Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

Download Full-text

Yeats and Japan: The Dreaming of the Bones

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2015.0150 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 54-68 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Masaru Sekine

Keyword(s):

Ezra Pound ◽

The University

‘Yeats and Japan: The Dreaming of the Bones’ first investigates how the Noh came to influence Yeats, then analyzes Yeats's Four Plays for Dancers, focusing on The Dreaming of the Bones, and explains how this Yeats play is adapted into a new Noh play, Hone-no-Yume, in which the places, names and situations were changed to Japanese ones. An account is then given of the latter's production. Fenolossa came to Japan with an appointment to teach Ethics and Logic at the University of Tokyo in 1987, where he studied Noh with Minoru Umewaka, a Noh master. He also translated some Noh plays with the help of his students. After his death in London, his manuscripts were handed over to Ezra Pound by his second wife, Mary, and it is through Pound that Yeats came to read them. Inspired by them Yeats wrote Four Plays for Dancers. At the Hawk’s Well was later translated into two different Noh plays by Mario Yokomichi, thus completing the circle from Japan to Ireland and back.

Download Full-text

‘BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND’: The Manifesto in Britain and Ireland

Modernist Cultures ◽

10.3366/mod.2017.0172 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 297-315 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Julian Hanna

Keyword(s):

Detailed Analysis ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Ezra Pound ◽

Wyndham Lewis ◽

Italian Futurism ◽

Free Zone ◽

Hugh Macdiarmid ◽

The Times

Aside from the familiar story of Vorticists and Imagists before the war, no detailed analysis of manifestos in Britain (or Ireland) exists. It is true that, by 1914, there had been such an upsurge in manifesto writing that a review of BLAST in The Times (1 July 1914) began: ‘The art of the present day seems to be exhausting its energies in “manifestoes.”’ But after the brief fire ignited by the arrival of Italian Futurism died out, Britain again became a manifesto-free zone. Or did it? While a mania for the militant genre did not take hold in Britain and Ireland the same way it did in France, Italy, Germany, or Russia, the manifesto did enjoy a small but dedicated following that included Whistler, Wilde, and Yeats; Patrick Geddes and Hugh MacDiarmid; Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound; Dora Marsden and Virginia Woolf; and Auden, MacNeice, and Spender. Through these and other figures it is possible to trace the development of a manifesto tradition specific to Britain and Ireland.

Download Full-text