[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