Sixteen Words for Water - How many do you have? - WA

Opening this week is hard hitting and entertaining play about a man some considered a literary genius, even the Farther of Modern Poetry. Out spoken, opinionated and considered by some a fascist, he challenged the United States, and lost. (Event Details here)

The play is passionate, amusing, thought provoking and confrontational all at the same time. It is a bleak yet sometimes funny commentary on a influential man vs a powerful Government. Here is some history of the man known as Ezra Pound.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry.

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. His grandfather was the Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, Thaddeus C. Pound. His mother was said to be related to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a fruitful exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, and especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also had a profound influence on the Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.

In 1920, Pound moved to Paris, where he moved among a circle of artists, musicians, and writers who were revolutionizing the whole world of modern art. He was friends with notable figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He was also good friends with Basil Bunting and Ernest Hemingway.

His own significant contributions to poetry begins with his promotion of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and forgoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, spanning nearly fifty years, focused on his epic poem The Cantos.

On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in Rapallo, where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed. In particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th century revival of interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his death. Pound also became alarmed at the importation taxes levied by the United States on what Pound believed to be works of art. In addition to lobbying the US Customs and the House of Representatives, Pound wrote an essay in 1928 entitled "Article 211", where he related a trial to the recent decision to categorise the Nassak Diamond as a work of art, and therefore let it into the United States without payment of an import duty.

In a radio broadcast in June 1942 he would say "Every man of common sense, including the odd British MP, knows that every man of common sense prefers Fascism to Communism, from the moment that he learns a few concrete facts about both of them."

Pound remained in Italy, residing primarily in Rapallo, after the outbreak of World War II, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. He made several radio broadcasts from Rome, for which he was paid a small sum, but he also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing. Pound wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his scant political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it.

When Pound spoke on Italian radio, he gave a series of talks on political and cultural matters, art and patronage and economic theories. Pound believed that economics was the core issue for the cause of World War II. Specifically, his talks were largely about usury and the notion that representative democracy has been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the existence of central banks, which made governments pay interest to private banks for the use of their own money. He maintained that the central bank's ability to create money out of thin air allowed banking interests to buy up American and British media outlets to sway opinion in favor of the war and the banks. Pound believed that economic freedom was a prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on various sensitive political matters in his denunciations of the war. In addition, various comments of his were considered anti-semitic. Pound was indicted for treason by the United States government in 1943.

After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the time when Italy was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Salò Republic, evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States. He was found incompetent to face trial by a special federal jury and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958.

Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. He was still considered incurably insane, but not dangerous to others. He subsequently returned to Italy. When he arrived in Naples in July, 1958, he hailed his adopted country with a fascist salute. When asked when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied "I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum." Pound went on first to Castle Brunnenburg near Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen, then later to Rapallo and Venice. He remained in Italy until his death in 1972.

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Praise for SWFW - http://stonekingpages.webs.com/sixteenwordsforwater.htm
http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2005/03/sixteen-words-for-water.html