Ezra Pound

About the Author:

Pound_Ezra
Ezra Pound
Idaho, USA / Venice, Italy

Ezra Pound (October 30, 1885, Idaho – November 1, 1972, Venice, Italy) is widely considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th century; his contributions to modernist poetry were enormous. Around 1912 Pound helped to create the movement he called “Imagisme”. The original Imagist group included Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, F.S. Flint, and later William Carlos Williams. Pound helped and promoted writers such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.

As for his political activities: “An admirer of Mussolini, he lived in fascist Italy beginning in 1925. When World War II broke out, Pound stayed in Italy, retaining his US citizenship, and broadcasting a series of controversial radio commentaries. These commentaries often attacked Roosevelt and the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war. By 1943 the US government deemed the broadcasts to be treasonous; at war’s end the poet was arrested by the US Army and kept imprisoned in a small, outdoor wire cage at a compound near Pisa, Italy. For several weeks during that hot summer, Pound was confined to the cage. At night floodlights lit his prison. Eventually judged to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. … Upon his release from St. Elizabeth’s in 1958, Pound returned to Italy, where he lived quietly for the rest of his life.” * (from Poetry Foundation article on Pound)

Bookshelf
by Mark Budman

Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)

by Andrey Kneller

In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.

by Osip Mandelstam

This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.

by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

 

by Victor Enyutin

A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor  Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.

by Nina Kossman

A collection of poems in Russian. Published by Khudozhestvennaya literatura (Художественная литература). Moscow, 1990.

Videos
Three Questions. A Documentary by Vita Shtivelman
Play Video
Poetry Reading in Honor of Brodsky’s 81st Birthday
Length: 1:35:40