secrets of the modern poets #2 - ezra pound loves having two wives

Everybody know Ezra Pound played the bassoon. That's because Ezra Pound was the first blogger. He was a blogger that used other people's publications to document his life.

His romantic life was out of the tabloids. Olga Rudge and Dorthy Shakespear. Both of them. To the end.

He was fire in public, like gary busey. He would fence with his cane walking down the street. And made frequent scenes while reading poems to Wyndam Lewis and others at restauraunts. One bistro actually had a folding wall they would pull in around the writers table to keep the rest of the eating people at ease.

Pound was a control freak, a grab the wheel type. He helped bring up many of the figureheads of modernism, and liked to think he had a part in so many more. Toward the end of his life he became a cover band. Charles Olson comments on his change in the notes he wrote while visiting pound in St. Liz's. As Pound repeats CHAW CUT PLUG to the gaurd there Olson describes it as, "the poet making sounds, trying to see if they warmed his ear. But it was the fascist too, as snob, classing the gaurd." Pound began to use the pretty past of poetics to mask an increasingly agitated view on people, but mostly american and jewish people.

When pound was young he was going to a party one night, and before he got there people at the party were saying, "ezra pound the jew is coming." and when he got there he heard of the things that had been said. I always imagined this had some effect on his later antisemitism.

When I was younger and I found out about Pound's 'double-cross' on america it made me want to stick by america for the rest of my life. I told myself, don't worry america, you will get your due. Pound made a mistake about you. I believe in your great dingy."

secrets about modernist poets #1

When TS Eliot was little he used to go through the fence behind his house and walk the halls of the girls school behind his house in St louis. When he graduated high school he was sent to milton academy by his parents.

Stearns family life was rigid and oppresive. He had a big family. I think he loved his mother alot, but felt she was often too busy. Eliot loved the rigidity of schools. It was this systematic lifestyle that lead him to banking and eventually to catholic life.

It seems Eliot's family had an indirect effect on his literary life. I don't know if he would have become as important if his father wasn't vaugely a philanthropist.

Don't forget Tom also married up, and seemed to always have his eye on some prize. I wonder if some of those poems weren't frustrated outbursts on the systems that organize him to the margins. He could of just been addicted to the research he started as a child, watching his religous family move room to room. He had such terrible attempts at marraige, but I guess that is always common.