Jon here, long-time listener, first-time caller.  I've been gone during
the holidays and returned to some activity on the list I hadn't
expected.  I'm not at all upset, for the record.  The action's
enjoyable.

So, Stoner, I read what you had to say, and admire your tenacity in
saying it, no matter its specific content.  People (myself included)
are rather reticent on this list, which is hardly surprising: it's
difficult, in my opinion, to say much about Pound with complete
strangers without having in addition the benefit of a shared curriculum
or similar angle of interest.  That's the fun and the folly of these
newsgroups, as well as their democratic strength and weakness.  Free
association isn't only a psychoanalytic term: it's what we're
privileged and challenged to accomplish, for better or worse.  So, word
up, Stoner -- I'll nuff a pug in your honor.

Specifically, though, you (Stoner) seem to be asking for someone to
make plain Pound's point (or mode of beauty, or paraphrasable content,
or philosophy, I'm not sure which).  You say that Pound's critics (do
you mean professors that teach him, scholars that write about him, or
'civilians' that study and interpret him, or something else?) should
"bring him out of the muddy depths and into the clear blue water".  You
accuse these unidentified "translators" of being too incompetent to
"translate him well enough to get young people interested in him."  You
also ask the why question.  I take the why question to mean: why, given
the opacity (or muddiness) of Pound's texts (some of which are not
especially oblique,) should he still be taught, read, sold,
interpreted, criticized, eulogized with precious bandwidth and mental
mucous, or otherwise handled with respect or admiration.  The answer to
this why question seems to me to be:  Who knows?

Why should someone read anything by, say, John Donne, who was by no
means a clear communicator, even for his contemporaries, and whose
poetry has frequently been denounced (starting with Ben Johnson) as
aesthetically deficient, metrically ugly, and conceptually uncouth?  I
recently tutored a young woman whose native language was Vietnamese.
She was supposed to write a paper about a Donne poem for her literature
class, and her professor had given her a list of about a dozen to
choose from.  None of them, of course, were easy to understand, and
those that were were not necessarily the most thematically rich, at
least not enough that this young lady could write a six page paper on
them.  She asked me what each poem meant.  It was all I could do to go
through each one and approximate the action or argument in English
simple enough for her to use but subtle enough to communicate the
poem's tense networks of meaning.  It's not ultimately complicated that
a man wants to prove to a woman that it's no big deal if she sleeps
with him, but to explain the lines that Donne uses to make his case
(not so that the student could "appreciate" Donne, but so that she
could use our tutoring session to write her paper later on that
evening) is different than paraphrase or summary.  Summary makes things
clear.  Poetry makes them obscure.  Sometimes, beauty is an important
side-effect, and people experience it differently.  An answer we all
know doesn't apply to the Pound-oriented "why" question is "because
he's clear, once you understand the code."  There's no code.  There's
just an ongoing construction of patterned allusion in a medium of
versifying fluid.  You have to be willing not to understand to
understand, even for yourself, why you should read Pound.  The exact
same thing could be said about Joyce.  And my world is better off with
Joyce's texts around, on my shelf, in my memory, over my head.

Now Pound is much more abstruse than Donne, at least in the sense that
he alludes to everything he knows, and does so while paying attention
to the patterns his vowels are making.  He's not always, or even often,
making an argument on the surface of the poem.  To "get" a lot of his
texts, you need to know what sorts of texts he was working with or
answering.  A professor of mine says that Pound was busy designing a
curriculum, at least on a certain level.  People probably won't be
interested in Pound they're not interested in taking the class (or
rather, sequence of classes) he's syllabized for them.  And, Stoner, if
you really want to find out from someone who has a sensitivity for
Pound why he's worth anyone's time anymore, I'd suggest Hugh Kenner's
book.  And since you've read near and far, over hill and dale, and
generally broadly enough that you've already discovered the dirty
secret, rarely uttered in these parts, that academics are entirely and
completely full of shit up to their earholes, you'll of course know
which book by Hugh Kenner I'm referring to.  Even the academics know
that one, and they can't even zip up their pants without some grant
money.  (Lousy bastards, failing to turn the kids on to Pound... I hope
they all starve, or have to work in a UPS shipping room, or at least
get hassled at the DMV.)

(I apologize for this messages length.  Don't keep up if you're not
inclined.)  Obviously, I don't need to hold off confessing: I am what
people would term an academic.

Ezra Pound helped a lot of poets get major exposure, and he was himself
feted, a modern for the moderns, an artist for the artists, a major
figure in the field of restricted production we call the avant garde.
He kicked ass.  He flubbed wildly, and with panache.  He recognized the
value of the Troubadours, those enigmatic scraps of Sappho, that box of
notebooks donated to him by an expatriate's widow, all the remnants of
the worlds that had vanished, and at the same time saw the use of a
microphone and a motorcycle.  Literary history cannot do without him.
And poets cannot do without, ultimately, a little literary history.

Someday maybe Pound will be as unread as Dryden.  He won't be any less
canonical.  Maybe he's already as unread as Dryden, but I doubt it.
Pound has more to do with us, or at least with our hydra-headed monster
of an artistic heritage, than does Dryden.  He doesn't have as much to
do with the heritage of greeting cards as does Longfellow, or as much
to do with the heritage of verse for children as does Dr. Seuss, but he
has his place in the avant garde tradition as firmly as a slide in a
playground.  Why do people read him?  Because they like him, and
because they have to, and because they need to know, and because they
need to get paid, and because they're outraged, and because he gets
name- checked on a Bob Dylan record, and the internet's just a click
away, and because of all sorts of other (rare, isolated, valuable)
reasons.  If you think Pound sucks so bad (and I doubt anyone who
thinks so is still with me, but just for rhetorical effect, here we
go,) read some heaven-help-us Arthur Symons, or read some
for-crying-out-loud late-period Alfred Lord Tennyson, and tell me you
don't want to hit the books with an irascible bastard that knew his way
around a book stall, a grammar, and a radio transmitter.  I can't tell
you why Pound is better.  That's not necessarily an academic's job,
anymore than it's an academic's job to make a poem that does everything
it can to be unclear suddenly clear, suddenly accessible to the kids of
today, or even to the adults of today.

To tell the truth, I'm a beginner to Pound.  Stevens and Cummings are
more my speed.  So here's my request: The people that know the
interesting things about Pound, or would be willing to offer a reading
of a Canto or two, should do Stoner and I (and all the other stoners) a
favor (as well as those of us who aren't stoners) by posting to the
list their bounty.  We would all enjoy that, I'm sure.  So please, send
us your nuggets.  What's good about Pound, in two sentences or less --
isolated examples are encouraged.  Pound would have wanted it that way,
so on with the fragments.  Let's see some Pound facts and
interpretations!  Send the newbies to school, even if they don't like
it or seem to want help.  If they're smart enough to know they hate
what they read, they'll be smart enough to unsubscribe.

Give yourself a treat for reading all of this.

Peace,
Jon