. A visionary (at least according to Pound) stuck working with other people's scraps who didn't even make it past twenty three.

I couldn't work out how big 'Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound' actually was from looking at the photo in the book, but there's a photo of him carving it online;

antliff-01-ret.jpg


 

woops

is not like other people
i've got a biography of gaudier-brzeska here, he may not have lived long but he made good use of his time i think - one of his reasons for signing up to fight in the trenches, where he was killed, was to rescue art treasures for civilisation, Michelangelos and what have you.
 
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