Interesting. Oddly enough, just before reading yours above I was reminded of this self-description by Eliot: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion”. It’s in a brilliantly understated book by Molly Murray called “The Poetics of Conversion”. The book actually makes me laugh: her manner is so unassuming, but her topic is essentially liminality - though that’s the last word she’d use haha. 🙂
Hi Dick, no need to say sorry - I’m glad if my comment touched a meaningful chord. Also glad to hear your view of Pound. Normally I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole. But as you say, he’s unavoidable - your possible PhD project to displace him with the likes of Flint therefore seems excellent (to me). The reason I’m suddenly re-interested by the modernists stems from that Nietzsche quote I mentioned a while back - “I’m afraid we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar”. I’ve been musing over it for a while - years really - and being in a rather unusual, experimental place right now (with time, the first time in years - hence also my poetry and Substack!) I’m trying to pursue it as an article on the intersection of theology and literature. So despite really being an early modernist, I’m reading lots of Nietzsche and Pound and Eliot etc. - and enjoying the change. It’s a holiday, really - but one I’m enjoying while I’m on it!
Ah awesome - yeah that quote is so good, and seems really fertile for investigation. Super interested to see what you eventually come up with. One thing I have noticed is that a lot of more "modernist" poetry during that late-1800s and early-1900s period shifts away from "God" as a singular, and towards a more multiplicitous notion of "Gods" in the plural - probably an influence of Greek and Japanese ideas around the divine I imagine. That ended up being a big influence on my own approach to gods and the divine in my own poetry as well.
Rather unusually for me, I have been reading and writing on Modernists like Pound. Your short poem here (and elsewhere) makes me think of him. I note the influence of Japanese poetry on the Modernists too. Do you consider yourself a modernist, Dick?
Oh and in terms of Japanese poetry - one of the underlying theses of this project is that Japanese poetry had a much larger influence on this period than is historically recognised, to the point where I feel that it might be one of the most important things to have happened to English-language poetry (alongside Whitman and Dickinson), since the introduction of French rhymed verse in the 1000s, providing the model for "new" and "free" verse in English poetry in the late-1800s and early-1900s. If I ever went back to university to do a PHD that would probably be the topic, I think. :-)
Hey Thomas! Sorry about the delay in replying. Ah, that sounds really interesting! What kind of writing and reading? I'd love to know more. :-) Modernism is a weird one for me. I was a self-identified "modernist" and "structuralist" when I was young, like 18-22 or so. And for me that meant ideas around reducing each medium of art to its specific qualities, and notions around the "essence" of each medium and so on. It also meant rejecting post-modern ideas. Later I slowly moved away from modernism, got into post-modern aethetics, and then got really into "post-structuralism" (mainly under the influence of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, et al.). And a big part of post-structuralism is a critique of structuralism and modernism (in some ways, two sides of the sane coin) as hyper-reductive (both as an art movement, and a philosophy/aesthetic/approach to critique), which I wholeheartedly agreed with, and found fascinating.
So yeah, I abandoned modernism all together as a theoretical approach. I also had a strong interest in phenomenology, and kind of blended Deleuze with some Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Vivian Sobchack. Blah blah. These days I am much more chill and kind of don't care about all that. And my knowledge of it all is very magpie like - I took what I needed, and and use the concepts which are productive and work. I still go back to Deleuze a bit, cause his concepts and ways of approaching certain aesthetic and philosophic problems are really interesting to me. In some ways my whole project is a kind of critique of modernist histories, and the canon of modernist poetry from that period, which tends to dominate historical and theoretical discourses around poetry and verse.
In terms of Pound, he is someone I don't like much - but is also unavoidable in early-1900s poetry unfortunately haha. He has a few good poems early on, for me, but beyond that he kind of annoys me. And it doesn't help that he seemed like a real git in real life (and a card-carrying fascist to boot). Not that I begrudge anyone getting into his work - but for me, not a fan. My research also kind of shows that he also stole most of his main ideas, and purposefully hid his sources, so as to appear as if the ideas were his own - when really they were drawn explicitly from the writings of earlier poets like Hulme, Storer, Flint, Noguchi, at al. Haha - it's funny - one of the underlying bugbears of my whole project is to drown out the voice of Pound (my tongue is firmly in my cheek here) - I guess as the archetype Modernist with a capital "M" - he is so frequently one of few poets from that period to get any recognition, and is given far too much credit when it comes to the development of poetry at that time imo. But what can ya do? He's everywhere.
Sorry for the long answer - you just hit upon something I think about A LOT haha, and I thought, since you asked, I'd try and explain some of my complicated relationship to it. Again - these are just personal ideas y'know, and modernism was really helpful to me at a certain point, and if it works for someone, it works. And there were definitely good ideas in modernism, that I still tussle with from time to time. Would love to know more about your experiences with modernism, and your current reading and writing around it! :-) Hope you're well!
I thought of some of Picasso's early drawings in Paris, the ones he did of the Cirque Medrano, a bit earlier than this. I just edited a book about Picasso's so it came to mind right away.
