Ezra Pound's Hodge-Podge (Robert Duncan to H.D.)

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The Feast of St. Nicholas: Jan Steen, 1663-1665 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

The very obstruction, the contention within the spirit of Pound seems to me an act of the mystery Poetry, the act shows forth under its own orders. Cantos like 90 or 91 in the Rock Drills

Light compenetrans of the spirits

Where an Aphrodite that is creptallive light, a cluster of refractions appears I take it as heritage unmixed.

And in Thrones these are the gists:

"The Temple (hieron) is not for sale"

Getting the feel of it, his soul. . .
where the rime shows the mind has been brought into melody -- and

"Food is the root.
......Feed the people."

How odd that a man shld start about from an M.A., all his life an instructor, or professor manqué (as Dante was an ambassador manqué), and come into the genius of Poetry, into the Core of the Making. It did occur to me that I would believe too readily that the divine might keep company with publicans and whores, but find it hard to believe the divine could keep company with professors and Pharisees.

The professor shows up more and more. He wants to fraternize with his students and tries slang in his discourse: "grand-dad" -- "gramp," "bumbd off," fussed about hair-cuts," "that louse G burnt the Palatine

...........and messed up the music
to speak clearly
..ἀπληστία, insatiate κακουργία
....... this is not a mere stunt to lay fines
..............as is found in hodge-podge.

There is in the Cantos themselves, in the poetics of Pound, a music, a hodge-podge. May there be a hint of magic in this stew. Before the word was in cookery, the O.E.D. tells us: it may have had to do with the shaking of things together in a pot of other than culinary purposes. (I went to look it [up] in the O.E.D. bec[au]se I suspected a fairy or sprite in Hodge; the nearest was Hodge-poker who was a devil or hob-goblin.)

I think I see now what I am after here. We follow the melody usually as poets, discovering what rimes, along an organization of feeling that is counterpart of the musician's melodic sense. But there is an urgency (is the [κακουργία?] not only a pun here but an etymology) in the genius of our time to break up the mode itself, dissolving there discords [in] the old scale and trying to set once disparate elements into a new harmonia. Pound's recalcitrant off-notes then -- if we think of this greater scale of all things toward which we are set to work -- is [sic] not only a personal insistence but also a demonstration of the genius.

You askd in your last letter your "Why do you write?" but the question you then noted was rhetorical. But why, the what is happening in Pound's work, is as much the difficulty as the ease it presents.

The parrot cage: Jan Steen, 1663-1665 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Robert Duncan to H.D., excerpt from private letter, 1 October 1960, in A Great Admiration: H.D./Robert Duncan: Correspondence 1950-1961, 1992; Pound passage in inset quotation from Canto XCVI, in Thrones de los Cantares XCVI-CIX