Claire De Lune Comments

If one thinks of the first few bars of deBussyʻs Claire de Lune while reading Fordʻs poem, the hushed silence of the music flouts the first few lines I should like to imagine .... One asks: why SHOULD you WANT to IMAGINE? For in the second stanza, there is no need to imagine. Ford is ALREADY there. And so are we. And the hushed sense of LISTENING for, or toward, or at....a past, a memory of machine guns (wukka, wukka, wukka) is upon us. Then weʻre back to the Should and the Want and so on. Well, this is better than ON HEAVEN. It is also easier to believe. A dialogue of persons on earth is easier than a dialogue of...heaven....One of Fordʻs biographers wrote that Ford wept when he realized that all of the writers that he had helped become established in the literary world did not trouble to name him as a co-author (or editor?) . He need not have wept. For a fellow Master Editor was Ezra Pound. Pound mentions him repeatedly. Poundʻs acknowledgement is worth gold compared to some of the writers, like Hemingway, for example, that he helped into publication fame. To the Spirit of Ford: Let them go....Your generous spirit is no small honor to us, following after.