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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