Book selected: Ezra Pound: Collected Shorter Poems
New title: Properly We Should Read For Power
Ezra Pound is known for his political outspokenness as well as his poetry. In various circles, during his lifetime, it was speculated that he was an anti-Semite. This assertion has more recently been refuted. He made the now famous statement that conjoins the other sentence I have used as a title to this work: “A book should be a ball of light in one’s hands”.
I have used this sentence as pivotal to the manner in which I have altered the book. I have cut a circular hole through the whole book, allowing the inside of the back cover to contain this sentence stamped onto its surface. The hole through this book is aligned with my cutting through the lines that define a profile of the poet on the cover of the book, ideally, the stencil-like shape that this profile now forms, casts shadows and lines into the book’s interior.
I want my assertion that the book should be a ball of light in one’s hands to be literalised: light should be allowed to seep into this round hole, and the book itself should be held up to the light, which would give its back panel the appropriate sense of transparency. I also offer my violent gesture of cutting through the pages of a book of poems to be interpreted in the light of the power of political viewpoints but also political taint.
email : info@frodo.co.za
back