Ezra Pound wrote that “I believe in technique as a test of a man’s sincerity.” This is a declaration of faith in art, in the making of the thing as the place of significance, the place where meaning happens.
Williams proclaimed “no ideas but in things.” This is a different kind of declaration, one that suggests a skepticism about art as art.
Pound and Williams came from a common place, Imagism, which praised precision and clear images over abstractions and decoration. From there, they diverge widely.
Here’s a different kind of apology in the following, late Canto by Pound.
Canto CXX
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
—Ezra Pound
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11 comments:
...sometimes I just feel what I read, is that enough??
tell me what you feel.......
...I hope I knew how to put it in words, maybe I would be a poet...but the thing is that poems have a rythm like music, or color like painting, sometimes I feel like a chemestry, I just like them or not...sometimes if I don`t like a poem I read it more times and maybe I can start to like it, or understand it...but never like the ones I fall in love at first sight...
Like with me...
Pero, soy el maestro.
...si Salvador..exactamente...y Garrett, como que tu eres el maestro? what do you mean?? was it a bad answer?
...si Salvador..exactamente...y Garrett, como que tu eres el maestro? what do you mean?? was it a bad answer?
"the ones I fall in love with" - to which Salvador responded "Like with me...." So I just wanted to say that it's okay for students to fall in love with their teachers.
Yes, it was a good answer. To take the metaphor of a love a little further, there are poems we might feel an initial attraction towards, only to realize that they are quite shallow when we return to them again. Good poems have something to give again and again - but we have to be willing to be patient with them, treat them with attention.
As silly as this may begin to sound, I really do think we have conversations with poems. The good ones are the ones that, rather than telling us something that we get at once, speak to us again and again.
In my bookish way of thinking about things: Walter Benjamin wrote about the "aura" of art - that it was the experience of the painting looking back at us. Same with poetry, the poem talks back to us.
This goes for my argument against taste: poems are not things to consume, like TV shows or cheese, where our role is to become expert in the qualities of the thing or just to be entertained. Good poems come alive, and live with us.
I feel that some cheese speaks to me.
...yes, we know, cartoonists are like that...
Ah...I understand now about you being the teacher...don`t worry all of us, eventually, will fall in love with you..
take it easy Babe...
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