Just back to the list and catching the tail ends of what I read (as I posted
to John) of an "electronic food fight." I wanted to say Amen or some such
affirmation of the support already expressed for John's handling of the
list, which is, after all, a shared social contract of sorts that his
efforts created, and also to thank him not only for the discussion space but
for the many list-related projects he has generated and to wich he has
welcomed one an all.
Re. domfox's poetics statement: I know there is a history of reading
Pound's Cantos against his politics, but there are also a number of other
views, Seiburth's marvelous work on the economics/poetics of the Cantos
among them (I've presented a piece in this vein myself, and at a Pound
Centennial). To claim that EP is "polyvocal" in the Cantos, as Bernstein
does in his "Pounding Fascism," is to ignore the monomaniacal nature of
those vocalisms and what they, i.e. Pound, seek to instate. I am, like most
contemporary poets, a son or daughter of Pound, a grateful one, I'd say in
my case, but I wouldn't want to live in the Paradise that the Cantos sought
to create.
Yet one more matter: I wonder if the artifice vs. the bugaboo of presence
argument is not overstated in general, as if Plato's scary view of the
rhapsode were now taken too literally. Representation has its uses, even if
only as a "truth" always passing, under the burden of experience, into untruth.
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