[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I took several POETS Days off from the regular world recently, but rather than declaring “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” to reclaim a deserved – and I could go on, but those hours are ours by right – Friday afternoon, I tagged along with friends and family for a couple of weeks of nature. That meant going to Wyoming to hear the kids make “Teton” jokes, Montana to eat elk burgers and stay in a hotel within driving range of Yellowstone and snobby Bison that walk right up your car, cogitate, and pass without so much as a nod of acknowledgement, and then on to the second-most-fantastic state in the U.S. for white water rafting down the Salmon River, from which we returned despite the nickname. Again. It was all glorious. I got to wear SPF river pants that were almost identical to the parachute pants I wore in 1984, zippered pockets and all.

Idaho. I meant Idaho when I wrote “second-most…”

Hemingway killed himself in Blaine County, Idaho, where Ezra Pound was born. I’m not throwing that in to satisfy my POETS Day Ezra Pound mention quota, though it does do that. For whatever reason, that patch of land was an alpha or an omega to two remarkable literary careers. They were sparring partners and Pound considered Hemingway, who once said that he learned through Pound more “about how to write and how not to write than anywhere else,” one of his most intimate friends. Hemingway later helped secure Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital.

Pound’s connection to Blaine County is of his parent’s doing. He doesn’t mention his origins much directly in his writings – I should say, “In his writings that I’ve thus far read.” – except to present himself as a Philadelphian of the world. He does adopt a yokel written affectation in some of his letters: Robert Frost is “VURRY Amur’k’n,” and of Ulysses, in a letter to Joyce, he writes “An’ I reckon’ this here work o’ yourn is some concarn’d letershure.” The affectation is almost always used in association with something he admires or at least approves of. Pound was an awful snob so maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the yokel affectation grasps the heart of the matter. Was there a wistful bit of rural Idaho in him that came up in conversation between the two? It would make sense in response when (not if) Hemingway spoke of his Michigan woods. I have no evidence, but I assume Hemingway found Blaine via Pound and if I ever find some tale or exchange detailing the hows and wherefores, you’ll hear about it. It’ll be a POETS Day seven-parter.