Tag Archives: ezra pound

Ezra Pound, Nature, Science fiction

A Tree Amid the Wood

18 Comments
A Tree Amid the Wood

I am delighted to announce my story “A Tree Amid the Wood” is featured in the latest edition of Little Blue Marble, which publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry focusing on ecology.

Franklin Pratt lives in a special house of his own design. It is a living thing that senses and responds to its owner’s needs by growing rooms as needed and reflecting the owner’s emotional state with bioluminescent blossoms. Once it’s mass-produced, Franklin’s invention can provide housing for millions and help heal the environment.

But since his stroke, Franklin is unable to share his creation with the world. He feels he’s a prisoner in his own home and distrusts Carrie Masada, the woman who supervises his team of caretakers. Franklin fears she only wants to steal the secret of his house.

And he’s right. Carrie wants Franklin’s secret. But why?

My love and concern for nature has inspired a number of my posts and published stories, so while honored by this acceptance, I am especially pleased my story promotes a cause I believe in deeply. The title comes from one of Ezra Pound’s early poems, “The Tree“:

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bough
And that god-feasting couple old
That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
‘Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart’s home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.

 As in Pound’s lovely poem, my story explores how love of the natural world is the essential foundation for understanding, connecting, and caring — in other words, for becoming fully human.

Ezra Pound, Lovecraft, Poetry

Quote of the day

6 Comments

Bad boys of literature

“The argument that we should judge a work by the sins of its creator reeks of puritanical righteousness and moral certitude. No work of art exists that wasn’t created by some complicated creature. When forming our literary, cinematic, and artistic canons, it’s important to remember that if you want a canon of saints, you’ll end up with a canon of zero.” Tyler Malone

Some bad boys of literature pictured above: Pablo Neruda, H. P. Lovecraft, Ezra Pound

Art, Ezra Pound, Science fiction

New Words, New Worlds

6 Comments

sunrise

Novelist and teacher M. Thomas Gammarino experienced an epiphany when he taught two courses in the same semester, one on science fiction, and another in modernism. Gammarino expected the two genres to clash, but happily discovered they supplemented each other. The reason, he explains in this Omni article, is that all art aims to enable us to see the world more intently by presenting it in unfamiliar and challenging ways:

In his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” Russian formalist poet Viktor Shlovky gave us the term ostranenie to describe the primary function of art. The term is usually translated as “defamiliarization,” though it literally means “strange-making.” The job of art, in other words, is to renew our eyes by making the familiar appear strange. Other modernists had— or would— put forth variations on this idea, from Mallarmé’s “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” (purify the words of the tribe) to Ezra Pound’s “Make it new,” and modernist critics regularly invoke this idea to illuminate the sorts of linguistic experiments writers like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce were up to.

I heartily agree. Both fantasy and sci-fi renew one’s sense of wonder in ways literary fiction cannot. That’s not to say literary fiction is incapable of reawakening the awe we felt as a child discovering our shiny, new world. Energetic, evocative writing in any genre helps us re-imagine the world around us, forcing us to see it anew. But literary fiction tends to focus on the inner world, while fantasy and sci-fi direct us toward the outer world — or even toward new, imagined worlds. Speculative fiction always goes big, reminding us of our role in society, the world, and the universe itself.

That’s what makes fantasy and sci-fi such powerful springboards for the imagination.

Art, Ezra Pound, Movies

4 Lessons from Star Wars

2 Comments

Star Wars

Alice Osborn writes: “Star Wars is more than shoot ‘em bad guys with laser guns and escaping in fast spacecraft—it’s about 4 fundamental life lessons.” Alice discusses those lessons in her latest blog post, which I highly recommend.

Almost 40 years after it blasted its way into movie theaters and popular culture, Star Wars still commands our attention. There’s good reason for that. In crafting Luke Skywalker’s grand adventure, George Lucas took Joseph Campbell’s heroic myth, added memorable characters and innovative special effects, and produced a cinematic classic that tells a timeless tale. Lucas managed to “Make it New!”

Ezra Pound’s battle cry not only inspired the Modernists who explored radical techniques to convey their ideas, but also describes the maddening challenge all artists wrestle with, to take what already exists, whether paint, bronze, or words, and shape those elements into something both meaningful and worthwhile of our attention.

