The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics

§ Daniel Kane. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 306 pp. $27.50 Emphasizing the public performance of poetry at such now-legendary forums as St. Mark's Church and Le Metro, Manhattan's Lower East Side poetry scene in the 1960s and 70s encompassed a menagerie of poetic and political temperaments, from soi-disant revolutionaries to the relatively dapper and mannered New York School poets. The Lower East Side, now gentrified into the East Village, was a hotbed of sixties radicalism and inanity, a pseudo-bohemia of cheap rent and urban grittiness. Daniel Kane's thesis in All Poets Welcome is that "in terms of the growing poetry scene, the Lower East Side as a neighborhood proved helpful in lending 'alternative' status to artistic production." The West Village, New York's prewar artistic epicenter, had ossified into an "overpriced, bourgeois, and co-opted" neighborhood of poseurs, while the Lower East Side retained its "tradition of working-class radicalism and resistance." Into this fiery parcel flocked dozens of poets who were or would become associated with "an increasingly established number of often ill-defined and porous poetic'schools.'" The Beats; the "generations" of the New York School; Black Mountain; Deep Image; Umbra; the San Francisco Renaissance; Language: these and more were represented and in some cases formed or consolidated in the coffeehouses and other public spaces of the Lower East Side. It is no exaggeration to say that this milieu transformed American poetry-establishing the styles and ideas that continue to define our literary imagination. Kane is at his best as a social chronicler of the scene, constructing an enthralling journalistic history of the participants' antics and contradictions, rivalries and ribaldries. Some of the most interesting material in the book is pleasantly gossipy and anecdotal-none more so, for this reader, than the pages devoted to the New York School. While Charles Olson was declaiming from the mountain about the breath and kinetics, Kenneth Koch was grumbling against "the myth, the missus, and the midterms." The mostly homosexual, urbane, and anti-programmatic New York School poets, with their uptown sensibilities, made many on the scene uneasy at first. While for John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Koch, lunch dates and cosmopolitan conversations with the likes of Willem de Kooning were of the utmost compositional importance, self-important shamans like Jerome Rothenberg and Clayton Eshleman were trying to "reach down among the lost branches" to attain "a moment of seeing" (as Rothenberg put it). The conflict between this misty brand of romanticism and the playful, Francophile sensibilities of the New York School was typical of the internecine fractures that could result from aesthetic and political tensions among the assorted personalities and coteries on the scene. One is reminded of Kerouac's heckle (recounted in David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde): "You're destroying American poetry, O'Hara!" And Frank O'Hara's retort: "That's more than you ever did for it." Kane fastidiously documents the famous Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, still going strong after nearly forty years, which boasted a roster of poets that comprised a who's who of what Donald Alien called "the New American Poetry." The (at least nominal) democracy of the poetry readings that took place in such venues across the Lower East Side-where "all poets [were] welcome to come and read," as an ad for readings at Les Deux Megots had itproduced a feedback loop of artistic ferment and acted as a generator both of poetic energy and of spiraling discord. The strange decline and fall of Le Metro coffeehouse-replete with fistfights, legal troubles, and rumors of Mafia involvement-is a case in point, as is the "assassination" of Kenneth Koch by the justly forgotten Alien Van Newkirk, which Kane vividly recounts (and a recording of which is included on the valuable CD that accompanies the book). …

All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s

This Article explores the historical and present-day significance of proposals for copyright reform advanced by the controversial American poet, Ezra Pound, in 1918. These proposals have never been discussed by legal scholars and have received but scant attention from literary scholars. Yet, like William Wordsworth and Mark Twain, whose efforts to reform copyright law are much better known, Pound is a major writer whose views shed considerable light on the state of copyright law and the conditions of authorship in his time. Pound's proposed statute-offered as a "cure" for American book piracy-begins by making authors' copyrights exclusive and perpetual, and goes on, surprisingly, to introduce broad compulsory-license provisions that would prevent authors and their heirs from interfering with later efforts to disseminate authors' works, and would require publishers only to pay a fixed royalty on sales. The tension in Pound's proposal between a perpetual, exclusive copyright and expansive compulsory licenses shows him to be an inheritor of two legal and economic traditions: on the one hand, a Lockean and Romantic belief in a strong property rule grounded in an author's natural rights and unique personality, and, on the other, an anti-monopoly, free-trade preference for a liability rule that would encourage wide dissemination of affordable works to serve the public interest. As the author of such a dual-purpose proposal, Pound emerges as remarkably and presciently alert to the dangers currently posed by lengthy copyright terms unaccompanied by limitations that adequately protect the public. Today, the estates of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett, and other modernist authors use extended copyrights to discourage or control use of those authors' works by scholars, critics, and others. Pound's perpetual, royalty-based copyright would, in principle, have removed or reduced such obstacles to the study and enjoyment of modernist authors. Moreover, Pound's draft statute anticipates recent proposals by Richard Posner, Lawrence Lessig, and others for mitigating the conflict between the lengthy copyright monopoly and the needs of the public.

Ezra Pound's Copyright Statute: Perpetual Rights and the Problem of Heirs

To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound's 'Cantos'@@@Omaggio a Sesto Properzio@@@Ezra Pound: Un Poeta a Rapallo@@@Paradise and Ezra Pound: The Poet as Shaman

In this first full-length study of Pound's influence on American poetry after World War II, Beach argues that Pound's experimental mode created a new tradition of poetic writing in America. Often neglected by academic critics and excluded from the 'canon' of American poetic writing, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and later members of this experimental tradition have maintained the sense of an American avant garde in keeping with Pound's modernist experiments of the 1910s and 1920s. The work of these poets has served as a counterforce to the established traditions of the 'American Sublime' and the Anglo-American formalism represented by T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism. "ABC of Influence" challenges previous discussions of poetic influence, particularly Harold Bloom's oedipal theory of revisionist 'misreading', as insufficient for understanding the influence Pound's modernist practice and his relationship to poetic tradition had in defining the postmodernist poetics of Olson, Duncan, and other postwar American writers. The relation of these poets is most clearly seen on a formal level, but it is also evident in thematic elements of their work and in their stance toward poetic convention, the 'canon', political and social engagement, and the inclusion of historical and other nonpoetic materials in the poetic text. This book makes a significant contribution to the study of modern American poetry by exploring modernism's legacy and charting new canonical possibilities in American literature. In reading Pound through the works of later poets, it also provides important new insights into Pound's own work and ideas.

ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition

Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII , the final volume of his Cantos , first appeared as a 1967 piracy, mimeographed and staple-bound by Ed Sanders’s Fuck You Press. The piracy elicited two authorized versions: a commercial edition by New Directions (1968) and a hand-printed Stone Wall Press edition (1968). While the story of the piracy is well known, Sanders’s version of the text has received scant attention from critics, who tend to dismiss it as illegitimate. However, each of these three versions offers its own way of imagining Drafts & Fragments in relation to the market and the canon. In particular, the bibliographic details of the piracy situate Pound in the 1960s mimeograph revolution, offering insight into the ways that the next generation of experimental poets reconfigured and responded to modernism—not only through poetics, but through the dynamics of print production.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.40.1.05

Chelsea Jennings

Papers

Pirating Pound: Drafts & Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph Culture