Nikolay Nikiforov wrote:
>
> Take Kenner, the major specialist on Ezra.
> http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/bbr/reviews/March2001/hugh_kenner_thegrandtour.htm
> He once wrote a book about "Poetry of Ezra Pound".
> Then discarded it, it's not in print anymore, but there's "Pound Era".

I own that book. When I began reading Pound back in 1956 it was about
the only book on Pound available.

Actually, it's a really lousy book -- an unrevised and unexpanded
printing of Kenner's doctoral dissertation.

As lousy as it was, it was better than nothing and offered one some hope
that if one kept at the Cantos something might come of the effort.

In a later essay (I read it long ago, don't know where, & can't quote or
paraphrase it very accurately), Kenner (I think it was Kenner) quotes
directly a conversatin between a NY cabdriver and a passenger in which
the cabdriver came out with an immense amount of information on some one
topic (I can't remember the topic -- perhaps Chinese history). That
cabdriver had been a guard at the Pisa DTC. It seems Pound was an
enormously gifted teacher, using a rock-drill as it were and various
kinds of repetition to drive informnation into his listener's head.

I take it that the idea of driving ideas/information home is behind the
title _Rock-Drill_??

Carrol