Advice for Poets: Theodore Roethke

The first poem that I remember:

My Papa's Waltz
by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

For this poem and more information about these poems by Roethke, click on this link:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172103#poem

When I read it now, I see so much more than that dizzying waltz.  In these few lines, a full narrative emerges with conflict, characters, desire, and suspense.  It is told in second person--the pronoun you addresses the father.  There is great contrast: the poem has death suspended within the waltzing.

It speaks so clearly of a relationship with a father, a retrospective: the speaker "hung on like death" and on the last note, was "Still clinging to your shirt."  The action becomes symbolic, metaphoric and it is a traditional, "formal" poem, made with regular meter and end rhyme.  It's brilliant.

Later on, in college, I came across another of his famous poems, "I Knew a Woman."  The first lines:

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!

His language pleases so much-- it is as if he was able to bring the waltzing into this sweet homage.  This rhythm and movement is characteristic of his poetic voice.  It is also in the poem, "In a Dark Time."
...

A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
...

This excerpt reflects the same movement and even things.  Notice in "I Knew a Woman" he spoke of a bright container, and here "All natural shapes."  It is as if he notices the profile, and the same darkness of "My Papa's Waltz" has grown here to a solitary, grown-up dark night of the soul.   This poem has similar word repetitions, effective use of meter, alliteration and rhyme.  So today, when I happened upon this poem (available as a broadside from Copper Canyon Press), I was delighted:

On Poetry and Craft
by Theodore Roethke

In poetry, there are no casual readers.
Nothing seen, nothing said.
The lyric is almost forgotten in this time of sawing and snoring and scraping.
Energy is the soul of poetry. Explosive active language.
Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
Rhythm depends on expecting.
The literal—that grave of all the dull.
I need the botanist’s leaf more than the poet’s flower.
Put it this way: I detest dogs, but adore wolves.
Eternal apprenticeship is the life of the true poet.
That intense profound sharp longing to make a true poem.
Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
If we muddle and thump through a paraphrase, with side comments, however brilliant, we still do not have the poem.
Talent talks; genius does.
Poetry is an act of mischief.
A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality.
The greatest assassin of life is haste.
Make ready for your gifts. Prepare. Prepare.

Fail Better

"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail... failure is his world and to shrink from it is desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living... " (Samuel Beckett)

I've said I'm a poet, but I don't know exactly what that is. From now on, let's define a poet as somebody who writes in broken lines as opposed to unbroken. 

I deliberate over what comes onto the page. Right now, I work on tensions and opposites. I'm interested in traction and think that I can create it out of history, memoir, image, string and paper clips. Language is a system of wheels and pulleys, a contraption of sorts, that one can ride. 

I'm moving, in other words. I'm going to several places at once. I turn to Samuel Beckett and return to Zadie Smith. 

"Fail Better" by Zadie Smith (The Guardian, 2007)
http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/failbetter.htm

The Pleasure Principle by Philip Larkin

According to Philip Larkin:

It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance, the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.

To read the entire essay, go to
http://www.mrbauld.com/larkinpl.html

Reading Is More Than Seeing

Reading Is More Than Seeing: Reading with Virginia Woolf 

Writing is more than seeing; of course, it involves all of the senses of perception. It is mind or consciousness inviting mind. In "How Should One Read a Book?" Virginia Woolf wrote:  

"Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel—if we consider how to read a novel first—are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing."

I am intrigued with the thought of being fellow-worker and accomplice. Is reading and writing a complicity between two people who don't know, and don't need to know, each other?  Perhaps it is like stitching; the writer has run the thread of his or her spool through the eyes and rings and needle of the sewing machine. The writer is the top stitch and the reader, the bottom stitch, a thread that is grasped and pulled by the top thread. They exist perfectly in a balanced tension on the fabric and together make a seam.  

I myself, as writer and reader, am on both sides. Here are Virginia Woolf's thoughts about poetry:

"Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements and approximations; to cease from searching out the minute shades of human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the purer truth of fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and generalised, unaware of detail, but stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is poetry; and that is the time to read poetry when we are almost able to write it."

"The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is not other sensations except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then--how sudden and complete is our immersion! There is nothing to catch hold of; nothing to stay us in our flight.... The poet is always contemporary. Our being for the moment is centred and constricted, the sensation begins to spread in wider rings through our minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to sound and to comment and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The intensity of poetry covers an immense range of emotion."  

Virginia Woolf places an amazing charge in the poet's hands. Poetry, the essence of language, is nothing but spirits, liquor brewed of rhythm and sound that alters or heightens our perception. In poetry, in metaphor, one thing becomes something else. The pattern that emerges reaches beyond the poem. The meanings are many and always new. 

