Douglas Mercer
December 22 2024
In 1925 a man from Idaho was the king pin of European culture, universally recognized as a man who had a huge heart and would sacrifice anything for any artist; he would put his own work on hold, and he would White Knight for a culture he feared was dying but which he wanted to make live with his exhortation to salvage what was left of a gross of broken statues and a few tattered books. If Joyce was struggling and needed money he would swoop in and rummage it up from the coterie of rich friends; if Eliot could not get a poem published he would contact his editor and see that it was done. He had become a one-man band for his only and true love: the European people. And his advice was to salvage the past by making it new. His family had been among the first to America, and his name says it all: Pound. His name might as well have been Dollar and he was working for a spiritual movement that could never be deflated. Revered by all as the master maker, he wanted to ensure that the mastery he so cherished would never die.
Forty two years later in 1967 Pound was as eager as ever to see his great people flourish; and it was in that year that an unlikely interlocutor for the European people, Alan Ginsberg, went to meet the great man at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric unit. Tucked among his belongings was a demo tape of the new song Eleanor Rigby. He played it for an increasingly wide eyed Pound who praised it to the skies. He said he was very impressed with this young poet and that he was gladdened that worthy successors still live in the land that his people had called home. What most impressed him was the simplicity of the track and how much narrative it packed into to so few words. The line her face which she keeps in the jar by the door reminded him of Eliot’ prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. Mostly he was thankful that the culture he had sacrificed so much for had not died, that more than these fragments would be alive to its survival. For Poetry is an office which whatever skald inherits it goes back to time immemorial and which stretches on into the infinite future. And so the new generation had been given the seal of the future and the imprimatur of the very best as surely as if they had been given a grave Roman Salute sent ringing down the corridors of time.
Poetry
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
