[log in to unmask] writes:
Now you may go on endlessly prating about how no one need respond to
your missives, but under current conditions that leaves nothing to
respond to--since you basically spam this list on a daily basis. And
since response only encourages you to recite the Pound-as-fascist
litany once again, it becomes a primary example of how, as Brennan put
it, a single-minded and determined bore can take a fairly free-form
unmoderated and democratic medium of self-expression and manipulate the
entire flow of discussion toward their self-aggrandisement.

>You're certainly not the first to attempt this on this list Wei, and
>doubtless you won't be the last, for as long as Burt Hatlen wishes to
>maintain this discussion group. The "Yes but he was a fascist" argument
>is one that has dogged this list with a steady hiccough ever since I
>signed on, something that judging from your one-note samba I tend to
>believe you are blissfully unaware. You do understand this, Wei--that
>there are many people on this list with academic credentials far
>exceeding your own who have devoted a good portion of their lives to
>the study of Pound's various follies--they know everything of which you
>write, every delicious little morsel of opprobrium by way of Pound's
>politically idiotic stances, and yet they still find themselves in
>thrall to his poetry. Your endless repetition is I would imagine an
>ever-widening chasm of boredom for them as it most certainly is for me.

I'm committed to the principle of open discourse, and thus I've refused
to play the role of moderator on this list, even though I'm the
"owner."  The Poetics list out of Buffalo, for example, became much
less interesting, in my judgement, when the owners decided to assume
the role of moderator, vetting submissions before they went out. But it
is also clear to me that Wei's very volubility, averaging (I would
guess) somewhere around three lengthy postings per day, and his
insistence that HIS issues are the only ones worth talking about, has
indeed silenced some voices who once contributed regularly. I hope that
some of these voices will return.  And I'd like to believe that there
is a process here which we are slowly working through. For example, the
above comment by M Deporres (whom I have, to my knowledge, never met)
suggests that some contributors are being forced to articulate
precisely why we find Wei's postings so irritating--and that seems to
me a good thing.

Anyway, I'd like to second Deporres's comments.  I've been writing
about Pound's relationship with Fascism since 1982, when I gave a paper
on this subject at the Pound conference at Middlesex Polytechnic in
London. The paper was published in 1985, in a volume titled Ezra Pound
and History, edited by Marianne Korn, and published by the National
Poetry Foundation. This paper represents one of the first attempts to
address the issue directly--at the time, the tenor of Pound studies was
still determined by Kenner's The Pound Era, which still seems to me a
great book, but which devotes only one evasive sentence to Pound's
anti-Semitism. In the bibliography to his short 1989 guide book to The
Cantos, George Kearns cites my "concise, well-balanced essay" as one of
the best then-available treatments of "Pound's politics and its
correlative anti-semitism." Leon Surette's new book on Pound's politics
(and if I recall correctly, Surette was present at the Middlesex
conference) also grudgingly recognizes that my paper broke new ground,
although unfortunately he seriously misrepresents my argument. (He says
that I equate European socialism with American populism, which I have
never done.)

The critical discourse around Pound's fascism has moved far beyond my
modest 1982 paper, in books by, for example, North, Morrison, and now
Surette himself. In particular, the case against Pound has been
exhaustively documented by Robert Casillo, in The Genealogy of Demons.
Now if this discussion group were a genuinely scholarly forum,
contributors would presumably feel some need to acknowledge work that
has already been done, and they wouldn't send in postings unless they
thought that they had something new to contribute.  Yet to the best of
my recollection, Wei has never cited any of the published scholarly
work on Pound's fascism. In his mind, the year still seems to be 1980,
and Pound scholars are still willfully blinding themselves to the
retrograde character of Pound's ideology.

I would like to add that I am generally sympathetic with Wei's own
politics. I believe that American imperialism has, in the name of
democracy, squashed democracy around the world. I believe that the term
"political correctness"  has been developed by the American Right as a
way to discredit any voices that are seeking to call attention to
economic and social injustice.  And I remain committed to the radical
American democratic tradition of Tom Paine and Whitman's Democratic
Vistas and Eugene Debs and Paul Robeson and Michael Harrington.