The mood while reading of a poem is very close to the mood while writing one. In music, the strings of an instrument can set to vibrating other strings.  More than composing, it is  tremolo and breath on the ear's hammer and anvil; it is the vibration between the instrument and the room and what's inside our body. In poetry, one has the vowel, consonant, breath, and heartbeat -- arranged as if it were music -- for the body of the listener or reader. Writing is more than telling; it creates an experience that circumscribes another.  

Creative Restlessness

I prize unstructured time. Unfettered, I go to and fro in my house and along my road and into the city, looking for what I can't name.  I am between projects, a place most delicious and terrifying because it awakens a yearning without cease.

In my house, I have been cooking risotto and making hand-made almond coconut macaroons. In my garden, I make way for the new by pulling out last year's dry branches, each handful crumbles and scatters a fine dust in the air that will be washed away by rain.  Underneath, I notice the new growth, soft and thick leaves of mint.  On the road this morning, I met the fox hunting.  I am hunting as well, although I don't know for what.  In the city, I wander, glancing in the side-yards and alleys and lanes.

I found this today, a poem called "Restlessness" by D.H. Lawrence*:
...
"I will escape from the hollow room, the box of light,
And be out in the bewildering darkness, which is always fecund, which might
Mate my hungry soul with a germ of its womb.
...
But oh, it is not enough, it is all no good.
There is something I want to feel in my running blood,
Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to the rain,
I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain
Me its life as it hurries in secret."

Everywhere I go, I am looking.  It is the same restlessness that came upon me when my father died and I, suddenly preoccupied with real estate, searched and searched.  I thought I understood death. When I look back, I realize I looked for something that had to do with him.   Did I think I would find him -- he who had disappeared from the face of the earth?  No, but I did find some trace of something he had spoken.

It retrospect, I was searching for freedom, for a new language, for a place where I have not stood before but needed in order to see.  I generally look outward, but when it comes, it seems to come from within.

*read the full text of DH Lawrence's poem at
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/david_herbert_lawrence/poems/14705

The Poetry of Place: Northern Minnesota

I search for poetry that rises from the roots, flows like the winding St Louis River to Lake Superior, and surges inside, wave against wave. I search for moments of the past that cast their light upon the hands. It is in the body, visceral and geologic, in the stones broken for mineral deposits, in the cities on ice. It is in the scent of wintergreen and yarrow. I search for the knock and echo of the pileated woodpecker, the call of the bittern and the Canadian goose. In the hidden things, the just whelped wolf pups playing amid the tangle of shadow and light, the endless roads taken by the wild and civilized or the wind, in the encounters and surprises, in breath and word, I find my music.

Writing about place offers poets the opportunity to explore stories that are layered and deep. There is a wisdom in the landscape and secrets spoken without our knowing. Writing that begins or ends with the land is a way to ground ourselves, hold to the elemental and enduring, and access the part of history or heritage right before us. "The Blessing" by James Wright begins:

Resources for Poets

Here are some useful links for poets. The databases offer listings of places that publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.  Other resources I've listed provide information about opportunities, grants, conferences, classes and literary events.  The last links are specific to Minnesota poets.  Check Poets & Writers and AWP if you live elsewhere.  

Databases of Literary Magazines

Duotrope:

This database lists over 4000 markets for fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Its features include a submission tracker and weekly email that let's you know what's new and what's no longer available. It's free, but they do ask for donations.

http://duotrope.com/

Poets & Writers:

The website features a database of literary magazines (over 700). Poets & Writers is a good resource for writers; it features articles about writers and writing, presses, and it also has useful information about deadlines for contests, calls for submissions, and writer's conferences.  

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines?&perpage=*

Directory of CLMP Member Publishers

CLMP stands for Council of Literary Magazines and Publishers. Basically, this is a resource for literary magazines and publishers, but this list of members will guide you to several member/ publishers who are committed to independent publishing and quality programs. 

http://www.clmp.org/directory/index.php

Resources for Information and Support

Mnartists.org

This website offers profiles of Minnesota artists and writers, opportunities, a calendar of events, and calls for proposals.  You can set up your own profile and post your events.  

http://www.mnartists.org/

Lake Superior Writers:

This is the Duluth writer's organization that supports literary arts. The Duluth Poet Laureate program, classes, contests and information is available for members ($30)

http://lakesuperiorwriters.wordpress.com/

The Loft Literary Center, Minneapolis

This organization offers classes, mentors and literary events.  They administer the McKnight Fellowship grants and other contests like the Loft Mentor Award.  Membership is about $60 for out-state members (now it appears you can donate smaller amounts and be considered a member).  

https://www.loft.org/

Association of Writers and Writers Programs (AWP)

http://www.awpwriter.org/aboutawp/index.htm

This national organization connects writers and writing programs. Membership (individual one year is $65) gives you access to a magazine, calendar, articles, and resources. AWP has an annual conference and book fair.   

