You almost think it is
sex and nothing but sex
but one morning you are standing on the train,
facing down the long car,
every passenger sitting dully,
sunlight chewing their passive faces,
and the truth hits you. Enthusiasm is easily smashed.
The public is diffident and frankly, ugly. Sex
must be furtive and secretive
and exists mostly in talk and innuendo.
Statistically and truthfully
sex is a wash of bad poems and broken signs,
the hair and skin I cannot stand to look at in the sun.
We cannot use the word unfit anymore,
(the last to do so was Pound in the 1930s)
and wary, America, after Hitler,
slowly accepted communism's comfort
(everyone's okay!)
hiding and ducking from the scrutinizing sun.
The sun could blind, but not scrutinize.
No one was looking, even though Brian Jones was the one.
"Mick only attracts the fellas," Brian cracked on the Mike Douglas show,
when the Beatles were tops in 1964,
and that was the end of him.
Now everyone's a whore.
There will always be that guy
who can't sit still during Beethoven's slow movement.
He will go on to take advantage
of those who don't know who Beethoven is.
He will rule the world. Watch out.
The rock and rollers sing and dance and mangle poetry
so they almost get back to
wordless Beethoven but not quite.
Expertise performs Beethoven.
And it's always Beethoven---
no matter how hard Richard Wagner hits the keys.
But your rock and roller star
is a star by his smile.
The smile is a beautiful fountain.
But Beethoven is always climbing Mozart mountain
or floating in Mozart's ancient hills.
Bach is the father, Mozart, the spirit.
Wait. Listen. The rock and roller's death. Did you hear it?
Beethoven is the son.
John and Paul were so amusing to each other.
Brahms. In childhood I heard violins in these rooms.
We wrote things on pieces of paper. We tried to express ourselves.
Love? There will never be one, as you knew her then, again.
There will always be that guy.
D.H. Lawrence (b 1885). A more complete writer than Pound (b 1885). A better free verse poet than WC Williams. Why is he snubbed today in the History of Modernism?
There’s only two real types of lived philosophy: the religious and the utilitarian.
Ezra Pound (he lived off his dad) was a utilitarian; he got behind fascism because Pound believed fascism “produced,” while at the other end, communism only redistributed. The middle ground for Pound were the helpless phonies like Harriet Monroe at Poetry, who Pound was always trying to boss around because she didn’t do enough for him.
D.H. Lawrence (a frail man) was religious, instinctual, psychological. He couldn’t boss anyone around. His wife, the busty German baroness (niece to the Red Baron of WW I fame) slept with whomever she wanted. But she did remain with Lawrence until his death in 1930—and left her three children and husband (Lawrence’s ex-professor) to be with him.
Lawrence opposed the mechanical horror of World War One—because he believed in nature and free love.
Pound supported World War One—most likely because Amy Lowell (his rival) opposed it and because the British aristocratic establishment Pound and T.S. Eliot and H.D. were trying to get in good with, were for it.
The conservative New Critics, who found influential gold in a school textbook, Understanding Poetry, they produced which every school boy studying literature in America read between the late 30s and the mid 70s, featured Pound prominently, as well as his friend, “Bill Williams” (the white petals and the red wheelbarrow) while Amy Lowell (Pound’s Free Verse/Imagism rival) was not mentioned, haiku (from which Pound stole Imagism) was not mentioned, and D.H. Lawrence (Pound’s other Free Verse/Imagism rival) had one poem (“The Piano,” not his best) tucked away in the back without commentary.
In the wake of Pound’s literary, Avant-garde King, reputation triumph, Americans look at him strangely.
Pound is bi-part.
Pound’s followers (every poet in America born after 1940) 100% hate “his ideas” which strangely feeds into a stubborn 100% adoration of his literary work.
It’s high time we integrate these two halves and see Pound as one.
Lawrence is even more complex and divided, and it’s high time we simply see Lawrence again—and bring back this working class writer to share Modernism’s stage.
In 1927, Pound wrote to Glenn Hughes, a university press publisher, from Rapallo:
“Lawrence was never an Imagist. He was an Amygist. [Ford Maddox -ed.] Ford dug him up and bloomed him in Eng. Rev. before Imagism was launched.”
