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Ezra Pound

THEMES

THEMES: VENICE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments3 min read240 views

This is the first post in a new category, one which brings together poems with a connecting theme.

Links to all of the poems on the site set in Venice and other islands in the Venetian Lagoon are listed in alphabetical order:

 

ACCADEMIA BRIDGE

Although elsewhere they must compete with tall men

from Senegal selling faux Gucchi bags…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/accademia-bridge/

 

A CONTINUING CITY

A millennium of trade and empire

has pushed the wooden piles the founders drove

more deeply into the seditious silt…

https://davidselzer.com/2012/12/a-definitive-history-of-venice/

 

BACINO DI SAN MARCO

From the Daniele’s restaurant terrace,

a bride and groom watch a shower of rain…

https://davidselzer.com/2012/12/a-definitive-history-of-venice-3/

 

CITY OF ART

There are the Biennale’s Big Beasts, of course…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/city-of-art/

 

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Ezra Pound looks both querulous and almost

slightly shifty…

https://davidselzer.com/2024/06/cognitive-dissonance/

 

DECLINE AND FALL

Once, there were no panhandlers in La

Serenissima. Now there are four beggars…

https://davidselzer.com/2012/12/a-definitive-history-of-venice-2/

 

EZRA POUND IN VENICE

Sitting in a traghetto, Olga Rudge

from Ohio and Ezra Pound from

Idaho – together fifty years…

https://davidselzer.com/2009/06/ezra-pound-in-venice/

 

FRUITS OF THE SEA

On the island of Burano, where women,

sitting at their front doors for the light, make lace…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/fruits-of-the-sea/

 

GRANDE HÔTEL DES BAINS

…Cholera is no longer a rumour…

 https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/grande-hotel-des-bains/

 

LA FENICE

At Punta Della Dogana, a cellist

seated under the arcade, is playing

melodies from operatic arias…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/la-fenice/

 

LA SERENISSIMA

…stucco white as cuttlefish. In shadows,

a lion’s mouth utters advantage or blame.

The whitewashed stench of the prison inspires

the palace. An improbable city…

https://davidselzer.com/2012/12/a-definitive-history-of-venice-5/

 

O BRAVE NEW WORLD

On the third floor of Ca’ Rezzonico –

where gondoliers slept when the palazzo

was let to the song writer Cole Porter…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/o-brave-new-world/

 

PIAZZA DI SAN MARCO

After the sky has shaded from indigo

to sepia, when swifts have gone and pigeons

roost in the crepuscular arcades…

https://davidselzer.com/2012/12/a-definitive-history-of-venice-4/

 

RIVA DEI SETTE MARTIRE, VENICE

If you stroll far enough, long enough eastwards

on Riva Degli Schiavoni (Shore

of the Slaves)…

https://davidselzer.com/2017/11/riva-dei-sette-martiri-venice/

 

 

THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY, SAN LAZZORO, VENICE

San Lazzaro island was the city’s

leper colony until the Doge

gave the Armenians sanctuary, no doubt

to annoy the Turks…

https://davidselzer.com/2016/09/the-armenian-monastery-san-lazzaro-venice/

 

THE FISH MARKET

The resin and fibreglass installation

of one of the sculptor’s small children’s

hands and wrists emerges from the Grand Canal…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/the-fish-market

 

THE GARIBALDI STATUE, VENICE

Usually on a geometric plinth,

sometimes ahorse, once like Charlemagne…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/11/the-garibaldi-statue-venice/

 

THE GHETTO

We came here more than twenty five years ago

but know when we reach the Trei Archi bridge

we have gone too far and turn…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/the-ghetto/

 

THE GULLS OF VENICE

Many things are forbidden in Venice…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/the-gulls-of-venice/

 

THE LAGOON

Like most houses over centuries here

this one has been divided…

https://davidselzer.com/2018/09/the-lagoon/

 

WINTERING IN VENICE

The exiled Russian poet, Josef Brodsky… https://davidselzer.com/2024/03/wintering-in-venice/

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read368 views

Ezra Pound looks both querulous and almost

slightly shifty in Walter Mori’s

black and white photograph taken

on the Fondamenta Nani, Venice,

in the winter of 1963,

the ageing poet in overcoat and scarf.

