Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto V

This entry is part 8 of 60 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 …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto IV

This entry is part 7 of 60 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 …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: The Ur-Cantos

This entry is part 6 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Well, then: having worked our way through the official, final versions of Cantos I-III, it seems it’s time to go have a look at the “Ur-Cantos.”

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto III

This entry is part 5 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto II

This entry is part 4 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing Canto …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto I

This entry is part 2 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Where to begin? I could go back and read Personae …

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The Pangborn Defence by Norm Sibum

Norm Sibum -- The Pangborn Defence

I first read Norm Sibum on the recommendation of a man I studied poetry with in graduate school, the notorious and controversial Montréal writer David Solway, who in turn provides the first blurb on the back of The Pangborn Defence. He writes: The fare Sibum provides covers the four spiritual food groups — humor, seriousness, discipline, humility — and is therefore wholesome and nutritive. Knowing David, these words could as easily have been either criticism or praise — or even both — though I think in this case it is the latter. What I’ve read of Sibum’s work in the …

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“Beauty, Sleeping” & Thoughts on This Semester’s Creative Writing Class

I write this on Friday evening, at 10:30pm, in a coffee shop I’m likely to be kicked out of in half an hour. The only other people who’ve been here as long as I have are a couple who seem to be locked into one of those fights that involve no actual fighting, just a pretty woman sitting silently with a frown on her face, and a handsome, baffled-looking young man who is sitting across the table from her with a frustrated look on his face, learning that sometimes, a pretty woman is also the hardest sort of girlfriend to …

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Rilke

Oops! Wow, I can’t believe I forgot to include the two books of Rilke in translation that I read on my list of books read from 2009. This is a serious omission, since 2009 was the year that I finally really discovered Rilke. If you’re interested in what I have to say about those books, I’ve added my thoughts to the post, and you can click through to see what I had to say. But for here, I’ll just say that I came to Rilke because of a conversation I had recalling a few lines from one of the letters …

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Diet Soap #3! (Get One Free!)

Diet Soap #3 is finally out! It includes my poem “Tian Ju Zhao,” which is the first poem ‘ve published in ages. (Though a couple more will be showing up in a future issue of Diet Soap.) There’s a heck of a lineup too, including none other than Howard Waldrop! You can pay to download or get a print copy at Lulu, but there’s a special offer on, at least at the time of writing, where you can request a free copy of the current issue in PDF format (presumably to see whether you like it enough to subscribe). Might …

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