This list has been so quiet for so long. I have been enjoying this thread
quite a lot. But I would like to interject a couple of pleas and points:
 
--Lets abandon the use of  the word "elitist". The word is used primarily as
an _ad hominem_; and _ad hominem_ argument is small and contemptible, and
surely beneath all of us here. The word "elitist" is most often used to
massage the ego of the user--not to make a considered point about the person
it it thrown at. It functions as "you [or Pound, or James Joyce, or T.S.
Eliot, or whoever] are an elitist--which means that I, a non-elitist, am
better than you"--in other words, establishing the user of the term as a
member of an elite while demonizing the one so appelled. It is a cheap and
easy out. Lets find other ways of indicating that a person is drawn to
"higher" things. To tar Pound with the generally pejorative epithet of
"elitist" is to ignore or to be ignorant of so much of the man--he was an
enormous, complex, and many-sided man--_he_ was polumetis. He was in many
ways *not* "elitist". Anyway, I am not sure that the word can truly be used
of a person _who has done their homework_ in their field and wants the
highest standards to be the aim of those in the field. (The word is then
applied to such a person by another who wants to avoid doing his or her
homework. [Whoa! Did I just describe a well-known movement in poetry and the
arts that began in the US in the 'fifties and their followers?])
 
--The academic/non-academic thing is puerile. Adolescent. I  can't imagine a
person subscribed to this list who is not either--as many here are--a
profound expert on EP et al., or someone who loves Pound's poetry or even EP
the man, or someone who wishes to learn about Pound/Pound's poetry. I doubt
we have any lurking Sees or Torreys posting to the list (well, there is the
occasional troll...). We are all comrades here. Tong zhi. Confreres. Not all
of us are academics, not all of us are booksellers, not all of us are pool
players, not all of us will earn a plaque in Cooperstown. Etc. Let's let
that rest too. Academics are like every other group--there are haughty
know-nothings and humble geniuses; some of them deserve the respect that an
advanced degree once accorded, some don't. That's it.
 
I am not an academic, but I am the son of academics well known to some on
this list, and I have always found the Poundians to be extraordinarily open
and equitable. And no-one who has met Terrell, Kenner, Mary, Laughlin, or
the other Poundian luminaries could feel that they are "elitists". Far the
other way--I speak as both a non-academic and as someone who met many of
them when VERY callow. They are good and open folks, and they meet you
one-to-one.
 
--To complain, for example, about the _Cantos's_ polyglottism is absurd
whining. It is like a person watching Olympic sprinters and complaining that
they shouldn't be allowed to run so fast because nobody else can, or, to
bring us back to baseball, that McGuire or Sosa shouldn't be allowed at bat
because no-one else can hit so well. (I remember a friend in college, a
quite poor trumpet player, saying of a famous musician "Oh, he's just a
virtuoso." Sour grapes can be a part of this too.) EP used the _mot juste_.
That's it. His mind skimmed life the way a dragonfly skims the water's
surface, its tail touching lightly here, here, here, with each concentric
rippling pregnant with a new dragonfly. Its not a performance, its a kind of
Cadmian labor, trying to sow the laguna rasa with his dragon worldview.
 
--One more thing. In the1980s I was at a conference at Orono. I think it was
the EP Centennial, but it may have been the Williams Centennial. I was
standing with John Walsh, a Mahatma if there ever was one, at a table of
books, and I picked up a small blue book with peach pages. It was a book of
poetry by a poet I had not heard of before, and was marked at one dollar. I
bought a copy, and if I remember correctly, a copy joined John's excellent
library, too. I think that the height of the pile of copies on the table
didn't diminish afterward, and I think I saw the books again at a later
conference at Orono. The book was subsubtitled "Homage to Pound", and was
one of the best-spent dollars of my life. The poetry in it is extraordinary
in its claritas and its music. It exemplifies as the work of few poets since
Pound has managed to do the qualities of melopoeia, logopoeia, and
phanopoeia. Its poet is learned and many-minded, and possessed of a very
rare music in his "voice". The book is entitled _Three Antiphonies_, and I
have been waiting for the Poundians to discover it and respond.* But, it
seems, the poet has discovered the Poundians. I was very pleasantly suprised
to see his name appear on this mailing list recently (I surely couldn't have
missed noticing it for long). Carlo Parcelli is a bit of a gadfly, but, as
EP said of the young Hugh Kenner when he first met him, he's "done his
homework", and he's a poet worth taking a look at--which is what THIS [the
list, life] is all about.
 
Please, all, excuse my longish post.
 
Chris Booth
 
*_Sagetrieb_ has given many a page to poets who have not done as good work
as can be found in many pages of _Three Antiphonies_, in my opinion. And
Carlo really is in the Pound etc. tradition. [I know that his work is mostly
out of print or unpublished. If Carlo could direct us to Web sites holding
electronic copies of his work, that would be good; if he hasn't such, I'd be
glad to volunteer to key in or scan some of his work and throw it up on a
Web page for any that might be interested.]
 
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