#pound.ezra

[aamjp]

Concorde, metro station

curved walls/ceiling covered in lettered tiles by Francoise Schein > tiles spell out Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen of 1789 [Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen], a “fundamental document of the French Revolution” // they look a bit like crossword squares

Ezra Pound's ‘In a Station of the Metro’ was inspired by this station 

A Moveable Feast

Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper. But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, not sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. (49)

[Stein] was angry at Ezra Pound because he sat down too quickly on a small, fragile and, doubtless, uncomfortable chair, that it is quite possible he had been given on purpose, and had either cracked or broken it. That finished Ezra at 27 rue de Fleurus. That he was a great poet and a gentle and generous man and could have accommodated himself in a normal-size chair was not considered. The reasons for her dislike of Ezra, skillfully and maliciously put, were invented years later [i.e. "A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."]. (60) 

Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamoured of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint. He was also irascible but so, I believe, have been many saints. (88)

She quarrelled with nearly all of us that were fond of her except Juan Gris and she couldn't quarrel with him because he was dead. (93)

I was wondering if he [Ernest Walsh] ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask him. (98)

[aamjp]

Pound’s three kinds of poetry:

i.e. the means through which language is charged with meaning: phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia. (The final induces the preceding two by stimulating associations with other word/word groups: cryptics.)

[aamjp]

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

"To go back to the beginning of history, you probably know that there is spoken language and written language, and that there are two kinds of written language, one based on sound and the other on sight." (20)

"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

"This is a very unpalatable and bitter doctrine. But I cannot omit it.

"People occasionally develop almost a fanaticism in combating the ideas 'fixed' in a single language. These are generally speaking 'the prejudices of the nation' (any nation).

"Different climates and different bloods have different needs, different spontaneities, different reluctances, different ratios between different groups of impulse and unwillingness, different constructions of throat, and all these leave trace in the language, and leave if more ready and more unready for certain communications and registrations." (34-35)

Dichten = condensare.

I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dicten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dicjtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’ (36 // 18-01-17 15:42)

"Rodolfo Agrícola in an edition dating from fifteen hundred and something says one writes: ut doceat, ut moveat ut delectet, to teach, to move or to delight.

"A great deal of bad criticism is due to men not seeing which of these three motives underlies a given composition.

"The converse processes, not considered by the pious teachers of antiquity, would be to obscure, to bamboozle or mislead, and to bore." (66-7)

"The mere questions of constructing and assembling clauses, of parsing and grammar are not enough". A carpenter can put boards together, but a good carpenter knows seasoned wood from green. (73 // 11-01-17 09:35)

"In all cases one test will be, 'could this material have been made more efficient in some other medium?' This statement is simply an extension of the 1914 Vorticist manifesto." (76 // 11-01-17 09:40)

"It is only after long experience that most men are able to define a thing in terms of its own genus, painting as painting, writing as writing. You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem." See: Art & Language group (84 // 11-01-17 09:51)

"[Chaucer] made fun of hrimm hramm ruff, the decadence of Anglo-Saxon alliteration, the verse written by those who had forgotten the WHY of the Anglo-Saxon bardic narration, and been too insular to learn French. True, Chaucer's name is French and not English, his mind is the mind of Europe, not the mind of an annex or an outlying province.

"He is Le Grand Translateur. He found a new language, he had it largely to himself, without the grand opportunity. Nothing spoiled, nothing worn out." (101 // 16-01-17 13:18)

"The question of using another man's manner or 'style' is fairly simple. Good writing is coterminous with the writer's thought, it has the form of the thought, the form of the way the man feels his thought.

"No two men think in precisely the same way.   Mr Wyndham Lewis May have an excellent coat, but it would not give sartorial satisfaction on the back of Mr Joyce, or Mr Elliot, and so in varying degree, until a writer uses a speech of his own, there will be odd bulges, or a slackness over narrower shoulders." (123 // 16-01-17 14:35)