“… ‘The Pound Era’ bring; into one volume much of the same kind of insight and point of view found in Kenner’s earlier work. In particular, the book seems to have grown out of a situation Kenner discussed 22 years ago in his first treatment of Pound: ‘There is no ready‐typed role in which the essentially melodramat ic imagination of the literary historian can cast Ezra Pound, except perhaps the role of barbarian; hence he has little chance of starring in the academic extravaganzas of the 1960’s and ’70’s.’ Although not done melodramatically, Kenner, in his capacity as literary historian in ‘The Pound Era,’ seeks to rectify the dismal state of confusion surrounding ‘Old Ez’s’ appropriate role. Under Kenner’a impassioned direction, Pound is cast as the leading man in the pageant of 20th‐century literature, with a supporting cast of Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, William Carlos Williams (on tour in America) and…

Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reports that high schools are canceling productions of plays that might offend parents and members of the community. The “culture wars” have watered down which topics are permissible in 2023. Once again, we see how fear of offending anyone restricts freedom.

She writes:

The crew had built most of the set. Choreographers had blocked out almost all the dances. The students were halfway through rehearsals.

Then in late January, musical director Vanessa Allen called an emergency meeting. She told the cast and crew of 21 teens that their show — the musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” — was off.

Board members in Ohio’s Cardinal Local Schools disliked some features of “Spelling Bee,” Allen explained, including a song about erections, the appearance of Jesus Christ and the fact that one character has two fathers.

Sobs broke out across the room, said Riley…

“Gidra: The Monthly of the Asian American Experience, the self-proclaimed ‘voice of the Asian American movement,’ was a revolutionary monthly newspaper-magazine that ran from 1969 to 1974. It was started by a group of Asian American students at the University of California, Los Angeles as a platform to discuss Asian American interests on campus and later expanded to address the entire Los Angeles Asian American community. Sixty issues of Gidra were published during its primary run, as well as a 1990 anniversary issue and five issues between 2000 and 2001. Gidra covered mainly issues affecting the Asian American community, including the anti-war movement; ethnic studies at universities; and the struggles of colonized people in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Also crucial to the newspaper was art, mostly illustrations and poetry. Highly politicized, Gidra took stances that were anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist. One of the first newspapers of its…

Good Morning!

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“What potent blood hath modest May.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“… honey-sweet May, when the birds come
back, and the flowers come out, and the
air is full of the sunrise scents …”
– Samuel Scoville Jr.,
American writer and naturalist

Robert Browning born on May 7, 1812 in Camberwell, a middle-class suburb of London. He was the only son of Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and a devoutly religious German-Scotch mother, Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning, who loved music. Browning’s father had amassed a personal library of some 6,000 volumes, many of them collections of arcane lore and historical anecdotes that the poet plundered for poetic material, including the source of “The Pied Piper.”

Browning has come to be regarded as a major Victorian poet, and his approach to dramatic monologue has influenced countless poets for almost a century. However, he is at least as famous for falling in love with Elizabeth Barrett, who began writing poetry at age 11, but by age 15, was suffering from intense head and spinal pain, and remained in frail health for the rest of her life. They met in 1845…

“How to manage the heat”: On Gerrit Lansing: “Gerrit Lansing passed away February 11, 2018, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. A man of wider & deeper knowledge than almost anyone I have known, Lansing was as familiar with, & brought as much care to, contemporary poetry & poetics as to older literatures, to the traditionary sciences as to modern science, to the making of music as to the preparing of food. … 3. SET #1. In 1961, Lansing saw the need for a magazine of poetry, actions & community (see #5) & created SET—the polysemic title resonates from jazz to tennis (well, in a minor, more humorous way) to stance (I hear as the Olsonian term but also as Paul Celan’s ‘stehen,’ as equivalence to being alive, still) to Egyptian hermetic godhead—which will be ‘fix & dromenon / & to the poem.’ The inside front cover starts with the word ‘onset’…

“Wattstax was a benefit concert organized by Stax Records to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 riots in the African-American community of Watts, Los Angeles. The concert took place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on August 20, 1972. The concert’s performers included all of Stax’s prominent artists at the time. The genres of the songs performed included soul, gospel, R&B, blues, funk, and jazz. Months after the festival, Stax released a double LP of the concert’s highlights, Wattstax: The Living Word. The concert was filmed by David L. Wolper‘s film crew and was made into the 1973 film titled Wattstax. … Stax Record’s West Coast director, Forrest Hamilton, came up with the idea for the Wattstax concert. Being in Los Angeles during the Watts Riots in 1965, Hamilton later became aware of the yearly Watts Summer Festival…

The degraded original version of the Moorman photograph: the Badge Man is purportedly located behind the stockade fence at photo center.

“The Badge Man is a figure that is purportedly present within the Mary Moorman photograph of the assassination of United States president John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that this figure is a sniper firing a weapon at the president from the grassy knoll. Although a reputed muzzle flash obscures much of the detail, the Badge Man has been described as a person wearing a police uniform—the moniker itself derives from a bright spot on the chest, which is said to resemble a gleaming badge. The Moorman photograph was taken a fraction of a second after the fatal bullet struck Kennedy’s head. It was analyzed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but no evidence of hidden…

A late-‘50s poetry reading in New York City..

“The New York Intellectuals were a group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. They advocated left-wing politics but were also firmly anti-Stalinist. The group is known for having sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism and socialism while rejecting Soviet socialism as a workable or acceptable political model. Trotskyism emerged as the most common standpoint among these anti-Stalinist Marxists. Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Leslie Fiedler and Nathan Glazer were members of the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League. Writers often identified as members of this group include Lionel Abel, Hannah Arendt, William Barrett, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow (despite his usual association with the city of Chicago), Norman Birnbaum, Elliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Morris Dickstein, Leslie Fiedler,

Robert Smithson, walking on Spiral Jetty, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah.

Mortal Coil: Resurrecting Robert Smithson • Zack Hatfield. “Astonishingly, it has taken fifty years since his death for a ‘life’ of Robert Smithson to emerge. Then again, the endlessly polysemous nature of Smithson’s art, the vertiginous heap of writing on him already out there, and his own profound ambivalence toward the very enterprise of history—collective and personal—make him a rather daunting subject. The prospective Smithson biographer, over the winding course of her inquiry, must advance despite so many taunting aphorisms like signs telling her to turn around: ‘The self is a fiction which many imagine to be real.’ ‘History is a facsimile of events held together by flimsy biographical information.’ ‘Vanished theories compose the strata of many forgotten books.’ Suzaan Boettger’s book is, fittingly, a counterhistory. The cover of Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson features…