Hey, Mussolini couldn't have been all bad: he was, after all,
named after Juárez.
Hal
"How strange we are, to call what happens
anything at all."
--Robert Kelly
Halvard Johnson
================
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http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
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On Mar 29, 2008, at 11:18 AM, David Bircumshaw wrote:
> I've just been re-reading The Pisan Cantos prior to writing this,
> Doug, and,
> as ever before over the last 35 years (when I bought it, price 80p),
> my
> impression is of a farrago of the brilliant, the wilful, the
> rambling, the
> majestic, the incomprehensible and the downright objectionable. It
> is a poem
> of a gifted callow passionate selfless egotist. A profound crank.
> Pound's poetic project too, from A Draft of XXX Cantos onwards, is
> increasingly inseparable from his brand of Fascism, a belief system
> which he
> never recanted, (I know he did make some remarks in the 1960's
> regretting
> his antisemitism but his support for the 'twice-crucified' i.e.
> Mussolini
> never wavered). Prosaic 'fact' in such a belief system is always
> going to be
> subject to the writer's delusions and prejudices.
> One can go back to the Pound of his London days: in 'Mauberley' the
> section
> about 'Brennbaum' (The Impeccable) is about Max Beerbohm. The piece
> is, none
> too furtively, antisemitic. There is more than the one obvious
> problem about
> this:
>
> Beerbohm wasn't Jewish.
>
> (Beerbohm was of Lithuanian ancestry so some gossip in the London
> literary
> world implied he was Jewish, as his antecedents were Eastern
> European)
>
> Pound couldn't get his facts right much of the time so it does call
> into
> question his imputed ability to incorporate prosaic information into
> the
> techniques of poetry.
>
> Best
>
> Dave
>
>
>
> On 28/03/2008, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Depends, but her point was that he got that material, & the concept
>> that such material belonged there, back into poetry; many since have
>> found ways to, indeed, make it work there (as did he, at his
>> best)....
>>
>> Doug
>>
>> On 27-Mar-08, at 10:02 AM, David Bircumshaw wrote:
>>
>>> I don't feel, pace Perloff, that Pound's imagistic and rhythmic
>>> techniques
>>> succeeded in digesting the gobbets and wedges of prose content in
>>> The
>>> Cantos.
>>
>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>>
>> Latest books:
>> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>> Wednesdays'
>>
>> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>>
>> to rid me of
>> the ugh in
>> thought
>> i spell anew
>> weave the world
>> out of the or
>> binary
>>
>> bpNichol
>>
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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