Just a brief comment as a used bookseller for 25 years and as one who is
a practitioner of the style of the Cantos e.g. a working poet who
encounters the opinions of other working poets. As a bookseller, it was
not unusual for me to purchase copies of the Cantos' many editions as
well as Pound material in general. I once purchased three small
collections in one week. Also, having been identified as a 'Poundian'
poet I was often offered material. My colleagues in the book profession
also often purchased Pouniana. In short, Pound's work, relatively
speaking has "wide circulation", not as wide as say Eliot, but certainly
more distributive coinage than most. This I found "troubles the sleep"
of the practicing poetic community many of whom relentlessly dismiss
Pound as too difficult and since he is too ambitious for their taste,
they gloss over his influence in introductory 20th century poetry
classes they often teach and certainly don't tackle the Cantos in any
serious way. This resembles the attitude towards Finnegans Wake and even
Ulysses. I live in Washington DC where when Ulysses was self-declared by
Random House/Modern Library to be the greatest novel in English of the
20th century, a number of journalists/literary reviewers at the
Washington Post had to declare their hostility to the choice because
they lacked the capacities to understand Ulysses. Jonathan Yardley,
David Streitfield and to a lesser extent Richard Cohen were bitterly
hostile to Jaysus James' canonization, while Michael Dirda who had
actually gotten through Ulysses was more resigned but felt compelled to
offer his alternatives, a collection of the kind of cloying light
reading that seems not to challenge the anxieties of Dirda or the
bourgeois, easy listening, upper middle class drones that the Post
economic/advertising arrow targets.
So to boomerang back to bookselling: Pound's influence cannot be denied.
His associations with other great or influential writer's and poets,
Joyce, Eliot, Ford, Lewis, Zukofsky, Olson, H.D., Frost etc.
notwithstanding, his work stands on its own. People buy it and read it
to their capacities and interests. But it does reside at the demanding
end of the spectrum and buying the work doesn't translate necessarily
into seriously engaging the work. As used bookseller especially I can
see the sliding scale of engagement, often abetted by the reader's
marginalia and underlining or where the bookmark sits. Gary Snyder,
Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, Richard Brautigan et al are easy to read
and speak to generalized sentiments and so are often dog eared. Jorie
Graham and Frank Bidart are considered 'difficult'. This speaks directly
to the wider questions of education and a consumer society, the kind of
"prose kinema" that Pound identified 85 years ago. If you want to see
what disrepute serious poetry is held in, just sign on the new poetry
list where the new formalists, langpo revisionists,
terrified-of-being-caught-out-meaning-anything flip school, and the
self-absorbed, "I-I-me-me" solipists lurk. Walk a day in my shoes as a
practicing Poundian among these pervasive and monumentally silly poetic
voices. Sure, most of then have tried Pound. A good number probably own
the Selected Poems.

The members of this Pound list are like archaeoligists and the new
poetry poets are like eager suburbanites waiting for a new mall to be
built over the once living and sacred but now merely archaeological
site. Only the sentimentality of the media gives them brief pause. So if
Pound and Joyce are forgotten or become just unfortunate footnotes in a
literary culture of self-absorption and material ease, so be it. The
newpoets might sy, "Go look on the Pound list. Its just archaology.
Nothing living over there." Carlo Parcelli
Tim Bray wrote:

> At 02:22 PM 31/07/01 -0500, Carrol Cox wrote:
> >... when I was first reading the Cantos practically alone
> >back in the late '50s.
>
> Which raises a question in the mind of this non-scholar, the
> answer to which may be at the mental fingertips of the titans
> of erudition on-list: how popular is this stuff anyhow?
> Did ND ever say how many copies of various Canto collections
> they've shipped over the years?  I guess not counting the
> ones that are compulsory undergrad fare. [Er, I did math,
> I'm assuming that English undergrads are exposed to Cantos?]
>
> Put another way: just exactly how hermetic and weird are we
> all, anyhow? -Tim