Imagine the cruelty here. Amy Lowell has passed away recently. Lawrence, whose first novel, The Rainbow, saw every copy burned in 1915 by a court in London (obscenity—the book was not obscene; British Society simply hated Lawrence for being anti-war) and who was in 1927 literally dying from illness, a man (the same age as Pound) who was just as responsible for free verse modernism and aesthetic progress as Pound was, snubbed as an “Amygist.”
Was Pound betrayed by “certain ideas?” Or was his problem more that he was simply a jerk?
In a letter to Glenn Hughes, discussing Japanese poems in translation, Pound confesses to Hughes, in a rare moment of humility from Rappolo, that his own project was “the scattered fragments left by a dead man, edited by a man ignorant of Japanese.”
Pound (who rode a reputation for being a linguistic wizard but didn’t know any languages besides English terribly well) was ambitious. Modesty was not a trait we associate with him. Here he is (Dec 29 1927) lecturing Harriet Monroe, not quite on politics or literature—but a clever, caustic, ranting, version of both. This is the “real” Pound—mistaken and silly as usual, but well, funny, and nicely unified:
“In our several thousand of nearly useless institutions of learning no student has ever been known to reject a scholarship or fellowship or any form of endowed sop. In fact, budding millionaires often grab them with great joy in order to slew off an inferiority complex and show that they are just as good as the sons of the proletariat.
If you wd. once divest yourself of the notion of the author as an object of charity or of the feeding of authors as a force of preservation of the unfit and arrive, even slowly, at the idea of ‘aiding production.’ Confound it: PRODUCTION!
Am I expected to respect either myself or anyone else because some graduated ribbon-clerk offers me 75 bucks for writing blah in a false-pearl and undies monthly?
Did any 100% Ohioan ever offer Burbank a large salary to interrupt his work and write ads for the local florist?
There is one source of confusion, namely that a man can get more for doing rotten writing than he can for doing rotten chemistry. The standards in science are easier for examiners to get at: or at least they are supposed to be. The confusion between the scientist and the fake is less likely to occur. But this should not be allowed to obscure the whole and main difference between stimulating production and pampering the producer.
Between definite individual desire to stimulate the arts (which means Maecenism) [Maecenas was a generous art partron, ed.] and pure communism there is only a middle ground of muddle, blah, sentimentality. Pure communism seems unlikely to affect the U.S. in our time, pending which I suggest emergency measures on a line known to be quite efficient. But for gawdzake cut out the idea of the high school boy and his gilded metal.”
Note that Pound, here 42 years old, is embarrassingly obsessed with endowed college kids. Obviously feeling sorry for himself, Pound avers that chemistry is a field considered more authentic than his: writing. Pound concedes writers have an easier time faking it than chemists, but says this shouldn’t distract us from the fact that “production” is the overriding aim of the writer. “Rotten chemistry” is Pound’s odd phrasing: Pound the poisoner? Or Pound the poisoned? Axis propaganda and the ranting in The Cantos. Rotten chemistry?
From another letter from Rapallo (1929) to James Vogel, (a young writer who reached out to Pound purely out of ambition) this describes Pound’s anti-Democratic personality quite well:
“It takes about 600 people to make a civilization.”
The correspondence from the late 1920s finds Pound in middle-age bitterly reflecting on the failures of his youth.
In another missive to Vogel in 1928, Pound wrote:
“The group of 1909 [Imagism -ed.] has disappeared without the world being much the wiser. Perhaps a first group can only prepare way for a group that will break through.”
But notice how Pound sounds a note of perseverance and hope, as well. I wonder if he knew that his next “group” would “break through” with Panzer divisions? Or that the New Critics “group” would make him an Imagist star in a popular school textbook?
In 1927, Pound won the Dial Prize which carried with it a large cash award. The Dial magazine was Emerson’s transcendentalism journal from the mid-19th century which Scofield Thayer, Eliot’s pal from prep school, ran in the 20s as a Modernist journal. Thayer, heir to a wool fortune, gave out annual prizes to his friends: Eliot, for the first American publication of “The Waste Land,” e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, and Pound.
