On Fri, 30 Jan 1998 08:50:46 -0500 wrote...
>
   I really think the first book of Kenner's, "The Poetry of Ezra Pound," does
a better introductory job of bringing initiates closer to Pound's work.  Pound
Era is a great book, but it is Kenner's book.  It illustrates Kenner's
brilliance, refracted through Pound, by way of Buckminster Fuller, for an
audience of folk who already admire Pound's work.  And if I had to make a list
of the five most important first books for understanding Pound (Companion
aside), read in this sequence, here is what that very limited but manageable
list would look like:
 
 Carol Christ, Victorian and Modernist Poetics (paperback, available)
 Kenner I: Poetry of Ezra Pound  (paperback, available)
 Paul Nassar, Cantos of Ezra Pound: The Lyric Mode
 Daniel Pearlman, Barb of Time: Unity of Pound's Cantos
 Leon Surrette, A Light from Eleusis, A Study of Cantos
 
         you know, this was a very difficult list to assemble, given all of
         the great Pound criticism out there.  But here it is. $100 worth of
         books, my guess, though Nassar, Pearlman, Surrette probably out of
         print. After this, you could move to books that look at sections of
         the Cantos--Nolde, Bacigalupo, Furia, or which situate Pound in broad
         philosophical traditions, Gefin, Scwhartz, Sherry, Zhaomin--but here
         I go, thwarting the cleanness of a five book list...
 
 
 
 > The Pound Era overwhelming.
>>
>> actually: the pound era was the first book -on- pound i ever read. it
>> absolutely facinated me. (did kenner die? if so, when?)
>> i actually took the idea of the one two page section with the photo of pound
>> juxtaposed to the portrait by lewis. i made a large xeroxed copy of the
>> photo and a small xeroxed copy of the painting. i attached the painting to
>> the lower righthand corner of the photo. it hangs above my desk.
>> yup.
>> jeff.
>>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
>>
>>         There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass,
>>         there are only
>>         eyes in all heads
>>         to be looked out of
>>
>>                              -charles olson, from "letter 6" (of the maximus
>                                   poems)
>
>Tim Redman
>School of Arts and Humanities, JO 31
>University of Texas at Dallas
>P.O. Box 830688
>Richardson, TX  75083-0688
>
>(972) 883-2775 (o)
>(972) 883-2989 (fax)
>
>
 
Robert E. Kibler
Department of English
University of Minnesota
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                fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,
                Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.