Creed –- A Poem
It’s Christmas Day and my brain is full of Christmas dinner and too many chocolates and the Doctor Who Christmas Special — which my son thought was rubbish and I thought was a bit of fun.
The upshot of that — which is a rather poor excuse for slothiness — is the following poem, which I didn’t write today.
I love Ezra Pound’s poetry (and a lot of the criticism and books he wrote up to the 1920s) . But I hate his politics as they manifested themselves in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s.
There is quite probably no excuse for the politics. There is no need for an excuse for the poetry.
The poem:
CREED
I fell into Pound, Ezra,
before I knew he was racist,
fascist,
sad and foolish.
Or mad.
~
Some lines of his still fizz me alive.
The exotic made necessary;
curlicues of thought
pinned to a bare board.
~
Not to capture essence,
not to mine gems in words,
but to splinter in a roiling mind,
jabbing new connections to life.
