A New Age behind, so my report on this one will be a little quick.
Ezra Pound's latest article on French poetry is on Charles Vildrac, and Beatrice Hastings (under pseudonym T.K.L.) continues to parody him ridiculously. EP seems slow to anger, haughtily ignoring BH's lampoons with only slight references to their existence. BH, or rather TKL, is dazzlingly mean. My favorite is this parody of Pound/F.S. Flint/Imagism in general:
A man sat on the kitchen stove;
it burned him severely.
Good-bye! This is where I live
with
my wife and her domestic... (636)
Even though the content is ridiculous, BH shows that she "gets" imagist rhythms, especially in the shifts between pentameter to free verse--she also manages to make it look as bad as possible, with the "with."
Anthony Ludovici attacks artists for "over-production," comparing them to fast-reproducing but primitive bacteria. Alas, his replacement is more mysticism about how a true artist pours so much of themself into a piece that they'd just die if they made more than a couple, etc. etc. Futurists and Pointillistes and their ilk are just showing off new techniques, not genuine novelty.
Well--I'm going to move on to the current week's issue (1913).
Showing posts with label Futurism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Futurism. Show all posts
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Friday, October 4, 2013
Poetry, September 1913
A quick post on Sept's Poetry.
This one wasn't quite as rich as some have been--the real standout is the essay from Ford Madox Heuffer on impressionism and on poetry in general, which provides a window onto his aesthetics. These in turn help to make sense of the incredible range of style and taste in Poetry and in the other periodicals. Expect hilarious qualified compliments to Pound. Heuffer was able to equate Yeats with Walter de la Mare as poets who he used to think silly, but who he now respects. This makes high-school Tyler Babbie happy because de la Mare was one of the first poets I read on my own, and I'm usually embarrassed to like him these days. Also of note--FMH claims to like futurist poetry, pointing to his own circle's work. I wonder when the term dissociates from the English avant-garde and sticks to the Italians.
Other observations:
The paraphrases from Chinese by Allen Upward are pretty great.
The rest of the crop of poems is the exquisitely rhythmic stuff that Heuffer denigrates in his essay... but I'm starting to think that their age was as much an age of poetry-as-craft as ours. I respect the attention to metrical detail, and see how a lot of people could get really into what seems to me like platitudes in dactyls.
This one wasn't quite as rich as some have been--the real standout is the essay from Ford Madox Heuffer on impressionism and on poetry in general, which provides a window onto his aesthetics. These in turn help to make sense of the incredible range of style and taste in Poetry and in the other periodicals. Expect hilarious qualified compliments to Pound. Heuffer was able to equate Yeats with Walter de la Mare as poets who he used to think silly, but who he now respects. This makes high-school Tyler Babbie happy because de la Mare was one of the first poets I read on my own, and I'm usually embarrassed to like him these days. Also of note--FMH claims to like futurist poetry, pointing to his own circle's work. I wonder when the term dissociates from the English avant-garde and sticks to the Italians.
Other observations:
The paraphrases from Chinese by Allen Upward are pretty great.
The rest of the crop of poems is the exquisitely rhythmic stuff that Heuffer denigrates in his essay... but I'm starting to think that their age was as much an age of poetry-as-craft as ours. I respect the attention to metrical detail, and see how a lot of people could get really into what seems to me like platitudes in dactyls.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
The New Freewoman, September 15 1913
This issue of The New Freewoman begins with a remarkable essay on ecological responsibility, Stephen T. Byington's "On Interference with the Environment." The thesis: "If one person injures another by making the material environment unfit for that other's use, the injury should be regarded on the same level with a direct assault on another's person or on the products of his labour. I say 'material environment,' meaning such things as the air, the water, the hosts of birds and beetles and bacteria, not the social environment."
Rebecca West's review of Granville Barker has the characteristic mix of fin-de-siècle pessimism and double-edged compliments that make it seem like there is no good art being made in 1913. She makes me want to read his play "The Marrying of Anne Leete " because she likes it: "There never was written anything quite like it except Tchekov's Cherry Orchard, which it resembled both in the fastidious hands it laid on the sterile and sentimental governing classes and in its Futurist technique" (128). It's interesting to think of Chekov as a Futurist...
