BK. Ezra Pound

46. ‘Vou Club’. Townsman 1 (1938): 4.

The Vou Club, apparently named after the English word ‘vow’, was organised in 1935 by the circle of poets associated with Kitasono Kat[s]ue and shortly thereafter his journal, VOU (see D29). Pound’s discussion of the club here includes the suggestion that ‘it may be from now on that any man who wants to write English poetry will have to start reading Japanese’, for ‘all the moss for twenty years we have been trying to scrape off our language—these young men start without it’; Pound ‘know[s] that nowhere in Europe is there any such vortex of poetic alertness’, for ‘Tokio takes over, where Paris stopped’. Precedes ‘Notes’ by Kitasono and poems by Vou Club poets. Reprinted, along with Kitasono’s ‘Notes’, in 82.