Modernism's topics - tribe.net

Pound Pound Pound

2008-01-13T22:17:07Z

I've been chewing on Ezra Pound off and on for maybe ten years now. I'm as intrigued by his genius as I am repelled by his conspicuous failings. Specifically, his severe failings of character loom larger and larger the more I study him, and I find the Cantos to be fundamentally misconceived. Rather than exploding into true cosmopolitanism, his eclectic fascination with languages and translations led him into an extreme form of idiosyncratic solipsism.

As far as I can see, the reader of the Cantos has only four options:

1) Reproduce Pound's piecemeal, eclectic philology,
2) rely heavily on commentarial literature,
3) enjoy the poems without comprehending them, or
4) let them be.

I'm gradually settling on 4, with an increasing sense of resentfulness that he made so many absurd demands on his reader. It's not clear to me that the Cantos are more profound than Paterson, for all their obscurity. It seems to me that Pound somewhere forgot that the primary function of language is to communicate.

I had a fresh shock recently reading through Pound's letters and realizing what a savage bully he was. Kenner's otherwise-excellent "The Pound Era" gives little sense of the degree to which he routinely bullied, insulted, and cajoled friend and enemy alike, or his colossally disagreeable egotism.

Having said all this, I wouldn't trade Exultations or Lustra for anything.

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

favorite poetry anthologies?

2007-12-01T08:15:27Z

My two current favorites are Pound's "Confucius to Cummings" and "The Rattle Bag" by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. I admire the former for its erudition and precision, and the latter for its overflowing vitality. The Rattle Bag stands apart in that the works it collects are chosen not because they are the "best" or "most important", but because they are the most beautiful and enjoyable.

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

what's on your reading plate these days?

2007-11-21T08:31:04Z

personally, i'm immersed in poetry by sterling brown and edwin rolfe. specifically, poems that bring together racialized and working class bodies. anybody reading similar material? if not, what modernisms are you enjoying?

posted in Modernism - 14 replies

from The Onion

2007-10-26T13:11:03Z

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47722

posted in Modernism - 3 replies

always accepting submissions

2007-03-24T15:59:37Z

always accepting submissions
why vandalism? is an online arts journal currently accepting submissions from visual artists and writers of poetry, fiction, and gonzo. We also publish original art/film reviews and essays.

www.whyvandalism.com/

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

Modernism?

2007-01-23T20:36:11Z

Barnaby, how would you feel about expanding the title/purpose of this tribe to modernist lit ior modernism (to include visual art, architecture, music, etc) nstead of just modernist poetry?

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be one of those, just a lot of sub-tribes. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be one, unless it belongs to somebody who never associates with any of the tribes associated here. I should probably double-check, but I'm too sleepy,

posted in Modernism - 3 replies

Artisit Communities/Grad Schools

2006-10-18T20:14:19Z

I was watching a film on the life of Wallace Stevens and another on the life of WCW. WCW was able to find a group of people near him, and he was able to spend weekends/days/hours with them.

Do any of you have this? Is it as rare as I think it is?
Tribe is as close as i can get to lovers of poetry, beside my prof..

Sad that even a love of soulful words isn't enough to help people get along. A few jaded poets might even dislike me for being (seeming...) too sweet. bleh.

anyway..

which are the best schools for studying poetry? graduate programs?

posted in Modernism - 6 replies

marvelous website

2006-10-06T15:44:36Z

http://www.poemhunter.com/eBooks/default.asp?p=1&search=

posted in Modernism - 6 replies

Thylias Moss

2006-09-30T04:31:37Z

Hey folks

The January issue of Poetry magazine featured a magnificent poem by Thylias Moss entitled "The Subculture of the Wrongfully Accused". I was most impressed by this work and have done a little digging. I see that she has several volumes of poetry in print, but I was not able fo find out much more about her. Apparently she teaches at an MFA program at the University of Michigan.

If any of you know her work or anything about her, I'd love to hear any facts or opinions.