New Pages 

http://www.newpages.com/

This website is useful for writers. It has listings of literary magazines, calls for submission, reviews of literary magazines and books, and interesting links.   

Moving Poems

http://movingpoems.com/

This website features "best of the web" videopoetry.   

Poetry Websites:

The Poetry Foundation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary

organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

The Academy of American Poets

http://www.poets.org

This website offers a listing of poets, poetry, essays about teaching and writing, interviews, and other useful information.   

Arts Funding in Minnesota

Arrowhead Regional Arts Council

http://aracouncil.org/ 

to see the listing of all the Regional Arts Councils http://www.arts.state.mn.us/racs/index.htm

The ARAC serves the Arrowhead region of Minnesota.  It awards grants for individual artists and organizations. See the website for application guidelines and deadlines. 

Minnesota State Arts Board

http://www.arts.state.mn.us/

MSAB is our state agency that promotes and help develop the arts.  See the website for individual and organizational grant opportunities and deadlines. 

New Worlds

"Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world."  Rumi

Once in awhile, a few words can rise like a wave and break. Like these. I heard them on the radio, an interview by Krista Tippett on NPR: "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi with Fatemeh Keshavarz."

As a poet, I consider the craft and vision of this sentence.  So few words, and two are repeated: new and world. It's written as a command: speak a new language! There's cause and effect, departure and arrival; there is an authority in the voice, a knowing, a mystery.  Somehow, like a wave that breaks on the beach and bounces back, the words fall back, rearrange themselves in my mind.  These are words translated, a world translated.

Keshavarz was speaking about Iran, but this applies to many things.  She also uses the poem in such a way that it rises and breaks like a wave and then meets other waves in a back wash.  It is often the case that poetry has this sort of resonance.  Keshavarz said:

"Language can take over our lives and make us not see things. He [Rumi] actually has a fabulous verse, he says (Persian spoken). "Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world." I mean this is the most sophisticated, philosophical approach to language. Now we talk of language as being constitutive of experience, but that's exactly what he said. You know, 'get yourself a new language and then you will be able to see a new world.' So that the world will be a new world, speak a new language. The world will be a new world, so speak a new language.  Speak so the world will be new.  Speak!  It is what the world needs."

Of course, we are born into a language that we grow up speaking. Besides learning another tongue, I think Rumi is also talking about discovering the untried in one's own language:  new words in new places.

Next time you are working on a poem, try this.  Get a dictionary, or use the lingo from a particular field of study or work (think of boats, technologies, specialized fields of knowledge), or reach into your own history to find the interesting phrases or foreign words that came into your life.  Think about the unique ways that we talk in church, in a medical facility, in a math class, to a lover, or to an authority. Try transferring that to another context.  Get out of the rut of the usual and expected things, and try the unexpected.

Random or aleotropic techniques can help you break out of a tired pattern.  Look up the noun or verb that you want to change, count down seven words in the dictionary and try that word. Collect words from the eleventh line and fifth word in from any book and use them to make a poem.  Close your eyes and let your finger fall onto a page of the Bible, a cookbook, a repair manual, a dictionary, or a newspaper.  Take that word and make a poem.  Make a poem by collage.  Make a poem that names seven different shades of a color.  Experiment.

Language is a sea that we navigate. See if you can find a new shore.  

To listen to the interview between Krista Tippett and Fatemeh Keshavarz, go to http://being.publicradio.org/

Traveling in the Astral: H.D.

Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D.  (1886-1961)

As a young poet, I was often looking for models for myself. Too often, the women poets I admired had committed suicide.  But not H. D. I reached for her, and still do. She still sweeps me off my feet. She was also a poet who became an expatriate. She lived in Europe for many years, was married to poet Richard Aldington, was an analysand of Freud, a friend of Ezra Pound, involved in the new medium of film as an actress and writer, and a lover of Bryer, a wealthy woman novelist who during the war had financed the escapes of several Jewish people.  In the following, H. D. shows her artistic abilities. The poem is firmly embedded in the body-- and it stays physical-- and it draws on both landscape and mythology.

Lethe

Nor skin nor hide nor fleece
     Shall cover you,
Nor curtain of crimson nor fine
Shelter of cedar-wood be over you,
Nor the fir-tree
Nor the pine.

