Ken Edwards

  When I mentioned that Rapallo would be one of the destinations of Elaine's and my rail trip to Italy, more than one of my poet friends mentioned Ezra Pound. "Poundland!" remarked one. Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast, was of course the abode of the American poet from 1925 until 1945, when he was repatriated to the US and arraigned for treason because of his collaboration with the Italian Fascist government during the Second World War. He returned to Rapallo following his lengthy incarceration in a mental institution in Washington DC, and again lived there until his death in 1972. In the years before the war, Pound in Rapallo was the centre of a distinguished group of writers, composers and artists who came and went, including his wife the painter Dorothy Shakespear, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Georges Antheil, Richard Aldington, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and many others. He started composing The Cantos there. He gave regular talks to visitors. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale

   Writing is a solitary occupation. You spend hours, days, weeks, months, years on your own, sitting on your arse, churning stuff out, editing and re-churning, re-editing and re-re-churning, in the hope that one day the results of your efforts will be shared with at least one and hopefully more readers.  Writing for theatre at least holds out the possibility of working with other people – having the joy and frustrations of sharing the creative process. I've never done that. However, one of the reasons I am involved in music as well as writing is having access to that shared experience as part of the primary creative activity. There is the possibility of that magical feeling that something is happening and you are playing a part in it but it doesn't come entirely from you. Collaborating with four others on the project that became THE SPIRIT IN THE DUST has been extraordinary. It started out with Elaine wanting to work again with the Japanese dancer Yumino Seki, whom we'd wo