Human Zoos

My dear friend Alex posted a link to his blog, "Antiwarzone" to the right, so check it out. He also posted links to other writers and it's cool because I like them all (well I don't even know the name of one but I'll check it out). Ezra Pound is a genius (bravo Alex!). However I know this random fact about him that is worth writing down.

Ezra Pound was an extreme anti-Semite an supporter of Mussolini's Fascist Italy during World War Two.

*No Allen Ginsburg, he never reformed. He hated Jews till the end.

Anyway, he just could not shut up about Mussolini and he lost. Got hung and had his body beaten by his own country men. They also captured Ezra Pound. What they did with him is interesting.

Ezra Pound's poem "The Metro" is just a few lines long:

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Took a entire year to write and he scrapped seventeen pages to edit it down to those two lines! He discovered T.S. Elliot and knew James Joyce. Elliot even dedicated "The Waste Land" to Pound, siting in the opening line "To Ezra, the better craftsman".

The Allies forces captured him and put him in a cage on display in, I think, Seattle Washington. He had some sign up to warning the public that this is what happens when you can't keep your K-hole shut about fascism. Ezra Pound was on display, like a gorilla in a cage, for seven days before the academic world protested enough to transfer him into a different cage: They said he was insane (he was definitely not) and he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Despite his weird hatred of the always awesome Jewish race (the people that I have known and studied at least) and despite his political beliefs, he was a great genius of a poet, so check out some of his writing. And stay away from fascism!