Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and the intolerant

Another night of troubled sleep faces me, so I sit reading Ezra Pound. His own life quixotic yet his writing both enigmatic and divine, Pound helped to bring the world some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps most substantially, T.S. Eliot--all these writers owe great debts to a man who offered the modernist voice to poetry. If you read nothing else of his, I recommend The Cantos. It's not easy. Indeed, he wrote *eight* volumes over the course of 52 years. But everything I find amazing about language and form is found there. Detaching mania from genius is not always possible. Maybe to be truly brilliant, you need to be a little crazy. If that's the case, I wouldn't mind a little of that kind of crazy.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity , it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity , I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry ,
Pull down thy vanity ,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance .
'Master thyself, then others shall thee beare'
Pull down thy vanity

--from Canto 81

Not to go too far into analysis here, but consider the thought of this passage. Something remarkable is being realized. Our author, the voice, makes a claim to have exorcised Vanity through having seen what is man's limited place in the scale of a green world in which 'it is not man / Made courage, or made order, or made grace'. Around us, there is a Oneness of the universe where all things are brought together in a construct of both intricate detail and massive scale. Yet, even as humanity exists within a cosmic order of such proportion that we can scarcely conceive it, we remain in thrall to another power, a remoteness that is itself a human creation, a thing 'in scaled invention or true artistry'. Perhaps this remoteness is an artifact, e.g the mind of man at work with its many inventions. Or it could be even less tangible, as in a natural consequence of art. In any case, as we are freed by the nature of the universe, we are contained by the very nature of being human. This dichotomy says something about us as human beings. An unspoken contract binds each of us to one another, whether we consent to it or not. Actions can ripple throughout time, echoing long after even the thought of us has faded from memory. And all of this can be found if you simply look closely enough for it. This is why I love art, why I love poetry. This is reason for Ezra Pound.

**************

No one wants to talk about literature anymore. I don't mean "that David Sedaris is good; when is his next book coming out?" Whether poetry, prose, or a play, no one knows how to talk about literature anymore. Whether taught and forgotten or simply never attempted, few see the power of this kind of thinking, the places it can take you. In a sense, we are all amazing little worlds. But too few care about how to go from simple orbit to terra firma. Once when I was taking a class on writers' of the three Americas (i.e. North, Central, and South), I had a professor ask, in the midst of some particularly complicated psychological read of Fuentes' Aura, 'Why are we doing this?' At that point, the class seemed to freeze. Other than a course credit or the right to say that we've read such books, there was hardly an answer that seemed anything other than shallow sucking-up. Noticing our discomfort, (and surely enjoying it from the smile on his face), this professor offered an unexpected answer. "All of this, all of the reading, the dissecting, the unpacking of passages, the study and application of lines of reasoning through the biographic, the bibliographic, the genetic, the historic, the epistemological, the psychological--all of these reads that we do, in the end, serve one purpose. To enjoy the writing just a little bit more."

That, my friends, is why this guy was the best teacher I ever had in my life. Close down the store, that's all I needed to hear. Because he was right. All the time, effort, even the *hassle* put into the analysis of literature (please note that analysis and criticism are two completely different things) isn't just an exercise. We do it because we love writing. We love authors. We love art. To understand undertakings as complicated as Carlos Fuentes or Ezra Pound is like holding a ripely blossomed flower or falling in love. Rarely is anything so beautiful or sweet as that moment.

People are such amazing little worlds. Sometimes we just have to look really close to see through the atmosphere.