Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Jerry Rothenberg
Subject: on Pound
This is in reply to Tenney’s query about my own statement that the the most
telling impact of Pound’s work was on poets who politically, morally, might
have been at the greatest distance from it. To start with my own experience –
growing up when I did – the presence of Pound in the late 1940s was, to say the
least, a bewilderment. I was stunned by much of the poetry, both by how it read
(the language of it) and by what I heard it saying: anti-war & anti-capital &
powerful too in its presentation of a way, a means, of approaching & hoping to
shape the world through the poet’s means, the poetry itself. I was about 16
years old at a first reading of him & shortly thereafter – along with the reading
– came the awarding of the Bollingen & the tremendous fuss that that stirred up
(close to fifty years ago). With that we were aware also of the extent of Pound’s
fascism &, as became clearer over the years, the viciousness of the antisemitism
in his World War II broadcasts – a lunacy of language common to the
fringe of homegrown fascists who were also in his entourage. My own first
published piece of writing was a letter to the New York Post (a different NY
Post at that time) in which I lamented what I thought had happened to Pound
and what had become (as it still seems to be) a conundrum around the man &
the work the man had given us. There was a lot I didn’t know then but knowing
it would certainly not have made it easier.
I was never, in any sense, a Poundian, since there were too many other threads
& lines coming into my awareness to allow a focus (in that sense) on any single
individual. But the observation of Pound’s impact – on myself & others –
began shortly after that: the observation that those who were most significantly
building on Pound’s poetics & actual poetry were not the crazies & the fascist
hoods of the John Kasper variety, etc., but poets like Kelly, Olson, Duncan,
Mac Low, Blackburn, & before them the whole gallery of "Objectivists" or –
from other directions – any number of European and Latin American writers –
all of them (as I understood it) with a political and moral sense (coming out of
World War II) that was strongly anti-fascist, strongly in opposition to the
totalitarian barbarisms for which Pound (in the years of his fascist infatuation)
had become a minor flunky. In their context Pound became, remained a vital
force – the proof, through them, of what was right & germinal about him and
the proof, conversely, of what was evil – & banal in Hannah Arendt’s sense –
in his succumbing to the "fascist temptation."