I appreciate your in depth response but I feel that you are incorrect in
almost all of your statements. The Cantos are not a scrapbook. Anyone
who has written in the Canto form and been faced with the realities of
the limitation of time, along with the honest attempt to engage the ever
emerging material and the poet's shifting ideas, would never make this
statement. Think for a moment what a scrap book is.
Also, I am not one of the many who feel that Casillo's book is executed
in good faith. The tone is persecutorial.
Further, I didn't mean a dialogue between Pound and the reader, but
between Pound and his sources. And when I'm talking about biography, I'm
talking about Pound's more intimate friendships, ones that don't warrant
the demonization that Casillo insists on.  I've lived all my life in
Washington DC so I've met many of the people who knew Pound when he was
held at St. E.'s and as Everett Lee Lady has pointed out, the image of
Pound on this list is at its very best a caricature.
In closing I would suggest that people, as Joe Brennan recommends,
understand the difference between history and poetry. This speaks
directly to the question of how a Canto is constructed and where I feel
you are utterly wrong in comments on the cited material. For example,
rather than "semi-digested or undigested materials" "undermining" the
Cantos, they provide an approach that allows for the incorporation of
themes that otherwise could not be presented in all of their complexity.
Further, Pound's "radically anti-democratic, pro-imperialist,
pro-facist, racist, and hierarchical stances" have always been under
scrutiny by myself and others. In a sense Casillo presents nothing that
hasn't been considered before and it sounds like your research will be
more of the same. As I learned thirty years ago, its a school of hard
knocks studying Pound and constantly addressing his reactionary slop.
But in the process one comes to realize further manifestations of
reactionary slop like Casillo's book which as an imaginative work cannot
hold a candle to the Cantos and in one of the great mysteries of
existence needs such genius for its very enterprise. Pound's genius is
not flawed. It is whole. So, the Cantos cannot be criticized in part as
Casillo does and its disingenuous to say that this is exactly the point
of such criticism. There is so much beauty in the rhythms of the cited
material, rhythms I've been learning from and incorporating into my own
poetry for decades. This also implies the search for your own thematic
material. Mine is the epistemology of science. The intense study
required apparently must take place as far from a university as possible
to avoid the obvious constraints. Its what Olson was referring to when
he wrote, "Oh poet. Get a job."
My sense of Pound and the Cantos is entirely different than Casillo's
views or yours and a damn sight more humane. You scholars can be some
cold motherfuckers. Carlo Parcelli
Finally, scholarship on Pound for all its exertions has failed to
realize the tremendous potential of the Canto form. More's the pity. For
this lack has helped give the field over to the tripe I have to
encounter out there in the real poetic world.      Lin Wei wrote:
>
> I would like to address some points made about Casillo by
>
> "R.Gancie/C.Parcelli."
>
> I think you might be right that Casillo does not take into account the full
> dynamic of Pound's development.  Allow me comment on some of the remarks you
> made in some detail.
>
> >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.
>
> I am not sure that Casillo's work is any more of a "mess" than Pound's--and
> in either context the word "mess" may or may not be derogatory.  The Cantos
> are in one sense "an ideologues scrapbook," and Pound admitted as much on
> several occasions.  This in itself is not a judgment for or against them.  A
> poem, particularly a 20th century poem, can be a "scrapbook," and there is
> nothing odd or strange about that.  In fact, Pound's conception of the
> ideogrammic method almost demands it.
>
> As to Casillo's "straining credulity," I find that he helps us understand
> many of the ideological, political, racial, and historical dimensions of
> Pound's work which too many people are all too eager to ignore.
>
> >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.
>
> Well, there may be an underlying "sinister cohesion," or attempt at cohesion
> (even though the poet could not "make it cohere").  This is debatable.  As
> to whether it is borne out by biographical data, a close reading of the
> Radio speeches, and of Carpenter's biography (which is fairly extensive) may
> bear it out.  I urge those who wish to fully undertand Pound to sit down and
> read the Radio speeches, however painful that may be.
>
> Now, your next point is the most interesting to me personally.
>
> >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 are static without evolution in direct
> contradiction to Pound's stated and admittedly failed aims.
>
> I think this may be correct, but the fact may not alter our potential
> agreement with Casillo's conclusion, namely that racist, fascist,
> imperialist, and classist (elitist) ideology imbues the vast bulk of the
> Cantos.
>
> I would argue that if one views Pound's development in relation to his use
> (or misuse) of Chinese materials, one can come to understand more clearly
> the WAY in which his ideology does develop in relation to his poetic
> intentions, dialectically, as it were.
>
> [If you want to examine this approach more fully you might look at:
>
> www.geocities.com/weienlin/raceandempire.html  ]
>
> Is it conceivable that because most critics and readers are unable to
> comprehend many aspects of Pound's use of Chinese materials that they ignore
> the full extent of Pound's ideological commitments?  I would maintain that
> this is the case.
>
> You go on to argue that in interpreting Pound,
>
> >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.
>
> This is the whole problem, isn't it?  How do we determine Pound's
> intentions; how do we evaluate the significance of certain texts in relation
> to those intentions; and what significance does the poem have independently
> of those intentions?  The last question will have to be answered by each
> individual reader, on a subjective basis.
>
> My own impression is that Pound, perhaps more so than almost any 20th
> century poet has stated his intentions very straightforwardly.  Unlike Eliot
> and Joyce, Pound has invested himself very concretely and very practically
> in the political sphere; and he has stated, in  very direct uncertain terms
> the relation between his art and his politics.   Thus it is not too
> difficult to divine his purposes.  The main difficulty lies in the obscurity
> of many of his allusions.
>
> >The Cantos are always at least a dialogue; never a monologue as Casillo
> implies.
>
> Again, this is debatable.  If we have to choose between two statements:
> "The Cantos are a dialogue" and "The Cantos are a monologue,"  I think the
> latter would be closer to the truth.  Why?   Simply because the ideological
> underpinning of the Cantos, the methodology of the historical presentation
> of "facts", and lack of ambiguity regarding basic philosophical assumptions
> are dictatorial (rather than dialectical). Pound seems more interested in
> "pronouncing" the truth, rather than exploring it.  In this way he has much
> in common with his greatest heroes:  Mussolini and Confucius.
>
> Of course, there is a sense in which his poetic brilliance, and his attempt
> to incorporate large amounts of semi-digested or undigested materials into
> the Cantos undermines his purpose.  He inadvertently, constructs his poem in
> such a contradictory fashion that a kind of dialogue is necessitated
> (between the reader and the poet, between the reader and the poet's source
> material).  Many contradictions are between text and subtext, or between
> (and these are the most insidious) --- between quoted text and unquoted
> adjacent text, between what is included and what is omitted.
>
> Pound's radically anti-democratic, pro-imperialist, pro-fascist, racist, and
> hierarchical stances lead him to suppress much of the material in his
> sources, and cause him to elevate and distort much of his source material.
> Casillo is right to point this out, and he does this quite well I think.
>
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