Modernist poetry tends to eschew ambiguity for particular obscurity. This can create an interesting aesthetic effect, like in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It can also create 824 pages of unreadable diarrhea like the Cantos. Ezra Pound once said that bad art must have an efficient cause. It does: Ezra Pound.RATING: 19%, or 80% if your name happens to be Mussolini ("Ma questo è divertente!")
(Image from veethree.files.wordpress.com.)
That's not true. Look at this poetic gem from Canto 30, for example:
ReplyDeleteA factory
has another aspect, which we call the financial aspect
It gives people the power to buy (wages, dividends
which are power to buy) but it is also the cause of prices
or values, financial, I mean financial values
It pays for workers, and pays for material.
What it pays in wages and dividends
stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less,
per forza, damn blast your intellex, is less
than the total payments made by the factory
(as wages, dividends AND payments for raw material
bank charges, etcetera)
and all, that is the whole, that is the total
of these is added into the total of prices
caused by that factory, any damn factory,
and there is and must therefore a clog
and the power to purchase can never
(under the present system) catch up with
prices at large (38.190)
P.S. I hate Jews!
(Actually that's Canto 38.)
ReplyDeletehey internet jon check out my name
ReplyDeletewait
ReplyDeletethis is the one i wanted to show you
ReplyDeleteisnt that a funny grad school band name
ReplyDeletealso i came up with a joke that you can tell in your school class:
ReplyDeleteokay, so, like i think it would be p. funny if you started a restaurant that was ezra pond themes and you could serve ezra poundcakes (like pancakes though, not like poundcakes) and with them you could serve a side of:
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
ready?
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
USYRUP hahahahahahaha
Lawlz. What's sad is that I'm going to retell this and 5 people are going to laugh at it.
ReplyDeleteI dig the picture for this post. The problem with Ezra Pound was that his name was EZRA POUND GOOD GOD.
ReplyDelete