 

The photographer was creating

a series of images of cultural

phenomena. He has his subject stand,

not in one of the usual settings,

like St Mark’s Square, but on this narrow path

beside the Rio San Travaso –

one the busiest, most direct walk ways

from the Grand Canal to the Zattere.

For cognoscenti, over Pound’s right shoulder,

dimly is the Squero di San Travaso,

one of the oldest gondola boatyards.

 

Caught in the image is a passerby

who has walked on then suddenly turned,

a man with startlingly large, black rimmed

spectacles, like a burlesque foreign agent,

who has stopped as if amazed or appalled

by what he has just seen – hence perhaps

Pound’s expression, his paranoia

overcoming his vanity. Like

some provincial tragic hero

in self-exile –  his hubris, by his own

confession, ‘that stupid suburban

prejudice of anti-semitism’ –

he poses reluctantly in a city

of decaying labyrinthine passage ways,

surrounded by unending waters.

 

A much younger man, during the First World War,

he wrote about poetry, charmingly

and dogmatically denigrating

the Fin de Siècle’s ‘…rhetorical din…

luxurious riot…painted adjectives…’.

His reputation suffers, in retrospect,

from what might be termed the Wagner Syndrome.

Genius and fascist – how is it possible to

both approve and condemn?

 

 

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POETRY

A TANDOORI TALE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read331 views

‘A tale is but half told when only one person tells it.’
THE SAGA OF GRETTIR

 

Under the almost crepuscular lighting

in the British Library’s Gallery

endowed by Sir John Ritblat (London

property developer, Tory donor,

philanthropist) among the treasures displayed –

including ‘Beowulf’, the Magna Carta,

Gutenberg’s Bible, Da Vinci’s notebook,

Handel’s ‘Messiah’, the Beatles’ lyrics –

are three pairs of Jane Austen’s spectacles

and a first edition of ‘Paradise Lost’.

 

Close to Bloomsbury’s traffic-congested heart,

about half a mile from the Library,

is Woburn Walk, a short, pedestrianised,

cobbled, late Georgian shopping street,

designed with first and second floor lodgings –

named after Woburn Abbey, the country seat

of the first landlord, the Duke of Bedford.

The poet, William Butler Yeats, has been

blue-plaqued at what is  now Number 5.

 

Number 16 is a small, well established,

family run, Bangladeshi restaurant

with British staples – like papadoms,

prawn vindaloo, chicken tikka masala.

Tonight the two tables by the window

have been pushed together. The seven diners

are Icelanders – enjoying the curries,

and speaking the language of the forty five

sagas, like the one about the outlaw

poet. I wonder what Willie Yeats

and his pals, Tom Eliot and Ezra Pound –

and Milton and Austen for that matter –

would have made of all or any of this,

not least a mongrel bard like me.

 

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POETRY

WINTERING IN VENICE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.2K views

The exiled Russian poet, Josef Brodsky,

winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,

whom the Soviet authorities

had forced to ’emigrate’ permanently,

taught at various colleges in the States,

and usually spent his Christmas/New Year

vacations in Venice, a city

that reminded him of his native

Leningrad – previously and now

St Petersburg. Tzar Peter the Great

had canalised the Ladoga marshes

to build a northern city emulating,

perhaps outdoing, La Serenissima.

 

The American poet, Ezra Pound –

self-exiled to Venice, claiming he feared

the electric chair if he had returned

after the war to the States – was buried

in the Protestant Cemetery

on the island of San Michele, along

with consuls and admirals, and, in time,

Brodsky himself, a descendant of revered

rabbis become a Christian convert.

 

One winter’s night, Brodsky, with his then lover,

the American Jewish polymath

Susan Sontag – who, years later, would stage

‘Waiting for Godot’ in a candle-lit

theatre in besieged Sarajevo –

visited Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound’s widow,

in her apartment near La Salute,

a church built as a votive offering

for the city’s once more surviving the plague.

