No the sculpture of Jacob Epstein is behind Rock-Drill. You don't say why
you think Kenner's first book on Pound is lousy, Carrol. Tell us.

GAVIN




on 1/25/03 2:15 PM, Carrol Cox at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Nikolay Nikiforov wrote:
>>
>> Take Kenner, the major specialist on Ezra.
>> http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/bbr/reviews/March2001/hugh_kenner_thegrandto
>> ur.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