Ezra Pound
Article
Ezra Pound is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 04, 2021 and August 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “see eg Ezra Pound’s BLAST”; “Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezra Pound, Monet and other important early modernists themselves”; “William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound”. It most often appears alongside France, G.K. Chesterton, jazz.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: October 04, 2021
- Last seen: August 23, 2024
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
- Your Book Review: Kora In Hell
- Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book (1936 Edition)
Related Pages
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- France (2 shared issues)
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- G.K. Chesterton (2 shared issues)
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- jazz (2 shared issues)
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- Paris (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- 1917 (1 shared issues)
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- 19th century African art (1 shared issues)
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- 20th century (1 shared issues)
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste (1 shared issues)
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- A Hymn to God the Father (1 shared issues)
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- abstract art (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But analysis of the rise of modern art has been hindered by the fact that it was an ideological movement which still controls academia and Western art institutions, and it has always been in that movement's interests to revise the past in order to blame its failures on its enemies. For instance, you'll commonly read that modern art began as a response to the horrors of WW1. The truth is quite the opposite: proto-modern artists were demanding a great war from about 1906, and got quite psyched up about WW1 (see eg Ezra Pound's BLAST). They believed Western civilization was systemically corrupt and needed to be utterly destroyed before they could create "true Art". (They used phrases like "a clean sweep" and "a great burning".) Albert Gleizes, one of the founders of Cubism, hoped for the complete destruction of cities and a return to a more pastoral, spiritual, community-oriented medieval lifestyle. The artists now paraded as "modern" to give the illusion that modern art was some sort of peace protest movement--e.g., Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen--weren't modernists at all; just read their poems. Not a single modernist technique among them.
One of the largest causes, as stated by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezra Pound, Monet and other important early modernists themselves was the collision with minimalist Japanese culture/Zen philosophy in the late 1800's. Frank Lloyd Wright and other early modernist architects were heavily indebted to Japanese architecture (see https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wright-and-japan/). Minimalist poetry descended from the haiku (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Station_of_the_Metro).
William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound, mythological references’ number one fanboy. Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina, the Spring captured and taken to Hades by Hades himself. Persephone as a plant goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a groovy afterlife glimpsed at by psychedelic shrooms. And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere. So, in that sense, Kora in Hell alludes to the multitude of suffering young women Williams met while working as a doctor, assisting in 1917 style home labors, and, because WWI was going on at the time and doctors were extremely scarce, as a local police surgeon. Conditions were dire:
This is the early Midlife Crisis of a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey. According to the doctor himself, some entries were basically gibberish and were discarded at the time of publication. Only 81 from presumably 365 days survived. Each one had a particular meaning, but Ezra Pound urged his friend to “give some hint by which the reader of good will might come at the poet’s intention”, so WCW added a commentary. In his own words: “Notes of explanation often more dense than the first writing. Explain further what I intended would be tautological.”
Even if you don’t know that red is supposed to make you angry or that everything in the world is secretly the number three or what’s up with all the circles and rings, you can still enjoy Kora In Hell. Williams is usually thought of as a visual poet, in the sense that he uses a lot of visual metaphors and really really likes to talk about painting, paintings and painters like Kandinsky. But as he jumps from metaphor to metaphor I personally found the best way to understand what he is saying is to follow logically the way words unravel themselves in space. That is a visual metaphor for, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, a rational, continuous and uniform way of reading a text which is in itself not rational, but discontinuous and fragmentary. “Many matters are touched but not held by the speed of emotions thrashing, more often broken by the contact, and by the brokenness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way”. Like Cortazar's Hopscotch, Kora in Hell lets you alter the order in which you read it. Williams: “There’s more sense in a sentence heard backwards than forwards most times.” If you prefer, again in McLuhan's terms, the participatory, incomplete, mosaic images, you should definitely start with the improvisations, and maybe even skip the commentary altogether. Ezra Pound said “It is not necessary to read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everybody I said so.” But if you like rationality, and if you’re reading this you probably do, then you can start with the commentary and use it as a frame of reference. Just keep in mind the WCW dictum: “Poetry makes logic a butterfly.”
Two decades earlier, Ezra Pound’s essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” outlined the original guiding principles of Imagism, a literary movement aimed at making poetry more fresh, more alive, and more relevant to a public quickly getting bored of the old conventions. Reading the essay, Pound’s advice is unimpeachable, encouraging aspiring poets to raise their standards significantly, avoid plagiarism, and buckle down on learning all the nuances of language in order to produce the most striking images possible to convey with the written word:
Inline links: “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, Imagism