At 07:44 PM 12/21/2001 -0800, you wrote: >It is one thing to accuse Mr Pound of anti-Semitism ... >another to accuse him of treason ... >but to blame him for Olson -- >well, that, ladies and gentlemen, >is going too far That was funny. Going back to the ethical/aesthetical judgement problem; I think to use the current geopolitical idiom, "we must drain the swamp before we proceed" in order to move on to the larger question of Pound's politics which seems to make his poetics problematic. So far we seem to have high-tech, low-concept approaches to deal with the problem; that is launching sophisticated vocabulary bombs, and sophist accusations, that I take to be intentional friendly-fire more than any attempt to get to the heart of the matter. But then again I'm still ignorant to the ways of the world as a grad student, Like my Italian professor not too long ago said: "Your mouth still reeks of mother's milk (Boy was I pissed-off at that comment)." Metaphors and war, allow me to moan how they morph into our peaceful existence, coming far from the understanding of the true conflict--powers we cannot conceive. This is a dilemma. In Chinese it would me called a maodun (conflict), which is an interesting character-compound, the first character mao means "a long spear," and the second character dun means "a shield." Given a choice do you go with the dun or the mao? Or has the mao left no choice but the mao, and the dun no choice but the dun? Once you go down a wrong road and you get to the toll-booth, the toll collector knows not from whence you come or whither you go. If you go down the wrong road has your poetry necessarily become the road? One reason why I'm interested in Pound is not the myriad of byways that lead to meanness, bitterness, and an ocean of self-deceit; but the written roads that lead out of such swamps (that is in a situation that requires an attitude that isn't hell bent on an "if A then not B" syllogism). Pound in a way wrote Northwest passage. He, more than any poet, managed to find the mythic "East" (with all the Said implications). What he brought back wasn't a dream of Western mansions, but something fundamental. Something that became not only a cornerstone of his poetic philosophy but what was to be part of his best poetry, and one of the elements that give the Cantos coherence-- Chinese Tang dynasty poetry. This poetry not only is arguable the best poetry of the Middle Kingdom, but perhaps of the human experience. One of the philosophies of classical Chinese poetry is readership. The writer writes from the point of view of something that is witnessed, such that the reader shares the same point of view as the writer, floating in the consciousness, if you will. Something as common as a "Charge of the Light Brigade," in Western literature would be a strange experience for the reader, not only the empathetic value would be terrible for the reader, but the reader would also expect that Tennyson would be trotting along with the whole disaster. I think that in Pound's Cathay, he really begins to capture the consciousness demanded in poetic imagery. This gets played out in the Cantos as a very necessary experience in order to bridge the classical into the modern; or allow the Classical to be rendered as Modern. He never finished the Cantos. But the problem internal of the Cantos might be solved outside the Cantos; when studying Han Dynasty China, you can't not look at Japan. There were Beats that didn't espouse an ounce of his "delusions," but, while putting queer shoulders to the wheel, found some commerce (Go fuck yourself with your Atom Bomb). These are some of the things that lead me to the decision to pay all this money to get into the Pound listserve (besides the fact that I'm Jones'n for some leads). I can't quite get at a lot of list's urban discourse; but I hope it doesn't end soon. As I'm subsisting (or is it subsiding) on my UF TA stipend and cheap beer, this list has been a little holiday fun amid the gators and hummocks of the American dream. Soon I'll be teaching two Freshman writing about literature courses (as you, can see I have a long way to go on the sentence, let alone the Cantos); my students' soon to be mortgaged for textbook has a short bio on Pound that ends: "Pare away his delusion, and a remarkable human being and splendid poet remains"(X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, Literature 8th ed., Longman Press, 1306). Peace and Love Gan Xiuyun "We have one sap, one root"