From K.K.Ruthven’s Ezra Pound as Lit­er­ary Critic:

What were really needed to launch A Lume Spento prop­erly were ghosted reviews: “I shall write a few myself,” he told his mother, per­haps recall­ing that Walt Whit­man had writ­ten favor­able reviews of his own Leaves of Grass, “and get some­one to sign ‘em.” One such review is quoted by T.S. Eliot in a pro­mo­tional pam­phlet he wrote at Pound’s request and pub­lished anonymously…to boost the Amer­i­can sales of Lustra in 1917. The review is attrib­uted to the London Evening Stan­dard…. Pound cal­cu­lated that if he could place such “genuine and faked reviews” in London and New York news­pa­pers then “Scribner or some­body [could] be brought to see the sense of making a reprint.” Nobody did, but that hardly mat­ters: for what is revealed in the first and unsuc­cess­ful attempt to market a lit­er­ary com­mod­ity of his own is his con­vic­tion that lit­er­ary texts make their way in the world not by some sup­pos­edly intrin­sic merit as lit­er­a­ture but by claims made on their behalf by crit­i­cism.

…Read More…

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CHICAGO REVIEW is pleased to announce the pub­li­ca­tion of issue 55:1: SEVEN POETS FROM BERLIN, edited and intro­duced by Chris­t­ian Hawkey.

Fea­tur­ing:

POEMS by Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck, Hen­drik Jack­son, Uljana Wolf, Stef­fen Popp, Sabine Scho, and Ron Winkler

&

TRANS­LA­TIONS by Chris­t­ian Hawkey, Nicholas Grindell, Nicholas Perrin, Cather­ine Hales, Susan Bernof­sky, J.D. Schnei­der and Andrea Scott

as well as:

FIC­TION by Jorge Edwards and Deb Olin Unferth

an INTER­VIEW with Jorge Edwards

ESSAYS by Jef­frey Yang and J.H. Prynne

plus REVIEWS and NOTES!

To order or sub­scribe, visit:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/review

***

(our cover is cour­tesy of Andreas Töpfer)

From today’s Times:

Some experts say that emis­sions from air­line travel are simply so large that it may be impos­si­ble to offset them.

“Buying off­sets is a nice idea, just like giving money to a soup kitchen is a nice idea, but that doesn’t end world hunger,” said Anja Koll­muss, a staff sci­en­tist for the Stock­holm Envi­ron­ment Insti­tute who is based at a branch at Tufts University.

“Buying off­sets won’t solve the prob­lem because flying around the way we do is simply unsus­tain­able,” said Ms. Koll­muss, who has researched air­line offsets.

A recent study in Britain con­cluded that one flight from London to Los Ange­les pro­duced more carbon diox­ide per person than the aver­age British com­muter pro­duces in a year by trav­el­ing by train, subway or car.

Also, from The Awl:

The orig­i­nal plan was to call the book La Fraisne (“The Ash Tree”) after the title of the first poem, and ded­i­cate it to H.D. Shortly before Pound sent the book to his Venet­ian printer, how­ever, he learned that his friend William Brooke Smith had died of tuber­cu­lo­sis. This was 1908; Pound and Smith had met seven years ear­lier when the former was a fresh­man at Penn. It was Smith who first gave Pound a book of Oscar Wilde’s (Salomé), and Smith whom Pound would lament to WCW some thir­teen years later, “I haven’t replaced him and shan’t and no longer hope to.” The news of Smith’s death demanded a change: now the book would be ded­i­cated to Pound’s “caritate primus” and titled A Lume Spento.