Today is also “the people’s poet” Milton Acorn‘s birthday (1923 – 1986).

Here’s Acorn on Frye in what is arguably a Menippean satire, “On Not Being Banned By Nazis…” in More Poems for People:

After all, the fascist poet, Ezra Pound,

Who continues to pass off his preposterous

common and dull Cantos as very profound, also condemned

Academics. The fast-rising patriotic poet

Robin Mathews is a professor.  Pound was not.

Obviously, when I was saying academics, I meant some-

thing else.

I now realize that what I meant was “Imperial

Academics” – such as Northrop Frye, who in the past did

more than any other man to abolish everything native

and non-European in our literature.

Filmed interviews with Al Purdy and Milton Acorn on poetry and socialism after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJmn4g21VM8