Nor sight of whin or gorse
     Nor river-yew
Nor fragrance of flowering bush,
Nor wailing of reed-bird to waken you,
     Nor of linnet,
     Nor of thrush.

Nor word nor touch nor sight
     Of lover, you
Shall long through the night but for this:
The roll of the full tide to cover you
     Without question,
     Without kiss.

H. D. is one of the great American poets.  In this poem, her power is evident. The sound and rhythm of the language, hypnotic in its accumulation of nor, causes the poem to rise and break in the last lines in the last k sounds, "Without question,/ Without kiss." In Greek mythology, Lethe was the "river of forgetfulness" or the goddess of the underworld river of oblivion. The poem works on more than one level, decrying the losses of love on the physical body. The river likewise is stripped of the beauty of tree and flowering shrub at its banks, as if the river and the land were lovers.  Wanting to be annihilated by flood, a victim of its own qualities, of too-muchness, the longing is palpable.  It is both real and mythic.  

There is a record of letters between H.D., Bryher, and May Sarton. At the time, May was discouraged in her efforts of publishing. H.D. wrote: "O, my dear--don't worry about your work. It is wonderful, you have wonderful gifts. The fact of the writing is the thing--it trains one to a sort of yogi or magi power, it is a sort of contemplation, it is living on another plane, it is 'travelling in the astral' or whatever it is, they are supposed to do. That is the thing" (July 26, 1941).

Trilogy: The Walls Do not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, The Flowering of the Rod is my favorite. H.D. was in London, England with Bryher during the bombing. This was written afterward. I read it again and again, marveling at the tumble and flow of syllables and her deft use of metaphor.  In The Flowering of the Rod, excerpted here, the migration of geese and Jesus' resurrection speak to new beginnings in life:

...
I would rather beat in the wind, crying to these others:

yours is the more foolish circling,
yours is the senseless wheeling

round and round--yours has no reason--
I am seeking heaven;

yours has no vision,
I see what is beneath me, what is above me,

what men say is-not--I remember,
I remember, I remember--you have forgot
....

again, the steel sharpened on the stone;

again, the pyramid of skulls;
I gave pity to the dead,

O blasphemy, pity is a stone for bread,
only love is holy and love's ecstasy

that turns and turns and turns about one centre,
reckless, regardless, blind to reality,

that know the Islands of the Blest are there,
for many waters can not quench love's fire. 

Her poem soars and circles in this series, moving between opposite poles, touching the images of war and the distance of airborne flight, faraway islands, the vision of divine love and ecstasy.

H.D. as an imagist was much more powerful than her cohort Ezra Pound. She deftly used history and mythology in her work, and her vision was much greater. This poem has been my center during change in my life. I am restless by nature, settling and unsettling as a flock of birds. Along the shoreline of Lake Superior where I have lived for so many years, the migrations of birds have entered my internal landscape. Perhaps my grandparents' migration to the U.S. has had a residual effect, the impetus still echoes like waves from the stern of their ship stirring the ocean. 

H.D. has captured the heart-breaking truth of leave-taking, of striving, of being in the air, in the midst of perpetual change. Her words whisper in my ear--in moments of uncertainty, at times of break-up and loss and sorrow--to remember:

"In resurrection, there is confusion
if we start to argue; if we stand and stare,

we do not know where to go;
in resurrection, there is simple affirmation..."

Bibliography

H. D. biography http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/234

Mandell, Charlotte. "Letters Across the Atlantic:  H.D., Bryher, May Sarton, During World War II" This article originally appeared in A celebration for May Sarton : essays selected and edited by Constance Hunting. Orono, Maine : Puckerbrush Press (c/o University of Maine, Dept. of English, 5752 Neville Hall, Orono, Maine, 04469-5752), 1994, p.89-104. http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdcmone.html

Martz, Louis, editor.  H.D. Collected Poems 1912-1944. New Directions, New York, 1983. 

Ponsot, Marie, "Shot Through with Brightness: The Poems of H. D." http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19222

Detesting Ezra Pound

Pound was a literary giant and many have lived in his shadow. Although I have not often liked his poetry, I've have been influenced by those he influenced. His essays about poetry and his translations are still read, and they still resonate. Pound edited an essay by Ernest Fenollosa comparing the pictographs or characters of the Chinese language with poetry. In the Chinese character, image joined with action to convey the essential quality of transformation. So influenced, it was image that drove Ezra Pound as a poet. He edited the work of Yeats and T.S. Eliot.  He was a strong force promoting the work of several other poets.  In the essay "Retrospect" he writes about Imagist poetics:

"In the spring or early summer of 1912, H. D., Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:

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."

