>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^F00:00:08 ^M00:00:23 >> Robert Casper: Thanks so much for coming out. It's good to see you on a beautiful, almost Halloween afternoon in October in the nation's capitol. My name is Rob Casper. I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to our first literary birthdays events in the fall, featuring poet Ezra Pound. We realize we've been doing this series for almost five years, so it's exciting to have the opportunity to promote new writers when their birthdays come up not on the weekends and moments we can actually get this room and honor them in the way that we should, and Ezra Pound is no exception. I'm going to do something I'll ask you to do too, which is to turn off any electronic devices that you have, which may interfere with the recording of this event. I'm going to tell you a little bit too about the Poetry and Literature Center. We are home to the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, and we put on literary readings, symposiums, panels and so on and so forth throughout the year. We do some 40 events mostly here in the D.C. area. If you didn't hear about us via email, you can sign up for our email notifications outside. I'd encourage you to do that. You can also check out our website that has all sorts of information and has unique content worth checking out at www.loc.gov/poetry. I'm also happy to say that my bosses here, one of more important figures in the Library of Congress, John Cole, the Director for the Center for the book. So we're thrilled to have him come out for an important event like this. We're also thrilled on the opposite side of the aisle so to speak to have the cultural attache from the Embassy of Italy, [inaudible], here so he's taking pictures for the Pound family so they get to see how we're celebrating Mr. Pound here at the Library today. Also, I just want to let you know in an ongoing effort to learn more about our marketing and communications outreach as well as continue to provide the highest quality programming and events, the Library would appreciate the evaluation of this event that you're attending. We have a survey in the back that we hope that you fill out and hand in. You can also fill out a survey outline later on. It helps us as we continue to develop programs such as this. Let us know what you think of it and how you found out about it. That would be great. We are thrilled this afternoon to honor one of America's great voices and one of the more important figures in the Library of Congress in it's history and history of the Poet Laureate Center and the history of the Library and it's awards. Charles Bernstein will talk a little bit more about that. This day which is -- or would have been Ezra Pound's 130th birthday. You can learn more about Ezra Pound and about our two featured readers, Elizabeth Arnold and Charles Bernstein, in the program you all should have. We are thrilled to have both here. Elizabeth came from just up the road, and Charles came from all the way -- all the way away in New York City, a trip I make every week. So I well know how it goes. We're happy to have them here, and I might be eager to get them up here. Let me tell you a word about our program. Our reader -- our featured readers will read their favorite Pound poems, talk a little bit and hopefully connect them to their own work. Following the readings, we'll have Mark Manivong, who's sitting right over here from our Rare Books and Special Collections Divisions who will talk about this great table top display that we have upon materials in our collection. I encourage you afterwards to come up and check it out. And you can find out a little bit more about the invaluable work the Division does to ensure that future generations can connect to the exemplars of our exemplars of our culture to sort of understand them better through these primary documents. To learn more about the Library's Rare Books and Special Collections Division, you can visit it's website at www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook. And now please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Arnold and Charles Bernstein. ^M00:04:50 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:54 >> Elizabeth Arnold: Thanks, Rob. And it's so great to see all these people here. It's going to be good. So I will start. Frank Bidart says in an interview that reading Pound's Cantos gave him permission to put anything into a poem, doctor's notes and Ellen West, the preface to Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and now in your hand found material of many kinds as widespread in The Cantos and important in lots of ways, but I think that for me at least I find something sort of deeper going on in his poems, especially The Cantos with regard to his adherence to the actual, and it's related idea that the natural object is adequate symbol. Instead of using the rose, the flower, as a code word for love, not showing the reader anything out of the natural world, the particular kind of rose it is say as seen in the light of morning or in lamp light filling the room like a liquid. To show all this