Juan de Fuca is the alter ego-voice of Dr. James Bledsoe, owner of
Bledsoe’s NW Tours. Dr. Bledsoe is an American and native to the
Pacific Northwest.

Twice each month he conducts writing tours of the Pacific Northwest to
see what can be found out first hand. The object of these writing tours
is to keep eyes & ears open, to take notes & to carry a few books for
the work. The tours & writing tutorials cover poetry, natural history &
New West History stressing the haibun prose form.

Backtracking Across Civilization With Ezra Pound

I

Get up and do it, pretend Snake River Mustang.
You Brought it into fashion.
Return, backtrackin’ Sawtooth climbin’
Bitterroot crossin’,
Scolding River wadin’ Chiner tea trader.
                   
    “out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
In the old sense. Wrong from the start--

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus ( a husband with a ladder in the wrong place at the wrong time );
big river rainbow trout for factitious bait...”

as he went He touched. as he went He unlocked.
as he went He uncovered. as he went He became touched,
as he went He was locked up, as he went He ended staved
on the sharp long spike of power over wild beasts.

“and my old man went on hoein’ corn
    while George was a-tellin’ him,
come across a vacant lot
    where you’d occasionally see a wild rabbit
or mebbe only a loose one”

And He went wilting verseward a thousand years
in the already cut yellow sweet grass
On stilts, playing horse straight across the wind.

Frontier poet Backtracker Ezra Pound came and went from Idaho up over the Bitterroot Mountains, over the plains, over the newly plowed fields leaving wild Idaho rabbit tracks behind, seeking behind the hill the monk’s bell.

Across the River That Scolds All the Others came He then
to the bounds of deepest water, the offshore oceans flowing backward;
asking crab pinching sarcastic questions,
He going to be the cat’s pajamas or the gout symbiosis & symbolics mindful of Johnson and Boswell from
Jutland to Gypsies and a slave to the Chiner tea traders.

Goodbye tall timbers and pine pitch. You are so much smoke to me now.

And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves of parchment and rice paper.

II

Rhythm is a form cut into time.
And he saw a procession coming down through a cut in the hills, carrying timbre & pitch and intonation. He listened to the sounds they made.

He became generous with the lords of the mountains, he journeyed back to abbeys in Belgium and monasteries high in the Italian Alps to hear the ruling monk crass;
Franciscian wifely forefather tampering.

Ezra Pound worked back across civilization, looking after the Sound; releasing literature and poems from their cages as he went.

>From his mountain, Noah had opened his ark &
let forth out of the ark every beast &
every creeping thing.

>From his Bitterroots,
Ezra just went forth and let
Every cat out of the bag.

The first Codex autistic, these anew gnu. Then came the cattle did find the sound blizzard interlinked with every tenor verbose, every diva prolix.

as he went He touched Chinese letters, classic Noh theater in Japan, Ireland, England, France, Italy, and every creeping periodical.

back across friends, Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, his own America, footprints of a small barefoot child.

Found any horse thieves or ear wax yet me hardy bards? Opening, letting out stolen strophes, haggardly after, vacating with the embezzled smoothes of tell.

>From the roaring house that Ruth built
To the chanting house that dead sounds made into monkish rockers,
Pound made peace with Walt Whitman’s buggering fragrances & Wilson’s subverting classifies.

He touched Chinese parchment manuscripts &
saw letters on rice paper made prior to printing.

Bitterroots and time,
sound of broncos galloping
through the Chinese letters of date;
Candle lit broncos galloping through
the caves of Southern France.

He saw Chinese and English prose together and had his obscure reveries, Concluded He that English was halfway between inflected languages and Chinese letters so He got a Sun Valley snow shovel out and shoveled up Chinese lettering and peppered his CANTO poems with them.

Idaho frankness as never before;
backtracker Ezra, setting locked up things free to roam and bring happiness,
backtracker Ezra, setting locked up things free to cause pain and suffering.

Rain, empty rivers and cold tunes amid reeds.
In his zealous lenses, he saw the mix in the creeks and streams, Gregorian chanting, Benedictine abbeys, Confucianism and the relationships between Gregorian lips and Oriental music and language.

Reappear as he crabs; He went back over the course by which we all had rhymed:
He found esoteric literature
He found the tangle of inrooted ideas of history
He found the complex ideas of various periods; He found the
Gregorian chants amongst the Listerine gargles.

Ezra Jock, a tennis playing agitation offering Wimbledon
Edgerton Revelations that floundered in Greek Showoff.