I do agree with these principles. I believe that the image carries meaning like nothing else.  It easily becomes symbol or metaphor.  The image that undergoes change in the poem, like the image of lemon slices in the poem "Miniature" by Yannis Ritsos, goes beyond metaphoric to metamorphic.  It's powerful.

H.D. was a powerful poet. Her spare lines still emit her radiant skill with sound and image. Other poets, also called modernist, used these tenets well: William Carlos Williams (although in a letter to Ezra Pound, he criticized Pound's first book of poetry as bitter), D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hart Crane, and Gertrude Stein. In the lineage, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, and Amy Lowell.

On the subject of influences, even unwanted influences, here is a poem he wrote about Walt Whitman: 

A Pact
by Ezra Pound

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman--
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root--
Let there be commerce between us.  

The powerful poetry of Whitman with its sweeping democracies and celebrations were not those of Pound's.  Pound complained that sometimes he detected Whitman's rhythms emerging in his own lines, but he brought the focus of his poems back from such abundant multiplicity to the single image, defined as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

Some of Pound's work seems to me as mysognist: "The Garden," "Portrait d'une Femme" or "The Lake Isle." Sometimes his endings seem clunky. I do much prefer the other modernists to him.  Only this poem of his, so deeply influenced by the Chinese poetry he studied, I love:

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

It is an instant of time, the intellectual and emotional complex, that fascinates. His choice of word, "apparition" means sight, yes, but it also means haunting.  This small haiku: a stream of faces, perhaps going to the front, or returning to it, faces of women who are saying good-bye or reuniting, the endless motion that is captured by the strong counterpoint of "petals on a wet, black bough."  His equivalent image captures the brevity, the fragility of full blossoms in the rain.

A translation of Li Po, "The River-merchant's Wife: A Letter" Pound did beautifully.  This is the work that will let me have commerce with him. 

While in Italy, Pound became involved with the Fascists. He was anti-Semitic and pro-Mussolini and Hitler, and he referred to President Roosevelt as "that Jew in the White House." When Mussolini died, Pound was arrested and returned to the United States.  He was charged with treason (the penalty was death by execution) for broadcasting fascist propaganda by radio to the U.S., but he was found incompetent to stand trial by reason on insanity. He was committed as mentally ill to a St Elizabeth's Hospital, a federal asylum, in D.C. in about 1946 where he remained until 1958.

Some people have argued he not mentally ill, and some think he must have had bipolar disorder.  I've worked in the mental health field for thirty years. I know that at the time he was committed, patients often went into a patriarchal and brutal system. Medications were just coming into use; the heavy tranquilizer Haldol had disabling and sometimes permanent side effects like tongue rolling and uncontrolled hand movements (called pill rolling). This was the era of lobotomies, high voltage electroshock treatments, strait jackets and shackles. Commitments were also done on people with mental retardation, epilepsy, and homosexuality. In 1981, when I first walked through a back ward in a state run psychiatric hospital, I thought of Dante's circles of hell. Patients were over-crowded. Some people spent their life time in these hospitals; often their bizarre behaviors were related to the environment, lack of privacy or control, assaults or intrusions of other patients, and punitive or demeaning systems (like an M&M economy--a system of exchange based on candy M&Ms). I don't know what the conditions were in St Elizabeth's when Ezra Pound was there, but I know they were difficult in general for all mental health patients.

During his commitment, he convinced Eustace Mullins, another writer, of a conspiracy of "The Rothschild system" which was a group of bankers, corporations, and secret governmental agencies which yielded world power. Pound's theory of monetary control leading to the Federal Reserve influenced Mullins went on to write a book, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, updated later in The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitism (1985), and The World Order: Our Secret Rulers (1992). Pound continued to rant; perhaps he was delusional. Clearly he was racist, and this also I detest about him. When he was released, he returned to Italy and lived there until he died in 1972.

Despite his political involvement, his literary contributions were recognized in 1948 with a Bollingen-Library of Congress Award.

Sources

Aldington, Richard. "Images" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21788

Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.) http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/234

Ezra Pound Biography http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/161

Ezra Pound Biography http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ezra-pound

"Insanity on Trial," Frontline, PBS. c1995-2011, WGBH. retrieved 02/24/2012. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/crime/trial/other.html

Pound, Ezra, Editor. The Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa. City Lights Books, San Francisco. c1936 Ezra Pound.

Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems. 

Pound, Ezra. "In Retrospect" and "A Few Don'ts" (1918) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237886