Pound for a pound of flesh (poet, Ezra Pound) by richard lynn livesay

I enter the void of my blank-white world

Punch lettered buttons, mind-connected

I call up Ezra Pound and his imagist poetry

I read his apology to Walt Whitman, grinning

Time grows us new limbs reaching skyward

Our roots grow deeper and horizons expand

“Let there be commerce between us,” he says

Once coded poems begin to reveal themselves

Ezra;

The innocent, Hailey, Idaho soul soon evolves

Entering U of Penn. at fifteen, he devoured poetry

His doctorate program led him to Europe to study

He abandoned academics and taught in Indiana

He called this endeavor, “the sixth circle of Hell”

He went back to Europe; London and Paris mainly

He wrote and studied with a group of poet friends

He began to change his style and poetic philosophy

[“It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's art,

and another ten to get rid of that education.” he said

His three poetic principles were;

“1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.”]

He was instrumental in the Imagist Movement

Moved to Paris with his second wife, enjoying prominence

His friends were the like of, Hemmingway, Yeats, C. Williams, etc.

He moved to Italy; lectured and became somewhat political

Because of his wife’s musical concert, he talked to Mussolini

He also made contacts with politicians in the United States

[“Pound's fear was an economic structure that depended on the armaments industry,

where the profit motive alone would govern war and peace.”]

He wrote and broadcast from Rome, his anti-war beliefs

At the end of the war, he was captured and put in a “death cell”

His spirit broken, was then sent to the U.S. to stand trial for treason

Ezra was declared insane and kept twelve years at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital

He continued writing poetry and seeing his influential friends there

But in 1958, Archibald McLeish hired a lawyer and obtained his release

Moving back to Italy, he continued writing but fell in and out of depression.

“As drops that dream and gleam and falling catch the sun
Evan'scent mirrors every opal one
Of such his splendor as their compass is,
So, bold My Songs, seek ye such death as this”…Ezra Pound (1885- 1972)