BBC Radio 3, Sunday, 20 Jul 2008, 21:30.
“To mark 2008’s 50th anniversary of his release, historian Sean Street investigates how Ezra Pound, one of the 20th century’s most important poets, was accused of treason by the US Government and held for years in a mental hospital after he made a series of anti-American and anti-Semitic broadcasts in Italy.
The programme investigates the significance of the case today, asking whether he committed treason or inconveniently used his right to free speech. With contributions from Pound’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, his biographer David Moody and the playwright Bernard Kops, who wrote a play about Pound, in order to find out how we should view the complex and controversial poet.”
Category: Cantos
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BBC Radio 3: The Trial Of Ezra Pound
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All powers of Europe
For my part thought that Americans
Had been embroiled in European wars long enough
Easy to see that
France and England wd/ try to embroil us Obvious
that all powers of Europe will be continually at manoeuvre
to work us into their real or imaginary balances
of power; J.A 1782 FISHERIES.–Ezra Pound, Canto LXV. Pg 377.J.A = John Adams -
Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958)
Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958)
Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos: BrazilFrom Concrete Poetry: A World View, 1968, ed Mary Ellen Solt
RELATED RESOURCES:
Haroldo de Campos in UbuWeb Historical
Augusto de Campos in UbuWeb Historical
Decio Pignatari in UbuWeb Historical “Concrete Poetry: A World View : Brazil” in UbuWeb Papers “The Imperative of Invention…” Charles A. Perrone “Interview with Augusto de Campos” Roland Greene “The Concrete Historical” Roland Greene Sérgio Bessa “Architecture Versus Sound in Concrete Poetry” “Speaking About Genre: the Case of Concrete Poetry” Victoria Pineda “From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation”, Kenneth Goldsmith
Concrete Poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms. Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent. Qualified space: space-time structure instead of mere linear-temporistical development. Hence the importance of ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax, or in its special sense (Fenollosa/ Pound) of method of composition based on direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements. “ll faut que notre intelligence s’habitue à comprendre synthético-idéographiquement au lieu de analytico -discursivement” (Apollinaire). Elsenstein: ideogram and montage.Forerunners: Mallarmé (Un coup de dés, 1897): the first qualitative jump: “subdivisions prismatiques de l’idée”; space (“blancs”) and typographical devices as substantive elements of composition. Pound (The Cantos); ideogramic method.
Joyce (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake): word-ideogram; organic interpenetration of time and space. Cummings: atomization of words, physiognomical typography; expressionistic emphasis on space. Apollinaire (Calligrammes): the vision, rather than the praxis. Futurism, Dadaism: contributions to the life of the problem. In Brazil: Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954): “in pills, minutes of poetry. João Cabral de Melo Neto (born 1920—The Engineer and The Psychology of Composition plus Anti-Ode): direct speech, economy and functional architecture of verse.
Concrete Poetry: tension of things-words in space-time. Dynamic structure: multiplicity of concomitant movements. So in music-by, definition, a time art-space intervenes (Webern and his followers: Boulez and Stockhausen; concrete and electronic music); in visual arts-spatial, by definition-time intervenes (Mondrian and his Boogie-Woogie series; Max Bill; Albers and perceptive ambivalence; concrete art in general).
Ideogram: appeal to nonverbal communication. Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects and/ or more or less subjective feelings. Its material word (sound, visual form, semantical charge). Its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this material.Factors of proximity and similitude, gestalt psychology. Rhythm: relational force. Concrete poem, by using the phonetical system (digits) and analogical syntax, creates a specific linguistical area-“verbivocovisual” -which shares the advantages of nonverbal communication, without giving up word’s virtualities. With the concrete poem occurs the phenomenon of metacommunication: coincidence and simultaneity of verbal and nonverbal communication; only-it must be noted-it deals with a communication of forms, of a structure-content, not with the usual message communication.
