All these photographs except the last one, come from one day July 30, 2011 that began with a visit to San Michele (the Isle of the Dead), where my mother would like to end up as flotsam. I was looking for Ezra Pound, just a name, but I had discussed his responsibility to his art and politics a month before at an Irish literary festival, and despite his awful fascist thought, his poetics remain stimulating.
“All art is great, and good, and true, only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its entire and highest sense; that is to say, not the work of limbs and fingers, but of the soul, aided, according to her necessities, by the inferior powers.” Ruskin, The Stones of Venice III (1853)
See – Looking for Ezra Pound – and finding Joseph Brodsky and David Campbell – art and responsibility (April, 2013)