Pound's review of John Gould Fletcher is classic Pound--while not really boosting his friend (who was always frustrated by Pound's self-declared superiority), he manages to make Fletcher come across as a leading poet of English (if not to be compared with the French).
There are a set of poems by Richard Aldington, in the Greco-Imagist fashion. I really do like them for their soft tones--an understated version of what H.D. does so well. Again, that pessimism creeps in at the end of a long prose translation from Moschus: "O Anax Hyperion, golden Apollo, cease thy task of sending mortals light/ and teach this generation not to write" (133). That is also very Poundian, of course--I like Aldington's place in the triad, though. He seems more aware of the repetitiveness of artistic cycles, turning to the Greeks not because they are classic but because they remind him of himself. That's strictly a blog statement, though--I'd have to do some thinking before defending it.
Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of getting a feel for the fractures that exist between my two main journals is the paragraph in Huntley Carter's essay "The Stone Citizen," which takes on The New Age directly. It has given me a few names to research that I hadn't run across before: Samuel Hobson, who Carter says founded Guild Socialism, which he calls "balderdash" (135); Field Marshal Bruce Williams, who sounds VERY familiar (Pound related?), and a "Geddes" who may be this Geddes, but may not. He blames Geddes for the idea that people should be citizens, rather than individuals, "civics" and not "cosmics." That's all very Huntley Carter. He also makes an idenfitication: Romney of TNA is J. M. Kennedy, though the Modernist Journals Project pseudonym database doesn't agree. The similarities in tone between Romney and S. Verdad leads me to agree with Carter, and the MJP admits that it isn't sure who Romney really is. Here's the text: "it has set its handy man J. M. (Julius McCabbage) Kennedy disguised as Romney to reconstruct the British Army with Williams' pale system for pink persons."
Well, we'll see what happens next.
Rebecca West's review of Granville Barker has the characteristic mix of fin-de-siècle pessimism and double-edged compliments that make it seem like there is no good art being made in 1913. She makes me want to read his play "The Marrying of Anne Leete " because she likes it: "There never was written anything quite like it except Tchekov's Cherry Orchard, which it resembled both in the fastidious hands it laid on the sterile and sentimental governing classes and in its Futurist technique" (128). It's interesting to think of Chekov as a Futurist...
Pound's review of John Gould Fletcher is classic Pound--while not really boosting his friend (who was always frustrated by Pound's self-declared superiority), he manages to make Fletcher come across as a leading poet of English (if not to be compared with the French).
There are a set of poems by Richard Aldington, in the Greco-Imagist fashion. I really do like them for their soft tones--an understated version of what H.D. does so well. Again, that pessimism creeps in at the end of a long prose translation from Moschus: "O Anax Hyperion, golden Apollo, cease thy task of sending mortals light/ and teach this generation not to write" (133). That is also very Poundian, of course--I like Aldington's place in the triad, though. He seems more aware of the repetitiveness of artistic cycles, turning to the Greeks not because they are classic but because they remind him of himself. That's strictly a blog statement, though--I'd have to do some thinking before defending it.
Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of getting a feel for the fractures that exist between my two main journals is the paragraph in Huntley Carter's essay "The Stone Citizen," which takes on The New Age directly. It has given me a few names to research that I hadn't run across before: Samuel Hobson, who Carter says founded Guild Socialism, which he calls "balderdash" (135); Field Marshal Bruce Williams, who sounds VERY familiar (Pound related?), and a "Geddes" who may be this Geddes, but may not. He blames Geddes for the idea that people should be citizens, rather than individuals, "civics" and not "cosmics." That's all very Huntley Carter. He also makes an idenfitication: Romney of TNA is J. M. Kennedy, though the Modernist Journals Project pseudonym database doesn't agree. The similarities in tone between Romney and S. Verdad leads me to agree with Carter, and the MJP admits that it isn't sure who Romney really is. Here's the text: "it has set its handy man J. M. (Julius McCabbage) Kennedy disguised as Romney to reconstruct the British Army with Williams' pale system for pink persons."