Concrete Poetry aims at the least common multiple of language. Hence its tendency to nounising and verbification. “The concrete wherewithal of speech” (Sapir). Hence its affinities with the so-called isolating languages (Chinese): “The less outward grammar the Chinese language possesses, the more inner grammar inherent in it” (Humboldt via Cassirer). Chinese offers an example of pure relational syntax, based exclusively on word order (see Fenollosa, Sapir and Cassirer).
The conflict form-subject looking for identification, we call isomorphism. Parallel to form-subject isomorphism, there is a space-time isomorphisin, which creates movement. In a first moment of concrete poetry pragmatics, isomorphism tends to physiognomy, that is a movement imitating natural appearance (motion); organic form and phenomenology of composition prevail. In a more advanced stage, isomorphism tends to resolve itself into pure structural movement (movement properly said); at this phase, geometric form and mathematics of composition (sensible rationalism) prevail.
Renouncing the struggle for “absolute,” Concrete Poetry remains in the magnetic field of perennial relativeness. Chronomicro-metering of hazard. Control. Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back. Faster communication (problems of functionality and structure implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making.
Concrete Poetry: total responsibility before language. Thorough realism. Against a poetry of expression, subjective and hedonistic. To create precise problems and to solve them in terms of sensible language. A general art of the word. The poem-product: useful object.
Note: Original printed without capitals. The “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” presents a synthesis of the theoretical writings of the Noigandres group from 1950-58. The critical writings and manifestos of Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos have been collected in a volume: Teoria da Poesia Concreta, Textos Críticos e Manifestos 1950-1960, Sao Paulo, Ediçãoes Invenção, 1965.
Translated by the authors.
1958
(From Noigandres 4) -
Email To The Tribe (A Youtube Playlist Refresher)
Email to the tribe is my research class into the tale of the tribe, paying tribute to the last great work of Dr Robert Anton Wilson.…
–Steve Fly
Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe: A Rollercoaster Ride With Robert Anton Wilson
by Steven James Pratt
Link: http://a.co/gOGNKyV
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Ezra Pound and Film adaptations of fragments from the Cantos
Hamilton celebrates Ezra Pound’s 128th Birthday
By Max Newman ’16
October 31, 2013
Forum on Image and Language and Motion (F.I.L.M.) celebrated Hamilton alumnus and late poet Ezra Pound’s 128th birthday last Wednesday with a night full of history and experimental film adaptations.
Associate Professor of English Steve Yao opened the discussion with a detailed history of Pound from his time at Hamilton to his death in Venice in 1972. Professor Yao claimed, “Pound is arguably the most important poets of the 20th century,” referencing his controversial support of Benito Mussolini and fascism.A graduate of the Hamilton Class of 1905, Pound portrayed his social and political beliefs in his poetry. “Pound’s goal was to solidify free verse as the dominant mode in American Literature,” Professor Yao said. Pound’s poems draw on revolutionary era American history, Chinese history and his own experiences.
Professor Yao describes Pound’s poetry as “difficult” and “mystical” because of its political commentary through romance language. This is especially true in The Cantos, Pound’s unfinished poem split into 120 sections. The poem was highly controversial as politics became heated at the start of World War II. Pound takes the reader through his ideas, focusing on oppression in China due to government corruption.
Professor Yao ended his opening words by introducing the evening’s main attraction: “Emergency-room physician in Toronto by day (and night), Bernard Dew has an aesthetic calling and artistic gift: he is a devotee of experimental poetry, and Ezra Pound in particular, and is fascinated with avant-garde film, especially the work of Stan Brakhage. In recent years Dew has brought these fascinations together in a series of remarkable cinematic adaptations of selections from Pound’s epic Cantos.”
Many of Pound’s poems are ekphrastic, written verses in response to visual images or paintings. Dew brilliantly took the text and turned them back into images through his films portraying Cantos #49 and #116. Four years in the making, Dew primarily gathered footage from Venice, Pound’s home for the last few decades of his life as well as his burial ground.
