“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

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

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 VIII-IX (The Malatesta Cantos, Part 1)

This entry is part 10 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 VI and VII

This entry is part 9 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). They 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 …

Continue Reading