Epic Proportions

Dude. Ezra Pound, chill out with all that anti-Semitism. You're making me a bit uncomfortable with all that degrading talk about Jews and women. You're quite the jerk ya know... Taylor Swift wrote a song about you (see above).

The great Ezra Pound was a little more than my little brain could handle all at once. I felt super dumb for not knowing all of the references and found it quite frustrating to have to stop and read three paragraphs of footnotes after every other line. But I was determined to enjoy Pound this week, to some extent at least. So I did a little research and found that I was not alone in my frustration with the Cantos. Even the famous poet William Carlos Williams had some concerns. In the New York Evening Post Literary Review he laments, "Pound has tried to communicate his poetry to us and failed. It is a tragedy, since he is our best poet" (www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ezra-pound).

We are not alone. But nevertheless, his poetry made it big, so there must be something awesome about it. Maybe its Epic. As in, the poem fits into the epic genre. But this epic, unlike others, is not shackled by any one place, generation, or person but is omniscient. (and maybe epic in the 21st century definition of the word too, but that's a bit more subjective.)

Pound pounds absolute power permanently into our permeable brain pattern. 

That was fun and has nothing to do with what follows... :) 

In Canto XLV Pound directly attacks the Jews and their use of usury. He compares and contrasts all of the good things that came about "not by usura" and depicts "usura" as a force that "blunteth the needle in the maid's hand/ and stoppeth the spinner's cunning." I can't help but be reminded of Shakespeare's comedy The Merchant of Venice whereby a Jew by the name of Shylock is known for his usury and bad character. Through this play, Shakespeare plays with the stigma that Jews are inferior and Christians are superior. He subtly suggests that maybe a deeper inspection of motives is needed to get a clearer picture of the differences-- that Christians aren't any better than Jews. Pound must have overlooked that part. Anyway, the way Pound contrasts what happens when usury is not used verses when it is used makes this poem stand out. Rather than just saying "when usury isn't involved we have Duccio, Pier della Francesca, etc" he contrasts the good things directly with the absence of usury-- "Not by usura St. Trophime/ not by usura Saint Hilaire."

Is/Not, a poem by Margaret Atwood takes a similar idea of comparison and contrast and applies it beautifully.

"Love is not a profession

genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry

the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor

you are not my cure,

nobody has that

power, you are merely a fellow/traveller

Give up this medical concern,

buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger

and permit me mine

which needs neither

your approval nor your suprise

which does not need to be made legal

which is not against a disease

but against you,

which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,

which needs instead

to be said and said.

Permit me the present tense"

While content vastly differs between the poems, the conduit by which they communicate has some similarities worth noting. Atwood even incorporates the use of absence in her poem by not saying what love/sex is, but only what is it not. Both could have said it differently, but chose to say it through comparison and contrast to make you think and feel the tension between the objects of the poem. A tension of Epic Proportions...

lame joke.