That year Pound wrote to Hughes that “even this amount of reminiscence bores me exceedingly” as he briefly discusses his Imagism group, whose publications had very few readers. Pound was not proud of his London, Imagist years, and considered them a failure. The Dial, as well as Ford Maddox Ford’s English Review, published the best of Modernist writers (American and European, including Lawrence) but their circulation was small.
Pound’s two most important literary rivals may have been Amy Lowell and D.H. Lawrence. Pound actually sued Amy Lowell for stealing “his” Imagism (haiku) movement.
Lawrence wrote a travel book, Etruscan Places, unfavorable to the Italy of Pound’s beloved Mussolini.
Pound went on to outlive Lowell (d 1925) and Lawrence (d 1930) by many years. Otherwise, literary history might have been quite different.
The complexity of Lawrence (he wasn’t perfect, either) is captured extremely well in this interview with D.H. Lawrence biographer, Frances Wilson. Give it a listen, won’t you?
This Pound/Lawrence tempest is not about choosing favorites—it’s merely a hope some lightning might restore a balance.
You'll just have to face it, whoever you are,
you are both ugly and beautiful---
never either one.
You want to be ugly---so you can have fun,
or eternally beautiful---beautiful, like the sun.
You want to wear the badge of the ugly,
but sorry, you're beautiful, too.
Remove that frown, soldier,
they want to tickle you.
The beauty which inhabits these hills
is made of sun and shade.
Whatever's beautiful is
with the ugly, made.
Beauty knows the ugly thrills
Which greet the sexually mad.
And the ugly dream of beauty,
tender and chivalrous and sad.
Beauty has always known the fragility of its place.
As the beauty brushes her teeth, she stares at her twisted face.
I knew a socialist, who drove all beauty away---
but still wrote beautiful poems, praising the beautiful day.
Which came first? The inability to love
or seducing everyone by lying?
Words cannot tell us. Words
only seduce. Cold poem.
The non-conspiracy theorists
maintain humans don't conspire---
or think, or speak, or imitate.
The Speech Theorists, who believe
humans speak, were told to leave the meeting.
As they shouted, we laughed.
The meaning of the word "mom" is gone.
So is "family"and "country." Cold words.
God and world, flimsy terms, still hang on.
The Bee Gees started fires as kids; little pyro-criminals.
Later, they recorded a song: it's only words and words are all I have...
Whitman’s poetry sounds exactly like Emerson’s prose—has anyone ever noticed that? “The Poet” by Emerson expresses Whitman’s philosophy. The essay “English Traits” by Emerson is deeply racist. As for Whitman’s little poem, “To A Certain Civilian,” it is arrogant in the extreme. No, I understand you, Walter. And very well. The avant-garde gesture can only be made once, like putting a toilet in a museum; it’s exciting when it’s first done, but after that it quickly becomes intellectually inhibiting and didactically boring. It is thrilling to see Whitman “step out” of the “poem” and speak in a sour manner to the reader.
TO A CERTAIN CIVILIAN
DID YOU ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow, to understand?
Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand—nor am I now;
—What to such as you, anyhow, such a poet as I? —therefore leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand;
For I lull nobody—and you will never understand me.
Actually, Dante had already done this. In the Vita Nuova, (wonderful book!) Dante orders his poem to to go to his lady and speaks in prose about his experiences and the poems he is about to write of these experiences, so that his thoughts are, and are not, his poems, in a kind of hyper-simple, hyper-mysterious, writing-workshop. English took a long time to catch up to Dante. Poe, a modernized Dante, compartmentalized into Criticism, Verse, Prose, was Emerson’s and Whitman’s target. (Emerson’s “The Poet” attacks Poe, unnamed.) The All-Encompassing Genius vs. Avant-garde Hacks. Emerson and Whitman represent the pseudo-liberal position, always divisive, incomplete, and rather bullying. Poe, the well-rounded genius of dulcet rhymes and remarkable innovation and reach, hounded by America’s literary elites, is, through Scarriet, having the last laugh.
