And I have little more to add than that, so… pop!

In fact, I take it for granted, since it’s been built while I’ve been here, but PennSound’s archive of Pound recordings is incredibly rich. Here, for instance, is a 1939 recording of “Ode Pour L’election De Son Sepulchre,” where you can hear his faux-Yeatsing to better advantage. Or later, a 1958 recording of Canto I that must have been made as soon as he was released from St. Elizabeth’s.

1) My OT’s progressed to the point where I can type with both hands again, which pleases me to no end. My felicity is pretty good, speed is, well, getting there. I get tired, though, so I posted this in batches after reading your post this morning. And I’m bad at spotting typos.

2) I love Lewis Hyde’s book; it introduced me to The Cantos, and I used it extensively in a dissertation chapter on Citizen Kane (a movie all about variations on the gift economy, including collection and trash). But if you want Pound the poet AND Pound the person, Kenner’s The Pound Era can’t be beat. It’s a lot like McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, except instead of the printing press, Kenner has Ezra Pound.

Speaking of which, for book/tech folks like us, Kenner’s The Mechanical Muse is also a marvel, as is Lawrence Rainey’s book about the Malatesta Cantos, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture. I think EP is essential to any media-driven reading of the early twentieth century, because he already did so much of the heavy lifting himself. ABC of Reading is a great entry point for this, and to Pound in general.

Robin:

1) Pound was notorious, but of course he never sold terribly well. TS Eliot and later Robert Frost certainly did better, as did almost any well-known fiction writer. (Then as now, poetry does not sell.) Pound (like Gertrude Stein) was always a convenient target to lampoon whenever anyone wanted to deplore the excesses of the “new writing.” So he was much better known than read. And he was extremely well-known among people who read poetry or poetry journals, because he wrote so much. Some analogues in our own time might be filmmakers like Spike Lee or Lars von Trier; they’ve both had some successes, which is why they get to keep making movies, and their films always get written about, but they’re not shown in a ton of theaters. If you asked a random person in the 20s who EP was, they might say, “oh, that guy who writes those poems that don’t mean anything.,” or something similar.

If I can find Rainey’s book, I can dig up some real numbers for you. Likewise, there are recordings somewhere of Ezra’s radio broadcasts…

I would love for a good movie to be made about Pound. Or about Gertrude Stein. Those are the two writers from the first half of this century whose lives, personalities, and writings were so dramatic that people would be shocked at how well they translated to celluloid.

Our hilo heroes brief is 200 words; thanks be you’re under no such restriction. Lewis Hyde gave me back Pound as a person—you’ve restored him as a poet.

An observation and a question.

The observation. This…

“Pound’s brain was always faster than his lin­guis­tic skills, and his Ital­ian would slip, jux­ta­posed with long pas­sages in Eng­lish where he would per­form in dif­fer­ent dialects, as dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters — as if he were Orson Welles doing voices for a radio show.

…cries out for dramatization. Or re-dramatization, I guess. Maybe dramatic interpretation. Sounds like the source material for an Oscar contender. Or perhaps some innovative RadioLab-ish audio project.

The question. You talk about Pound as anti-low, anti-high, anti-middlebrow, and mention that he “cham­pi­oned both pop­u­lar cul­ture.” How was Pound consumed in his day? Who was reading him? Had a random American pulled off the street ever read Ezra Pound? Pulled off the street in San Francisco? In Cambridge, Mass.?