In Canto #49, Dew has a typewriter-at-work overtone throughout the movie as 15mm film images flash on and off the screen. The grainy collage of film allows the viewer, for even just a few minutes, to journey inside Pound’s complex poetic mind. The images move quickly from beautiful Italian architecture to abstract color flashes Dew filmed in his basement.
In his final completed Canto, #114, Pound reflects upon the poem as a whole. “It’s especially moving to see him questioning himself,” Dew said. Rarely do poets question the legitimacy of their work, yet Pound explores his crisis in depth.
Dew portrayed the beauty of Pound’s reflection by filming the first half of the Canto in in silence. Images of long, drawn-out ocean waves fill the screen in silence as if representing Pound’s mind at work.
Bernard Dew offers an intriguing perspective on Pound’s legacy. Although the films will unlikely appear in a theater near you, the adaptations are slowly circling around the world depicting Pound’s poetry in a language that is universal.
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Liffissippi River to Joyce’s Poundland
…and when the mode of the
music changes
the walls of the
city shakea perspective from relative place
humbled individual to their part
in universe and othersingle individuated mind
in time
gathering tales and knick knacks
of history into a trick bagdo you feel melody and riddim’
in verse
word sound image sandwiches
attention to source
to _____ and just storyword jazz s c r a b l e m and
recontext’ of everything
in John Coltrane and
James JoycePound’s eccentricity flows
to American in Europe, Joyce’s concentricity
circulates the planettwo sides of a new shiny coin
ideograms on side a
hologrammic prose on the fliptwo torrential rivers of ink
bleeding shared currents
liffissippiJoyce’s Be-Bop and
Pound’s symphonic compositions
cut and mixed togetherHomeric history and Ulysses
in a conch shell sunset
and a Dublin street fightthe inner
Joyce and the
outer
Pound dynastic index
Irish American tell all talesThe Cantos awake
a wake Cantos:
a dream/nightmare from
which I am trying to awake
(not)sleepwalking giants leave
footprints in the mud
trackers reverse the prints
into beastsexplicit Cantos give us facts
weights and measures, the dates
places, names and flames to witimplicit Finnegan offers us
truer ficts, rubber inches,
neurological realism and the funnies…like J.C’s Ballads versus
Stellar Regions
it’s a whole different thing
consistent in its genius‘FW is psycho-archaeology
Dr Wilson said.
‘no mystery about the Cantos,
Pound said.
they are the tale of
the tribehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_the_Tribe–Steve Fly
Amsterdam, 9th June, 2013 -
Quotes from Ezra Pound Guide To Kulchur
I am currently reading Ez’s guide again and find it very stimulating with great ball of genius striking in the direction of the 2008-2013 global recession, music, painting, sculture and poetry. –Steve fly
Full text at Scribd.
Quotes from…
EZRA
POUND
GUIDE
TO
KULCHUR“To put it another way: it does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order, and quite unlikely to be very “new” in themselves however fresh or stale to the participant.”
“I suggest that finer and future critics of art will be able to tell from the quality of a painting the degree of tolerance or intolerance of usury extant in the age and milieu that produced it… That perhaps is the first clue the reader has had that these are notes for a totalitarian treatise and that I am in fact considering the New Learning or the New Paideuma… not simply abridging extant encyclopedias or condensing two dozen more detailed volumes… May I suggest (not to prove anything, but perhaps to open the reader’s thought) that I have a certain real knowledge which wd. enable me to tell a Goya from a Velasquez, a Velasquez from an Ambrogio Praedis, a Praedis from an Ingres or a Moreau…”
“Ideogram is essential to the exposition of certain kinds of thought. Greek philosophy was mostly a mere splitting, an impoverishment of understanding, though it ultimately led to the development of particular sciences. Socrates a distinguished gas-bag in comparison with Confucius and Mencius… At any rate, I need ideogram. I mean I need it for my own job…”
“Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman It gnaweth the thread in the loom None learneth to weave gold in her pattern; Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered Emerald findeth no Memling… Usura slayeth the child in the womb”
“Dante uses che sanno in his passage on Aristotle in limbo. He uses intendendo for the angels moving the third heaven… Our Teutonic friend, what’s his name (Vossler is it?), talks about schwankenden Terminologie des Cavalcanti’s. I believe because he hasn’t examined it. Till proof to the contrary overwhelms me, I shall hold that our mediaevals took much more care of their terms than the greeks of the decadence.”
