Richard Parker’s News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries has just been published by Shearsman. I have an essay therein, entitled “Myth, Culture, and Text: Ezra Pound’s Homer and J.H. Prynne’s Aristeas” (pp. 142-159). There are wonderful contributions by Laura Kilbride, Alex Howard, Joshua Kotin, Gareth Farmer and many others.
A puff by the great Peter Nicholls: “‘…the full shock of what a fascist s.o.b. Pound is caught up with me’—thus Charles Olson after one of his several encounters with Ezra Pound at St Elizabeths Hospital. Olson’s “shock” has continued to reverberate in the work of many British poets as they have sought to weigh the dazzling innovative force of Pound’s poetry against the rash brutality of his politics. This has been a difficult and contradictory legacy, but one which, as this fascinating collection of texts so amply demonstrates, has also proved a spur to some of Britain’s best experimental writers in ways that we are only now beginning to appreciate.”