I have nothing to say about whether or not Pound would e-mail to a list
purporting to discuss his work.  The notion is absurd and misleading,
in my opinion, and a poor use of our collective gray matter.

So I'm about to begin teaching next semester, in about two weeks.  The
first novel I'm teaching (like three other novels I'll be teaching) is
one I've never read before, The Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey.
  I've been told that this book was a massive bestseller in the teens
and twenties, and that it is something of a standard bearer for the
Western novel at large.  Does anyone have any excited or exciting
opinions about this book, its genre, or the possible relationships
between it and the modernisms flourishing at the time?  I have no idea
myself, though I imagine I'll develop a number of opinions as I read
the damn thing.  Oh yes, and does anyone (preferably educators) have
any opinions about teaching books one has never read?  I seem to be
drawn inexorably towards the new read whenever I'm designing a class,
and have convinced myself that my inclination has some pedagogical
justification.  Of course, I'm blind to much about myself.  Who after
all is not?

Speaking of which, the internet doesn't just suck because you can't see
the asshole on the other end.  You also can't see the people who read
your screed, and since you can't recognize or accomodate their
responses, you also can't see the asshole on your own end.  So hah.
Not only does everyone have an asshole, everyone in some respect is
one.  Let's be polite, productive, and entertaining assholes, shall we?

One other thing: what's the point of distinguishing between poetics and
politics, when any inclined reader can find that they're implied in one
another?  I'm sure that the teenager writing the broken hearted poem in
his Trig class doesn't think much about its socio-political sources,
consequences, and subterranean content.  Does that mean one couldn't
read it as a document that emerges from a socially pressurized
evnironment?  Maybe you wouldn't want to disillusion (or discourage or
confuse) the Noble Teenager by telling him what it was that he REALLY
said, but that's not really the point.

This seems like a fight about what's REALLY being said in a given
verse, and that by itself begs the question.  The political seems more
materially grounded as a concept than does "the poetic", but that's a
dead end: neither concept, the political or the poetic, rests on some
permanent or secret foundation that makes one more real than the other.
  After all, they're concepts, not colors or quantities (which I know
are also concepts, but hopefully you get my drift.)  And as concepts,
we can recognize when they apply and when they don't, when they're
gateways to interesting discussion and when they're just ideological
toys.  Pound certainly did not consider the political disposable, and
neither did he dismiss the poetic.  Partially, what he did was to set
the stage for the difficulties we're having, implicating the lofty
traditions of fossilized poetries within the sordid ethical
complexities of modernizing humanity.  And vice versa.  I realize that
what I've written says very little that is substantive, merely that
there are connections between poetry and politics that Pound makes
active problems of, but perhaps it can clear the way for a more
interesting dialogue, and a little less of an
"I'm-astounded-by-that-asshole-over-there" polemical clearing house.

There's no need to save Pound from anyone.  He's already dead.

Respect,
Jon Weidler