Why do people take Pound so seriously? I understand he’s a religion—all those poets who made pilgrimages to St. Elizabeth’s. Talk (fame) garners fame, etc. But he began as an Imagiste (ripping off haiku). He was extremely pro-war his entire career. He didn’t know any languages; he “translated” from other’s English translations. People know that, right? He didn’t invent translation, for God’s sake. His criticism, “How To Read,” etc is nonsensical, blowhard, dreck. His attempt to write school textbooks in middle age bombed. His Cantos is 99% footnote-dreck, private ravings. Because he became a religion, he’s merely a ready-made excuse for the elevation of pseudo profound bad poetry. Never mind he fought for the Axis, he was just a madman/creep, living off of women, and he didn’t “make” anyone. Eliot, the genius of “Prufrock,” declined after he became associated with Pound. Let’s cut all this Pound crap, can we?
Pound influenced no one. He was a social butterfly. His chief income was money from dad. His influence was social, not literary, and even in this sphere he was a loser. When his ex-girlfriend H.D. was married to Richard Aldington, Pound would show up unannounced, to discuss poetry with her—she subsequently moved to another part of London, to escape him. It helped his reputation that he knew Yeats, but Yeats, like Eliot, like Joyce, were fully formed as artists; Pound was merely a secretary/manager of their affairs, a valet, essentially. When the creepy Yeats tried to marry Maude Gonne’s daughter (she was twenty-one, he was fifty-two) just to upset the mother, whom he had wooed unsuccessfully, Yeats turned around and married another woman in her early 20s, Georgie, who Yeats ended up calling George a year later as the marriage failed. Pound was the one witness to the wedding. Pound was “useful.” Poor Eliot had great promise, but 12 years elapsed between “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land,” and in his late 30s into his 40s, in what should have been his middle-aged peak, Eliot fled from his wife and condemned Shelley and the Jews; during this period Pound wrote harsh, empty, bombastic, criticism; embraced Hitler. Pound ends up in a cage after a sequence of literary failures; Eliot remarries and helps to rescue fascist Pound. It’s all ridiculous. Modernism a low, seedy, joke, its best moments in “Prufrock” and the 19th century French poets who influenced Eliot. Even Eliot’s criticism is over-rated; derivative; at times outlandish; but he secretly stole from some good authors: Dante, Arnold, Poe—Eliot later nastily trashed Poe when Eliot was sixty-two, reaching out in desperation for some hard-nosed Modernist relevance at that point, perhaps, as he and Pound were being held aloft as revolutionary greats by a new generation of idiots trying to “make it new.”
I should add Pound didn’t “begin” with haiku rip-offs; Imagism was his H.D./second phase (producing a few ‘zines no one read); the first was a “stiff” antiquarian imitative phase, basically laughed at (same as WC Williams, who rhymed at first). Failing at traditional poetry, minimalism was a new trick, which only succeeded later for Williams and Pound when they were both picked up by the New Critic’s successful text book, Understanding Poetry—at that point, Williams and Pound were has-beens in their fifties.
People will often show me Pound’s poetry (as if they can’t believe I’ve read him.) Oh God, I hate “In A Station At the Metro.” This wretched, failed, haiku literally tells the reader what the petals stand for. This may be the worst poem ever written.
The chief reason we are shamed into admiring Modernist poetry is the Moderns successfully condemned the “sentimental,” and somehow managed to make us think only 19th century poetry is sentimental.
Oscar Wilde (in the 19th century) condemned it as well: “A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”
I love Wilde but if I’m granted the luxury without paying for it, why not? This is not one of Wilde’s best epigrams.
We’ve all heard how sentimentality is abused. The terms “inauthenticity” and “mawkishness” are trotted out. Sentimentality isn’t genuine feeling, it is said. Or, it’s counterfeit feeling. It’s a demonstration, or “performance” of genuine sentiment. Ultimately, it’s just phony and untrustworthy. Etc
But don’t we get into trouble when we censor “performance” in what is essentially a dramatic art form? Or isn’t it equally untrustworthy to use the term “untrustworthy?” Socrates says all emotion is untrustworthy. Does that mean to avoid “sentimentality,” we are asking that poetry have no emotion whatsoever? Also, to “earn” the emotion—this implies length and work, when we all know wonderful poems convey emotion briefly and instantaneously. I may “trust” that James Wright loves ponies (“A Blessing”) or WC Williams loves cold plums, (“This Is Just To Say,”) but this certainly doesn’t help me understand why the Moderns consider Shelley and Poe “sentimental.” (I don’t.) The topic—let’s define more specifically the “mawkish”—may be somewhat counter-intuitive.