Printer’s guilds favor shaky retypes or
what’s a union bug for? agree? Not Ezra!

out Outperforming quaintness, Kind Ezra did spell out inside the made already. He wrote Guide to Kulchur which is a kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Gutenberg Galaxy in CANTO.

Idaho, New York, Dublin, London, Paris, Rome, Naples
And where the stars and stripes catch the beltway sunset,
A Funny Farm outside Washington D.C.

Bled of words
chased down and tangled in
barbed wire and red tape

Hard time, bad light
Caterwauling thunder off padded walls
Burn a cross total loss
Denigration plunder

But still we are without fathers
At last, long last, the funny farm became too much to bear
He too was diminished
His hair bursting out of all control
his tongue punished if not silenced

Freed from the harsh house of wind his
Play horse had corraled him in,
another poet, Robert Frost and friends
sprung him from the funny farm when they got him a
Monopoly Get Out Of Jail Free Card in 1958.

Under his old Idaho cabin roof was one lantern.
Out back there was the trail to the outhouse and the
Sears & Roebuck Catalog.

Thinking back to that time,
he saw the overwhelming importance of manuscripts based on parchment and paper prior to printing, also paper production in relation to commerce in Italy and the migration of printing and the issue of humanist books in Italy and their export to the half-moon North.

He saw the guilds
He saw the condensed hushing
He saw people told not to move their lips when reading
and that went for you or for Fred Wareing and the Pennsylvanians.

Podium hero in back of a paraphrase,
soon enough we’ll eat the gravel
backtracking back down roads once traveled by
Crusaders and Holy Land Pilgrims.

III

A man a plan a CANTOS SOTNAC Pound Palindrome
There was something in his blood
a memory; the last hint he had of narrow roads
to distant places

    He worked back across civilization,
releasing literature and poems
from their cages as He went
He gave verses landscapes to roam on
He gave prose Exhibits to hang in
He gave ideas a side access to a
Three ring circus of contortionist showing.

Copernican creams, Confucian pearls, Betty Crocker’s
Seven Minute Frosting -- Stir it till your arm falls off.
See the emphasis on the classics -- the closeness of writing as handicraft to the production
of works in vernacular and in metre.
And Tchi said, “I would prefer a small mountain temple,
with order in the observances.”
Voiced prayers cooperate inside stone arched chapels,
Candle flashlight surgatherings yet to render the
Classics in their own paraphrase!

Tellers though far away. Out by the lower river He gave Helen’s fleets history, the far and tinting thinking of might have been. And later He told of that treacherous horse bearing Greeks.

Showing off again with Greek ceremony
Nekia. Nekia, Nekia -- abbreviated, and pointed deaf baiting. Greek ceremony for the dead.
Pouring the dead a draught of blood, to liven them & coax
them to speak, just like givin’ your in-laws a Bloody Mary
on Christmas morning.

Always halfway between turning around and the point of know return; He saw that with the printing press the demands were made on literature and the emphasis was on the rhyme.

Finally came to a cage with a very big lock. He wanted to free the European tradition of metre and writing but soon learned the difficulty of maintaining quality level,
yes Capaneus once again, ‘going down the long ladder unguarded” to scrape the bottom of the metered barrel in the dark.

He talked James Laughlin into starting New Directions Publishing House, a house dedicated to avant-garde literature. Later, New Directions became a publishing house dedicated to publishing Pound’s own gargoyled gargles.

Ezra backtracker, perched up on the flying buttresses, the one man regiment of inspectors looking down at the blur above the ripples on the collective pool, farting at Freud and sending the political skimmers out to look for surface tension, seeing ramifications cleverly deliberated.

He once remarked that his Cantos 1-40 was a
detective story about a crime against man and civilization;
gumshoe lilies from the acorn mush.
The Betwixt story boy. Write bellowing, symbolic comedian
of the saintly cloisters with your unattainable disclosures.

Reappear once again as he crabs. This came in the face of what he perceived as the cramping of literature, as he went from the U.S. to England and then to France and Italy.

In Ireland he tried to break William Butler Yeats out of his rhythm jail by letting him ride his pretend Snake River Mustang that He’d brought along for the breakout.

“If I could get Yeats on a horse, I’d put a new rhythm
into English poetry,” Pound said.

What if Pound had gotten Yeats up on that horse? What if Pound had gotten Yeats up on another civilization to release literature and letters, with the bullets zinging overhead, the sound of their broncos galloping through an old Murphy field.

“Hey Ezra, the Sheriff, the River, the Ripples out
there on the collective pool, think they’re coming after us?”
“This way Wild Bill, follow.”
“Hey Ezra, that Sheriff,
he rhymes with nothin’ but tariff
He must be one of them too.”

