Old Ez among the longleaf pines

One of the grander things of Waldo's largely misspent life was attending St Andrews Presbyterian College in the 1970s, whose informal motto was painted on a graffiti wall: "In the Real World, There Is No Drop/Add."

SA was a strange and wonderful place, full of profs with grand visions and no one, apparently, sufficiently in charge to stop them trying them out. Thus in 1973 St Andrews assumed the mantle of Black Mountain College, the defunct academic institution that managed to host or teach almost everyone of any account in post-WW2 art and literature, with a year-long festival that lugged the likes of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller to Laurinburg, North Carolina and just turned them loose.

Another strand of the St. Andrews experience was a fascination with Ezra Pound, then recently deceased, his reputation in serious disrepute for his Fascist radio shows and perceptions of insanity. You just weren't a decent English Lit student at SA unless you were pontificating over Pound's Cantos, which, as a new biography points out, takes some doing:

'“The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” Pound explained in BLAST, the magazine that he and Lewis produced, and that ran for two issues. “All experience rushes into this vortex. . . . All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.” The cluster of associations triggered by the apparition of the faces—Odysseus’ descent into Hades, Dante’s visit to the Inferno, Persephone and Demeter—is present in the twentieth-century subway, but only for those who can see. “Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius,” Pound wrote.

'As Moody concedes, somewhat reluctantly, not every reader is a genius, and this can lead, in Pound, to many conundrums. Moody spends several pages, for example, puzzling out the opening lines of Canto IV:

Palace in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!

'Most readers will get the reference to Troy, but the rest is, well, Greek. Moody thinks that the palace in the first line is Agamemnon’s (although there is nothing about “smoky light” that would make this necessary, and other commentators have seen an allusion to Euripides’ play “The Trojan Women”). “ANAXIFORMINGES” is from a poem by Pindar; “Aurunculeia” is from a poem by Catullus; Cadmus was the brother of Europa and the founder of Thebes. Even with the allusions identified, there remains the question of what to make of this particular cluster. What about Troy, Agamemnon, Cadmus, and so on makes for significance? Moody works it out (something to do with cities, women, music, and ravishment), but, by the end, any notion of the “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” has vanished. The perception of relations is anything but swift.'

Had he lived longer, we bet Pound would have adored TV shows like Twin Peaks and Lost.