Where to Begin?

For three years, out of key with his time,


He strove to resusitate the dead art


Of poetry; to maintain 'the sublime"


In the old sense. Wrong from the start---





No hardly, but seeing he had been born


In a half savage country, out of date...............





Of course I begin with Ezra Pound... having missed seeing him in early 1965 when he came over to Dublin after the memorial service for T.S.Eliot in London... how long ago all that seems: the going to the Hibernia Hotel and the asking for Mr Pound... is it even possible to imagine ever again such a moment of a seeking out in such a way...



Of course there was another time of going to the cemetery in Meudon looking for the grave of Louis Ferdinand Celine...



Of course there was visiting Julian Green in Paris in his 90th year...



Of course there was being told by Jorges Luis Borges that he himself preferred James Joyce's poetry: those other books are just so much gossip...



And then there was Francis Stuart and Ernst Junger...



But what about Anthony Burgess and Hannah Green and John Jordan and Denis Donoghue and Juan Carlos Onetti and James Liddy and Jack Spicer and T.S.Eliot and David Jones and Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard and Jean Genet and Curzio Malaparte and



you gotta start someplace or no place and that is probably where I am at the moment: finally to quote :



The enemy--- he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
---from Cold Friday by Whittaker Chambers (from the library of Father Flye, James Agee's friend)