Some thoughts on the art and the artist

The art and the artist, can we love one and not the other? It’s a difficult question to answer. Sometimes my heroes might seem to some a little foolish, embarrassing or pathetic, like Li Bai trying to kiss the moon’s reflection on the lake falling out of the boat and drowning himself (I had a friend who did pretty much the same thing, so it can happen), or Stephen Foster cutting his throat while shaving, a down and out Bowery drunk who had the shakes, or Janis Joplin falling down dead from a heroin overdose, flat on her face, breaking her nose in the process. These artists you might say were all too human, having maybe too much fun, but hurting no one really but themselves and the collateral damage of loved ones. I have no trouble loving them.

But sometimes I find out my heroes have had unlikable ideas that caused harm. Like Walter Brennan, one of my favorite actors since I was a kid, feeling so much affection for him, and he turns out to have been a right wing Jew hating racist. I come from Pennsylvania, the state of Joe Paterno, who turned a blind eye to young men buggered in the shower for the sake of football and the almighty dollar. Should we leave Joe’s statue up or tear it down? Should I never watch Red River again?

And then there’s Ezra Pound. Perhaps if he had only signed his letters with a Heil Hitler! and called Mussolini the boss, but he wrote articles for Italian newspapers with titles like, “Jews, Disease Incarnate,” during the time of the concentration camps, which leaves me feeling an involuntary, “Yuck,” right there in the middle of my guts. His politics started out all right and rather prophetic; Pound believed that the modern economy was becoming dependent on the manufacturing of armaments and to keep on going the future would have to make war not peace. We’d think of Pound as a far-sighted poet, but he also became antisemitic, and a ranter of hate blaming the Jews for everything.


Ezra Pound reads Cantico del Sole from Don Yorty on Vimeo.

I’ve pretty much avoided Pound my whole life. Have I been cutting off my nose to spite my face? There always has been plenty to read, more than I ever will be able to; in fact, I think it’s soon time to read Winesburg, Ohio and Les Fleurs du Mal again, but I’m planning to start the Cantos, some written on toilet paper when Ezra was left to go mad in the solitary cage with the blinding lights on. I bought Pound’s Collected Work a few weeks ago. The first poem, Child of the Grass, is young with lovely sounds and full of promise. The good and the bad are all of a piece bound in a book some 1400 pages long.

Child of the grass
The years pass Above us
Shadows of air All these shall Love us
Winds for our fellows
The browns and the yellows
Of autumn our colors
Now at our life’s morn. Be we well sworn
Ne’er to grow older
Our spirits be bolder At meeting
Than e’er before All the old lore
Of the forests & woodways
Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal
Ne’er shall we feel
Aught of sorrow

Let light flow about thee
As a cloak of air


Child of the Grass, I would love to hear how Pound would read that. Give a listen to Moeurs Contemporaines, a kind of nasty gossipy People Magazine 1919, a cantankerous poem (perhaps with premonitions of the evil to come). Pound’s voice reminds me of the sound a frustrated wasp makes flying against a windowpane. Just leave him alone and he won’t sting or say anything bad about you. He changes a few words from the original text while he reads. I’ve noticed he says, “She will neither come in, nor stay out,” instead of “She will neither stay in, nor come out.” Instead of “Stele” for the title of part VI, he says, “Column.” “There was once a man called Voltaire,” becomes, “There once was a man called Voltaire,” which has a bit of a limerick quality to it. I like that he says, “And the guards couldn’t stop ’em,” as opposed to “And the guards couldn’t stop them.” And he shortens “And I said: ‘That was before I arrived,'” to, “I said: ‘That was before I arrived.'” I believe he recorded Moeurs Contemporaines in 1958 shortly before he was released from Saint Elizabeths.


Moeurs Contemporaines by Ezra Pound from Don Yorty on Vimeo.

I read an account of T.S. Eliot visiting Pound at Saint Elizabeths Mental Hospital. Perhaps it was in a letter of Robert Frost, and perhaps Frost was there as well. As the poets sat talking on a couch, one of the other patients came vacuuming the floor with an imaginary vacuum cleaner. The poets lifted their feet when the sweeper got to them, so as not to get entangled in the invisible hose, letting the man continue cleaning. I’ve always liked the story. Eliot finally did get Pound out of Saint Elizabeths. It took him and other friends like Robert Frost over a decade to do it. Someone in the U. S. Justice Department finally decided it was time to let the cranky (vicious?) old coot out. If he hadn’t been committed as insane to begin with, Pound would have been sentenced to life in a federal pen for his pro-fascist work during WWII. His book is on the table. Should I take a look?

As an after thought I might add that both Eliot and Frost (neither perhaps the most likable of men) are two of my favorite poets and I will continue to read them for as long as I live. In fact, I’ve read them so deeply and so much that I feel (have felt) a part of them, or they a part of me, not just a reader and writer, but a talker and talker, actually communicating. Perhaps when all is said and done, Pound just doesn’t speak to me as those two have, but I need to give Pound a good listen, and see if we can start a conversation. Here he is reading his first canto.


Ezra Pound reads Canto 1 from Don Yorty on Vimeo.



4 Comments

  1. I was friends with a poet named Samuel Loveman (The Hermaphridite & Other Poems), close friend of Hart Crane, who was among those who got Pound out of that mental hospital. All the more remarkable, since Sam was Jewish. I’ve transcribed interviews I did with Sam back in the 1960s and plan to publish them. Sam was “discovered” by Ambrose Bierce and corresponded with Swinburne(!). He has some things to say about Pound in those interviews, He published a book, a slim thing, as well about Pound’s incarceration.

  2. gary introne

    I am tempted to call this flat-out rubbish, but I won’t, though I did. Don, you are being pedantic here, erecting your own categories and then ponderously and smartly responding to your own straw-man queries. It is only you here who is setting up these categories. What difference does it make whether you like the work or the person? And who would care? Why are you, inconceivbly, putting Janis Joplin and Walter Brennan in a mix of otherwise arguably credible people? That’s ridiculous. They were slight media characters of no import at all, except for the purposes of your argument. Of course, and why not, the old canard of anti-Semitic intention surfaces – once again, for you, conveniently; without facing off or discussing the issue itself and – of course – with a pre-ordained and already closed mind and decision. You won’t even entertain argument, already demanding to own the narrative. This isn’t a popularity and ease-of-comfort contest. these are learned people, with their own decision-making and conclusions. Were they here, with us, I’m sure they would respond and shred your arguments easily. But you wouldn’t accept that because it wouldn’t fit your closed box of teaching pedantry. There is no extreme reverence due here; both parts of the artist contain equal content. Quit your loving, and try acceptance of the ‘person’.
    I liked your smashed-head snake piece much betterm but I felt your reading was too tight.
    I hope this represents at the least, to you some authentic form of argument. Any errors, please forgive. Thanks, Gary Introne

    • Gary, I don’t feel like arguing. A lot of people enjoy this piece every time I post it. So from time to time I post it, and I did enjoy writing it. Obviously Walter Brennan and Janis Joplin mean more to me than they mean to you. C’est la vie.

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