With Gaudier-Brzeka’s hieratic

bust of the poet standing a yard tall

in a far corner of the room, they listened,

for two hours, as patiently as they

were able, to the widow’s rehearsed defence

of her late husband – “He had a Jewish name…

and Jewish friends…” – declined more tea, and left.

 

A few years after this encounter Brodsky

had open heart surgery in New York,

and later, two bypass operations.

He remained a heavy smoker, and died,

aged 55, from a heart attack

in his Brooklyn Height’s apartment.

The coffin was flown in the cargo-hold to Venice –

‘A drowning city, where suddenly the dry

light of reason dissolves in the moisture

of the eye’ – and, from Marco Polo airport,

taken by water-hearse to San Michele.

 

Homesick for his family and city

this unselfpitying, bilingual

genius in his writings about Venice,

poetry and prose, frequently mentions

the wintry fogs that rise on the lagoon,

and drift along the canals, and soften

the pillars of arcades, and baffle

the echoing sounds of distant footfalls…

…’A tin can launched skyward

with the tip of a shoe goes sailing

out of sight, and a minute later

there is still no sound of it falling on

wet sand. Or, for that matter, a splash’.

 

 

Note: see also EZRA POUND IN VENICE.

 

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POETRY

BLOOMSBURY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read648 views

‘O, there you are,’ Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

ULYSSES, James Joyce

 

Joyce read his poems to Lady Gregory

in Dublin. She was impressed and gave him five pounds

to help fund his escape to Paris

from the ‘coherent absurdity’ (his words)

of Catholicism. She wrote to Yeats –

her close friend and patronee, who had lodgings

a five minute walk from Euston – to meet him

off the Holyhead train at six a.m.,

give him breakfast, look after him and then

give him dinner before he took the boat train

from Victoria. She was afraid James

‘would knock his ribs against the earth’. Imagine

these two bespectacled Irishmen,

Orange and Green, very amiably

walking along Woburn Place! No doubt

Yeats introduced him to Bloomsbury neighbours

Eliot and Pound, amongst others,

to ‘help him on his way’. What if James

had torn up his ticket, kept the fiver,

of course, and stayed in this extraordinary

two thirds of a square mile – with its leagues

of floors of books and artefacts,

its revolutionary exiles,

its assorted geniuses, blue plaques,

handsome, greensward squares, cohorts

of multicultural students and tourists?

 

From the window of our budget hotel

we can almost see Yeats’ lodgings.

Before us is St Pancras Parish Church –

in Greek Revival style with terracotta

caryatids and cornices embellished

with lions’ heads. On Euston Road the world

passes – endless pedestrians, black cabs,

red buses. How I longed, as a youth,

to be here – to live and work among these

acres of ideas, the palpable shades

of literary men and women, shakers

and movers in that enduring tradition!

 

Our train passed the same blackened walls

he would have seen – perhaps even the same

stunted buddleia! Not until just before

Bexley did there seem to be some woodland –

or, until after Bletchley, ploughed fields

with murders of crows in the furrows.

We watched a shower of rain move towards us

through the obsolete radio masts

near Rugby, and I thought of James Joyce

creative in exile.

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

EZRA POUND IN VENICE

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‘But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.’ Ezra Pound

 

Sitting in a traghetto, Olga Rudge

from Ohio and Ezra Pound from

Idaho – together fifty years,

from concert violinist to poet’s helpmate,

poet maker to fascist propagandist,

he, typically, with stick, wide brimmed hat,

floppy collar, she, wearing woollen gloves,

left hand clutching a large, canvas bag, right hand

a carefully folded scarf, dressed, like any

elderly woman, for a chilly day –

look away separately into the distance.

 

Five years before Pound’s death, Allen Ginsberg,

from New Jersey, on a sort of Grand Tour,

kissed him on the cheek and forgave him,

on behalf of the Jews, for his ‘mistake’.

‘Do you accept my blessing?’ asked Allen.

‘I do’, said Ezra. What closure! What chutzpah!

 

Held in a cage in Pisa, lit day and night,

jeered at as a traitor and a coward

by GIs who had battled from the south,

he wrote: ‘What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross’.

 

 

Note: first published on the site in June 2009.

 

 

 

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