“Shocked at my Levity”

Ezra Pound’s humor promotes unorthodox intimacies between readers and writers. His portraits in The Pisan Cantos catch Henry James and James Joyce laughing, emphasizing their human peculiarities and Pound’s personal knowledge of them. These scenes suggest how unsatisfactory he finds traditional notions of poetic immortality. Instead, his portraits of jesting writers make literary texts contain the artist as both heroic figure and human individual, doing the work of high art and personal interaction simultaneously. Pound loves the Romantic figure of the poet-hero, but his laughter emphasizes that artist’s fallible humanity, and highlights modernism’s concern with creating accurate models of imaginative sympathy. As Pound’s laughter becomes more intimate, however, it is also more troubling: humor in The Cantos seeks to enlist his reader not just in his poem but in his hierarchical vision of art and his fascist politics.

Continuities of Racial Fascism: Louis Till and Black Marxism in the Pisan Cantos

In Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Pound mourns the unjust execution of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. This essay argues that the unusually sympathetic representation of Till in the poem was made possible by Pound’s engagement with the ideas of activists for black liberation like Nancy Cunard and Langston Hughes; hence Pound, an avowed fascist, ultimately voices a critique of the “racial fascism” of the United States typical of discourses of black anti-imperialism. The essay concludes with exploring the antinomical racial logic of the Pisan Cantos, for which black political radicalism—the “Black Leninism” of Langston Hughes in particular—is revealed to be a constitutive, but repressed, ideological interlocutor.

Performance Typing

This essay reviews the publication of Larry Eigner’s selected poems and provides an introduction to Eigner (1927–96) and his place in US poetry. It gives an account of his life, describing his lifelong disability from cerebral palsy and the trajectory of his poetic career, which ended with over three thousand poems and great acclaim from US innovative poetic communities. It then relates Eigner to those communities, specifically Black Mountain in the 1950s and 1960s and the Language writers decades later. Eigner’s poetry is glancingly compared with that of Keats and of Dickinson, but the main juxtaposition is with Pound’s Pisan Cantos, where the rushed, typewritten quality of the lines is shown to have been foundational for Olson in his influential “Projective Verse.” Eigner’s work, while it shares characteristics, calls for different manners of reading. The latter part of the essay demonstrates this, by a close reading of a number of Eigner poems.

The Pisan Cantos in Progress

An interpretation and survey of Pound’s most famous poem and its processes of composition.

Pound, Ezra (1885–1972)

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885– 1972) was an American poet, essayist, and literary critic. In addition to his own literary accomplishments, he famously promoted the work of other artists, writers, and musicians such as George Antheil, T. S. Eliot, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He helped to establish both the Imagist and Vorticist movements. His best known poems include "Sestina Alta Forte" (1909), "In a Station of the Metro" (1913), Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), and The Cantos, a 120-poem epic published in 11 book-length instalments between 1917 and 1969. The Library of Congress awarded him the prestigious Bollingen prize for The Pisan Cantos in 1949.