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From:
Von Underwood <[log in to unmask]>
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Date:
Fri, 14 Feb 2003 11:44:28 -0600
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I do know what you mean, and I do not really object to your use of those
words to describe several aspects of Pound's view of history. The way
poets reconstruct history, particularly in the 30's, 40's and 50's, has
interested and perplexed me for some time. I think there is a lot to be
admired and emulated in Pound's way of appraoching history, though I
think he seems to have lost a sense of himself in persepctive, and, perhaps
it is worth saying in this discussion, to have given his epistemoilogy over to
indignation, rage, and sometimes to bluster. I think he admired in
Confucius the attempt to search through history for the themes and
lessons of how a flourishing culture got itself organized and how such
cultures came unglued and fell apart, toward the end of overcoming the
catastrophe's of the depression, on the one hand, and mediocrity on the
other.

There are severeal difficulties in the imagist approach, and inherent in the
tasks of imagist poetry that shape his view of history but have
epistemological limits which Pound transgressed in a sort of trial and error
way. I mean that focussing on the image as the basic unit of the poem, and
defining it, or zeroing in on it in  the way Pound and others did, implies a
kind of immanence of the big picture in the small, so that something about
a person's furniture and furnishings, let alone or brought to light properly,
tells the story of the time more eloquently than a lot of abstract talk. I do
not mean to refute this type of claim, which I think the imagist projects
show has a clear value. On the other hand, if you took an image from my
worst Monday, I think it would be a problem to suggest that it adequately
reveals my entire history. Pound's search for the radiant gists does result in
wonderful poetry and also plugs one in to a vibrant sense of the moment
one loses in offical histories. It seems a mistake, though, to think that one
remark by a dictator or something about Brennbaum's beard epitomizes a
group or a person. The point in Pound is often valid within its limits, and his
notion that economic systems of credit, for example, have all kinds of
effects in  the backbone of individuals within a culture is not really at all
incorrect.

What of course is astonishing, and not irrelevant to current affairs, is that
Pound really thought he could come back to the United States, go in to
see Roosevelt, and perhaps on the basis of a literary reputation, have his
views outweigh those of the Department of State and the cabinet. Perhaps
this is to caraicature Pound, and I would welcome a better account, or a
lead to a better account, of his expectations. I think I may be relying on
Williams too much here.

I think there is also a commitment ot the value of the small or out of the
way, in terms of the history of politics and military action, implicit in imagist
approaches as they developed. This allies practitioners with essentially a
pacifist position grounded in the assumption of the value of the day-to-day.
For persons enmeshed alertly in the movements of poetry in our language
in recent decades, a war is first a foremost an all but unconscienable
destruction of fragile but important stuff, not just for poetry, but in lives of
people who are more important to us than our leaders in Washington. War
also threatens to replace a world of dynamic relations and adjustments of
consciousness with a new world of details that we can think of as
essentially being on fire. I am struggling to articulate something here, and
frankly, I do not mean this in a limited aesthetic sense. The world of
contemporary poetry, after Pound and others, is set on fire by a war of the
scale the United States in considering, and for most of us, we can see this
only in the most grizzly terms, on our own skin, in our own bodies.

I have never been quite sure that this is a view Pound would have shared,
since there is a lot that Pound seems to see as of negligible, and his view
of culture is aesthtically hierarchical. Sigismundo's battles may be a case
in point. The shipments of weaponry, and food for the troops, are radiant
gists.

Date sent:              Thu, 13 Feb 2003 02:18:12 -0500
Send reply to:          - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]
NE.EDU>
From:                   Daniel Pearlman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                Re: laureates against the war
To:                     [log in to unmask]

Pound's puerile, moralistic view of history is no guide to the real world,
I'm afraid.  Civilizations occasionally profess to live by principles, but
power is their and our bottom line.  I do believe, however, that Western
civilization is the only one ever to even profess humane ideals--and, when
we can afford to, we actually try to put these fine principles into
practice.  In principle, for example, we care about the Other and we even
profess love for our fellows.  In no other region of the world except the
West have such ideals ever been professed, and in fact they appear
laughable to every other culture on earth.  It is true that we betray our
gods whenever it is necessary or expedient to do so, but our gods are
nevertheless nicer guys than others' gods.  Pound is important because he
reminds us of who our gods are, but his hope that, in historical time,
principle will someday guide practice is utopian.  Pray to god but pass the
ammo.
==Dan

At 09:42 PM 02/12/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>My response to the below post takes off from Ezra Pound's flat-out
>detestation of war, which has been attested to on this list just recently
>with a posting of relevant verses from the Cantos, and which was what
>attracted me to him in 1950 and has kept me convinced ever since that the
>warfomenters in the West are the real betrayers. That our true Western
>(certainly American) instinct as to "les autres" is to live and let live. It
>is enough to see to one's own conduct. To take a God-like stance and presume
>to know how history is to be managed and what "must" be done violently to
>save the day, is as near madness as I care to come. 1600 years ago Augustine
>wrote about the two cities, man's and God's, and the hallmark of man's is
>the desire to dominate, libido dominandi, the lust for, the thrust to, power
>and wealth. We now are at the end of the Nietzsche anti-Christ craziness
>which puts madmens' drive for control in place of any reverence for the way
>or the Tao or the truth. We have given up principle for gross economic
>expediency and are giving up liberty for God alone knows what, and the
>probable payoff in blood and ruin is beyond imagining. Presumably the
>juggernaut is unstoppable, but if Pound had been listened to in the 1940s
>and 1050s or at any point since, we would not be in the present mess.
>Anti-semitism is the biggest red herring in the whole business. Forget that,
>and concentrate on war makers, war mongers, munitions makers, and usurers.
>No doubt vastly more nominal Christians, or at least goys, in that lot than
>nominal Jews, which I rather think is all that Perlman is. I would give much
>(if I had it) to stop the present rush to war. If we turn out the Western
>light of reason and charity and faith and hope and humility, what conscience
>could we be said to have left? Tom White
>
> > From: bob scheetz <[log in to unmask]>
> > Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> > <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 22:14:34 -0500
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: laureates against the war
> >
> > Daniel Pearlman writes:
> > Gentlemen,
> >> moral issues take a back seat here.  We are witnessing a life and death
> >> struggle for the survival of the Western way of life against an absolutely
> >> relentless militant Islam ...
> >
> > Dan Pearlman is right.  Saddam/WOMD' s are just a convenient bogey for the
> > pavlovian masses.  The elite think tank'rs (Richard Perle's group) see a
> > malthusian oil supply situation in the next 25 yrs with no possibility of
> > averting it with new tech.  Central asia and the middle east are the
> > strategic real estate and long before 9/11 the bush team had determined
> upon
> > the need to create a new world order that would see the re-colonization of
> > that area.  So the question you have to answer is, Are you willing to pay
> > for your good conscience with turning out the light of Western History?
> > ...are you will to accept it is our turn to be the fellaheen civ?

=====================================================
Dan Pearlman's home page:
http://pages.zdnet.com/danpearl/danpearlman/

My new fiction collection, THE BEST-KNOWN MAN IN THE WORLD AND OTHER
MISFITS, may be ordered online at http://www.aardwolfpress.com/
"Perfectly-crafted gems": Jack Dann, Nebula & World Fantasy Award winner

Director, Council for the Literature of the Fantastic:
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/clf/

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Von Underwood
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Von Underwood
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