POUNDIAN POETRIES
Leeds
Robert Sheppard
1
Arcade
Mosaics underfoot
Rises past tall brown windows
To tinted skies carved fruit on
The way painted brisk as if for
A masque
Capital sinks
Through the vault blouses
Shiver on shoppers before the foot
Note’s restored to
The convolute a
Polished truth
2
Iris Barry reptilian
Green metallised by
Wyndham Lewis
On buckled canvas awaits re-
Discovery here’s a ‘mistress’
Still
A smutty footnote
Grubby whites on a
Marlow Moss abstract
Amid primaries
Mondrian supports
And struts
3 (Fujiwara)
Rebekkah
terracotta terrorist with
Pixelated video eyes closed lids
For your casting smashed and
Fragmented on the floor of mis-
Reading costing an arm t-shirt leg tight
Sweat-shop jeans
guard for eternity
The mad Emperor of Capital
Return to real life ‘emotional’
But transfigured (quite shyly
Precisely formal Sickert
Hides in his own shadow from self
Portraiture
[I discovered Pound before university, as an editorial hand behind Eliot, as the instigator of Imagism, with its basic poetic hygiene, and as the inventor of a kind of China. The Cantos came later. Like many in the alternative British poetries Pound’s metrics have been important. Witness a story about Pound’s death being announced at one of the Poetry Society meetings of the ‘radicals’ during the 1970s Poetry Wars. After a stunned silence, the chairman Jeff Nuttall began chuckling, and declared to the meeting: ‘All move up one!’ – RM]