Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

The great Modernist of 20th century poetry
blew into town drunker than a skunk
pissing away foggy days as guest lecturer
too soon fleeing into the night
with a pretty young thing from the back of the class
She, he solemnly married sober then dumped
somewhere on the continent

___________________________________

- a true tale my lit prof regaled the class with


.

i never trusted that guy. enjoyed immensely.

ty the university was so scandalized that they still talk about it in hushed titillated tones decades later.... no one knows what became of the poor girl.

~west

Interesting diary entry.

EP, one of the 20th century's greatest writers, f-ed some booj-wah coed in his office. Wowee. It cost him his Americun academic career, really. If that offends ye, you rilly in the wrong biz. ( ah trust it doesn't). He was skilled in numerous languages, an expert chess player, amateur scientist, and composer as well. Pompous perhaps but as with his pal TS about as close as any yankee approached a renaissance mensch.

What might offend a bit more would be Ez's broadcasts for Mussolini during the 20s and 30s. Now that was a rath-thur egregious moral failing. (Buk loved Ez, be assured of dat). Read his Cantos written during his time as prisoner of the US in a cage in Pisa. Intense: like Kubrick or somethin' but better.

great personages are often greatly flawed.. i'm not offended. he's history. i think it's funny my alma matter remains twittering about a long distant event.

interesting comments Totenkopf.

are you familiar with the lives of lesser known poets, such as Galsan Tschinag? schooled in east germany then returned to mongolia. a leader of his people. i doubt his poetics would appeal to you, but his story might.

http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu//tschinag/intro.htm


~westie

thx. it came off a bit ruder than I intended. es tut mir leid.

No I don't follow poesy biz, really. Lots of it just doesn't do much for me. One "modern" whose work I read with amusement is Simic. That dude is whacked. His work reminds me of Barthelme, or perhaps Kafka. Strange, comic-nightmare vision, and not as PC or marxista like so many wannabeats-

i'll check him out. tx

i gave a google to this Simic and was rewarded with Charles Simic and a link to his poetry. Fun reading so far.

"Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator."

-Charles Simic

I am in love!! I am gaga over Simic - he is my kind of art.



Good god, why hadn't I heard of the man before.

Thank you so much Totenkopf for the recommendation.

~westcoast

De nada. Yeah he has some nice riffs, like your quote: wasn't he Poet Laureate for a while? The online stuff seems tamer than much of his recent writing. Nice work if you can hustle it.

i believe he was PL 2007.

Ok this is sort of a tu-tone response.

Yea, 'nice work if you can hustle it'.
Yeh the poet laureate bizness, go figure..

On the other hand, would someone explain, and with a little more clarity of language please, just how the beats and wanna-beats are "PC"? Or is it just the 'wanna-beats'? And how so?

And the marxista thing... Of what particular relevance is that here, or in so many of these discussions for that matter? In this thread for example, it would seem something such as, say, fascist leanings of certain artistes/scholars/thinkers might be more relevant to the topic at hand.

wc - You should post about Pound and what happen there. I would be interested in wanting to know about it.
_________________
Honda Activa

Yes, perhaps you have a videotape of the indiscretion!

Seriously, EP's supposed scandal with the coed at UoP, or Hamilton or whereever pales before many of his other acts (read a few transcriptions of his radio propaganda done for Il Duce for phunn). Much of this sort of "literary biography as ethics-lite" (not saying wc does that here, but one sees similar sorts of writing, whether lit, or non-fiction) functions as sort of a character defamation by proxy. Once a Pound has been shown to be flawed (which he probably was), then he's tossed in the Evil European Kultur category or something.

That sort of ethics by proxy begs the question of "Justice" anyways. Although all too many soi-disant marxists and liberal belle-lettrists believe they have some insight into ethics (merely by intuition or some other mysterious process), lit. is NOT ethics. Besides, few are those who could offer some convincing rational justification for any Justice-realm, whether theological platonic or otherwise.

Pound could have been a scoundrel, and still have written great things (indeed he did, and that's probably part of the appeal of EP to some bourgeois. Americun consumers love their Literary bad boys.)

too true. and what i wrote is all i know - passed on from semester to semester. my point wasn't condemnation. in fact, there wasn't one really. just the sharing of tidbit. interesting commentaries nevertheless.



~westcoast