Ezra Pound Archive
The Modernist Revision of a Foreign Culture in Ezra Pound’s Cathay
Pound, a white man who couldn’t speak or read a word of Chinese, was not even necessarily attempting to faithfully recreate Cathay’s poems in English; he rewrote the poems to fit into American modernist aesthetics, bringing ancient Chinese poetry into his own place and time.
The Problem of “Make It New,” the Help of Joy Williams
At whatever point "Make it new" became a phrase so canonically removed from its creator that it began to reach the minds and ears of young writers years before they'd ever pick up Pound's poetry, a particular fine-edged damage was done.
When Women Writers Become Nightmares
When we go to inspect female-presenting writers, the canon is too familiar: Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen. There’s no purpose in arguing this. What’s more interesting is uncovering forgotten women writers—women who wrote poetry with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in life, or produced movies with Alfred Hitchcock.
The Poetry of Place: Origins
When I was a teenager I read T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound obsessively. (And yet somehow managed not to have a girlfriend. Go figure.) Eliot and Pound might seem stodgy and academic to most but for me—growing up in Fresno, California—they represented a larger, better world. Ivy League schools.
Concretizing the enemy
Words have always coveted pictures for how immediately they can stir us. I think of the photograph of the South Vietnamese child who’d been sprayed by napalm. No word alive can match it. It was the photo on the cover of every magazine in 1972, which “probably did more
Round-Down: Saludos to the Spanish-Speaking Reader
Those in the U.S. who speak Spanish in the home can rejoice: now, more easily than ever in this country, Spanish speakers can also find books in their lengua materna—and not just translations from English to Spanish. Real, authentic stories from all over the Spanish-speaking world are in demand