Well, we'll see what happens next.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
The New Age June 5 1913
A quick report from this issue:
The New Age is covering catastrophes and atrocities these days: the Balkan wars, the Irish famine (a retrospective piece), wage slavery in England, a scandal in the Gilbert Islands, and of course faint rumblings of the impending WWI. Oh, and graduate school reform.
Turning to that topic, Ezra Pound concludes his three-part series with a few delightful observations. First, I love this one: "Some triple-X idiot of an editor has boomed a bad poem and called it worthy of Shelley. As if Shelley the revolutionist Republican, propagandist, writer of canzoni, would, were he alive in 1913, be content with the same mannerisms of expression that suited him in the year of grace 1813." Readers should notice why this particularly delights me. At least, it inspires me to work. Other parts of his article aren't so great, but I thought it would be worth recording that artist-hipsters have been around for at least the last century--Pound complains about how artists are vegetarians and simple-lifers, rather than master craftsmen (emphasis, perhaps, on craftsMEN).
This, though, is most precious: "Not only must the artist be able 'to look any damn man in the face and tell him to go to hell,' but he must be able to do this quietly, seriously, without needless bravura or bombast." That goes out to my old bandmates at the University of Maine.
My favorite part of this issue, though, was the short satirical piece "Futurism in Food" by Lionel de Fonseka. You may notice that his Wikipedia page has been updated by some other MJP-head, judging by the links attached. It's the account of a visit to the Post-Impressionist Restaurant and then Moderno, the Futurist restaurant. It's especially hilarious because many of the goofiest things about Moderno have come to pass in the foodie movement: "We believe that every emotion can be rendered gastronomically, and there are immense possibilities in food as a medium of expression. What is art, after all, but conscious expression?" My favorite part was at the end, though, when they are feeling cynical, and so are fed caramel. I'll leave the punchline to the story itself, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a laugh at the Futurists (as all good Futurists do).
Because the perfect connection between the two pieces above is too perfect to resist: the advertisement on the last page of this issue is for a restaurant offering "a simple-life, pure-food, non-flesh luncheon." Enjoy.
The New Age is covering catastrophes and atrocities these days: the Balkan wars, the Irish famine (a retrospective piece), wage slavery in England, a scandal in the Gilbert Islands, and of course faint rumblings of the impending WWI. Oh, and graduate school reform.
Turning to that topic, Ezra Pound concludes his three-part series with a few delightful observations. First, I love this one: "Some triple-X idiot of an editor has boomed a bad poem and called it worthy of Shelley. As if Shelley the revolutionist Republican, propagandist, writer of canzoni, would, were he alive in 1913, be content with the same mannerisms of expression that suited him in the year of grace 1813." Readers should notice why this particularly delights me. At least, it inspires me to work. Other parts of his article aren't so great, but I thought it would be worth recording that artist-hipsters have been around for at least the last century--Pound complains about how artists are vegetarians and simple-lifers, rather than master craftsmen (emphasis, perhaps, on craftsMEN).
This, though, is most precious: "Not only must the artist be able 'to look any damn man in the face and tell him to go to hell,' but he must be able to do this quietly, seriously, without needless bravura or bombast." That goes out to my old bandmates at the University of Maine.
My favorite part of this issue, though, was the short satirical piece "Futurism in Food" by Lionel de Fonseka. You may notice that his Wikipedia page has been updated by some other MJP-head, judging by the links attached. It's the account of a visit to the Post-Impressionist Restaurant and then Moderno, the Futurist restaurant. It's especially hilarious because many of the goofiest things about Moderno have come to pass in the foodie movement: "We believe that every emotion can be rendered gastronomically, and there are immense possibilities in food as a medium of expression. What is art, after all, but conscious expression?" My favorite part was at the end, though, when they are feeling cynical, and so are fed caramel. I'll leave the punchline to the story itself, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a laugh at the Futurists (as all good Futurists do).
Because the perfect connection between the two pieces above is too perfect to resist: the advertisement on the last page of this issue is for a restaurant offering "a simple-life, pure-food, non-flesh luncheon." Enjoy.
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