Hello Uncle Ez

I've arrived. In London. Ready to carve out a career. Not true, just playing the game. Truth is, was, I had to bring up a wife and 2 children...and we all know poetry doesn't pay the rent. So, instead, I got as near as I could with advertising. Another untruth. I was still a dreamer, and yet I seemed to drift into the jobs I got. Now, I don't intend to use this blog to tell you of my chequered career. This is a literary based blog. Suffice to say I made it. But at a price. For many years I gave-up writing and concentrated on making a career. But all that time my creative wellspring was filling-up, ready to cultivate a new spring.

Along the way I picked-up Ezra Pound. Not exclusively, my literary taste was, and is, wide. Why Ez? Well he is a giant and his influence touched many people. I then looked at those people and the journey began.

I started this blog with the first stanza of a poem about Ez, I will end it with the complete poem. But right now let me drop in a piece of juvenilia that was published in the international poetry magazine, CORE:

Looking back to Pound

Eye corners, eye corners
always eye corners.

Now, just as then, askance
at usurers and usury.

Gone banker to right from drudgery
or bog eyed stupefier.

Just a botched civilisation
gone in the touch

for a few Sunflowers let loose.

Where then, worse now,
and unCantoed.

A pound of this a pound of that
is just a pound of anything
and not a Pound of Poundian.

He became an important part of my life. He still is. I've been where he lived, where he is buried, where he was feted. I think I have most of the books by him and most of those about him. And yet I only know what I can learn by studying him. That's what fascinates me about him. To know him is to know so much and I am still scratching the surface. Will I ever reach the summit; unlikely. But the effort is worth it because it shows us a great deal about the human condition and our condition.

Meanwhile another poem from that time that was short listed for a prize:

ANNUNCIATION

Into the field, every day
a man walks into the field.

Tell me why, there's a man
in the field tell me why?

Messages to bring, each day
he's got messages to bring.

Who sends them, the messages
he carries who sends them?

People they say, thoughts
from the people they say.

None from us, he carries
thoughts but none from us.

Like to know, the people's
thoughts I'd like to know.

Never ask it, what bones
their deeds never ask it.

Let us leave, we have seen
and know now let us leave.

He'll be back, we can watch
when we need to he'll be back.

So an ad man, a father, an erstwhile poet soon to swing the cape of good fortune across many years. Where will it leave me then? I'll tell you next time.