I think many of us have had to deal with this, um, problem ever since
discovering Pound & realizing that the formal work had so much to
teach us.
He did confess & apologize, at least in a way, for this particular
fuckup before he died, & he did like & support some Jews. But, in some
areas of thought he was stone crazy.
If, like me, you still find yourself stepping into the Pound/Williams
line, you have to accept that this poet, whose poetry had so much to
teach you about how to go about the act/art of writing, had some dark
ideas that must be denounced.
Doug
On 18-Mar-08, at 6:33 AM, Roger Day wrote:
> Pound had a completely fucked-up sense of economics as well. Kenner
> mentions that Pound followed the teachings of one the lesser
> economists; which fed into these usury arguments.
>
> Wagner, OTOH, seems to make his antisemitism a part of his aesthetics,
> a lethal load; the Jew as other, a scrape-goat to bind the "greater
> germany" (which was only an idea at the time) together. Not sure that
> Pound went as far as to shape his whole work into a denial of Jewry.
>
> I suppose it is easier to exclude people like this from one's
> thinking, kinda avoids the ickyiness of the whole subject, that
> descent into becoming an apologist which I'm trying to avoid.
>
> Roger
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Joseph Duemer <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>> Antisemitism runs through many of Pound's later Cantos, not so much
>> in
>> explicit insults directed at Jews (though those exist) as in the
>> pervasive
>> cant of anti-usury ramblings. Wendy Flory, writing in *The Cambridge
>> Companion to Ezra Pound*, counts only three instances of
>> antisemitism in the
>> Pisan Cantos, though she counts only direct insults, not passages
>> in which
>> anti-Jewish sentiments are merely assumed. She is also careful to
>> couch
>> Pound's antisemitism in terms of psychosis.
>>
>> jd
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 6:50 AM, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I thought fuck-up was a prime requirement for being an artist.
>>> Flippancy aside, does an artist's CV really affect the way one reads
>>> their work? What accommodation does one make in dealing with an
>>> "unpleasant" poet?
>>>
>>> On a side-note, does Pound's anti-semitism actually make it to his
>>> work? I've read that a case can be made for Wagner's anti-semitism
>>> being embedded in his operas, each a propagandist piece but Pound?
>>>
>>> I suppose as well that we could sit pretty and deny that anti-
>>> semitism
>>> (or whatever nastiness you care to mention) does not exist. Baraki's
>>> words may not be to our taste, still, they deserve an hearing as
>>> much
>>> as the next poet's. I do not validate his anti-semitism (which I'm
>>> failing to spell, sadly), but to look at whatever nightmare he has
>>> in
>>> the face, acknowledge it's existence, see if it is reflected within
>>> and try and find a way out.
>>>
>>> Roger
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Baraka vs Pound: who's the mostest anti-semitic?
>>>>
>>>> I guess a poet can be good *and* a fuck-up?
>>>>
>>>> Dominic
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
>>> "She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
>>> She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
>>> The Go-Betweens
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Joseph Duemer
>> Professor of Humanities
>> Clarkson University
>> [sharpsand.net]
>>
>
>
>
> --
> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> "She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
> She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
> The Go-Betweens
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
to rid me of
the ugh in
thought
i spell anew
weave the world
out of the or
binary
bpNichol
|