Yesterday I posted smart-alecky status on Facebook about April being misunderstood as the cruelest month. In no time, my good friend Michael Doyle chimed in defending the bumbershoot-toting Hollow Man who posited the fourth month’s excessive cruelty. (If you’re not reading Doyle’s blog regularly, here’s why you should be.) The string was quickly unraveling into adjacent subjects, adjacent poets, when Doyle made one of the funnier and more insightful analogies I have ever come across. “Pound is to Eliot what Cheney was to Bush.”
It made me think of this section from an early draft of An American Book of the Dead* The Game Show†. Why was it cut? Official history blames structural redundancy: it echoed the first act’s “The Bardo of American Heroes of Violence” without advancing the second act’ action significantly. But an alternative legend purports that the bardo was actually blown away because the costume/design concept for the original L. A. production was so painful to watch unfold that the author, egged on by the actor who played Walt Whitman, simply wiped the whole shebang rather than risk having to watch something like it again.
Still, I’m proud of the “Poet’s Bardo”, and believe it sort of stands on its own as a bizarre bit of poetry geek fan fiction. (Plus, any time we can see Ezra Pound returned to his rightful gorilla cage, earned with the nastiest bits of bigoted treason, well, that’s a good time by me.)