Thanks!

posted in Modernism - 4 replies

Most Americans Value Poetry, says study

2006-09-28T14:03:31Z

The Poetry Foundation (publishers of Poetry Magazine) have published the results of a recent study that says that 90% of Americans value poetry and feel that it enriches their lives.

http://www.fdncenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=139500008

I will be interested to look more closely at their methodology, as I can say that this does not conform very closely to my experience. Still, this is nice news and I thought I'd pass it along.

posted in Modernism - 10 replies

stone cottage

2006-09-21T05:19:36Z

I just finished reading stone cottage - it was actually a little more than I wanted to know about the relationship between Ezra Pound & Yeats - I should have just stuck to enjoying thier works - I finished with a strong dislike for Ezra's personality.
I was always more of a yeats fan anyway.

posted in Modernism - 1 reply

Poem by Brecht that speaks to me.

2006-07-08T03:25:37Z

To Posterity

by Bertolt Brecht

1.

Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?

It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.
The old books tell us what wisdom is:
Avoid the strife of the world, live out your little time
Fearing no one,
Using no violence,
Returning good for evil -
Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness
Passes for wisdom.
I can do none of this:
Indeed I live in the dark ages.

2.

I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger ruled.
I came among men in a time of uprising
And I revolted with them.
So the time passed away
Which on Earth was given me.

I ate my food between massacres.
The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.
And when I loved, I loved with impatience.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

In my time streets lead to the quicksand.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
There was little I could do. But without me
the rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

Men's strength was little. The goal
Lay far in the distance,
Easy to see if for me
Scarcely attainable.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

3.

You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think -
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
that brought them forth.
For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes,
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do not judge us
Too harshly.

- translated by H.R. Hays

posted in Modernism - 10 replies

Writhing is the mostest exquisite pane...for a moment, just a moment, I can see.....

2006-06-25T02:05:14Z

The nefariously protesting mutter of my long-gone mama
as I make a Mother’s Milk,
cold cheap gin, warm whole milk; pause,
dig out the maple syrup and make it a Sweet Mama’s Milk,
a taste appropriate to the thistly breakfast I’ve got on for this bustly bumpkin of a morn.
Jangled by derailleur thoughts,
of witless heroism,
unwitnessed Impressionismism,
leafless weaseling; refutations of reputations surreal with their jaundiced hostility to hospitability.
Merely technically dark, I see,
of a magnitude only barely dissonant,
I step forward toward the artichokey assonance of one of inauthentically measured manhood.
Want to say “boy” to a cat,
want to give a stern look to a bat,
proffer twee wishes to the next pink impulse that frolics along?
Yeah, whatever; an absentminded admission of volcanism is worth what? an intimation of a sheepish coyote’s electrolytic breakfast?
Not more.
Though one could easily argue the converse, if inclined to the pose of the prissy heathen; it’s dragon-fodder to the ruthless cosmopolitans of these confessional lucubrations…
More unromantic arcana; give me a kilo of sweet peace, a mindful guinea prig, lithium imprecations swaddled in a Scottish séance; ordure in the court!
Moth-eaten Wheaties with a porn star on the box suggest some boutique idiosyncrasy bulimic with hypocrisy,
a deplorable fidelity to encrusted salvation. “…death is the world’s landlord…” sayeth Chris Fuhrman, not so mysterioso, not meaning to purport more than can be aspirated at a swell foop, I tink.
I am an otter, and am off to Addis Ababa to sell someone gums for a short-legged helping of tea and weary jam, toasted by a sun bigger than the biggest spider ever; see you THEN!

Writhing....

posted in Modernism - 4 replies

Quarterlies, Periodicals?

2006-05-10T15:43:46Z

Which literary quarterlies or periodicals do you read? I am in Canada and am only familiar with our publications, any suggestions for good poetry journals?

