Gery and Ezra Pound continued ...
In June, John was invited to Hailey, Idaho to participate in a lecture series at the Town Cultural Center on their controversial native son, Ezra Pound, who was born in Hailey in October 1885. Although Pound only spent the first 18 months of his life in Hailey, the house where he was born still stands. Thanks to a generous grant by Ms. Jennifer Wilson, the house was restored to reflect its design at his birth. Today, it serves as a community art center for the Sun Valley region. John's lecture, "From Idleness to Splendor: Ezra Pound's Poetic Legacy" is available on YouTube through the Hailey Library website.
In July, John served as co-Convener and secretary of the 30th Ezra Pound International Conference (EPIC) at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The conference, titled "The Legacy of The Cantos," featured 25 sessions on Pound's work, roundtable discussions, a poetry reading, a concert of Troubadour songs from Pound's translations of Provencal poems and excursions to the Scottish National Library, Walter Scott's Abbotsford and the Scottish Highlands including Loch Ness. John also delivered a paper entitled, "Scots Poundian: The Poetry and Criticism of G.S. Fraser" and read poems at the reading.
John's poems also appear in Japanese translation in "Ezra Pound and Friendship: The Online Fusion of East and West," edited by Miho Takahashi (2023). He has been invited to lecture at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo in December.
