Christine Brooke-Rose on Pound

Pound was proceeding by poetic intuition, and who knows, his may be the only comprehensible poetry to the twenty-first century, when a new economic order, unimaginable to us now, may have emerged from the present apparently irreconcilable dogmas; it may be, for that matter, a post-McLuhan age, an age of mixed media and ideogrammic thinking in quick cut, when we may all be speaking Chinese, with nothing of our civilization left but the fragments he has ‘shelved (shored)’ against our ruin. (236)

From A ZBC of Ezra Pound, U of California P, 1971.

I had the chance to spend some time with Brooke-Rose’s papers in Austin a while ago, and perhaps I’ll have the chance to write about them. (A dangerous woman to anger.) I find the above passage remarkably suggestive, if not strictly prescient.