What rhythms indeed! Only if he and Yeats had become train robbers together...The River Liffey Cannonball, the Orange Blossom Special as an Irish Jig, Sweet Betsy From Ulster.

Then Pound backtracked through France when England succumbed to the dead art press publishing control of W.H. Smith and Son and turned publicity inwards.

Sweet Betsy Pound the Idaho backtracker;
Get out of the way
Old Tan Mucker
You sure are
One belligerent Fucker

Ode to obscure Sparta libraries, O, the untapped harbors and alcoves teaming with nonspecialist pith;
everywhere, he found smoldering pockets of language that were just ahead of monopoly. This made him constantly concerned with the outpouring of small groups and small periodicals, the outpouring of language that was just ahead of monopoly established by a centralized universal press.

IV

But backtrackers also reverse their policies.
What got caught in His unstopped ear?
the klaxon of a fire truck?

Only Ezra Credit seeing perverts and arse-holes everywhere. Press gangs, money-lusters and printing houses; perverters of language, obstructers of knowledge, obstructers of distribution, etc., etc., etc.

He started attacking the entire monetary system of the Western World because of its control over publishing and he swung to notions of Social Credit, screaming of the war pimps, and the cowardice of gold and how understanding the issue of Jew usury was central to understanding all history.
Horse charming landmark baffler
Blur froth the occult.

If He found traces of democratized credit or the socialization of debt we can find no record of the encounter,
only Ezra Pound the Idaho backtracker -- & his artistic revolt against the economic system --

In his revolting artistic pajamas, &
his funny hats and scarves
Paper, Scissors, Rocks

Pound, Ezra, Hammer,
Pound, Hammer, Ezra,
Shout out the rhetoric;
Valley Forge,
Conjure up the people who live in the painted, neat, white houses in Delaware and Virginia and Connecticut and Massachusetts who should have no part in helping Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Borrow the kerosene from Diogenes.
With one lantern,
Render the classics under their own cabin roof

Pass the plate, collect the hate
“What god, man or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!” as
He developed heated prejudices and mysterious
theories about Jews, Hitler and Stalin.
Ezra backtracking over the hatred and the awful price paid by Jews for introducing flexible monetary systems.

Belgium luxury booster
Wrong time prayers don’t cooperate inside a
stone arched jail. Careful when you go back across history releasing sterile Papal bulls.

Ezra’s out-of-rhythm jail-treason account ignored the Church’s yellow cut grass stilt walking in the filthy lucre.

Play it Goddamnit. Do you worship god out of spite?
Play it, swing it, turn back & think time.

Ezra’s refinement ignored the Church’s restriction on usury; The restriction that compelled Jews to become financiers; He was all the wage against the spatter sound under His old Idaho inrotted ideas of history. His deepest protesting was permanently directed at money as Zionist heredity.

Give us a break, we’re lost, Idaho!
We can’t even find those damn old hobos.

He supported John Maynard Keynes against bankers and took Keynes up into atmospheres unsound; where letters were neat,
where deep systemic crimes did not exist; where there was only white-painted fence Connecticut and Massachusetts;
squeaky Lysol clean
phallic and ambrosial.

Free to break, double back, circle round, loop the him, come across a Vilfredo Pareto mock-o-sin. Circle ‘round the intonation. Walk a mile in Pareto’s mocha-sins. Son Pareto had emphasized a ruling class & vacant lots where you’d occasionally see a horse wearing an English saddle. Pareto emphasized a ruling class based on force and their use of persuasion to dominate the subject classes. For this Pareto too had been labeled a Fascist.

Ezra Pareto, the first rhyme
From his Bitterroots
Ezra, just down the long ladder
to the station.

Ezra, they have a Truck in Your Neighborhood.
But be careful when you start donating
Italian and German uniforms to history.

Get the trains to run on time so the train robbers won’t be late for work. Better mendacity’s than the classics and
neglected, ungarded sociology.

Thin arguments fatten in the Italian sunlight. All the Italian economists had shifted to sociology as a result of their Roman law backgrounds. Whereas and therefore Anglo-Saxon economists emphasized equilibrium and neglected sociology. But not poor old Pareto. He was dead by 1923.

“Imperial power is?and to us what is it?

The fourth; the dimension of stillness.
And the power over wild beasts.”

Ezra Pound On The Air. Only Ezra Pound of Limbaugh, the Bloods Dead. Radio electrocuting midnight, the meaner accelerated well, the impact of his radio broadcasts, circle around the tyranny of erudition, neglect human relations.

