On the last weekend of the month, there’s a trip to Venice to visit Ezra Pound’s grave and some of the places he lived, worked, and wrote about. For the Professor, the trip is a profound poet’s-pilgrimage he’s been making for years. For us, it’s a chance to see Venice — one of the most beautiful and mysterious cities in the world.
As we walk in our big clumsy group, the tiny streets of Venice twist and weave incomprehensibly. The Professor intrepidly leads the way, long armed and bent slightly at the waist — as if hunched over his desk enthralled by a new line. As he leads us over hump-backed footbridges and meandering canals, he is eager and intense, but also reverent, soft-footed, sacred-searching.
The pastel apartments of Venice lean into each other and cast sideways shadows over the canal’s cyan glass surface. The oars of gondola- men sing water in circles.
We are headed to San Michele, a small island in the Venetian lagoon where Pound and Olga Rudge, Mary’s mother, are buried.
As the ferry cuts through the canal’s waters shined gold by the sun, the Professor is quiet and composed, and his mood reverberates. He is always soft-spoken, but in Venice even more so. In fact, everyone in Venice seems more soft-spoken, contemplative, and pensive. Our words are sinking into the canals, and we can feel it.
We scrub the tombstone with bottled water and a roll of paper towels. Then, we pull weeds that are creeping up between flowers. We work for about twenty minutes and when we finish cleaning the two graves, we gather around in a little circle and sit.
“How’s everyone feeling?” the Professor asks.
We smile and nod, but there is a feeling of melancholy none of us want to acknowledge. Pound’s grave is unremarkable. Sanitary workers in random towns in New Jersey have more distinguished tombstones. Pound loved Venice, but it looks like Venice didn’t have much use for him. Perhaps this is the fate of all poets, eventually.
“There’s some shade over here if you want to gather closer,” the Professor announces, as I entertain these ominous thoughts.
“Let us open The Cantos and turn to page…” and those of us who have our books open them.
The Professor, who carries The Cantos at his side the way a devout priest carries a Bible — unruly leaves of paper and stick- ons shooting out from the pages — has multiple passages selected that he reads every year in Venice.
He reads aloud:
But to have done instead of not doing, This is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
that a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame this is not vanity
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered. . .
We are silent beneath the trees in the shaded graveyard as seagulls swoop by and cry out with their human-like voices, “GAW, GAW, GO,” and the Professor’s voice bounces off the tombstones.
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down —
For me, the poem is about art and Pound’s effort to keep poetry alive and to make it his life. To carry on the tradition and contribute something to it.
“You know, once,” the Professor says, “Pound sat on a bridge not far from here. In fact, we will go later. And he contemplated throwing all his manuscripts into the canal. Giving the whole thing up.”
The poem is the voice of the poet to the poet. A reassuring voice telling himself that the work he’s chosen, poetry, is worthwhile. If you decide to become a poet, you will need this voice from time to time to keep going.
He concludes the reading, and the class rises to leave, but I sit still near the grave in a silent, contemplative state. Mosquitoes swarm. Some people are walking away but nobody says anything. The Professor lights a cigarette.
I have been on a ride this past month, and now it’s seeping in. Studying poetry intensely, reading, writing, and living poetry has been a rewarding journey. I feel as emotionally open and expressive as I’ve ever been. I also feel purpose as a writer.
At Pound’s gravesite, this powerful sensation, an unusual mix of satisfaction and understanding, a spiritual feeling, overtakes me. All the work feels justified — and the month has been work. Long mornings and late afternoon classes wrestling with difficult poems like The Cantos. And the Professor isn’t one to let anyone slip by half ass’n it. He is a perfectionist.
Pound wrote, “Beauty is difficult,” and in this moment, I understand more clearly what he meant. It is a more precise way of saying “nothing good in life comes easy.”
Before we leave the cemetery, I stick a fragment of a poem I wrote in the dirt with a twig beneath a flower beside Pound’s grave:
I too have wanted to be like him, and him, and him.
Instead, I choose to wander with the wind.
Suddenly, I have a vivid memory. I remember being in the hospital with my grandmother before she died. It was a day near the end, and the family had been there for some time and had grown silent. My grandmother was in pain, and it was difficult for her to speak. She was reclined on the hospital bed with nothing to look at but a TV mounted on a sterile, white wall.
She must have been angry to spend her last days in such a soulless place, but now, she was just frustrated by the silence. She was going, she knew it, and she needed something to hold on to. A hand, yes. But also words — the sound of a human voice.
Fidgeting with her hands the way she did when she was nervous or irritated, she asked us to speak, to say something, to tell a story. And I remember how at that most important moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Where was my poetry then?
What is the role of poetry in the world?
What is the role of poetry in our lives?