“This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford a university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.”
http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Guide_to_Kulchur
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Ezra Pound and the tale of the tribe in 2013.
Ezra Pound and the tale of the tribe in 2013.
Today, Easter Sunday 31st March 2013, I am here at home in Amsterdam, switching between facebook, blogger, youtube and Wikipedia, and my copy of Pound’s Cantos. And I cannot resist pulling out some examples of Pounds relevance, coloured by the texts analysis by Pound/Joyce scholar Dr Robert Anton Wilson.
First off there is the poetry, the straight up imagist prose that is juxtaposing natures forms with man’s sensory experiences, bashing the mind with species and etymology through metaphor. Just on the surface, when revisiting Canto’s CXVII & CXVIII without pretending to be able to decode the strange new scripts intermingling on the page, there is an aesthetic appeal, an instant wonder and sense of the unique, nothing else in literature exits anything like this, to this day. And so I imagine the wonders and messages hidden away, what I don’t know is always in my face, highlighting what I can read and make inferences about, like little villages of recognizable action and meaning surrounded by a huge forest of mystery and unknown symbol systems.
Due my acknowledgement of what I don’t know about the Cantos, it proves difficult to state a case about the text, and about what Pound means by any particular fragment or ideogram. However, there is a long line of scholarship and decoding of the texts, along with extensive biographical commentary on Ezra Pound to help the lone rambler stumbling into the forest. Like Joyce’s equally dense work Finnegans Wake, Pounds Cantos…works its hidden magic most effectively with an accompaniment of skeleton keys, supportive texts and internet search engines, or if you are fortunate a good teacher.
Robert Anton Wilson regarded Ezra Pound very highly, although like many other Pound scholars made clear that he did not ascribe to Ezra’s opinions during the 30’s and 40’s which took on a fascist and racist tendency. RAW does not throw the baby out with the bathwater and almost begs us to reconsider Pound and all his contributions and his extensive wonderful works that aim to better humanity, our individual critical minds and refine a globalist taste for common horse-sense in general. RAW’s love and deep understanding of the Cantos is expressed in a series of Cantos commentaries published at rawfans.org, and which inspired this writing today. I recommend them highly, and especially with the Cantos in hand, reading in between the lines and discovering the labyrinth of rich languages running together with the English bits.
Commentary on The Cantos of Ezra Pound, c. 2001-2002
Canto I, II & XX, III, IV, VIII, IX, X,
XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVII, XVIII, XIX,
XXI, XXXI, XXXII, XCVIIIhttp://rawilsonfans.com/writings/
“There are six rites for festival
and 7 instructions
that all converge as the root tun pen
the root veneration (from Mohamed no popery)
To discriminate things
shih solid
mu a pattern
fa laws
kung public
szu private
great and small
(That Odysseus’ old ma missed his conversation)
To see the light pour,
that is, toward sinceritas”—Ez, Canto XCIX -
TTOTT 2013: Go git’ yr’ pens and pads
TTOTT 2013 by Steven ‘fly’ Pratt.
Some of my readers, and a small portion of friends may be familiar with Robert Anton Wilson and his tale of the tribe, but, alas i imagine that most are not. If you stumbled upon this writing, and are out of facebook well done, I dearly wish you might give me a chance to turn you on.
I have shared the continued relevance and impact that the individuals and ideas from ‘the tale of the tribe’ have had, and are having on global humanity through a network of blogs and posts. I am also resending the same simple message here: read Robert Anton Wilson’s books and try out his ideas, again! This post consists of a short review of his ideas from TTOTT and current 2013 events and breakthroughs that have a direct correspondence to the characters.