Pound strong against the Dollar. But He wouldn’t have been able to go up against Milton Berle as t.v. made radio’s future unsound, but if the phone only
Had the Pound sign...

Circle Air. The air without refuge of silence. Pound Radio. 50 Thousand Watts of Short Wave Soul. The Black Shirts got a Son Valley Showoff to say Hello to our boys crossing the ocean flowing backwards.
Backtrackers are perfect gofers for the everlasting maw of radio programmers and their demand for new material.

Skilled researcher. Podium hero in back of a
Sun Valley snow shovel;
Look on the back of each coal scuttle,
William Faulkner may have penned Absalom, Absalom there.

Pound knew the necessity of turning up old stuff which may be suitable or made suitable for radio --
Mogul abler know your own gargle
you’re having withdrawals in wiretapping.

Like one of Thor Heyerdahl’s spindly rafts,
He and the retracing accounts breakup in the flowing backwards offshore ocean.

Tennis player soon to be indicted for playing in dirty laundry water and leaving peckerwood tracks in the fields. Soon now there will be an embargo on classics & Wilson rackets and another price to pay, so rally in shortsighted fashion.

V

His Finger prints found on a futurist microphone,
this was a job for the lab boys.

For his wartime broadcasts of Fascist propaganda from Rome, beginning in 1940, and maybe for his tendency to drop into Greek from time to time, Pound was indicted for treason. He did time in St. Elizabeth Hospital for the Criminally Insane from December 1945 to May 1958.

Imprisoned just outside the town of the practiced grin
His prison stripes caught many a beltway sunset.

died some, came home to a lie
home to many deceits
home to old lies and new infamy
for the age demanded chiefly a mold of his
footsteps in plaster

Getting the trains to run on was,
should have been or should be.
Getting the trains to circle around the tyranny of erudition.
Why did he support Mussolini against Spuds?
To Be the Prince of Tater Tots?
Cuckoos the prince with the accelerated grin,
A resuming wit buffoon that is jest family.

Water Tower, let buffoons refuel;
Twist the truth and let it swing in the Roman wind. Renaissance poets, how do you say
Bullshit in cracked Italian?
Podium hero in back of a draped flag, political eunuch, liar in a public place, liberating a He world smacking and strutting and getting the trains to run on time.

The Bitterroots go down to the river’s edge.
Frontier poet Backtracker,
let a poet’s soul misguide the prosy say and run with the poesy metre and the sterile bulls.

To public it in the Middle Ages of the Twentieth Century. Unbecoming wires of political pointy & smashed broadcasters; Teller though far away, Why did He give the il Duce a horse to ride and make him out to be like an Italian Lash La Rue?

Hello price to pay when, il Duce’s are wild.
Circle the treason, get the trains to water.
Clack your false teeth together poet;
Strut on the piazza;
But when you start for home,
Always watch you back.

VI
Past the tip of the tongue, just outside of Venice
there’s a wind for which His nose
was untrained.

What news on the Rialto?
The Flesh of Pound.
Paw Prints on Rice Paper
Forever tracking a single heart

Brainstem rootness, captivated history;
This is the way to jaw locking bingo.
Blare the blindfolds within whom you wade
the moles wish them.

Whistle While You Work,
Hitler Doesn’t Jerk
Mussolini Bit his Weenie
Now it doesn’t’ work.

The mouths of spuds Ez, the mouths of spuds.
Every school kid from Bonners Ferry to Pocatello
once knew that one.

Frontier Of poetry?
Prison cage inwards?

Horse opera, horse drama, horse around.
Prison outside Roman wind.
Time to settle accounts, Renaissance poet,
You in real school now.


Time to chew blackbones.
Blackfoot, Idaho is the potato capital of America.
The Siksika, or Blackfeet Indians proper, along with
the Blood and the Piegan live to the East in Montana &
Southern Alberta.

These Indians sometimes name their horses, “Napi”,
After Napi Old Man.
Napi, Napi, Napi, the Old Man Trickster
who because he was impudent toward the Creator
brought death into the world.

Nekia, Napi, Napi, Nekia, Ketchum Katsup loves potatoes.
Coaxing the dead with clotted blood ceremonies or
Just Being impudent on the steep banks of the
Tongue Flag River,
the dead somehow find a way
to bring something to the kettle.

Staying at home or crossing the land bridge in a
depressing downfall of snow and cold rain,
Blackfeet Indian woman still know how to make blood
soup and blood pudding.