At the same time, I find myself baffled by Wei's interest in Pound, in
the same way that I am baffled by Casillo's book.  Why write a 500 page
book about a poet's whose work seems to you simply a farrago of hatred
and self-pity? If Casillo really thinks that Pound's poetry is
worthless, I would suggest that he say NOTHING about it: if you want to
purge a poet from the literary canon, the best strategy is to ignore
that poet's work.  Unless someone cares enough about a poet's work to
tlk about it, it will eventually vanish. ("What thou lovest well
endures, the rest is drowss.") And so I want to ask Wei why he is so
obsessed with Pound, since apparently he sees nothing of value in
Pound's poetry. Literary criticism is interesting, for me, only insofar
as it helps me to see reasons for being interested in a writer's work.
Criticism as cultural demolition sees to me simply a waste of time.

But furthermore, if Wei wants to talk to us about Pound's fascism, it
seems to me that he should do so within the context of the ongoing
critical discussion of this issue.  And I personally find myself
impatient with any discussion that does not take into consideration the
questions that I started to raise almost 20 years ago.  In particular,
I was at that time trying to get beyond the knee-jerk equation of
"fascism" with "evil," and was trying to understand it as a historical
phenomenon.  In the years since I wrote my article, I have found
especially instructive Zeev Sternhell's books on the intellectual
history of fascism: Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France
(U of California P, 1986) and The Birth of Fascist Ideology: from
Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton U P, 1994).
Books such as these raise important historical questions about fascism.
 What was its relationship to socialism? ("Nazi" after all is an
acronym for "National Socialist"?) To Conservatism and the historical
Right? To Populism?  In particular, what are the specific intellectual
lineages within which Pound was entangled? Here I continue to be
expecially interested in Guild Socialism, a matrix out of which
important intellectual figures of both the Right (Odin Por, Arthur
Penty, Pound himself) and of the Left (R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole)
emerged. And where precisely does Pound stand amid all the intellectual
currents of his time?  For example, I have recently been exploring his
flirtation with the political Left from 1926 to 1931, when he published
several pieces in Communist-affiliated journals, including New Masses.

But above all, what is the relationship between Pound's politics and
his poetry?  If we acknowledge that he was a Fascist, does it
necessarily follow that The Cantos is a "fascist poem"--that the
poetics on which it is grounded is necessarily also "fascist." And here
we come to the issue that I have been pursuing for more than 20 years.
What happens to Pound's poetry if we read it through the work of his
self-avowed literary heirs: Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert
Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, etc.? Not a fascist among them.

Well, the discourse on this discussion group has not been addressing
any of these issues.  Perhaps the problem is the medium itself.
Unfortunately (in my view at least) listservs seem to encourage people
simply to fling judgements at one another, rather than to develop
reasoned arguments. (Such an argument, I take it, requires the writer
to advance an hypothesis that will in some way challenge the currewnt
thinking on a theme, and then to test out this hypothesis by assempling
pertinent evidence, and by showing that the hypothesis in question
accounts for this evidence better than does any competing hypothesis.)
Perhaps the limited size of the typical listserv posting militates
against such reasoned argument. Or perhaps the problem is the
possibility of quick responses, so that in our postings (such as mine
here) we are responding to a specific provocation, rather than offering
a reasoned sequence of reflections.

But whatever the limitations of the medium, I think that we could be
putting this listserv to better use.
Thus I'd like to offer some specific suggestions.  What about some
discussions of recent Pound books?  Has anyone out there read Surette's
new book?  What do you think of it? Has anyone read both Surette's book
AND Alec Marsh's book?  What about the relative strengths and
weaknesses of the two books?  Also, I recently read Frank Lentricchia's
chapter on Pound in Modernist Quartet.  Does anyone have comments on
Lentricchia's treatment of EP?

Finally, and more selfishly: I am currently wrapping up an essay on
Pound's politics in the late 1920s/early 1930s, to be published in a
special issue of Paideuma on Pound and African-American Modernism.
Over the next few days, I'm going to post this essay to the list, in
installments, and I will invite your comments. I would also invite
other subscribers to post such items to the list.  At the worst, we
will by this means have something to talk about, other than Wei En Lin.


Burt Hatlen