With Usura
with usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall.
these lines from e. pound have been rumbling in my mind lately, as has the song "sixteen tons." when i was working on my dissertation, i spent numerous hours reading over everything i could by pound at the newberry--the poetry, "critical" books, radio transcripts. and though i did not use pound in my study, his ranting against usury stuck with me. perhaps it was because i trained in grad school in medieval italian and usury in that period was anathema, or perhaps it was something about my upbringing jumping in.
for the past few years, i've tried to take/keep poetry out of the "capital" market while still making it valuable. some things matter beyond the market, but our current setup trains us to view those things through commodities (family, art, sex, etc. . . ). in other words, those things structure the desires of the market but in the process are transformed into marketable goods. what i've been working on with poetry is an attempt to push it outside the current value system to view it as worthwhile in an alternate system. (we need an alternate system if we are going to tackle the challenges of overpopulation, environmental devastation, etc . . . , but i'm not convinced we will create such a new system willingly. i think we'll be forced to do so, but change is change. i just hope it leads us to a more peaceful future.)
with usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall.
these lines from e. pound have been rumbling in my mind lately, as has the song "sixteen tons." when i was working on my dissertation, i spent numerous hours reading over everything i could by pound at the newberry--the poetry, "critical" books, radio transcripts. and though i did not use pound in my study, his ranting against usury stuck with me. perhaps it was because i trained in grad school in medieval italian and usury in that period was anathema, or perhaps it was something about my upbringing jumping in.
for the past few years, i've tried to take/keep poetry out of the "capital" market while still making it valuable. some things matter beyond the market, but our current setup trains us to view those things through commodities (family, art, sex, etc. . . ). in other words, those things structure the desires of the market but in the process are transformed into marketable goods. what i've been working on with poetry is an attempt to push it outside the current value system to view it as worthwhile in an alternate system. (we need an alternate system if we are going to tackle the challenges of overpopulation, environmental devastation, etc . . . , but i'm not convinced we will create such a new system willingly. i think we'll be forced to do so, but change is change. i just hope it leads us to a more peaceful future.)
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