In the spirit of getting something other that "hey, I didn't
get the message that said he didn't get the message about the
message she didn't get" in my mailbox today...
 
 
Does anybody have any knowledge of Pound's historical interaction
with the early 20th century (1905-1930) Russian avant garde? It
seems as if one might compare some of Pound's lyric poetry in the
personnae to the experiments of the neoprimitivists (e.g./ linguistic
experiments, "folk" and pseudo-academic etymologies in his treatment
of Chinese characters, his word coining (kenning) in his interactions
with Old English texts (The Seafarer, e.g.).) And the Cantos themselves
seem to share a lot of their ideology with neoprimitivist/futurist
writers such as V. Khlebnikov. While the question of their aesthetic
relationships is probably a cloudy one, I wonder if there's anything
lying around the Pound archives to suggest that he read/met with/
corresponded with some of the big folk in Russia at the time.
 
-- Simon DeDeo
 
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sdedeo