The new way to literary salon

I’m grateful for social media for putting me in contact with some pretty nifty people who write about their respective passions: Music, film, literature, philosophy and, at the bottom of any reputable list, even politics. If your “friends” are picked selectively, your social media page can become a veritable smorgasbord of cultural delights. Otherwise, it just becomes a dumpster fire.

But let’s focus on the positives for the time being. I’ve worked for 20-some years in the think tank salt mines and another 20-some years in literary and music reference book publishing. Additionally, I’ve held numerous side hustles as an entertainment reporter, film and theater critic, podcast host, and magazine contributor on all matters cultural.

As a result, I’ve rubbed elbows with some sharp individuals, people for whom the arts are part and parcel of the very fiber of their beings. Many of those individuals have likeminded friends, and it became possible for me to expand exponentially my network of influences.

Among this wide-ranging group are folks who’ll politely point out the importance of Dante to world culture in one breath and argue the infield fly rule is an abomination in their very next breath. It can be exhilarating. Or, at least, until someone invariably galumphs like a bull in a China shop to derail the conversation. On the positive side, once the political morons have revealed themselves, you can either hide their posts or block the individual completely.

But … books, music, film and even sometimes sports. The last topic is a subject upon which I concur with Garfunkel and Oates (a female duo who perform a song, “Sports Go Sports,” neither act nor ditty which I more than likely would be aware without some social media “friend” or some weird algorithm that brought one or the other to my news feed).

All the above prompted by my current reading of Lauren Arrington’s “The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers.” Longtime readers know of my fascination with Ezra Pound and equal disdain for his anti-semitism and politics, but … the guy had talents for criticism, editing and poetry as well as a definite knack for scouting and nurturing literary talent.

I hold even more admiration for W.B. Yeats and Wyndham Lewis

(the latter nearly forgotten, unfortunately, despite the brilliance of his painting and literary efforts, including “The Childermass Trilogy,” “Tarr,” and “The Apes of God,” as well as two volumes of the Vorticist manifesto, “Blast,” in which he did the lion’s share of the design and writing with his then-partner in aesthetic crime, Pound.

One can imagine the pleasure of being transported to a geographical spot in which literary activity simmered around Pound; Yeats, Richard Aldington, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Bridget Patmore and Dorothy Shakespear. It was a literary salon not unlike those championed previously by Pound in London and Paris earlier in the century, as well as other salons such as the Bloomsbury Group and Gertrude Stein’s apartment on the Left Bank.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/but to be young was very heaven!” wrote William Wordsworth concerning another time when poetry and political revolution filled the air. I’ll cut to the chase: It didn’t end well then, either. Wordsworth’s excitement over the French Revolution soon evaporated, much like the poets orbiting Pound in his Italian orbit during the rise of Fascism and Mussolini eventually abandoned the increasingly politically obsessed Pound.

Nowadays, to literary salon, I can travel to the West side of the state or grab a burger in East Lansing to meet two of my favorite living poets, Robert Hudson and James Matthew Wilson. Or I can check in with other writer friends on Facebook, where I can avoid politics if I so choose.

One can imagine the pleasure of being transported to a geographical spot in which literary activity simmered around Pound; Yeats, Richard Aldington, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Bridget Patmore, and Dorothy Shakespear.