News from Afar: 

Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries.

Ed. Richard Parker

Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014

“The Pound event was an upheaval of the whole field of British poetry. Pound’s work was a total stance towards poetry and the world, a fierce rejection not only of mediocrity but of a ‘botched civilisation’, and through it we can pose some of the most vital questions concerning poetry that’s contemporary with the historical present. …

This is a book that travels that road, on the lookout for the signs that speak most strongly to the now. Merciless war against mediocrity, sharpest eye and ear for syntax, awareness of culture in its relation to politics, use of translation as workshop for change, suspension of limits between prose and poetry, opening of poetry to what its bourgeois practice excludes: here is the generic Pound, present to contemporary needs. The struggle for a practice of resistance, discrimination of antagonisms, with all the resources poetry is capable of, here is the Pound alive in current poetry. Pound is at the core. There is, as this book shows, no way round that.” —William Rowe

CONTENTS

1. Richard Parker – “Here’s Your Fucking Light Shithead”: 

Ezra Pound and Contemporary British Poetry    9

2. Keston Sutherland – In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions     21

3. Amy Evans – “So I think a beginning has been made”: 

Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram    25

4. Eric Mottram (ed. Amy Evans) – Pound, Olson and he Secret of the Golden Flower     53

5. Robert Hampson – Eric Mottram and Ezra Pound: 

“there is no substitute for a life-time.”      86

6. Alexander Howard – Compacts, Commerce, and a Few Remarks Concerning 

Andrew Crozier     109

7. Mark Scroggins – he “half-fabulous ield-ditcher”: Ruskin, Pound, Geofrey Hill      122

8. Josh Kotin – Blood-Stained Battle-Flags: 

Ezra Pound, J. H. Prynne and Classical Chinese Poetry      133

9. Ryan Dobran – Myth, Culture and Text: 

Ezra Pound’s Homer and J.H. Prynne’s Aristeas      142

10. Gareth Farmer – “Obstinate Isles” and Rhetorical Sincerity: 

Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Ezra Pound     161

11. Laura Kilbride – “Real Games With Books”: 

On Anna Mendelssohn and Ezra Pound      184

12. Allen Fisher – Atkins Stomp    194

13. Juha Virtanen – Allen Fisher Reading: Facture, “Atkins Stomp” and Ezra Pound     198

14. Gavin Selerie – Pound and Contemporary British Poetry: the Loosening of Form      212

15. Gavin Selerie – Poems from Hariot Double       229

16. David Vichnar – P.S.: Pound and Sinclair’s Intertextual Ley Lines      235

17. Harry Gilonis – Second Heave – Fracture Syntax       245

18. Tony Lopez – Darwin in Rome: Pound and Stein      258

19. Tony Lopez – From Darwin, a section of Only More So    266

20. Robert Sheppard – the Li Shang-yin Suite       268

21. Sean Pryor – Some houghts on Refrigeration       273

22. Danny Hayward – Or Storming the Shopping Centre: 

Poetry, Competition, Pound, Quid      281

23. Alex Pestell – “All in for folly and mustard”: Pound, Zukofsky and Word is Born      303

24. Tim Atkins – Happiness / 

the Art of Poetry Being a Translation of the 10 Buddhist Ox-Herding Poems       313

Author Biographies       324