I'd like to address via the list a couple of points that were
backchanneled to me. Firstly, it's not exactly that Pound had "his
opinions" and others have theirs and the poet should be understood on
the merit of his poetry alone. Pound requires, indeed deserves, stronger
measures than that. This is precisely because he IS a great poet. Hacks
and publicity seekers can have all the outrageous opinions they want and
as soon as they are no longer news nobody gives a rat's ass about their
so-called work.
Secondly, Casillo's Geneaology of Demons is a mess. Not only is the
interpretation often strained beyond credulity (although I can live with
that), it treats the Cantos as though they are not a poem so much as a
ideologue's scrapbook. Casillo's book suggests an underlying sinister
cohesion to the Cantos which goes beyond previous interpretations and is
not borne out by much contradictory biographical data. But even if this
is true, still C.'s greatest flaw is his utter ignorance of how such a
poem gets constructed and how the materials influence the epistemology.
The result is that Casillo's Cantos static without evolution in direct
contradiction to Pound's stated and admittedly failed aims. One has a
idea or set of ideas in circumstances like the Cantos and one seeks
supporting texts. But these texts have a life of their own and alter not
only the original intent of the poet but the poem itself without the
poet developing an original form of expression that would subsume the
quote more thoroughly into his conceptual flow. The situation is thus
complicated or enriched depending on your viewpoint when quoted material
is introduced into the text. This material becomes both part of the text
and an alternative text that the poet himself forms a dialectic with.
The Cantos are always at least a dialogue; never a monologue as Casillo
implies. This technique also has embedded within it the notion of
'authority' but not in a necessarliy negative sense. Casillo also
confuses the 'authority' that is implicit in the use of outside texts
with the authoritarian nature of some of those texts. This has happened
to me by people who confused authorities I was criticizing with the
overall intent of a poem. This happened because people associate
frequent recourse to authority in a poem with an inherently
authoritarian position because they don't have immediate access to the
poems meaning; that it is literally being held with malicious intent
beyond thier reach. Nothing could be further from the truth and the
generosity of a work can be lost when the reader or critic feels
threatened by the complexity and contradictions of a work such as the
Cantos. But leaving fragments of cited matter in tact in a poem allows
for interpretation and integration which is not there. Of course, to a
certain degree this hermeneutical dimension must be accounted for in all
poetry, but especally so in the Cantos. Many interruptions. Must go.
Carlo Parcelli


> perhaps to the surprise of no one, I'd like to associate myself with Carlo
> Parcelli's observations.  it's tiresome to read studies of Pound's life,
> which usually amounts to excoriating exposes of his many faults, by writers
> whose only contribution to the study of Pound is an attempt to diminish his
> poetic achievement  -- in my view, the most significant achievement in poetry
> in the 20th century, at least in the english speaking world -- by viciously
> denigrating him as a human being; I share Parcelli's view that this is
> principally because the poetry of Pound is beyond them.
>
> joe brennan....
>
> In a message dated 05/21/2000 12:05:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> <<
>  I'd like to get right to the point here. While I admire and appreciate
>  much of the scholarship on Pound that appears on this list, I find the
>  criticism as regards poetry, that is the creation and praxis of poetry,
>  to be in an important sense utterly without relevance. Although it is
>  indeed fine and useful (utile to borrow David Jones' term) to perform
>  these exegetical autopsies on Pound, we should never lose sight of the
>  poet and poetry that gives us such rich ground to work with in the first
>  place. This IS the legacy of what I refer to as High Modernism which I
>  somewhat eclectically extend to include Joyce, Eliot, Zukofsky, Jones,
>  Bunting, Olson, Duncan, Dorn, Metcalf and few others as well as Pound,
>  myself and Joe Brennan. Our poetry, in contradistinction to the
>  solipsistic drivel or pseudoexperimental anagrams that come out of the
>  academy and virtually all the publishing houses large and small, has
>  substance; so much substance (a poem that can contain history e.g.) that
>  many people earn a living mining the moderns and a few more such as
>  myself try to continue to explore the potential of the form(s).