Swooping from the global banking and credit circus to ‘open source’ software ‘The tale of the tribe’ forms a unique doorway into a coherent system, running from the renaissance to the present day, that helps frame some big questions pertaining to our times, a bawdy bunch and global cross-section of individuals and their works selected by Dr Wilson for an equal balance of high-brow and low brow, art and science and mysticism, all innovators and ahead of their time.
“Art as TRANSACTION / Information as TRANSACTION—RAW”
Most of them, worryingly to me, are still understudied overlooked and almost forgotten in the majority of mainstream Academic institutions, yet, together in synchrony and as the TRIBE, they bootstrap their influences and coherence into a group of 13–relatively unknown–super geniuses. A kind of renaissance super hero-gang. I think that Dr Wilson picked these characters very very very carefully, and of course, they still hold infinite potential for anybody crazy enough to begin studying em’ and carefully scaffolding between ideas, and, furthermore, I am certain they will be important for the future scenarios and technological breakthroughs during 2013 and ahead, in the spirit of the poet as early warning missile defence system.
“Pound & Joyce supplement each other
like Jefferson & Adams
each created a NEW non-aristotelian
language
for the tale of the tribe”–RAWIn one sense, the tale of the tribe includes some of the most complicated and scholarly works known to man: Finnegans Wake, Information Theory, General Semantics, Pound’s Cantos, Cybernetics, Ulysses, Media Studies and Quantum Mechanics. On the other hand, I think that Dr Wilson recognized this ‘too complicated’ factor, and might have been hinting, in part, that in the age of internet search engines and masses of shared data, translation software etc. the once esoteric works and ideas available to the select few, can now be read, decoded, studied and poured over, even when high…by anyone and everyone who can connect to the net. You don’t need no stinking Yale or Cambridge library, or even their professors, in many cases, you require a connection and whole lot of time, will and energy to invest in things that at first may not seem worth your while pursuing. I hope to persuade you otherwise.
“Distinguish also between faith-based programs [NO FEEDBACK]
and research-based programs [MAXIMUM POSSIBLE FEEDBACK].–RAWFor me today, the tale of the tribe boils down to the concept of humanity. The problems confronting everyman man, women and living system on planet earth today. Dr Wilson stressed a comprehensive strategy, a GLOBAL view, and he was known for having at least seven models for explaining anything. This wish to communicate and show compassion to all-around-humanity remains a goal of ‘TTOTT’ and at the same time liberate humanity, consciousness and our daily doings from the boot and chains and guns of the oppressors:
Those who champion closed systems, surveillance, secrecy, violence, war and clandestine attacks on the emotional and physical strings of a mostly innocent humanity-as-a-whole. Those that fan the flames, do damage to names, switch the rules, the sneaky pundits and spin doctors, the war advertisers and the TV Mirage salespeople, those that wish the majority of us live in fear and in debt, be it to Gods or States-entities, they’re surely watching you even now. I hear you, and I think ‘TTOTT’ provides an historical current that runs counter to the above trending towards centralized control and secrecy, to shallow pools of bullshit passing as news and bad, wrongheaded single mindedness and bullying throughout the mediasphere. The decentralized universe of the mystics, poets, shaman & shawomen, neuro-scientists, design scientists and information theorists pushes against centralized control, both psychological and political (via. The digital hacktivist revolution) these are new forces that we have all heard about, if not felt in our daily life.
“can we see this emerging in psychedelics & internet?
or in Leary & McLuhan at least?”–RAWFly On The Tale Of The Tribe: A Rollercoaster Ride With Robert Anton Wilson
by Steven James Pratt
Link: http://a.co/gOGNKyV
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1922 year 1 of MODERNISM (Book review)
A new age dawned on October 30 1921, said Ezra Pound, who claimed that the Christian Era ended on the day that James Joyce finished the final paragraph of Ulysses. Three months later Joyce’s book was published on the palindromic date of 2/2/22 – his 40th birthday —http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/9712690/Constellation-of-Genius-by-Kevin-Jackson-review.html
DEEP SCRATCH 