I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate to be among...
Even at this late-postmodernist moment, when self-defined innovative poetry needs to build on a long tradition of previous self-defined innovative poetry, such poetry still defines itself in opposition to ...
The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state...
Performance is a bothersome word for writerly poets. Performance art, poetry slams, and the like have made the term synonymous with theatricality, a recourse to dramatic, declamatory, and other tactics aimed...
In May 1998, the critic Michael Brenson organized a symposium at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York at which a number of people in the arts were asked to consider certain words. My word was “experimental...
To Alexander William Mowbray BaillieSept. 10. 1864.Dear Baillie,—Your letter has been sent to me from Hampstead. It has just come, and I do a rare thing with me, begin at once on an answer. I have just finished...
Speech is the effective form of a culture. Any shape or cluster of human history still apparent in the conscious and unconscious habit of groups of people is what I mean by culture. All culture is...
A DIALOGUE.POET. CRITIC.Poet. Approach me not, man of cold, steadfast eye and compressed lips. At thy coming nature shrouds herself in dull mist; fain would she hide her sighs and smiles, her buds...
There is an invisible architecture often supporting the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem. It reachesinto the poemin search for an identity with the poem,its object is to...
[Speculations, 113—40]I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this new classical spirit, when it works in verse, ...
Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!We stand for the Reality of the Present—not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past.We want to leave Nature and Men alone...
For a long time I've seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well...
VORTEX.POUND.______ The vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency. We use the words “greatest efficiency” in the precise sense—as they would be used...
There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By...
JACK SPICER: Well, I really ought to explain the structure of the three lecture/readings, more than is on the flyer that some of you saw. Essentially what’s going to happen is that each evening I...
THOMAS PARKINSON:(1) I think we can start the lecture now. This seems to be old home week. We have Jack Spicer with us, as we have off and on now for about twenty years, and it’s always a pleasure...
The War is the first and only thing in the world today.The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different...
A RETROSPECTThere has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in poetry, that I may perhaps be pardoned this brief recapitulation and retrospect.In the spring or early summer of 1912, “H. D.,...
(sermon faux – vraie historie) . . . and the old dogmatism will no longer be able to end it. ADOLFO SÁNCHEZ VÁZQUEZThe flower of capital is small and white large and grey-green in a storm its petals...