Wei, Burt, others -- what bothers me most about any of the posts related
to Wei's topics is the politics of authority underlying the writer's
voice, a meta-discourse that often shoots over the mark, if that mark is
taken to be a contribution to our knowledge of Ezra Pound and his work.
It is the "royal" sound of the democratic "we" -- the tone of an
enlightened dictator, an enshrined vox populi, saying, insisting,
reminding the hearer, reader of the list, what his or her rights and
duties are, what expectations for logical argument a citizen is
permitted to hold, what stances are consonant with democratic
procedures, etc. The tone of lecture and harrangue then, that I hear, is
not productive for me of substantive discourse. This last statement may
be an endemic, and fallacious too, Americanism, as in "cut the bullshit"
--  a fetishization of supposed American pragmatism. I find it very
interesting that Wei comes at this from a different cultural
perspective. I grant fully that 'the ply over ply' of Confucianism and
fascism has not been fully excavated, and I can see one having ardor for
this project and seeing in Pound a logical point for purposes of such
interrogation.

This does seem to be Wei's project so the question arises: isn't the
very possibility of the project engendered by Pound's palimpsestic
methodology? Does the project have cultural or historical value apart
from a deconstruction of what Pound himself has wrought? I think that
something of what Wei sees is very present in Pound; at the same time, I
don't think its presence in Pound has had much influence on how Pound
has been received by any particular group of readers. It has not for
instance made him a popular poet among fascist or neo-fascist coteries.

There might be a value in polling this question: of all who claim to
have read the Cantos, already a minority of the presumed readership of
serious literature, how many have done more than merely flip through the
Chinese cantos? 1 in 20 might be a fair guess? One in 100 would not
surprise me. I doubt we could get a statistically valid sample on this
question.

It seems to me that the influence of Pound's example, on the one hand,
has been to create a great sigh, indicative of the idea that poets no
longer (since the Bollingen prize farrago) have anything reasonable to
say about politics -- that is the argument that has contributed to a
perceived irrelevancy of poetry to civic life -- an operative assumption
of many who claim to love literature now for its own sake. On the other
hand, the example of Pound has created a variety of coterie readerships,
each coterie passionate about its access to secret knowledge: aesthetic,
spiritual, totalitarian (in Pound's sense), such access proving to be
part of a crucial identity formation process on the part of the readers
involved (various sons of Pound: Olson, Creeley, Ginsberg, Kenner, many
of those actively posting to this list including myself) -- all in
different ways to different ends.

For me the Cantos provide access to a polysemous sonority unlike any
other, a music that matches phrase and image with finely etched details
of musical accent or color and visual precision.  I am also frequently
aghast at how ugly certain passages are, when his prejudices boil,
sometimes making me wonder if the best of what he has done is only
artifice: "the ant's a centaur in his dragon world." Is this line
evidence of monomania: the ordinary individual has the capacity of a
demi-god to instruct or defeat the big players in his world? or is it a
perception of scale with reference to the world we share --a scale that
makes beauty possible. Well my coterie values that sense of scale and
every reference. My personal coterie reading gasps at the beauty of
"When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an ant's forefoot shall save
you / the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower" (LXXXIII 553).
Has metaphor ('as') ever had more substance than in this last line? I
can read this thread through to the concluding "I am not a demigod" -- I
gasp. I insist that this is more than feeling for form-- it is a feeling
for something all too beautifully real.

So it may be that the fascism/Confucianism thread -- equally a matter of
EP's perceptions and artifice is really in the Cantos -- but it may be
also that it is rarely found elsewhere, fascinating as it is in itself,
rarely perceived by anyone in detail. And we know too that the details
of this particular vision, haunting in different ways to both Wei and
Pound, does not cohere for either of them.

So we get back to a meta-discourse about the access of different
readerships to the text. This can have value. I have indulged in it
myself, but the tone can be (has been recently to my ears) shrill and
repetitive and tedious -- why should anyone use this list to reproduce
forms of alienation that are rampant in our media?

--
Donald Wellman
http://www.dwc.edu/users/wellman/wellman.htm