Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos X-XI (The Malatesta Cantos, Part 2)

Malatesta
This entry is part 11 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one by one (so far — I may deal with a few at a time on occasion). These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend …

Continue Reading

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XII-XIII (Baldy Bacon and Kung)

Seriously, now...
This entry is part 12 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one by one (so far — I may deal with a few at a time on occasion). These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend …

Continue Reading

“Ezra Poundings”

This entry is part 13 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Someone quipped on Facebook about the term I used for my Ezra Pound study group of many years past: “Ezra Poundings” was what I described our work as. Reading EP some sometimes feel like pounding on a wall, so it made sense. But in the intervening years, the culture has moved on, and somehow now it sounds like a porn movie title (or a pornstar name)… or maybe it always did, and I just didn’t hear it back then. The idea of a pornographic or erotic film about some of the giants of modernist poetry amuses me, and it’s not …

Continue Reading

Pound and the Occult: Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult

This entry is part 14 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Depending on where you stand in terms of the literary establishment, my past week’s break from Canto-reading and Canto-blogging was either well spent, or a waste: personally, I consider it very well spent, but Leon Surette gives the impression that the majority of academic literary critics would disagree. Their antipathy towards him is perhaps understandable: they may not be emperors, but they dislike having a dissenter point out their lack of clothes as much as anyone, while Surette does so not just intelligently, but consciously… and not just because they’re dubious about Pound’s occult interests, but also because of what …

Continue Reading

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XIV-XV (“The Hell-Cantos”)

This entry is part 15 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one by one (so far — I may deal with a few at a time on occasion). These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend …

Continue Reading