is to create an experience. By focusing on the particulars of particulars, Pound produces in his poems the emotional experience of being carried somewhere plus whatever symbolic idea the object may be associated with. Pound strengthens his hold on the reader further by his equally remarkable handling of sound, the intricacy of his descriptive language. His presentation of the thing as he put it is enacted and intensified by the intricacy and force of the sounds of his words. Often in The Cantos what Pound wants us to experience is visionary, ecstatic. It's nothing less than transporting. What I want to emphasize today is that for Pound, the actual is a kind of doorway into visionary experience. Portraying the world accurately therefore is crucial. And the music of the language Pound uses to portray the world has a great deal to do with sending us over into the visionary. I thought I could show you at least some of what I mean by looking at parts of Cantos II and one of the late fragments, notes for Cantos 117. Then I'll read one of my poems, Waking in my Boots. It's hard to [inaudible] I can compare anything I'm doing to Pound. So anyway, to start, consider some lines near the end of Cantos II, and I think they're on the handout. Glass glint of wave and the tide rips against sunlight. Pallor of Hesperus or Venus, grey peak of the wave, wave color of grapes pulp olive grey in the near far. Smokey gray of the rock slide . First, there's the [inaudible] glass glint which reveals a lot. The water is clear. The quality of the light hard. The latter comes not just from the word glint but that it is along with glass very heavily stressed and contains hard continents. The heavy stresses and hard continents continue through the line. The whole glittery vision caught in 12 syllables. Glass glint of the wave and the tide rips against sunlight. The rhythm and kinds of sounds repeated and almost repeated. In other words, rhyme in the largest sense as opposed to just end rhyme. The hard G's and T's especially that D. But the lighter S's also help me see the slightly sinuous light as the water moves it. The end sounds enlongating some syllables stretching them. All of it working to carry me into this world. Pound exists then at this moment. It almost makes me want to squint. Then comes the wider deeper sounds, gray peak of the wave, wave color of grapes, pulp, olive gray and the near far smokey gray of the rock slide. It's a minute difference in color of gray ocean water that's being defined here, but I feel how Pound must absolutely distinguish between them, the two colors. He must get the difference exactly right. And by doing so, capture a singular moment of perception. The obsession with accuracy here I find thrilling all by itself. That act of the mind. In addition to being transported to a particular place at a particular time. The rhythm of these lines stands out again. It has a chanting quality. ^M00:10:27 And Pound's signature free verse [inaudible] adopted from the Anglo Saxon poetry ray of the rock slide and earlier exactly the same. As Frost tells us, no syllable -- no two syllables are the same, but you can hear the pattern rips against sunlight, color of grapes pulp, da, da, da, da, da. This is Pound's -- one of those contributions I think. At this point, he has a very definite free verse rhythm, which is so sadly lacking generally. At this point in The Cantos, Pound is just coming out of a visionary trance arising from his translation of [inaudible] story, about how Dyonisus turns a slaver's ship carrying men who have kidnapped him. He was appearing as a child to them into a rock, an island. It's ropes becoming grapevines, the men, the sailors, fish. The metamorphosis happens in an instant. It is, after all, produced by a god but takes up two pages of poetry. Pound enacts the timelessness in the temporal medium of language by using the chanting rhythm we've just seen. Over time, but as if not. Stunning visual depictions distinguish the jungle Dyonusus creates in the middle of the sea. So I'll just read a few lines of this to give you the feeling of being sort of in a different dimension. And where was gunwale? There now was vine trunk and tenthril where cordage had been, grape leaves on the rowlocks, heavy vine on the oarshafts and out of nothing a breathing, hot breath on my ankles. Beasts like shadows in glass, a furred tail upon nothingness. Lynx-purr and heathery smell of beasts where tar smell had been. Sniff and pad foot of beasts. Eye glitter out of black air. The sky overshot, dry with no tempest. Sniff and pad foot of beasts, fur brushing my knee skin. Rustle of airy sheaths dry forms in the ether, and the ship like a keep in ship yard slung like an ox in Smith sling ribs stuck fast in the ways, grape cluster over pin rack, void air taking pelt. Not unlike a poet out of nothing in an instant the god Dyonisus produces a whole world. It is intoxicating appropriately and erotic. Out of nothing a breathing hot breath on my ankles. Fur brushing my knee skin. But although this is vision, a kind of make believe for most of us anyway though not for Pound, it has the visual