Part of that challenge is to work within a living tradition and keeping “it” alive by adapting it to present-day needs and concerns. The artist’s goal is to select and rearrange timeless insights and conventions and make them into something a new generation wants to enjoy and claim as its own. Timeless messages, such as Campbell’s heroic myth, have endured over generations because they speak to the human condition, something that does not change even as the conditions in which it exists does change, sometimes dramatically. It takes artistic vision to perceive those enduring patterns and make them interesting. It also takes hard work. But when it all comes together, it’s a beautiful thing to behold. No wonder we keep going back to classics such as Star Wars.

Ezra Pound, Fiction, Writing

Best Fiction and Writing Blogs

3 Comments

Ezra Pound

The best fiction and writing blog posts from around the ‘net, all guaranteed to make you a literary rock star. Compiled by ezra.

John Hartness – 5 Reasons Why Your Story or Novel Gets Rejected
A. J. Humpage – How to Pace A Novel
A. E. Stueve – On the Writing Process
Nicloa Alter – The Power of Competitions and Selections in YA Fiction
Emily Barton – Literary or Genre, It’s The Plot That Counts
Anna H. Lucy – The Art That Does Have The Power To Save Lives
Brigido Anaya – Mastery, and the Meaning of Practise
Julian Yanover – CSI: Poetry

Autobiography, Ezra Pound, Hemingway

Hemingway’s Paris Memoir Flies Off Shelves in Show of Defiance

11 Comments

Hemingway Writing

From Bloomberg Business:

Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about the time he spent lounging in cafes and bars in 1920s Paris has become an unlikely totem of defiance against the terrorist attacks that claimed 129 lives in the City of Light last Friday.

Hemingway’s ‘‘A Moveable Feast,’’ or “Paris est une Fete” in French, is flying off the shelves at bookstores across the French capital and is the fastest-selling biography and foreign-language book at online retailer Amazon.fr. Daily orders of the memoir, first published in 1964, three years after the American author’s death, have risen 50-fold to 500 since Monday, according to publisher Folio.

Copies have been laid among the flowers and tributes at the sites of the massacres, and people are reading the book in bars and cafes, Folio spokesman David Ducreux said Thursday. Orders surged after a BFM television interview on Monday with a 77-year-old woman called Danielle, who urged people to read the memoir as she laid flowers for the dead. The video was shared hundreds of times on social media.

I think this is a marvelous way to express solidarity with the people of Paris in the wake of last week’s horrific massacre. That said, the article’s description of A Moveable Feast as an account of the time Hemingway “spent lounging in cafes and bars in 1920s Paris” misses the mark. Yes, there are sensuous descriptions of how he and his friends “ate well and cheaply and drank well,” but the little masterpiece also reveals how Hemingway mastered the craft of fiction, including how he dealt with rejection letters. Hemingway’s vignettes of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are not to be missed.

If you haven’t read it, pick up a copy at the library or book store. And let folks know you’re doing it for Paris.

Ezra Pound, Music, Poetry

White Hot

3 Comments

 

You may recognize Tom Cochrane for his hits “Lunatic Fringe” and “Life is a Highway.” But “White Hot” is my favorite Cochrane song, and this version, featuring Cochrane’s band Red Rider and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, is electrifying. The song is a tribute to French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned a promising literary career for a life of reckless adventure. Cochrane’s lyrics evoke the thrills and terrors Rimbaud experienced:

Cast out from the jungle
With no rations or canteen
For selling faulty rifles
To the thieves in Tanzania

Adventures and misfortune
Nothing wagered, nothing gained
I have wandered through the desert
Found the ocean not the rain

Rimbaud influenced a number of important writers, including Ezra Pound and Henry Miller. Miller acknowledged his debt to Rimbaud in The Time of the Assassins, which Cochrane read and admired.

Assassins

Here’s the passage that inspired Cochrane to write the song:

Rimbaud turned from literature to life; I did the reverse. Rimbaud fled from the chimeras he had created; I embraced them. Sobered by the folly and waste of mere experience of life, I halted and converted my energies to creation.  …

Rimbaud restored literature to life; I have endeavored to restore life to literature. … With him I have felt an underlying primitive nature which manifests itself in strange ways. Claudel styled Rimbaud “a mystic in the wild state.” Nothing could describe him better. He did not “belong” – not anywhere. I have always had the same feeling about myself. [emphasis mine]

I think Cochrane’s lyrics and melody perfectly capture Miller’s mood and message. The song’s distant, mystical opening lures the listener close, then sweeps him up with a driving melody that arouses stark awareness of the dangers and adventures Rimbaud chased all over the globe. Ezra Pound believed we can recognize worthy poetry by “the play of image, music, and meaning” within it, and “White Hot” definitely qualifies.

That’s great songwriting. No wonder Tom Cochrane’s career has endured over the decades.