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7/6/2014

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9. U K A S E    U K A S E    U K A S E

            Led through historical landscape / syntactical not quite cosmological / but through civilization / understanding the narrative & events by sequence / but some other tracking procedure must be in order / world built into the Cantos / follow & attend / follow & attend. / inter-civilizations (Frobenius!)  OL EZ extending his body / ego into history through his epic /

            hairy epic “Shall we call in the world to conduct our municipal government . .  .”

            “Hath benefit of the interest on all the monies which it / the bank / creates out of nothing.”  Steinbeck feared “The Bank” too / called it “The Monster” in The Grapes of Wrath. 

            “. . . & this reward is fundamentally different from a tax.

            “From the moment a STATE bank-note exists / the state works & supplies the

            “MEASURE & has the right to reward

             “(tokens / stamps / invented by Avigliano / & by Gesell) 1%

             “interest per month maximum.  The savage uses one instrument /

             “where the civilised man uses a hundred.

            “One means for EXCHANGE.

            “Another for saving.

            “All the expense of the State must be paid for with prescriptable money.

            “All the services / everything that goes with each day is & renewed each day

             “must be paid for with a money which is not permanent.

             “I GET ANGRY EVERY TIME

             “THEY TELL ME WORK

             “IS A COMMODITY.

            “. . . LONG LIVE ITALY.”

            Ezra Pound

            jure italico[i]

10.  f o l l y

barbed wire cage/ special cage made out air strip cages werent barbed wire they were inside several fences of same the line of cages inside the punishment area / labeled ‘DEATH CELLS’ there he sat brooding in his cage in Pisa his body tamed / hair-crown flattened / but his eyes wild wild his anti-Semitism / his intellectual arrogance unbound.  Poor Ez Poundlooney / disarticulated / fragmentingthe seasons change / he sd to himself / leaves fall early this autumn / in wind butterflies yellow w/ August poor Pound / blind / blind as a bat old dog lickingits old sore: shadowed ghostwind seavoice heard in his hard heart / shadowy substantial & briskly swiftly speaking swiftly wafting swiftly voices singing signed softly & directly / swiftly gone eyebells  he uttered vowels to himself: oo--ah--oo--ay--oh--ah--oo.  the guard told him to shut his fascist fucking mouth & rapped the cage hard so that it buzzed Ole Ez looked down at his Chinese dictionary / his translated scraps of Confucian odes / his eucalyptus pip from the salita that goes up from Rapallo & sighed.[ii]  Alas / alas

           

if stanzas cd bleed / If paragraphs cd stab hearts / Amurika: rationality’s not intelligence / we’re bound to a terrible history inherited / Africa / Asia / at war with half the world Ezra looked at his hands  I’m a time mechanic / he sd to his left hand / not an embalmer poor Pound: traitor / fascist / nazi-sympathizer / aspiring philosopher king a la Plato / a la Heidegger trapped in his fragments.  He remembered his earlier years in London.  Flits of montage.  Tea with poets / strolling Soho / transcribing Yeats / courting Dorothy’s mother & teasing Dorothy with casual glances / waking early to shape his obscene Poundpadour / I am quintessential / he sd aloud to himself silently enough so as not to draw his guard’s attention / he looked at the Pisan hills over yonder & the dirt road leading through them & in his mind sd I overturned poetic meter / listen: my poetry’s changed the world he mentally told those brown hills Pound knew how to build chairs from pieces of scrap lumber & old posts / pecuniary living taught him village explainer / he couldn’t carry a tune to save his life / but he had an acute sense of linguistic rhythm.  “. . . to compose “in the sequence of he musical phrase / not “in sequence of a metronome.”  He advised Yeats to make it new by searching old forms / seek some troubadour fer yr blood / Sligo--make ye feel new / be an antennae not an ant & so Pound in his cage & in his poetics wallowed in the plumpy shit of his predecessors  revolutionary simpleton lightning flashed / rain poured / & he curled at his cage’s center covering his dictionary & translations with his torso we’re of one wood Ezra . . .  melopoet & which way does yr goatee point tonight? Pound tapped a rhythm onto the floor of his cage--one two THREE--one two--one TWO three--one two--one two . . . THREE  listened closely to his palm pop & he stacked syllables in his mind escaping his constrained landscape via soundscape / O & the purple vowels rushed & pushed upon him from somewhere outside his cage / duration / duration / duration he sd to those hills / music makes me happen he sd ear / ear for the sea surge / murmur of old men’s voices / flashes / bits / fragments / no pictures of those bastards. Pound was not crying.Pound / & don't say poor Pound: Pound blind as a bat in political matters / he was worn faint from the winds of good & evil / blinded w/ dust & burned cold down to his bones / out of key w/ his time invitation / mere invitation to invention / to perceptivity / gradually led him to the isolation of his cage.  Read this: “I was & no more exist / drifted a hedonist fascist.”  Setting sun behind hills / pink sky--sun’s gold glow reflected in rain puddle. Hold for just a minute longer light / just a minute please Pound sd to himself. Magnified serenity of the setting sun. & to himself he sd Whot the woild NEEDZ--



[i] Carpenter, 541.


[ii] Canto 80, lines 244-45. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1948.


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