accuracy of The Cantos later lines, the ones we looked at earlier. There is a level of actuality that authenticates the vision, let's us into it. And as in the lines Lynx-purr and heathery smell of beasts where tar smell had been, just by mentioning tar smell, we're on that ship right before it is transformed, an actual ship we can imagine or remember. And details of the vision itself post transformation, post metamorphosis are also very precise helping to convince us. It's as if the details are actual, familiar even though they're really quite fantastic. Beasts like shadows in glass, a furred tail upon nothingness, eye glitter out of the black air. Pound brings us over into the vision through a combination of these details, in the chanting with it's repeated rhythmic patterns and repeated words and phrases that put us into a trance or trance-like state. Grape leaves on the rowlocks, ship like a keel and shipyard, ribs stuck fast in the ways along with incredibly sensual sounds. The stealthy th sound in breath and heathery. The equally muted unvoiced f sound in sniff and pad foot of beasts. A line that is repeated verbatim, the d sound [inaudible], the sh in fur brushing my knee skin, giving us other dimensions of sensory detail, touch and smell and whatever it is the sounds are doing to us. Combined with the stunning visual detail, Pound makes the Dyonisus vision recorded here very real. He creates a powerful feeling of being spiritually transported. ^F00:15:49 ^M00:15:55 A similar kind of proceeding happens in notes for Canto 117. This is a much shorter Canto. Not enough time to get the chanting going. In fact, this Canto reminds me of Pound's much earlier images poems. Still coming at the end of the Cantos the fragment rides on the many longer visionary stretches that precede it. It's part of this kind of experience therefore, the kind of music that's been established already. Let me just give you a quick clause. Benedetto is Italian for blessed. The young for the old, Pound was thinking of young people dying in wars while the old stay home. The [inaudible] was a cliff in ancient Rome where criminals were executed by being thrown off it. Zagreus is another name for Dyonisus. And [inaudible] is his mother. For the blue flesh and the moments benedetto, the young for the old. That is tragedy. And for one beautiful day there was peace. Brancusi's bird in the hollow of pine trunks or when the snow was like sea foam. Twilight sky leaded with elm boughs. Under the Rupe Tarpeia, weep out your jealousies to make a church or an altar to Zagreus, son of Semele without jealousy. Like the double arch of a window or some great colonnade. I hear rhythmic patterns from Canto II here. Hollow of pine trunks, snow was like sea foam, leaded with elm boughs. Breaking out of this rhythm almost as if it is blooming in the mind is the expansive and for one beautiful day there was peace. Then back to the chant and the accurate surprising comparison of snow to sea foam, twilit sky leaded with elm boughs suggesting he is standing in a cathedral instead of on the grounds at St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital. He includes church among the possibilities for what could be built to honor the blessed, the benedetto, to honor peace versus jealousies associated as they are with disagreements that can lead to war and executions and altar to Dyonisus being presumably the preference for a polypheus such as Pound. But Pound doesn't choose. Art, of course, is included. There was a pine tree at St. Elizabeth's that reminded him of Brancusi's bird sculptures. And he's imagining how out of the peaceful time something like the double arch of a window or some great colonnade could be built. Pound couldn't make the world into paradise, but who could? Other then a god. So now I'll read my humble poem. Boy, every time I teach Pound, I usually teach people who are influenced by him afterwards, and it's always -- every time I stay with Pound longer. Next semester I stay with him longer because when I switch, even though these were great poets I love like George Oppen and James McMichael, just really amazing, amazing poets, but I alwayas feel this let down. I hope you don't feel -- [inaudible] -- I shouldn't have said that. Anyway, that is how I'm feeling at the moment. I won't pretend it has the power of Pound's Cantos, but it does represent sensory detail, my poem, without a lot of commentary and reaches the level of vision, I think that level of vision toward the end. There's a little turn that always kind of gives me a little thrill when I read it. It's why I chose this poem. As opposed to Pound, my being agnostic prevents me from feeling comfortable, claiming a fully god inspired vision. But I do feel transported across millennia in this poem, which gives me a bit of a jolt, a sense of rebirth. The poem is set just off the interstate highway between North Texas and New Mexico. ^M00:20:19 Desert. Just across the border from North Texas, my car broke. The land's heat hovered above the defunct road I'd rolled it onto with a clump of empty yellowish buildings at the dead end. The exit of the