Ezra Pound: “These people don’t know a thing about rhythm.”

When Pound visited Paris in 1930, he told me [Caresse Crosby—American poet, publisher, peace activist, and at age 19 inventor of the modern bra] that he wanted to savour ‘the immediate flavour of Paris by night’:

“I took him to the Boule Blanche where a remarkably beautiful and brilliant band of Martinique players were beating out hot music. We had a ringside table, Ezra was enthralled—I with my broken heart could not dance, which was perhaps just as well. As the music grew in fury Ezra avidly watched the dancers. ‘These people don’t know a thing about rhythm,’ he cried scornfully, and he shut his eyes, thrust forward his red-bearded chin and began a sort of tattoo with his feet—suddenly unable to sit still a minute longer he leapt to the floor and seized the tiny Martiniquaise vendor of cigarettes in his arms, packets flying, then head back, eyes closed, chin out, he began a sort of voodoo prance, his tiny partner held glued against his piston-pumping knees.

“The hot music grew hotter. Ezra grew hotter. One by one the uninspired dancers melted from the floor and formed a ring to watch that Anglo-savage ecstasy—on and on went the two, until with a final screech of cymbals the music crashed to an end. Ezra opened his eyes, flicked the cigarette girl aside like an extinguished match and collapsed into the chair beside me. The room exhaled a long orgasmic sigh—I too.”

—Caresse Crosby, The Passionate Years (1955)