>  Pound's poetry (his POETRY!!!) has placed demands on the scholars on
>  this list that has caused them in casual email conversation (show me an
>  equvalent list on some darling of Random House or Simon and Schuster) to
>  far surpass the level of discourse about current poetic movements
>  anywhere in any venue. That's because there is so much in Pound. So, in
>  spite of Pound's becoming a further academic opportunity, why aren't you
>  people out pushing for this obviously rich and most intelligent of
>  poetic forms to be carried on by succeeding generations? Are you
>  frightened of being tarred by his anti-Semitism, his Fascism, his
>  Confucianism? Do you secretly hate him but see his work as a sound
>  'business' opportunity? Huh?
>  I got interested in Pound when I was an undergraduate studying with
>  Pound's co-translator of greek drama, Rudd Fleming. Subsequently I did a
>  years independent study on Pound culminating in a poem in the style of
>  the Cantos called Ontology of Accident. Their is no fascism,
>  anti-semitism or reactionary Confucianism in my poem yet its still
>  unmistakably in the style of the Cantos. My thesis committee was
>  Fleming, Reed Whittemore and Hugh Kenner--Himmler was dead and Edward
>  Lansdale declined the invitation. I've read Pound's work and the huge
>  body of criticism for years even as I refined my own approach. But other
>  than Joe Brennan I've had to do it in a vacuum. Brennan and I are not
>  hacks. We are decades long practitioners with deep reading agendas and
>  original epistmological foundations much like Pound and all the other
>  great high-moderns. Like Pound are approaches may not be "right"
>  whatever that means, and because were so far outside established
>  practice they might seem eccentric to the conservative inside. But WE
>  are the true heirs to the high-modernist tradition, a plethora of poetic
>  techniques, insights and sources so rich that it has barely been tapped
>  at the imaginative and creative level though so much ink has been
>  spilled at the critical level.
>  I find it useful to continue to read the exegesis on Pound but after
>  many books, articles and email my enthusiasm is somewhat diminshed. Its
>  diminished because it should now be obvious to anyone that Pound and his
>  compatriots and heirs were (are) onto something; that is a poetic form
>  that simply isn't a reflection of middle class self-absorption or a
>  self-absorbed reaction to it that professes to be a radical alternative
>  like Language poetry. In fact, I hesitate to mention the two above
>  alternatives at all, because in a reasoned and interested poetic
>  universe they would be so diminished and irrelevant next to the work of
>  Pound or Joyce that it would be considerd ridiculous to mention them.
>  But I have to, because now this is pretty much all we've got poetically.
>  Stupid movements and whiny free verse now rule poetry and as a
>  consequence poetry has become largely a joke. Pound and the other
>  moderns for all their faults so far transcend this that poets who work
>  in their style are excluded by editors to stupid to know what the
>  authors doing and fellow poets too intimidated to offer them a place at
>  the table. Beyond that you have an audience that is made up of a mildly
>  refined soap opera set usually comprised largely of other poets or
>  poetry wannabees who insist on a stultifying etiquette that precludes
>  any engagement with the real world.
>  Many of you people have done the work. Many of you people are on
>  faculties and witness first hand the mind numbing idiocy that passes for
>  poetry at the academy nowadays. I'm sorry to say that some of you while
>  familiar with the larger possibilities of high-modernism, have made
>  minor reputations writing post-navel doggerel for the current market.
>  Well, I suggest you begin to understand the value of Pound and the
>  modernists before the terminally mediocre utterly take over the poetic
>  world and the squeaking that is poetry today becomes a well deserved
>  silence of tomorrow.
>  POUND IS A GREAT POET. And he's put food on the table of a lot of
>  academic families. That's no small thing. Think about it. If he was
>  really as worthless as your criticisms imply why do I have over 200 book
>  length critical studies of the man on my shelf. To me, Pound and the
>  other high-modernists are a living legacy, a legacy I carry on with
>  every book I read and every word I pen. I hope someday a couple of you
>  people will begin to understand a little of what I'm saying here.---
>  Carlo Parcelli
>
>   >>

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