I usually read The Fiddlehead, skim Descant, and flip through a few other journals.

posted in Modernism - 5 replies

Holding the Mirror Up to Nature by Howard Nemerov

2006-05-06T09:02:14Z

Holding the Mirror Up to Nature

Some shapes cannot be seen in a glass,
those are the ones the heart breaks at.
They will never become valentines
or crucifixes, never. Night clouds
go on insanely as themselves
though metaphors would be prettier;
and when I see them massed at the edge
of the globe, neither weasel nor whale,
as though this world were, after all,
non-representational, I know
a truth that cannot be told although
I try to tell you, "We are alone,
we know nothing, nothing, we shall die
frightened in our freedom, the one
who survives will change his name
to evade the vengeance for love..."
Meanwhile the clouds go on clowning
over our heads in the floodlight of
a moon who is known to be Artemis
and Cynthia but sails away anyhow
beyond the serious poets with their
crazy ladies and cloudy histories,
their heroes in whose idiot dreams
the buzzards circle like a clock.

posted in Modernism - 2 replies

On Sunday Morning...

2006-04-23T15:58:01Z

I was reading Wallace Stevens' - "Sunday Morning", which I have read many times over the years. William Stafford once said that you really don't "understand the meaning" of a poem until you have a "readiness" within yourself.

The death metaphor struck me this time as no other. I think before I was too caught up with the feeling of death as physically dying!

In the stanza VI he writes,

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Like Faust going down to the "realm of the mothers" there is emancipation in giving up the the old sentimental mother (attachments to 'what about me?') - for the mother - like the Indian Kali or Russian Baba-Yaga - the Creator and Destroyer, "who waits sleeplessly."

In stanza VIII (the last) he writes,

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not a porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

The "lingering spirits" again perhaps attachments to sentimental wants, but letting go into the death of that - understanding the death of Jesus as archetype of sacrifice - becoming the pigeon with its "ambigous undulations" winging into darkness.

Its about getting over it - dying so we finally get it - finally grow.

You think?

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

contemporary extensions of modernist poetry

2006-04-17T18:18:05Z

Thought I'd start of thread of recommendations of contemporary (21st century) books that couldn't have been possible with their modernist antecedents.

Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons ---> Jesse Seldess: Who Opens

posted in Modernism - 1 reply

contemporary poetry

2006-04-17T17:08:40Z

My formal study of poetry ends with figures writing in the 1950s. I'm trying to get a sense of what's going on in the world of poetry today, and I'd love to hear if y'all have any favorites of the last 20 years, especially people who are still working. The only person who meets that description that I have any familarity with is John Ashberry, and I am pretty much ready to admit I don't get him.

Thoughts/suggestions? Thanks!

posted in Modernism - 28 replies

Ask Chaucer

2006-03-21T23:50:57Z

http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/

Go on ... ask him!

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

wordstock in Portland?

2006-03-14T06:52:22Z

anyone going -- check it out

http://www.wordstockfestival.com/

This year's Wordstock will be April 21-23, 2006. The book fair portion will take place Saturday and Sunday at the Oregon Convention Center on the 22nd and 23rd. Again, we will be offering readings from some of the finest authors in the country, a two-day book fair with hundreds of exhibitors and authors, workshops, writing contests, a full slate of children's activities and more! Please check back often for updated details.

Plus, you don't want to miss our finale reading with This American Life host Ira Glass on Sunday, April 23 at 7pm at the First Congregational Church.

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

Casabianca -- Elizabeth Bishop

2006-03-14T06:44:46Z

Casabianca -- Elizabeth Bishop
-----------------------------------------------------
Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck." Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.
-----------------------------------------------------

-this poem references the original by Felicia Hemans, a common poem children were made to memorize.
see new image loaded in pictures!

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

Dante translation

2006-01-01T04:27:35Z

Hi there

I know it's not Modernist exactly, but hey! Can anyone recommend a good translation of the Divine Comedy?

Thanks,
Barnaby

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

Salon audio

2005-12-04T05:14:27Z

Hey there

Salon.com has some really interesting material in their audio section. You can download MP3s of a number of great poets reading their work. It's free if you sit through the 15 second commercial before entering the site.

They have readings by Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot (Lovesong and Burnt Norton), Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery, and Wallace Stevens, among many others.

