Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

& he taught many different groups of poets-not only the Imagists, the
Objectivists, & the Projectivists-new ways of making poems & of making
verse. It’s seems incredible when one thinks of the lineages of poem-makers
descending from EP, e.g., Pound-Olson-Duncan! Think of all the ears he taught
to hear & helped teach-even tho many of us learned as much or more from
Stein, & also, in approaching hearing & the putting together of disparate things,
Cage’s music of the early 1950s).
Would he have been as great a teacher-even to those of us who came to reject
as much as we accepted-if he’d not have been such a fucking authoritarian?
Probably for some-but that authority thing is what often drives teachers-good &
bad.
One cannot obliterate Pound because he was in so many ways a fascist (in so
many ways, he wasnt!) or Heidegger because he was a Nazi (for a much much
shorter a time than Pound was a fascist). I’ve recently learned that not only the
philosopher amd Jew Hannah Arendt, a lover of Heidegger’s as a student who
later wrote a major book on totalitarianism, but also Celan, who lost his family
to the Holocaust, visited Heidegger in his late years. We cannot be totalists
about poets & philosophers any more than we can be about society. Like
Whitman, we all contain multitudes.
One way I tried to deal with Pound-in the early 80s-was to make a long poem
by reading through The Cantos by a deterministic (nonchance) nonintentional
method-the "diastic reading-through text-selection method"-which gleaned
from the poem whole words & "ends" of words-everything from the last letter
of a word to all the letters except the first-that successively had the letters of
"Ezra Pound" in corresponding places (e.g., E’z & P’s in the first place, Z’s &
O’s in the second place etc). I spelled out the name diastically over & over until
I found no more z’s. (Thus the last section of the poem is a silence,
serendipitously consonant with his long final silence.)
I tried to follow this method out exactly. But, of course, I made mistakes. (A
lady in Missoula, Montana wrote me that I’d gotten off the track near the end of
the book, tho I was consistent from then on.) Just as Pound had projected a
great anticapitalist montage, I attempted to write a completely deterministic
nonintentional work by reading through _The Cantos_ and selecting words &
ends of words "diastically
I tried to follow this method out exactly, but since I didn’t yet have a computerautomation
of the method, chance intervened anyway in the shape of mistakes.
Luckily, I had decided long before to accept my own mistakes (tho not others’