On Sat, 24 Jan 1998 22:09:21 -0600 wrote...
>>
 
And yet at the same time, it seems to me that some of the experiments in
expressive form that Pound undertook are for the first time becoming
mainstream. The movie Pulp Fiction, for example, works through the disruption
of temporal reality and through provacative juxtapositions of images suggestive
of meaning. Twenty years ago, no one would have been able to accept such a
movie. As a culture, we are moving towards different receptions of reality, and
while some of those are frightening, there is, I think, something positive
afoot when popular culture is able to engage information that requires the
swift perception of distant relations.  And this is Poundian, refined, made
pop.  It is also illustrative of some kind of cultural effect, one that I
think suggests that Pound will become an acknowledged grand daddy. I know my
local Borders bookstore stocks more Pound books now than it did seven years
ago. Even critical works on Pound are there, from Kenner to Peter Makin. Nor
should we pass over the fact that as American culture comes more and more under
the influence of Asian culture, and perhaps, specifically Chinese culture,
those writers who were pushing the connection early will get an honored place.
That said, probably few people will ever read much Pound. Isn't there a story
in one of the biographies about Olga Rudge in the 60s, saying to some of the
flower children who had camped out in front of their house in Venice that if
any of them could recite just one line from the poetry, they could meet Pound?
The guy is for rock climbers.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
What do you think: can it be that in ten
>>years our kids are going to regard Pound the way young people regarded Pope
>>in, say, 1808, and for the same intelligible and not serious reasons?
>>
>
>I don't think it will take ten years. My son is sixteen, writes fiction and
>poetry, reads Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Burroughs. He thinks Pound is a
>fossil. Or worse, a crazy boring old Fascist fossil that his dad reads. But
>even factoring out the generational static between us, I think Pound will
>continue to be an acquired taste as the years roll along. I notice that my
>son and his friends favor **short** poems and fiction. I think perhaps
>television and MTV, digested by my son in large quantities, may have worked
>against EP (or Stevens, or even Whitman) in this regard.
>
>And strangely enough, they all loathe language poetry...
>
>Joe Ahearn
>Rancho Loco Press
>Dallas
>
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Robert E. Kibler
Department of English
University of Minnesota
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                fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,
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