The Bumptious American

Patrick McGuinness looks back at Ezra Pound:

He was the bumptious American who arrived in England and modernised its poetry and buttonholed its poets, dead or alive, as if they were tweedy laggards in need of a bracing lecture. The early cantos are full of humour and zesty New World egalitarianism. They are exuberant, learned, modern, funny, and also, in narrative terms, followable, though already starting to strain at the joins. In the later cantos, with their great collages of economics, statistics, social and political theory, unglossed segments of Chinese, French, Greek and Latin, Pound obscured the connections that might help us make sense of his project. Like a map with destinations but no roads, the cantos appear frightening, fascinating, rebarbative and barely navigable.

The Greatest English Poet You Haven’t Heard Of?

Daniel Westover takes a stab:

In my estimation, the most neglected “great” poet of the twentieth century is Lynette Roberts (1909-1995), a wonderful, difficult poet who was born in Argentina to parents of Welsh extraction, moved to London as a Spanish-speaking child, and lived in Wales as an adult. Her work was championed by Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas, who was best man at her wedding. T. S. Eliot thought she was a tremendous writer, and he published both of her volumes at Faber. Wyndham Lewis (of BLAST fame) championed her work and sketched [the above] image of her. Like the work of most Modernist poets with experimental inclinations, Roberts’s work is uneven, but in the words of Robert Graves, who called her “one of the few true poets now writing,” “her best is the best.”

Patrick McGuinness, who has done yeoman's work in bringing Roberts' opus back into the light, calls her poetry "radically modern, almost futuristic":

Roberts's work stands out for its originality of conception, its bold and experimental use of language, and for its conviction that the present is as dramatic, extreme and finally as heroic as anything to be found in the world of myth and legend.

Ange Mlinko has written a cantata for her.

Poetry Is An Operation Performed on Language

In Seizing: Places, his translation of Helene Dorion's 2005 collection Ravir: Les Lieux (sample some of it here), Patrick McGuinness reflects on the difference between French and English-language verse. His argument—that we are made uncomfortable by the "quasi-philosophical, spiritual language" of French poetry—might help explain why appreciation for much Québécois poetry in Canada lags behind where it should be.

We in English-language poetry write as if we somehow disdained poetry but had faith in language—it’s a facet of our national irony perhaps, our suspicion of abstraction, and a sense that poetry somehow denatures ordinary speech. Our quest for the demotic and the democratic makes us suspicious of the grand claims of poetry, and of its grand words: the soul, memory, the spirit, and the quasi-philosophical, spiritual language by which much European and some North American poetry has orientated itself. French-language poetry, one might say, is the other way around: it suspects language, which is why French poets always seem to be remaking it, asking the impossible of it, making it fail on a scale which makes mere success look petty. But it retains faith in poetry: the lyric urge, however broken its movement, damaged its materials, or ironic its gestures, retains its necessity. For Paul Valéry, poetry was not just a language within a language, but an operation performed on language. Poetry may reclaim its birthright from music, Valéry contended, but it always repays it debt to thought.

Sunday Poem

From "SEIZING: MIRRORS" 

The wind.—
And you’re falling
through the landscape:
the silent wave
closes around your steps, your hands.

Far off the burned-out day
tilts. The birds tear up
the sky as they come
to meet you.

¶ 

Mouth that the rivers cross
—where all life is crushed, a stranger
to the wind and the night
that lift it, towards itself— 

stone carried off by the sand.
There’s no journey you return from
without your life, from its
far-off bank, coming closer. 

¶ 

Arrows plunge
into the water
and the water trembles
—the wound

on the lake’s back
obscures the night
that tried to fall.

¶ 

You thought you saw
some mauve, a little blue
mixed with the crumbs
the day casts  

over the world.
You open your mouth
open your hands
and everything that still held  

by a breath
topples inside you. 

¶ 

Tonight, the moon
slices the lake, digs
a sheer well of silence
on the horizon.  

The world trembles
—eyes closed
you cross it. 

¶ 

What shadow
undoes the dawn
hour by hour?
What fragmented  

word is it piecing back together
time after time? 

¶ 

The wind.—
and the lake
stirs suddenly, the dark
herd of waves
stampedes the bank 

melts into the earth
where our faces pass
—scattering
into dust.

From Seizing: Places (2012) by Hélène Dorion, translated by Patrick McGuinness.