POUND, Ezra. Lament of the Frontier Guard.

Pound, Poetry, and Protest

POUND, Ezra. Lament of the Frontier Guard. New York: Bread and Puppet Press. November 1967.

8vo. Mimeographed white and black stapled wrappers; ff. [18], with black-and-white illustrations to each page; wrappers lightly toned, slight rusting to staples; near fine.

A bright copy of this scarce illustrated edition of Pound’s translation of Rihaku’s ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’, the illustrations by the Bread and Puppet Press drawing the poem’s themes into the context of the Vietnam War.

The Bread and Puppet Press was run in conjunction with the theatre company of the same name, and was founded by Peter Schumann in 1963, on New York’s Lower East Side. By the mid-1960s, the company had become increasingly involved in protesting the Vietnam War, and its press produced mimeographed pamphlets which combined simplistic imagery and text which often focused around the news as well as poetry.

This pamphlet, published in November 1967, at the height of publicity around the Battle of Dak To (3–23 November), recontextualises Pound’s ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’ which had first appeared in 1915 as part of his collection Cathay.

OCLC finds seven copies, all of which in the US (Brown, Delaware, Emory, Morgan, Northwestern, UC Davis, Yale); no copies traced on Library Hub.

Not in Gallup.

SKU: 2126181