marginalia

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Petals on a Wet Black Bough:
American Modernist Writers and the Orient
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Exhibition,
Yale University, 18 October - 20 December, 1996
Organized by Patricia C. Willis

Book of Chinese Poetry (Shih Ching), translated by James Legge,
annotated by Ezra Pound
© 1997 Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Kenneth Rexroth
22 December 1905 ~ 6 June 1982

I regret not finding time today properly to note Rexroth’s interest in and poems of Japan. The interest brought Japan to a generation of readers and many of those readers to Japan, and the poems are among the most beautiful that have been written of the country in English. I refer among others to the poems of The Heart’s Garden / The Garden’s Heart (Pym-Randall, 1967), On Flower Wreath Hill (Blackfish, 1976), The Silver Swan (Copper Canyon, 1976), The Love Poems of Marichiko (Christopher’s Books, 1978), and The Morning Star (New Directions, 1979, which includes Flower Wreath Hill, Silver Swan, and Marichiko). For now, this, set in Higashiyama, Kyoto, November 1974, from Flower Wreath Hill:

III
The full moon rises over
Blue Mount Hiei as the orange
Twilight gives way to dusk.
Kamo River is full with
The first rains of Autumn, the
Water crowded with colored
Leaves, red maple, yellow gingko,
On dark water, like Chinese
Old brocade. The autumn haze
Deepens until only the
Lights of the city remain.

IV
No leaf stirs. I am alone
In the midst of a hundred
Empty mountains. Cicadas,
Locusts, katydids, crickets,
Have fallen still, one after
Another. Even the wind
Bells hang motionless. In the
Blue dusk, widely spaced snowflakes
Fall in perfect verticals.
Yet, under my cabin porch,
The thin, clear Autumn water
Rustles softly like fine silk.

V
This world of ours, before we
Can know its fleeting sorrows,
We enter it through tears.
Do the reverberations
Of the evening bell of
The mountain temple ever
Totally die away?
Memory echoes and reechoes
Always reinforcing itself.
No wave motion ever dies.
The white waves of the wake of
The boat that rows away into
The dawn, spread and lap on the
Sands of the shores of all the world.

VI
Clustered in the forest around
The royal tumulus are
Tumbled and shattered gravestones
Of people no one left in
The world remembers. For the
New Year the newer ones have all been cleaned
And straightened and each has
Flowers or at least a spray
Of bamboo and pine.
It’s a great pleasure to
Walk through fallen leaves, but
Remember, you are alive,
As they were two months ago.

Image: Photograph by Gerard Malanga, American Poetry Review Records, 1971-1998.

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Heinrich Böll
21 December 1917 ~ 16 July 1985

Let’s stop joking, that joke was worn out in any case, after Verdun. They were the last knights—killed in battle, too many knights, too many lovers, all at once—too many well-brought-up young people. Have you ever thought of how much pedagogical sweat was wasted in the space of a few months? All in vain. How was it none of you ever had the idea of setting up a machine gun at the entrance of the trade schools and colleges, right after the exams, and shoot dead all those radiant successful graduates? You think that’s exaggerated? Well, let me say that the truth is pure exaggeration. I danced with the graduates of 1905, 1906, and 1907. They wore their caps, they drank their beer and I drank with them at their student parties—but more than half the students of those three years fell at Verdun.

Billard um halb zehn / Billiards at Half-Past Nine, English translation by Patrick Bowles (1959; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961).

Heinrich Böll Foundation
An Essay on the Reason of Poetry, Nobel Lecture, 2 May 1973

Ah, la Piaf est morte, je peux mourir aussi.

Jean Cocteau (5 July 1889 ~ 11 October 1963), 11 October 1963

Edith Piaf @ radio france internationale
Edith Piaf’s Paris, by J. M. Smethurst
EdithPiaf.com
Musée Edith Piaf

Oriental Feast
Paul Klee, 18 December 1879 ~ 29 June 1940

Klee @ WebMuseum, Paris
Klee @ archive.com

Thirteen Modernists

Ford Madox Ford
17 December 1873 ~ 26 June 1939
is the one talking.
With James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Quinn, and Diana,
Pound’s studio and courtyard,
70 Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris, October 1923

There passed from us this June a very gallant combatant for those things of the mind and of letters which have been in our time too little prized. . . . For ten years before I got to England there would seem to have been no one but Ford who held that French clarity and simplicity in the writing of English verse and prose were of immense importance as in contrast to the use of a stilted traditional dialect, a “language of verse” unused in the actual talk of the people. . . .

In 1908 London was full of gargoyles, of poets, that is, with high reputation, most of whose work has gone since into the discard. At that time, and in the few years preceding, there appeared without notice various fasciculae which one can still, surprisingly, read, and they were not designed for mouthing, for the “rolling out” of “ohs.” . . .

I did not in those days care about prose. If prose meant anything to me, it meant Tacitus . . . a dangerous model for a young man. . . . Start with Tacitus and be cured by Flaubert via Ford, or start with Ford or Maupassant and be girt up with Tacitus.

Ezra Pound, 1939, Pound / Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship, edited by Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (New Directions, 1982), 171, 173.

Images:
• A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, by Humphry Carpenter (Delta, 1988), from the collection of Mary de Rachewiltz.
• Ezra Pound: The Solitary Voclano, by John Tytell (Anchor, 1987), from the Photography Collection, Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
• The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915-1924, edited by Timothy Materer (Duke UP, 1991), from the John Quinn Memorial Collection, New York Public Library.

Ford Madox Ford, The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001, Bartleby
Ford Madox Ford pages maintained by Max Saunders, King’s College London
Ford @ Books and Writers
Ford @ Wikipedia
Ford @ firstworldwar.com

In these latter times, with the prodigious growth of material life in elaboration and of mental life in diffusions there has supervened upon this old dualism a new faith in man’s absolute power, a kind of return to the inexperience and self-assurance of youth. This new inspiration has made many minds indifferent to the two traditional disciplines; neither is seriously accepted by them, for the reason, excellent from their own point of view, that no discipline whatever is needed. The memory of ancient disillusions has faded with time. Ignorance of the past has bred contempt for the lessons which the past might teach. Men prefer to repeat the old experiment without knowing that they repeat it.(more)

The Poetry of Barbarism, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1900

George Santayana, The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2001, Bartleby
The Santayana Edition
Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society

Image: The Books of Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archive: The George Santayana Collection