TO GENERATE AN IMAGE

I want to bring readers up to date by reminding them of a statement by Ezra Pound which was cited earlier in this document:

An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time….It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sudden sense of liberation….which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

Cited in Humphrey Carpenter’s 1988

Biography of Pound , A serious Character, p. 197

SMALL INSIGHT ON DISTRIBUTION

According to his online biography, the poet C.P. Cavafy "never offered a volume of his poems for sale during his lifetime; his method of distributing his work was to give friends and relatives the several pamphlets of his poems that he had printed privately and a folder of his latest broadsheets or offprints held together by a large clip." This is the way John Ramington distributed his poems. This is also the primary method of the poet Owen Ames whose lines are cited from time to time in this blog.

The Measure of Goodness

THE MEASURE OF GOODNESS

Version 2

A work of art is defined as such, in part, by its context. Thus something nasty and ephemeral such as bronze silicate castings of celebrity turds could be presented, in the context of a gallery or a museum, as a work of art. Adjudging the value of a work of art is a more difficult matter. The term “value” when applied to a work of art is both a quantitative and a qualitative assessment. A work of art may be of high value, yet unrecognized by the marketplace, languish in a forest of fallen trees, unseen and unheard. A $21,000,000 Warhol may be a piece of defecate matter in the eyes of somebody.

There is a documentary film shown at art houses and available online about a band called The Holy Modal Rounders (Holy Modal Rounders Bound to Loose). They were the nucleus of a 1960’s New York band called The Fugs. I have to tell you that I loved both of these bands. I owned a great double album of the Rounders which saved my life in Southern Mexico. That is the power of art. More about that later. I would like to mention that I have a collection of Fugs albums. In addition to their own outrageous scatological songs often written by Tuli Kuferberg or Ed Sanders, they put to music lyrics by poets such as Blake and Allen Ginsberg.

I took my accountant lady-friend to a screening of the Holy Modal Rouders film. She is actually the sister of the dead poet-novelist, John Ramington about whom this entire blog is written. The blog is not so much about Ramington as a study and justification of his works. One problem with Ramington ‘s works is that they do not scan in the same way as the except recently submitted to this journal by Owen Ames as “found” poetry:

The cloud formation inside an oil filter

plans an escape from a moronic short order cook,

a proverbial oil filter.

And if I give you what you want,

you wont like it, and you wont want it anymore.

A completely linguistic briar patch

gives secret financial aid to the fairy.

He released his hold cautiously and allowed himself

to fall back on the mattress.

The sister and I were discussing the Holy Modal Rounders. I owned that actually they were not very good and in fact they sounded horrible. Only one cut from the, now to me, lost double album was played, that during the credits. In the great double album they demonstrated a scholarly interest in 1920’s and 30’s rural Southern music. This is what we call ‘old-timey’ music, which was popular before the blue-grass revolution of Flatt and Scruggs. The music is largely lost, like the Fugs and The Holy Modal Rounders. But Ed Sanders is more popular than John Ramington. I owned in the discussion of the Rounders that “they were not very good.” Well, the accountant replied, “they took a lot of drugs. Were they ever very popular? They weren’t the Rolling Stones.” The only thing I could answer was that they were certainly Brittany Spears either.

One measure of the quality of art is economic value. If it is held by a museum and the acquisition required a high price at auction, then the work of art is valuable.

I submit that the market place cannot be the criterion of value in a work of art

ON MEXICO

My wife—at the time—and I were visiting the oldest continuously occupied archeological site in Mexico. It was a major temple before the Mayans. The Toltecs still inhabited the region. We missed the tourist express bus back to Oaxaca so we had to take the local. We wound up in a small town in a bad neighborhood waiting for the bus after sundown. The locals smelled of pulque (a cheaper agave derived alcohol than Tequila) and tobacco. Suddenly I became aware of the fact that gringos just disappear in this part of the country. The men were crowding around us with hostile looks on their faces. Then I pulled a Jew’s Harp from my pocket and began to play a melody of Appalachian tunes from the Holy Modal Rounders’ album: Flop Eared Mule, Blues in the Bottle, It’s Moving Day (a Charlie Poole song), Soldiers’ Joy. It was a hit. The attitudes dissolved. When I finished my concert, men and women applauded. The most menacing person offered me a drag off his cigarette. They knew we were not the CIA. Just then, the bus arrived and we made our getaway. I made it back to Washington and was able to write up my report.

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You gotta check out the Fugs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-QeWlesSzk&NR=1