Interesting. Oddly enough, just before reading yours above I was reminded of this self-description by Eliot: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion”. It’s in a brilliantly understated book by Molly Murray called “The Poetics of Conversion”. The book actually makes me laugh: her manner is so unassuming, but her topic is essentially liminality - though that’s the last word she’d use haha. 🙂
Hi Dick, no need to say sorry - I’m glad if my comment touched a meaningful chord. Also glad to hear your view of Pound. Normally I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole. But as you say, he’s unavoidable - your possible PhD project to displace him with the likes of Flint therefore seems excellent (to me). The reason I’m suddenly re-interested by the modernists stems from that Nietzsche quote I mentioned a while back - “I’m afraid we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar”. I’ve been musing over it for a while - years really - and being in a rather unusual, experimental place right now (with time, the first time in years - hence also my poetry and Substack!) I’m trying to pursue it as an article on the intersection of theology and literature. So despite really being an early modernist, I’m reading lots of Nietzsche and Pound and Eliot etc. - and enjoying the change. It’s a holiday, really - but one I’m enjoying while I’m on it!
Ah awesome - yeah that quote is so good, and seems really fertile for investigation. Super interested to see what you eventually come up with. One thing I have noticed is that a lot of more "modernist" poetry during that late-1800s and early-1900s period shifts away from "God" as a singular, and towards a more multiplicitous notion of "Gods" in the plural - probably an influence of Greek and Japanese ideas around the divine I imagine. That ended up being a big influence on my own approach to gods and the divine in my own poetry as well.
Rather unusually for me, I have been reading and writing on Modernists like Pound. Your short poem here (and elsewhere) makes me think of him. I note the influence of Japanese poetry on the Modernists too. Do you consider yourself a modernist, Dick?
Oh and in terms of Japanese poetry - one of the underlying theses of this project is that Japanese poetry had a much larger influence on this period than is historically recognised, to the point where I feel that it might be one of the most important things to have happened to English-language poetry (alongside Whitman and Dickinson), since the introduction of French rhymed verse in the 1000s, providing the model for "new" and "free" verse in English poetry in the late-1800s and early-1900s. If I ever went back to university to do a PHD that would probably be the topic, I think. :-)
Hey Thomas! Sorry about the delay in replying. Ah, that sounds really interesting! What kind of writing and reading? I'd love to know more. :-) Modernism is a weird one for me. I was a self-identified "modernist" and "structuralist" when I was young, like 18-22 or so. And for me that meant ideas around reducing each medium of art to its specific qualities, and notions around the "essence" of each medium and so on. It also meant rejecting post-modern ideas. Later I slowly moved away from modernism, got into post-modern aethetics, and then got really into "post-structuralism" (mainly under the influence of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, et al.). And a big part of post-structuralism is a critique of structuralism and modernism (in some ways, two sides of the sane coin) as hyper-reductive (both as an art movement, and a philosophy/aesthetic/approach to critique), which I wholeheartedly agreed with, and found fascinating.
So yeah, I abandoned modernism all together as a theoretical approach. I also had a strong interest in phenomenology, and kind of blended Deleuze with some Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Vivian Sobchack. Blah blah. These days I am much more chill and kind of don't care about all that. And my knowledge of it all is very magpie like - I took what I needed, and and use the concepts which are productive and work. I still go back to Deleuze a bit, cause his concepts and ways of approaching certain aesthetic and philosophic problems are really interesting to me. In some ways my whole project is a kind of critique of modernist histories, and the canon of modernist poetry from that period, which tends to dominate historical and theoretical discourses around poetry and verse.
In terms of Pound, he is someone I don't like much - but is also unavoidable in early-1900s poetry unfortunately haha. He has a few good poems early on, for me, but beyond that he kind of annoys me. And it doesn't help that he seemed like a real git in real life (and a card-carrying fascist to boot). Not that I begrudge anyone getting into his work - but for me, not a fan. My research also kind of shows that he also stole most of his main ideas, and purposefully hid his sources, so as to appear as if the ideas were his own - when really they were drawn explicitly from the writings of earlier poets like Hulme, Storer, Flint, Noguchi, at al. Haha - it's funny - one of the underlying bugbears of my whole project is to drown out the voice of Pound (my tongue is firmly in my cheek here) - I guess as the archetype Modernist with a capital "M" - he is so frequently one of few poets from that period to get any recognition, and is given far too much credit when it comes to the development of poetry at that time imo. But what can ya do? He's everywhere.
Sorry for the long answer - you just hit upon something I think about A LOT haha, and I thought, since you asked, I'd try and explain some of my complicated relationship to it. Again - these are just personal ideas y'know, and modernism was really helpful to me at a certain point, and if it works for someone, it works. And there were definitely good ideas in modernism, that I still tussle with from time to time. Would love to know more about your experiences with modernism, and your current reading and writing around it! :-) Hope you're well!
Love the drawing and your poem! 🖤
🖤
I thought of some of Picasso's early drawings in Paris, the ones he did of the Cirque Medrano, a bit earlier than this. I just edited a book about Picasso's so it came to mind right away.
Nice connection - love those early Picasso drawings - such an amazing movement of line!
Simple sketches
Convey
Essence
Lovely! :-)