.
The Times
Madness clamours all around me,
Brute unreason fouls the air,
Rampant passion would confound me—
Invitations to despair.
Phantoms disperse!
For reason’s terse
And ancient sway
Will have its say,
With evidence
And common sense
For all to judge,
That noise and grudge,
Through forms well-grounded,
Be found ill-founded.
.
.
Reflections on
an Iconoclastic Imagist
“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the
dream of man.ˮ — Henry Adams
The Station of the Metronome
Ezra, the Zeitgeist’s megaphone,
Denounced convention’s masquerade:
“Automatons in grey parade
In homage to the Metronome!
‘Ti tum ti tum ti tum,’ they say,
In stale abstractions of the day.
__Abort! Evade!ˮ
.
1. Précis
Sage Ezra, Modernism’s Peter,
Shattered the rock for metreless metre.
.
2. Error and Consequences
The didact’s fib—tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock …—
Left the tradition with a heap of trouble,
Glittering images among the rock,
And artful scholars to explore the rubble.
.
3. In Contradiction
As though a train, click-clack, click-clack,
Could glide along a formless track.
As though a line of verse tick-tocks,
Like humble metronomes or clocks,
Instead of being not quite like
The rest, as one Mike’s not like Mike.
But if a metronome or clock
Holds to its purpose (keeping time),
Time has been lost with so much talk
In verseless verse that scorns a rhyme
To glorify a false assumption—
And because Ezra had the gumption.
.
4. The Mission
Tossing out “slopˮ and bombast as he went,
Shivering cant and pompous shibboleths,
Thunderous Ezra justly cried, “Present!ˮ—
Blind to the path to St. Elizabeth’s,
Losing precision, form, and argument.
.
5. In Summary
Aspiring genius, battering ram
Of Modernism, deft dominie—
If one of stylish infamy—
Crazed maestro of the ideogram:
Pound, revered prophet of the age,
Unravelled in a half-sane rage.
.
6. The Consolation
Yet scattered petals may be found, if few,
A shattering of urns, to “Make it new!ˮ
Calligraphed masterstrokes in China blue.
.
.
Tiree MacGregor began publishing verse with The Epigrammatist in the early 1990s. Since then his poems have occasionally appeared in print and online journals. He taught university English for many years in three Canadian provinces and now works as a freelance editor. Born in Scotland, he lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
I think I may be the very youngest U.S. citizen to have read Pound’s rant “against usura” and lament for Jesus as a “goodly fere” in a high school textbook–not mine, but one handed down from an older cousin. Still, I *was* allowed to read more than two lines of Pound in high school. I don’t think many people my age had that opportunity! So…Ezra Pound was a very interesting poet, peculiarly relevant to recent news. I’d like to go back and read all of his work as an adult, though I probably can’t since it’s not in libraries. If people can discuss this poem intelligently, though, this ought to be the place.
All I can say is that your Pound poem made me chortle, recalling the flavor of the scant selection from the poet’s work I read, long ago. And I thank you for the chortle.
Lovely, Priscilla, and thank you for your thoughts. I’m always glad to have provided a decent chortle.
Very funny and very pithy.
Much appreciated, Mr. Sale.
Thanks for this, Tiree. I wasn’t familiar with Ezra Pound’s views on poetry. Quite interesting, especially the call for ‘music’ over ‘metronome.’
And thank you, Paul. I suppose the best short guide to Pound’s views is his ABC of Reading. It’s hardly a coherent argument, and Pound inspired much to be regretted about modern and post-modern poetry, but ABC has some fine observations.
Numbers 1 & 5 are my favorites.
Thank you, Cheryl, for your kindness.
Pound’s two great commandments to his poetic contemporaries were “Make it new!” and “Simplify! Simplify!”
These directions had their valid uses, if they allowed poets to escape some of the more intricate vaporings of Victorian verse. But most unfortunately they became dogmas of modernist religion and practice, so that a vast heritage of poetic tradition was simply discarded like useless rubbish. And now, a century later, they have reduced mainstream poetry to a chaos and disorder that Pound himself despised, and to rampant emotionalizing and sentiment-soaked posturing.
Make no mistake — Pound sincerely loved English poetry, and made it his life. But his terrible fate was to be poetry’s pallbearer. As Oscar Wilde said, “Each man kills the thing he loves.”
I think Pound got his “Simplify! Simplify!” from Whitman, whom he reluctantly acknowledged as an influence (“Let there be commerce between us”). I agree that Pound had what you call a “terrible fate.” His unravelling is an intriguing subject, and at least part of it was owing to wilfulness, a refusal of reason. A great critic in an idiosyncratic way, he seems not to have been very interested in looking at his own work and pronouncements with a critical eye.
I agree. See my recent article on Pound (“New Directions, or Deviations?”) at Expansive Poetry Online.
Thank you, Joseph S. Salemi. I will gladly look up your article.
I’m fascinated by each of these sections. Each idea is creatively and variously expressed, from the first one’s insistent dimeter, to the clever imagery of the megaphone verse, to the allusion to Peter’s betrayal, and “verseless verse that scorns a rhyme”. This poem bears many eager re-readings. Thank you!
Many thanks, Cynthia, for your kind remarks. I like creating different effects through different forms (metres), and sometimes creating different voices or attitudes or perspectives in short poem sequences. Pound was right about the staleness of so much 19th and early-20th c. poetry, but one of his false claims was against metre itself — an absurd case of the old cliche about the baby and the bathwater. The truth is, of course, that metre has to be employed; it has to be at work (the same is true of rhyme); that it is not a matter of, on the one hand, mechanical compliance or, on the other, mere decoration, or shouldn’t be. That Pound had a first-rate ear and yet ignored that truth in favour of his new, progressive way, was a great pity. Bless you for your “many eager re-readings.”
It would appear that you, Tiree, are familiar with Timothy Steele’s Missing Measures, or at least the ideas contained therein. The short sections of your poem are concise and incisive, making for some really serious fun, and I thank you for these.
Thank you, C. B., much appreciated. I did read Missing Measures many years ago and still have it on a shelf. Steele was, you might well know, heavily indebted to Yvor Winters (In Defense of Reason; Forms of Discovery), J. V. Cunningham (whose Collected Essays, though ignored, is extraordinary), and, I think, Wesley Trimpi (at least in his Ben Jonson’s Poems).