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

the archaic Mr. Pound

2005-11-25T17:23:10Z

I've been reading "Ripostes" and I'm confronted with the muscular archaism of Ezra Pound's verse. Consider the following:

An Object

This thing, that hath a code and not a core,
Hath set acquaintance where might be affection
And nothing now
Disturbeth his reflections.

Is this verse diminished by rendering it in contemporary speech?

An Object

This thing, that has a code and not a core,
Has set acquaintance where might be affection
And nothing now
Disturbs his reflections.

It throws off the cadance of the last line, but surely he could have worked around this?

The best theory I can come up with off the top of my head is that, immersed in classical materials, this is the only way these lines could occur to Pound. Still, given his ruthless appetites for revision, it's not clear to me what ultimately warrants it. In many cases, I find it jarring and a little hostile.

I wonder if anyone has thoughts on this, or on Pound's love of archaic language in general.

posted in Modernism - 5 replies

Mr. Apollinax epigraph - Lucian

2005-11-17T00:47:07Z

Hi there

You're probably all on the T. S. Eliot Tribe anyway, but just in case ....

Can anyone give me a translation of the Lucian epigraph to "Mr. Apollinax"? It reads:

Ω της καινοτητος 'Ηρακλεις, της παραδοξολογιας ευμηχανος ανθρωπος.

Thanks!

posted in Modernism - 2 replies

Ellmann Biography of Yeats

2005-11-03T20:07:15Z

I have not read a biography of Yeats, and this seems like the obvious one to start with. Opinions?

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

Two Figures in Dense Violet Light

2005-10-17T20:52:45Z

I am undertaking a modest study of Mr. Stevens. So far, this poem and "Sunday Morning" have struck me the most.

I would love to hear anyone's interpretive comments on "Two Figures". There are aspects of the work I find impenetrable. Thanks!

Two Figures in Dense Violet Light
by Wallace Stevens

I had as lief be embraced by the porter of the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,
And out of the droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Beyond Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in the total blue.
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.

posted in Modernism - 6 replies

drunkenness and mermaids

2005-10-12T21:01:45Z

I love the poem, and I feel the message is pretty clear, but I think I should know why there is a mermaid in there, and I just don't.

Can anyone shed some light on the punks and mermaids and the salient characteristics for which they were included in this one?

William Butler Yeats - A Drunken Man's Praise Of Sobriety

Come swish around, my pretty punk,
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.
Sobriety is a jewel
That I do much adore;
And therefore keep me dancing
Though drunkards lie and snore.
O mind your feet, O mind your feet,
Keep dancing like a wave,
And under every dancer
A dead man in his grave.
No ups and downs, my pretty,
A mermaid, not a punk;
A drunkard is a dead man,
And all dead men are drunk.

posted in Modernism - 4 replies

Celtic Renaissance

2005-10-04T14:26:47Z

any great articles or books? Old Faithfuls? Benchmarks in study?

Who are the most trusted scholars on the subject?

I just refreshed my experience with Yeats's "The Hosting of the Sidhe."

"The Song of the Wandering Aengus" has made me weep, again.

I'm ever in love with Yeats.

posted in Modernism - 4 replies

poetry resources

2005-09-15T01:55:03Z

In tandem with my contemporary poets thread, I'd love to hear how you guys stay abreast of poetry. Are there periodicals, websites, email lists, et cetera, that you find good references to keep current or find new material?

posted in Modernism - 5 replies

Finnegans Wake reading group SF

2005-09-11T05:39:44Z

Hey folks

A couple of us on the Joyce tribe are starting a Finnegans Wake weekly reading group in San Francisco at the Finnegans Wake pub half a block from the Cole N-Judah stop. It meets Sunday nights at 8 pm.

More info here:
http://www.tribe.net/thread/ce1ef674-7cdc-46cc-a216-77927aef86b3?tribeid=95f72888-9a76-4144-9b84-ba0719075065&r=1

We've met once, and it was a great start. Please feel free to come by if you want to have a fun, interesting experience devling into a work of monumental brilliance. It also happens to be laugh-out-loud funny, as when Joyce coins the neologism "to caligulate".

Next week we'll start on page 3. Open to Joyce scholars and novices alike. Hope to see you there!

posted in Modernism - 1 reply

favorites?