I don’t care for Williams, but he was a clever guy. Zany/flowery vs. Utilitarian. Yes. We eat plums and only smell flowers so plums are more utilitarian than flowers. Therefore Williams made progress away from 19th century “flowery sentimentality” with his famous plums poem. (Which has been parodied endlessly—“this is just to say I used the last of the toilet paper…”) The dilemma is this. The sentimental doesn’t belong in the argument. It is a given that all poetry which moves us moves us in a sentimental manner—so the whole issue of sentimentality is a distraction/red herring. Eliot tried to think in terms of balance with his objective correlative. Eliot asked: How much emotion does this object deserve? And so with Eliot’s point in mind: If you’re emotional or sentimental about it or not, it really makes no difference—if your poem is about cold plums your poem is about cold plums and I’m not going to read it. Poe’s “A Dream Within A Dream” is highly sentimental—and would suffer as a poem if it mourned a small plum juice stain on the poet’s white shirt. Poe’s poem succeeds since it performs something which could very easily fail—but for unique (and simple) reasons, does not. But here’s the clever Modernist secret: Poems on plums cannot fail; the expectation is low. The modern poet has found a “way” not to “fail.” (The only problem is that all avant-garde tricks only work once. There can only be one Ashbery—a poet lauded because he cannot be understood. You try it today, and see how far you get.) And those “old” poems were all entirely “too sentimental.” Today’s poet—who learned from the Moderns—is sure of this.
Why is “experimental” poetry always bad? For this very reason. Avant-garde gestures—if they are truly avant-garde—work once, and once only. After the toilet is put into the museum, the toilet-in-the-museum joke is no longer funny and will never be funny, or interesting, again. Those who persist in whatever “experimentation” seems interesting at the moment are vanquished by this iron law. The idea for the poem is not the poem. This is why Poe wrote “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Raven” and why they are both necessary to each other—and why the fact that they are necessary to each other offends those who are chronically and continually avant-garde. The avant-garde gesture (and this is why it only works once) is precisely where the “idea” of “putting a toilet in a museum” and “putting a toilet in a museum” are the same—there is no division in Modernism; it’s all experiment; it’s all idea—and that’s why there is so little art in it which is popular and lasts.
When I say “idea” as it pertains to Modernism, I don’t mean coherent ideas, coherent thought. Every modern poet, almost without exception, says they love Pound’s work “in spite of his ideas.” Modernism never truly cared about ideas—only movements and moments. By “idea,” here, I mean, “wouldn’t it be a cool idea to put a toilet in a museum?”
The defenders of “experiment” accuse the “old” professors and Scarriet of being “nostalgic.” But nostalgia is a personal feeling, it has nothing to do with literary criticism.
The late Harold Bloom loathed Edgar Poe with a hatred bordering on mental illness. How’s that for “nostalgia?”
Likewise, T.S. Eliot trembled with rage when discussing the literary accomplishments of Shelley.
I saw them going to the Drake concert,
T-shirts the primary merchandise,
sexiness the ticket, young white girls with glossed lips,
nubile breasts showing,
their faces dead, a crazy person blocking their way for a few seconds
as they piled off the train,
obvious to me,
a license to be sexy the sole reason
for this so-called music's pounding, inane success.
"But sure," I thought, "my poetry
has always been the same thing,
a pathetic attempt to get laid,
my inane poetry a ticket
to learning supposedly, but in the end, just sex."
Remember quoting poems with that beautiful woman at the bar?
Years ago. Iowa City. She knew "Prufrock."
What is a lyric poem after all
but a wooden flute played outdoors in the evening,
one tremulous note worth an entire song?
