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