Revision, Revision, and Ezra Pound

I was talking to another writer the other night and he was saying how important the reading, gathering information, research section of writing was for him. I feel the exact same way- i compared it to the way they make astronaut food on cartoons. They jam a ham and a turkey and a bunch of vegetables and a dessert into a machine and out pops a little food cube. the product seems much smaller than the sum of what went into it, but as homer noted, "i only eat food in bar form. when you concentrate food, you unleash its awesome power, i'm told." (of course then he finds out that the powersauce bars he's been eating are made of old chinese newspapers instead of apples. maybe this cultural reference falls apart here.) (of course, he then also learns from his powersauce bar that deng xiaoping died, so maybe it works after all.)

i've talked about this research as part of my process before, but i'm really thinking about it for this poem because ezra pound keeps appearing in my life. (not in a ghostly way- in a referential way.) this jenkins piece has a definite political undertone for me and i keep weighing how much to foreground that and how much to swallow it inside the poem. part of the tension is because this is a performance piece- read aloud with no written text for the audience to refer to, there's room for only so much subtlety- and i also want it to work as a poem on a page as well. so the balance is hard with those 2 requirements.

but i also wonder about the political requirements of a poet. i'm not a march around on the streets activist. i'm a writer and i see part of being a writer is uncovering or revealing, helping folks unpack a situation, telling stories that otherwise get lost. and i also believe this is very important political work. so for me, this piece is also a commentary on the iraq and afghanistan wars. to me, that is also a crucial part of resistence and the way i choose to participate.

Pennsound just made available their collection of pound's stuff http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.html. a lot of it's very poor quality and hard to understand and apparently mary derachewiltz, pound's daughter, is unhappy about that. she makes the argument that the middle of a war might be the most important time for folks to hear an anti-war poet loudly and clearly. i also read the interview with ferlinghetti in poets and writers in which he argues for pound as a poet persecuted for speaking out against war. http://www.pw.org/mag/features.htm

i'm fascinated by this new take on pound ( i also learned last night while watching a new orleans documentary that pound was in new orleans for awhile. didn't know it and that was my 3rd pound exposure in one day. a little strange.) and it made me wonder why we don't have any poets dangerous enough to be detained. are there no speeches, poems, or other activities we could take dangerous enough to worry the powers that be? it made me scribble a couple of notes in my notebook about st. elizabeth's and the guantonamanian cantos and makes me thinking about how to gracefully foreground the current war connection with the jenkins piece.