interstate being there, I guess, really only for the road that actually goes somewhere in the opposite direction. It's border as deserted as my part until the eye caught dust colored cardboard box like houses lining the red hill's foot far south across the roar of highway. The car was dead, useless. No way away from this place. So I sat in the heat with the windows up for as long as I could stand it and my dog, waiting for the tow truck then rolled them down a little just a crack because I feared some slasher movie kind of incident, cruelty beings that seemed fitting here, the sun being cruel and the sharp sand grains. Then more rolled the windows farther down, then all the way, but even that wasn't enough. So I opened the door as if it had been years that I'd been in there. Broke a seal as if it had been milennia since someone, some sort of mason probably with the hope and fear of [inaudible] times had sealed me in to preserve for what? As if a living thing could leave it's tomb. I ended up on the car hood where these birds I didn't recognize fed on locusts it looked like. There was the click of excess skeletons, a remarkable display of leaping by the birds. It wasn't flying. As I went by turns into the cloud came out invariably with a bug in the beak then shot back in. My dog tugging on the leash, but we were free. Me barely catching breath and wonderment at another kind of what. Thank you so much. Thank you. ^M00:22:49 [ Applause ] ^M00:22:56 ^F00:22:57 ^M00:23:05 >> Charles Bernstein: I'm very happy to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. In 1948, Ezra Pound won the Bollingen prize for a book that's out here on the table, The Pisan Cantos, that created an enormous scandal and ended the prize being given by Library of Congress basically because it was not really feasible for a government agency to give a prize, and that particular prize in '48 was so controversial. And so it's interesting to speak here at the Library of Congress. To me, that's the primary occasion of my being here as much more than the birthday tribute because it's a very important event in American poetry. There's two approaches to the criticism of Pound that I disagree with, one of which is the defenders of pounds, some of them who would say that the antisemitism and the fascism in The Cantos, the suprematism is a cancer that doesn't really affect the main body of the work, and you can cut it out and read the beautiful passages or that indeed he was insane or crazy, and that's what gave rise to those views. To me, that's really not supportable by the work, and it also underestimates what Pound is doing. I prefer to take Pound at his word and to believe that he thought what he thought and wrote what he wrote, and I think it's intrinsic to the whole texture of The Cantos, especially the late Cantos, especially9 work that he did after the mid 30's or even the early 30's. However, I even -- as I more strongly disagree with those who say that because of that we shouldn't read Pound or deal with Pound, that seems to be the absolutely disturbing view because it associates the political or moral or ethical or even religious views of the poet with the quality of the poem. That is the view that most people have. They want poems to be exemplary of some virtue, but I'm against that. I don't think that poetry has to do with virtue. I don't think the greatness of poetry has to do with virtue. So in this sense, I have a great respect for the award in 1948. I think it was an amazing thing because what was the war about? Here was a person who opposed the American effort of the war to say the least and who was really a very deep and profound spokesperson for the extermination of the European Jews. And we fought a war against that, and we won that war, and the people here at the Library of Congress gave a book to somebody who was on the opposite side, not just in a superficial way, but in the most profound way because it was a great book, and it's a great set of poems. And this is something that's very hard to reconcile or for people to put their heads around. But I just want to note that. Ezra Pound is one of the most ambitious influential innovative poets of the modernist period who made significant contributions to American poetry not only as a poet but also as a translator, editor, polemicist and essayist. Pound's poetics had a profound influence was on both the poets and readers of his generation. He was a primary proponent of other modernist writers including Yates who served as a model for him, Elliot with whom he edited The Wasteland, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams and H.G. and poets of the next generation such as Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting. Pound strenuously attacked the prevailing verse styles of his time, which he found flabby and vague. Such verse, he said, lost it's musicality because of it's step adherence to metrical structure that substituted the regularity of the metronome for the intricate patterning of composition by ear. As a leading proponent of what came to be known somewhat problematically as free verse, Pound said that poetry