I’ve lifted a few quotables by Ezra Pound from Donald Hall‘s Paris Review interview with him, published in 1962 but linked a few days back by Al Filreis:

[In response to Hall’s question about how Pound would plan a new canto. “Do you follow a special course of reading for each one?”] One isn’t necessarily reading. One is working on the life vouchsafed, I should think. I don’t know about method. The what is so much more important than how.

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Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.

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Cal Lowell is very good. [I hope Captain Ron doesn’t have a mouthful of Chardonnay when he reads this one.]

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[As an artist…] You are trying to render life in a way that won’t bore people….

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The actual outlook of the experimental generation was all a question of the private ethos.

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The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers.

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You never get clarity as long as you have these package words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

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Often, I think, so-called obscurity is not obscurity in the language but in the other person’s not being able to make out why you are saying a thing.

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Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular character, of a particular culture in the awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche toward uniformity.

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Sixty years ago, poetry was the poor man’s art: a man off on the edge of the wilderness…. A man who wanted the best could have it on a lonely farm. Then there was the cinema, and now television.

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The immense […] loss of freedoms, as they were in 1900, is undeniable.

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Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?