Post by Denny on Jan 26, 2023 7:53:22 GMT -5
Thought’s really are noisy as bubble wrap.
I meant to speak on a lot of nothing sooner but just left the package empty. Maybe the goods aren’t fragile or valuable. It’s funny how the favorable tales end with ‘they lived happily ever after’. The interesting part is usually the conflict and when that’s happily laid to rest then one can quietly sip tea and contemplate in peace and who can argue with such an auspicious predicament?
I actually find that bit about Ezra an ethical historical curiosity. I’ve read no biography nor am I much inclined. The man was talented but a putz. I think it’s more fun to read about HD who seems equally complicated and more interesting. Barbara Guests book about HD and her world is engaging but I don’t recall if I actually finished it. I think it was pretty long. Mary Oppens memoir has an interesting recollection of time she and George spent with Ezra in Italy. George thought him a crank politically and George was a communist. Ezra knew any number of Jewish poets like Oppen, Reznikoff and Zukofsky and from what little I’ve read Ezra, though he was doubtlessly duly opinionated, appears to have been supportive of the poetry community or at least those poets whose work he liked and his atrocious politics don’t appear to have played out much on a personal level. George Oppen was a generation younger than Pound and his lived experience offers a stark contrast. He volunteered to fight fascism in WW2 and was nearly killed. Post war his persecution as a communist lead to a ten year exile in Mexico. I think George and others tried to shield Ezra from the worst consequences of treason.
I meant to speak on a lot of nothing sooner but just left the package empty. Maybe the goods aren’t fragile or valuable. It’s funny how the favorable tales end with ‘they lived happily ever after’. The interesting part is usually the conflict and when that’s happily laid to rest then one can quietly sip tea and contemplate in peace and who can argue with such an auspicious predicament?
I actually find that bit about Ezra an ethical historical curiosity. I’ve read no biography nor am I much inclined. The man was talented but a putz. I think it’s more fun to read about HD who seems equally complicated and more interesting. Barbara Guests book about HD and her world is engaging but I don’t recall if I actually finished it. I think it was pretty long. Mary Oppens memoir has an interesting recollection of time she and George spent with Ezra in Italy. George thought him a crank politically and George was a communist. Ezra knew any number of Jewish poets like Oppen, Reznikoff and Zukofsky and from what little I’ve read Ezra, though he was doubtlessly duly opinionated, appears to have been supportive of the poetry community or at least those poets whose work he liked and his atrocious politics don’t appear to have played out much on a personal level. George Oppen was a generation younger than Pound and his lived experience offers a stark contrast. He volunteered to fight fascism in WW2 and was nearly killed. Post war his persecution as a communist lead to a ten year exile in Mexico. I think George and others tried to shield Ezra from the worst consequences of treason.