2005-08-26T17:58:45Z

Some of my favorites:

The Wild Swans at Coole - Yeats
Ash Wednesday - Eliot
Four Quartets - Eliot (of course)
Cathay - Pound
What are Years? - Marianne Moore
The Walls Do Not Fall - H.D.

I find Yeats perilously close to precious at times, but lyrical like no other. A fitting antidote to the aptly-named Pound. Moore is the great love of my life; I find myself hanging on her every perfect word. H. D. is hard and immortal as the sea roses she eulogizes. Of Eliot, what can one say, other than he said all that needs saying, beautifully?

I'm glad that people are slowly beginning to gather here. Few things have brought me as much rapture in my life as the words of these great shapers of words and images.

posted in Modernism - 22 replies

Modern Snobbery & Prudish Scholars

2005-05-02T21:31:56Z

this past weekend a professor advised me not to venture into graduate study of the moderns because people in the field are snobby, mean, and competitive.

she also said the area is flooded..no need for more scholars any time soon.

is she right?

posted in Modernism - 2 replies

Jules Laforgue

2005-04-27T19:35:45Z

Eliot and Pound (among others) consistently cited Laforgue's work over and above any other French proto-Modernist. But, does anyone else love his work like I do?

RIGOURS LIKE NO OTHER

In an album's files,
A Geranium lying,
Picked in the Isles,
Was pressed and dying.

A fine troubadour,
Ivory, old,
Mocked the flower for
The tales she told ....

'A requiem!'
She asked just this.
'Oh, none of them
Will you have, miss!'

---from _Poems_, trans. Peter Dale, Anvil Press Poetry.

posted in Modernism - 12 replies

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

2005-03-30T16:05:04Z

Robert Creeley died this morning...

I'm thankful to have been able to spend time in his company, if only for a brief period of time...

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

poets' inscape

2005-02-05T04:56:08Z

i am, for the first time, reading WCW and GM Hopkins... Levertov on inscape...

i feel shame for not having read them before, so i confess my weakness, my waste, my neglect of their profundities.

could it be that this love is the play of our inner scapes? That the dynamic of seeing the seer, relating to the relayer, manifests as the readers' love? a pure inscape of a singular, individual experience, the birth of moment through admiration and interaction?

they make me want to read, but the resulting tenderness is more than i can bear and still function in r/l. is this common for us here? is this why we neglect profundities, our master feelers, our own depths?

love

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

seemingly obscure

2004-10-01T20:45:53Z

Two hours ago I started the Banana Phone tribe - it already has 5 members. It took 3 months for the Modernist Poetry tribe to accrue five members.

Curious!

posted in Modernism - 4 replies

Waste Land - redemption?

2004-09-10T19:56:04Z

Cross-posted on the T. S. Eliot tribe.

Perhaps the single greatest interpretive puzzle posed by twentieth century poetry is the ending of the Waste Land. After an eternity of 'water but no rock' we get a 'damp gust bringing rain'. The thunder has its say, and we're left fishing on the shore. What the heck happened?

Is this the rain of redemption? Is there an implicit salvation in the Waste Land, prefiguring Eliot's later conversion to Christianity? Or is the damp gust an ironic joke, the quantum mechanical carrot that keeps us stumbling forward through the endless desert?

I've got my own theory, but I would love to hear what other people think, and why.

posted in Modernism - 0 replies

Paper Nautilus

2004-07-02T21:38:32Z

I thought it fitting to begin with a gorgeous poem by Marianne Moore. The Paper Nautilus is precisely what it describes - a concise, animate formulation of the principles of Modernist poetry. As T. S. Eliot describes in Four Quartets:

"And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)."

Now on to poem....

The Paper Nautilus

For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters' comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.

Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smooth-
edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely

eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ram'shorn-cradled freight
is hid but is not crushed;
as Hercules, bitten

by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
the intensively
watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,--
leaving its wasp-nest flaws
of white on white, and close-

laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
is the only fortress
strong enough to trust to.

posted in Modernism - 0 replies