Ghosts.

The dead. There comes a moment when we invite them. Leaves fallen, everyone seems to want to provoke them to rise, when all I want to do is put them to rest. Finally, silently, a mere place to look at in the grass.
Smoking a cigar on a grave in another lifetime. Who was I? Have I myself become ghost?
Here are the terrible distinctions of my past, brought to life by a poet long a ghost himself. That damned cypher-poet. A cursed swastika, spinning in the sun. Pisa, a cage, where it should be buried.

name

Name it.
Name this thing that is all teeth, and rain. Chill.
How about a phantom? Locate the crypt, looping images. The dead, the dead. Back and back again, the source of a mania to come.
There is a sound coming through the receiver, but interference.
We can sense a Crossing, a seance with something beyond our knowledge, beyond the edge of image.
Describe, transcribe, translate; seek a fidelity. The sound, the sound. An esoteric language, translated into something otherworldly, a tongue more foreign, a voice of the dead.

Frequency. A repeating, a tuning, the tightening of a piano string, the dash of a chisel across stone. The sound, the image, lost to time, frozen in a motionless posterity. A voice, lost to time, a rigor mortis. A traitor, betrayed by time, betraying for a future generation.

Pound on the Radio

Italy in the Forties. Mussollini in Rome and Ezra Pound reading his Cantos on facist radio. What are you thinking at this point in time, man? Can you be doing the Goebbels rant on air? Surely you are more subtle than this? Are you feeling the pinch of your ideals here? You poetry speaks of the far reach of interpretation but also the hate you drudge up again and again. Mr. Pound, I am having difficulty confronting your contradictions. You are/were a madman, locked up after the invasion, locked in a cage. Sure they'd execute you, you thought, and you would've been, had it not been for that one strange intervention.
I'm confronting your image, both of your face and your poetry. Is it mere ideogram or something much more rudimentary? Can we put the cantos on display?
Somewhere you confused yourself, thinking yourself as the ethical tudor of some great liberator, but lost your way. Lost at sea, no periplus to guide you, lost and, at last, wrecked.

Kundera etc.

"The brotherhood of man [sic] on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch"...the boundaries of discourses enlarging, whole communities swallowed up by their own voices, voices reverberating from the interiors of their retention-walls. Can anyone cross the lines? Liberating who from whom? Does the intersection of praxis occur in this cursed land? I miss my country. ". . .that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. . ." wrote Milton in the manic turmoil of the English Revolution; so we have untested boundaries, unexplored meanings in these foreign discourses of our modern culture. But why bother? The anxiety of the unknown holds us all back, except in times of battle. Perhaps we were made to war upon ourselves, always, for to do otherwise would be to deny the "shit" of existence. Is kitsch the best we can hope for? Is this "democracy" kitsch now? Are we so close to totalitarianism? Can we teach ourselves out of it?

Is critical consciousness coming to the U.S.A.?