Richard Parker's News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries is out!
“‘…the full shock
of what a fascist s.o.b. Pound is caught up with me’—thus Charles Olson after
one of his several encounters with Ezra Pound at St Elizabeths Hospital. Olson’s
“shock” has continued to reverberate in the work of many British poets as they
have sought to weigh the dazzling innovative force of Pound’s poetry against
the rash brutality of his politics. This has been a difficult and contradictory
legacy, but one which, as this fascinating collection of texts so amply
demonstrates, has also proved a spur to some of Britain’s best experimental
writers in ways that we are only now beginning to appreciate.” —Peter Nicholls
More details and purchase details here.
Contributors include Harry Gilonis, Robert Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Keston Sutherland, Amy Evans, Mark Scroggins, Laura Kilbride, Juha Virtanen, David Vishnar, Tim Atkins.
I decided to respond to the Richard's request for a contribution to this book by having a go at versions and un-versions of Chinese poems by Li-Shang Yin that make use of the anonymous translations and the visual configuration of the Chinese characters, lineation and punctuation in the parallel text Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang Dynasty, possibly published in Hong Kong, which I bought in a charity shop. Further background and translations by A.C. Graham were consulted in eds. Cyril Birch and Dennis Keene, Anthology of Chinese Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. I wanted to testify to the continuing, but dispersed, presence of Poundian poetics in the broad understanding of contemporary ‘translation’ and spatial (rather than temporal) prosodies. Here is one of the poems from my contribution, 'The Li-Shang Yin Suite':
no name
Phoenix
tail motif hangs
on scented
drapes
Around your greenblue canopy stitched into night.
Sly peep round slice of moon fan –
Shy voice shushed my thunderous retreat.
Now
Quiet your room where
the candle droops.
How
far can your pomegranate blossom
scatter
?
I tether my horse to river willow
& await your word on the wind.
