Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”: GUFFAW!
So much for the gagged reviewers,
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;
These are they who objected to newness,
Here are their tomb-stones.
They supported the gag and the ring:
A little BLACK BOX contains them.
So shall you be also,
You slut-bellied obstructionist,
You sword foe to free speech and good letters,
You fungus, you continuous gangrene.
Come, let us on with the new deal,
Let us be done with pandars and jobbery,
Let us spit upon those who pat the big-bellies for profit,
Let us go out in the air a bit.
—Ezra Pound, “Salutation the Third,” 1914
Trying to figure out what triggered this (not that posting Pound requires any justification)…
Honest to God, despite the recent events on various social media, nothing triggered it beside my habit of picking up my LOA edition of Pound and pecking through it at random every couple of days. (Some might call this my serving of cultural vegetables, even!) This particular passage kinda jumped out at me. Not so much the invective as “let’s go out in the air a bit,” I dig that sentiment.
That could be from BLAST–God knows it’s written in the house style, though that particular line Glenn cites sounds like a lift from one of EP’s Catullus translations.
I mate with my free kind upon the crags;
the hidden recesses
Have heard the echo of my heels.
in the cool light,
in the darkness.
(Didn’t the Fugs do a version of this?)
I always did like EP. The earlier, funnier ones, anyway.
I like EP too, but “Come, let us on with the new deal” has a funny ring to it 3 years short of a century later, coming as it does from the man who would soon be deriding “President Rosenfeld.”
Yeah, there’s a lot going on here. Brings to mind a ditty by my old pal Peter Blegvad, also an EP enthusiast, whose first verse goes, “Say someone stole a line from Ezra Pound/Who’s to say it hadn’t lay there for centuries waiting to be found/and that he did not create it/no he heard a voice dictate it/in fact all he did was write it down.”
And yes, “Salutation” was a BLAST! piece.
Off-topic (or, in a stretch, on the subject of poetry) been wanting to share this info with “ExtAngel” Glenn for the two months it’s been around: “3xchair”, the REAL Armond White’s Twitter handle (presumably named for his three times chairing the NY Film Critic’s Circle- humble as always, our man). It would be quite interesting for you to shake up his little echo-chamber by tossing some @‘s his way, Mr. Kenny.
“Slut-bellied obstructionist” is going in my permanent file of insults. It may not be all-purpose, but I’m going to use it as often as I can even loosely justify doing so.
Hey, guys, let’s nobody tell commenter ‘leon” (http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/05/thats-bevay-floyd.html?cid=6a00e5523026f5883401543225c32f970c#comment-6a00e5523026f5883401543225c32f970c) about Ezra Pound, okay?
Someday a real rain will come and wash all the slut-bellied obstructionists off the streets.