could be divided according to three essential components, phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia, the play of image, music and meaning. In his manifestos for images and [inaudible] poetry stripped of all nonessential elements where every word made a necessary contribution to the poem "which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Pound's [inaudible] in the metro from 1911 is exemplary of the condensation or obliqueness of the images aesthetic and also reflects the influence of classical Chinese poetry. A second approach that Pound took to poetry early in his career was the use of masks or personae, personae being the title of his collection of shorter poems rather then the poem presenting the voice of the author as in much lyric poetry. The speaker in Pound's persona poems is made up of -- is a made up character with whom Pound did not completely identify. This allowed Pound to be satiric even sarcastic not only about the subject in the poems but also about their speaker, although he sometimes appears to share the sentiments of the poem's persona making for an interesting ambiguity. Section two of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley lampoons what the age, the period just before the first World War demanded, the superficial hit of plaster rather then the richer pleasures of alabaster. Section five is a bitter and antipatriotic comment on the futility of World War I in which so many young men died for a botched civilization about which I agree. The third and most important approach Pound took to poetic compositions reflected in his epic poem, The Cantos, a series of long poems on which he worked from the mid 30's until the end of his life. Pound defined an epic as a poem including history. By calling his poem epic, he brought to mind such works as the odyssey divine comedy. [Inaudible] unlike these narrative poems, however, The Cantos uses collage or what now might be called sampling, the juxtaposition of quotations from a carefully selected range of European and western cultures including a fair amount of American history and current events. Quoted materials forms only a small part of the overall text, however, since the entire poem is shot through with Pound's own interventions, interpolations and compositional extensions. Pound's quotations were often in Chinese, Italian, French and other languages, and he usually left them untranslated. In the later Cantos, Pound organized the word spatially on the page decisively [inaudible] with the flesh left orientation of much western poetry up until that time though following the lead of [inaudible]. The result is a poem of immense sweep often gorgeous lyricists with a sometimes baffling range of references and many infuriatingly didacdic passages. For this poetry of ideas, Pound maximized discontinuity with some would call fragmentation. At the same time, he tried to maintain strong authorial control over the intended meaning to be derived from the juxtaposition of what he called luminous details. ^M00:30:28 Over the course that Cantos and his essays, Pound would increasingly be obsessed with economics and in particular his belief that charging interest on money lent, in other words the whole system of monetary credit, was destroying western civilization. In one of his Cantos, he attacks usury, lending money at exorbitant rates, which for Pound was any interest rate. Pound believed interest eroded the rock solid values of things. Pound's economic views became increasingly rabid over time. He associated Jews with money lending and usury, a common stereostype with genocidal implications. By the way, I'm offering loans for one percent, 1.2 percent outside if you buy my book. I'll be happy to provide those loans for you. Insisting that Jews not being grounded in the land they own contributed to a wasteland of modern fragmentation and unintentionally ironic view for one of the greatest progenitors of modernist fragmentation in poetry and one who lived most of his life in exile. In World War II while living in Italy, Pound sided with the fascist cause, writing poems and speeches extolling Mussolini and excoriating Roosevelt. Pound's troubling politics are interwoven throughout his work with his poets and aesthetics, making for useful albeit sometimes distasteful study of the unavoidable relationship of poetry to politics. Pound's work reflects like much of the century in which he wrote both the best and worst of western civilization. Pound contrast the phallocentric logocentric unswerving pivot from Confucius "man's fallic heart is from heaven a clear spring of rightness with the castrated and nomadic Jew. Jews are the purveyors of fragmentation and therefore the dissolution of fixed hierarchical cultural values. The Jews [inaudible] on the radio want to blot out the classics! Blot out the record! Again, Jews as usurers and [inaudible] with the commies represent an indistinct rootless destructive mass eroding the [inaudible] ideal of homestead of nature and private property." Value Pound equated with order, clarity and [inaudible]. For Pound, Jews as -- Jews were falsification incarnate