Near the alley of trees near the museum,
the flute guy was there, playing,
a slow, languid sound.
Modern life temporarily like a dream.
My train ride from Boston to Salem had been uneventful,
my mood neutral.
Just as I turned into the alley
I thought how nice it would be,
look---here comes the poetry---
how nice to make love to her
as the wooden flute fanned out its somber wavering sound
and then a homeless man on a bench
received soft announcement after soft announcement
from his old cell phone,
the same ring my previous phone used to make
when happily she would call me. "Hello," I said
to myself, how peacefully I murmured it, completely out of my mind, "hello?"
Because you haven't lived,
little has interfered,
marvelously, or otherwise,
you being so passive and confused,
with the many things we felt and shared,
hedges with a drowsy bee or two in the early evening,
barely speaking, the two of us, in the still warm evening,
how many evenings we spent with each other outdoors!
Languid evenings, when nothing was expected,
loving to us an outdoor torture,
isolated as we were together,
alone in the perfect form of two,
society mutely forbidding our days together,
wandering among hedges and concrete dead-ends.
As two, we forgot the universe is one unique thing---
not many things. It is one unique thing.
We hardly communicated.
You rolled your eyes when I tried to sing.
I liked her and admired her
but could not love her.
She crept into my life
the way an afternoon will fill with light
after a cold and somber morning.
The quality of afternoon light just before evening,
molten, ebullient, but sad,
serenely characterized
both her youthful appearance and her mind.
Why couldn't I love her,
when she was both beautiful and in the middle of womanhood?
Manners compel me to say there were many reasons,
but, in truth, it was because her judgments were too severe.
Some view taste, for instance, when it comes to things
like art and taste itself,
as pertaining to valid differences;
she would have none of this.
Taste, to her, was a scale, and she believed
in a correct way to feel about all things.
She refused to discuss controversial topics
unless by indirection, in a manner figuratively dressed up,
so on subjects where others screamed,
she made her thoughts known softly, in poetry.
This unsettled many,
who doubted, behind her back, her sanity.
I listened to her for hours,
but days would elapse as I considered
the opinions of the many,
who belonged to both my habits and my livelihood.
I prided myself on the ability to find
agreement with her---and them.
They knew I knew in all matters how correct they were,
(this is how society works).
Correspondingly, she was to me an idle dream,
more pleasant than anything else I knew,
a drink, a cure, a game to entertain---and even nourish me, perhaps,
but only for a few hours,
inevitably in the stretching light of an afternoon.
Picture a chessboard bathed in calm light,
the long, delicate shadows of the statuesque pieces,
and never any music,
save the soft tones of her preternaturally soft voice.
She spoke on love with too much rigor for my taste.
Love is not a game of chess.
I recoiled at her opinions,
crafted, it seemed, from mountain ice.
Chastity to her was not religious,
but religion itself; at least this was how she talked.
On this subject, like my friends,
I found it difficult to believe her---
in light of her exquisite beauty.
She never touched me,
except once, by accident,
and it was as if nothing had happened.
Her hair was of great length
and torrid in its loveliness,
but when her arm brushed mine,
I was aware of no substance at all,
except for a tingle one might feel upon observing many stars at night
or distant objects covered by mist over moving waters.
I felt no weight, only electricity,
as if the whole of her were trembling air.
Once, she caught me smiling,
as she attempted to impress upon me
what in the world it was I'm not sure,
but the seriousness of it must have been sacred,
for she never spoke to me again.
Due to this, I was in a terrible state for weeks, perhaps months,
but condemning her philosophy
in my heart over and over again,
I recovered, and was able to write this, partially in her honor.
One of her observations particularly sickened and offended me.
She pronounced all physical love as crime.
She managed to speak this stern opinion to me in poetry.
She looked in my eye and said all seduction
was criminal---and hidden as such
because various steps of the exploits unfold in slow motion---
and therefore no child comes into the world who is innocent;
innocence is brought into the world only by poetry.
Here she closed her eyes and gasped.
For two or three moments it appeared she couldn't breathe.
"Poetry?" I asked. She took a deep breath as I said this word.
Then she looked at me.
And that was how our evening ended.
Scarriet 