Pour a near-dead French-Canadian fur trapper
a draught of blood pudding & he will be coaxed to speak.
He will say, Riviere Boudin, or Pudding River,
He will use the precarious magic of his native tongue
to establish and defend a space.

Son whose country was made on a road,
here is something that was denied to you in other lands;
the First Codex over wild beasts, the issue of the neat, white houses in Delaware; the empty rivers and cold tunes down the long ladder to a pond of skimmers out
looking for surface tension,
seeing treason
or for all the releasing of
literature and poetry,

This Idaho backtracker came to a cage inwards;
Podium hero in back of the house,
himself locked up and imprisoned for
being a backtracker,
for reversing his position.

Reappear. Return Chiner tea trader.
What if you had run on time or Minute Rice?
Would your meters have been a constraint
instead of a goal?

Coming in from the airport we saw a lot of remote
landscpaes & heard unsuggested meaning migrating
across some vertically written and printed Japanese lines.
Coming in from the airport,
we saw a lot of vacant lots for sale.
New rhythms or just old Japanese internment camps?

What eyes & ears will today try to capture?
You were the poet who didn’t trust printed words &
it hurts the way your footprints
brought down so many hearts
in your desperate flight toward fear and verse.

and I asked the kid sellin’ corn
    by the side of the road,
“can you get back to town drivin’ South?”
    “No,” he said, “that way only circles ‘round,
goes back up on the hill and comes out here again.
    To get to town you gotta drive North
and cross the river”

Return.
Backtrackers are all feeding on rice paper and hard tack diets of printing back across civilization; double back, circle round, loop the loop, turn back and think about the Bitterroots and time spent in the waters of the
River That Scolds All the Others. Reappear big river
Rainbow Trout, slap & slip on the marginal cobbles,
Fish or cut artificial bait?

The issue of preferring a
small mountain temple to a
small mountain cabin.

The All If,
the total polo prowl.
One planetary misunderstanding
tied strongly to tar paper shack incorrectness.

Return backtracker of manuscripts
Out back there, the dark.
What is to shield us from
floods and rascality?

Big Inwards and wrong diets
Imprisoned river rainbow
a dumped catch.

Take care of the body as implement
don’t kid yourself, don’t lie
But what if the kids won’t study?

Clusterings can briar.
Drier coincides with Skinhead
Crier glancoma


What shall we place in the
mouths of spuds Ez;
Curly fries, baked supper spuds
Somebody else’s meal?

Again, local history has it that
It is customary to mention our fathers
in a poem about this place.

And those men who ‘with bestial enthusiasm’
Took the pretend horses where?
Strange hobos who all insist they are our fathers
in voices harsh as gravel.

There is a path under childhood’s last hill
In Hayden Lake, Idaho
Children sing a skiprope song that goes:

Jesus christ miami vice
Abomination blunder
Pass the plate collect the hate
Put us six feet under
(then turning faster)

Jesus hates us this we know
‘cause the Butler told us so
off-colored skin is such a sin
Heaven is in Idaho
(faster)
Heaven is in Idaho

yes Capaneus once again, ‘going down the long ladder unguarded” in the dark.
Echos & voices going nowhere
but the word gatherer sees the stairway to heaven.

Whistle (in the Dark) While You Work
Hitler’s ghost is starting to jerk
some Spud cages.

The Aryan Nation horsy is going from
Idaho up and over the Sawtooth,
Potatoe bread, ears of corn, Again
Idaho’s inrooted ideas of history
Out for a ride.

Drunk, & confused,
Wasted days & wasted nights
Memories bulldozed and gouged by new roads

They travel circles, not roads
and have never admitted Idaho
to the union, much less to memory.

Thunderbolts Capaneus!
Thunderbolts Mr. Pound.
Woebegone & Far Away.
Other vacant lots with new rhythms,
other vacant lots where you hear gun fire
other vacant lots where you occasionally see
Cannon ball shell casings and scared rabbits.

“Gunfire Mother, Incoming.” Fire in the hole.
Coming in over the hill just like Boisie Cascade or
like our hydro-electricity did back in ‘42;
A Mr. and Mrs. Potatoe Heads’
Kevlar wedding anniversary.

FYI, FBI cross-hair scopes
now seek behind every hill
The Mr. Weaver’s &
their jest families.

Cannon ball common at you, Mrs. Weaver,
Blow out the lantern.

What Capaneus? Shall we place another husband with a ladder in the wrong notion, or give him another pretend horse to ride and make acoustic?

Was the backtracked trail from the house that language?

Ezra, Ezra, what did you have Confucius say in
your CANTO XIII:

        “You old fool, come out of it,
“Get up and do something useful.”