who aimed to distort, misrepresent and conceal language, to castrate literature, origins and tradition and are largely responsible for introducing abstraction, obscurity, verbiage, equivocation, ambiguity and allegory into language. In other words, Jews distracted men. This is Pounds speaking from the plain sense of the word. So it's my argument that Pound is one of the great Jewish poets of the 20th century since what's great about his work are all those things that he attributes to the Jews and of which few Jews actually are interested, although I am. I'm going to read now an excerpt from the Pisan Cantos that won the award. "Goat bells tinkled all night, and the hostess grinned when she gave me a paper to write on. We call all foreigners frenchies to break the pentameter. That was the first heave. What counts is the cultural level, yet ere the season died a cold born upon a zephyr's shoulder. I rose through aureate sky. What thou lovest well remains. The rest is dross. What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage, whose world or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the scene then thus the palpable. Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell. What thou lovest well is thy true heritage. What thy lovest well shall not be reffed from thee. The [inaudible] center in his dragon world pull down thy vanity. It is not man made courage or made order or made grace. Pull down thy vanity. I say pull down. Learn of the green world. What can be thy place in scaled invention and true artistry. Pull down thy vanity. Pacquin pull down. The green casque has outdone your elegance. Master thyself then others shall thee bear. Pull down thy vanity thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, a swollen magpie in a fitfull sun half black half white nor knowest a wing from tail. Pull down thy vanity how mean thy hate fostered in falsity. Pull down thy vanity. Wrath to destroy niggered in charity. Pull down thy vanity I say. Pull down. But to have done instead of not doing, this is not vanity. To have with decency knocked that a blunt should open to have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame. This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered." And I'll end with an excerpt from a poem of mine that relates to this called The Lies of the Toll Takers. There appears to be a receiver off the hook, not that you care beside the gloves resided a hat and two pinky rings for which no finger was ever found. [Inaudible] with no release became after not too long atrophied [inaudible] stupifying. Difference or difference [French accent]. It's the distinction between hauling junk and emptying rubbish while I needless to say take out the garbage, pragmatism, laughing all the way to the Swiss bank where I put my money in gold bars, the prison house of language. Neither speaking the unspeakable nor saying the unsayable. Though no doubt slurring the unslurrable. Never only [inaudible] always reconstricting [inaudible] flow just another word for [inaudible]. There was an old lady who lived in a zoo. She had so many admirers she didn't know what to rue. Like a dull blade with a greasy handle, a [inaudible] page with an unfathomable ramble. Poetry's like a spoon with three or four exemptions. In effect only off peak. Void where permitted by Lord. Triple play on all designated coast phonemes. You mean morphemes. Don't tell me what I mean! Rhymes may come and rhymes may go, but there is no chrome like presentiment. To refuse the affirmation of a straight forward statement. Sentiment is not to be so bent over with irony as to be unable to assert anything, but to find such statement already undermined by the resistance it pretends to over power by it's idealism masked as realism. What? No approach to gross if it gets a laugh? In Reagan's vocabulary, freedom's just another word for watch out! I pride myself on my pleonastic [inaudible] armour, ardor, besides love may come and love may go. ^M00:40:21 But uncertainty is here forever. She can slip and she can slide. She's every parent's joy and [inaudible] guide. In dreams begin a lot of bad poetry. The things I write are not about me, though they become me. You look so becoming, she said, attending the flower pots. I'm a very becoming guy. Tell it to that is better to become then Gestalt fiction, traction flirtation to be. Actuality is just around the corner, just a spark in the dark. Self-actualization a glance in a tank of [inaudible]. Not angles just tangles from which a certain direction emerges, urges. Hope gives way to tire tracks on the way without stipulating the destination, the better to get there somewhere other. The magic phoneme for today is [inaudible]. Funny, you don't look gluish. Poetry the show me business. You just said the magic phoneme. Don't give me any of your show me business. She wore blue velvet, but I was color blind and insensible. Give it to me where it counts. One and two and one, two, three. I had it but I misplaced it somewhere in the back burner of what is laughingly called my mind, my crime. A mind is a terrible thing to steal. Intellectual property is also