Ezra Pound Reads

Rating:
Summary: Essential Listening
Review: Ezra Pound has a deep, rattling, weird voice. It's one of those voices you'll never be able to forget. Even though this recording is completely unorganized - the tracks aren't really labeled at all and each one includes several poems - the selection of readings is very fine and won't disappoint a Pound enthusiast.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely Helpful
Review: Not until listening to Ezra himself reading from "The Cantos" did I begin to establish a toehold in the poem. There's no shortage of critical commentary about Pound's modernism, imagism, multilingualism, vorticism, influence, etc., but much of it doesn't necessarily help the reader with the specifics of Pound's poetry let alone provide a coherent pathway through it. Pound's obscurity is compounded, it seems to me, by those who keep insisting on seeing the Cantos as "cinematic collage." The problem is that the poem paints relatively few memorable images. Its poet was, above all, a troubador, inspired by the frequently coarse, frequently sublime and visionary music of Robert Browning's Sordello. To hear Pound's voice is to discover the musical basis of the poem. And as polytonal as the work is, Pound's relentless, frequently reactionary jeremiad begins to take on both narrative and thematic coherence because of the sound of his voice (which in parts of Canto 99 doesn't even have spoken word correlatives).

For anyone seeking either to further their understanding of Pound or simply to get into him, this recording is a better bet than most of the commentaries. It's useful if not essential in ways that the recordings of other poets--Eliot, Frost, Stevens, even Yeats and Dylan Thomas--are not.

Rating:
Summary: Songs, Speeches, Poems.
Review: One of the amazing things about the Poetry of Ezra Pound is the emotional tonality of his works, which burst off the page with primal strength and grab you by the throat. Most of this is written in free verse but it has a inexplicable sense of rightness about it. It sings. I was surprised to find Pound reading. I did not think that the trajectory of his life would have allowed him to read his works on tape, but I found that he was recorded during his stay at the American mental institution that held him in his final years. Pound reads them with the emotion that I thought he might. The cantos are firm, hymnlike, religious, songlike. He recites them like a monk relating his dark and austere secrets of his studies. His voice is a little wobbly in his old age, and this unfortunately reduces some of the power. But Pound still feels furious, intent, fanatical, even here. One can feel the weight of his intensity in these readings, especially the two Cantos on Usury from the 40 - 50's range. This is well worth it. I would recommend this for anyone. The readings are unfortunately incomplete (there must have been unwillingness to record all or some sort of limitation on the part of the recorders or Pound), but so power and virile that they are moving both as prose and as song and as speech.
The Cantos are monolithic and can be like getting shouted at for an hour. Pound also finds sympathy and you feel his description as a close friend relating a nostalgic tale. He can also be grim, and his words seem the perfect eulogy for Western Civilization. The Cantos can be like getting pummeled! Yet with each struggle one comes out feeling a desire to know more about the world and to search out truth. When I first opened the Cantos, I felt that they were not well written, because the writing is choppy, in places it seems haphazard and sloppy. Pound gives the impression of writing with incredible haste and bluster, as if fighting with his life to complete this work before his death. You see the unfolding of Pound's wild and weird life as the Cantos unfold, and his intellect and passions fight against the world that would ultimately defeat him. The cantos are not written to be accepted technically; they are about teaching life (Pound would say wisdom; APPLIED knowledge) and about truth, and not about words.
Reading Pound, one feels the weight of civic responsibility. Pound rages at what he sees rending Western Civilization from its roots. He discloses history by mentioning it, using events as metaphors, as expressions, as examples of his points, and in doing this he expects you to know them. Pound's poetry convicts one to read Dante, to read Homer, to read the Troubadours. And if you took nothing more away from that Cantos than that, that isn't bad. But you see in his work someone who is absolutely dedicated to how he felt the world should be. There is no apathy here. We can all stand to nod to Pound's conviction. You can feel it here.