theft. The near heroic obstinency of his refusal inability to despair and who can say whether dejection or elation will ensure the care for care in the world that may lead us weightless into a new world or sink us like lead baboons deeper into this one. Yet to have to admit it's highly drinkable. Delish [phonetic spelling]. I imagine you unbespeckled upright dictating with no hint of under current of victim of the tide. What if success scares you so much that at the point of some modest accepted midway through life's burning you blast onto the street six shooters smoking still a rebel? For what? Of course, new ventures always require risks. But by carefully analyzing the situation, we become smart risk takers. Fear of softness characterized as rounded edges indecisivists, need to please versus the [inaudible] rigidity of the phallic edge ready to stand erect, take sides, false dichotomies, all dichotomies and afirmation that dissolves into the fabric of unaccounted desires, undeterones of [inaudible] that can't be willed away but neither need be mindless obeyed. What's that? If it's not good news, I don't want to hear it. Stand up and [inaudible]. Our new service orientation meant not only changing the way we wrote poems but also diversifying into new poetry services. Poetic opportunities, however, do not fall into your lap at least not very often. You've got to seek them out and when you find them, you've got to have the know how to take advantage of them. Keeping up with the new aesthetic environments is an ongoing process. You can't stand still. Besides our current fees barely cover our expenses. Any deviation from these levels would mean working for nothing. Poetry services provide cost savings to readers such as avoiding hospitalization. You're less likely to get in an accident if you're home reading poems. Minimizing wasted time. Condensare. Or reducing adverse idea interactions. Studies show higher levels of resistance to double [inaudible] political programming [inaudible] those who read 7.7 poems or more each week. Poets deserve compensation for these services. For readers unwilling to pay the price, we need to refuse to provide such services as a literation, internal rhyme, exogamic structure and unusual vocabulary. Sharp edges which become shady groves, mosaic walkways, emphatic asymptotes, [inaudible]. The hidden language of the Jews self reproach laden with ambivalence. Not this or this either seeing five sides to every issue. The old [inaudible] song and dance [inaudible] clowning as ingraciation whose only motivation is never offend. Criticize only with a discountable barb. Genocide is made of words like these. Pound laughing with [inaudible] laughter all the way to the cannon's bank spewing forth about the concrete value of gold, the plain sense of the word. People rooted in the land they sow and cashing in on such verbal usury, language held hostage year 1987. There is on plain sense of the word. Nothing is straight forward. Description a lie behind a lie. But truths can still be told. Take this [inaudible] off my chest. I don't feel it anymore. It's getting stark, too stark to see. Feel I'm barking at hell's spores. The new sentians as if Harvard Law School was not a reeducation camp. No, only the disctinction between nature and culture may obscure the [inaudible] gumption of language. Clear as fudge. Then what can I believe then? Daddy, what did you do to stop the war? [Inaudible]. We may all be one body, but we're sure as hell not one mind. Tell her I had to change my plans. It's not what you know but who knows about it and who's likely to squeal. Button your lip. Clasp your tie. You're on the B team, a job by any other name would smell as sweet. It's not an operating system. It's an operating environment besides. ^M00:47:46 [ Applause ] ^M00:47:54 >> Mark Manivong: Good afternoon. I'm Mark Manivong, Curator for Poetry and Literature Collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. I'd first like to say thank you to Charles and Elizabeth for being here today and to the Poetry and Literature Center for organizing this wonderful event. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds more than a million items spread across more than 100 collections. Many of our holdings are unrivaled and you'll see a small table top display here today of Pound materials which wasn't exactly easy to assemble or to select. So I hope you'll come up and view these. They're available for you along with everything else in our division Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. Thank you. ^M00:48:45 [ Applause ] ^M00:48:50 >> Robert Casper: Thanks to both of our readers. Thanks to Mark and thanks to you for coming out. You should a, come up and see these materials. B, you should buy books. We have books by both of our authors. We also have books by our featured poet, Ezra Pound. You can surely get them our readers to sign any one of those books. And come back again. Sign up -- our sign up sheet, and come to our next reading. Thanks. ^M00:49:16 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:18 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.