Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

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From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Re: reading Pound What Greek logomachy had in common with the Hebrew poison was debate, dialectic, sophistry, the critical activity that destroys faith. …. The Hebrew attack, crying out for vengeance, began by destroying the Roman Gods. … But faith is weakened by debates, [which are] more or less rabbinical and if not rabbinical at least anti-totalitarian. "Che l’intenzione per ragione vale." Faith is totalitarian. The mystery is totalitarian. The sacred symbols are totalitarian. The destruction of the images of the Gods did not increase faith. … That fatal inclination to want to understand logically and syllogistically what is incomprehensible is Hebrew and Protestant. –Ezra Pound, 1942 (in Meridiano di Roma), qtd by Peter Nicholls in EP: Politics, Economics and Writing * THUS, in thanks to Jerry, Marjorie, Jackson, Rachel, and the rest of the Poetics "Jews" and Protest-ants (irregardless of ethnic origin) who insist on debating what they/we cannot understand. This is Charles Bernstein speaking … from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, home of Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass, the Sturgeon King. & now for some further sophistry: "the critical activity which destroys faith": * Many of the poets and critics who discount Pound do not do so because of his fascism but because of a dislike for collage, parataxis, and the very strikingly rhetorical surfaces of Pound’s poems. They also discount other poets, working in related modes, whose politics are quite contrary to Pound’s. The converse of this is also true, as the remarkable posts by Rothenberg, Mac Low, and Perloff, among others, have shown. In this context, I don’t take the new wave of Pound criticism that regards fascism as central to Pound’s poetic project to be a move away from reading Pound or as a way of undermining his significance or
influence. This new Pound criticism, which in some ways incorporates aspects of what has come to be called cultural criticism, or cultural and gender studies, tries to integrate Pound’s political and economic ideas with his poetic practice. Like all critical projects, this one is limited. Much of the best Pound criticism before this period tended in various ways to cauterize or surgically remove the cancerous parts of Pound’s work, or career, in an attempt to save the good parts. Partly this was a strategy to "save" the work, but it was equally a forceful interpretative system, an "apolitics" of poetry if you will. (Peter Nicholls: "Most previous criticism of [Pound’s] work has, from a variety of motives, sought to keep these different strands separate, tending in particular to drive a web between the ‘literary’ and poltical dimensions in his writing.") Starting in the 1980s, critics like Nicholls (a deep lurker on this list), Rachel DuPlessis, Richard Sieburth, Jerome McGann, Burton Hatlen, Bob Perelman, and others, but most militantly Robert Casillo, tried to integrate Pound’s political and economic and gender ideologies into the "tropical system" that is his poetry. In doing this, these readers were giving Pound the respect of taking him at his word, in contrast to those critics who, like well meaning relatives, were often forced to say Pound didn’t know what he was talking about. The point here is not to say one approach or the other is right but to note that these approaches allow for different readings of Pound’s poetry. None of this work, it seems to me, ought to drive one from reading Pound; quite on the contrary. (Possibly this may be the work of a distinctly younger generation of scholars who no longer felt that raising these issues aligned their views with those who roundly dismissed Pound in the postwar period; this earlier polarization pushed those who went to the defense of Pound’s poetry to avoid dwelling on the relation it has to his politics and views on money.) Casillo and Sieburth actually brought me back to reading Pound; that is, reading through the fascism and masculinism brought me from a passive, largely unarticulated, aversion to Pound, to an active, and ongoing, interest in all aspects of his work. Certainly I have been polemical in my essays on Pound, but not without the ironic realization that Pound relished just this sort of poetic polemicism. Reading Pound through the fascism means reading Pound in the most specific social and historical terms. It also means reading poetic forms politically, as an economy of signs; it means thinking through the implications of poetic structures, rather than imagining them ever to be neutral or transparent. A poem including history means we must read the history too, and this history is writ in the style, in the symbolic/semiotic economy of the poem, in the material means of production, as much as in Pound’s "disembodied" "ideas" – a matrix of material meanings that Christine Froula so brilliantly calls
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Preface Above the world-weary horiz
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of 750 subscribers. Because of the
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Introduction In a world where every
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But the "good old days" have passed
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Coeval with . . . to Ghosts vs. Mar
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From: Kevin Killian Subject: Carla
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If there’s one thing Harry learne
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The conservatism in this country co
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arts the mainstream is-and over the
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University of Auckland, is convenor
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less literate is implied by that "m
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What I am bothered about in these r
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From: Dodie Bellamy Subject: Breaki
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characterization of some the struct
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This is not so much ingratiation of
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My reconstruction of the argument i
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into the poetic. And I am wondering
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From: Patrick Phillips Subject: The
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ideology which contorts the referen
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disparaging Reznikoff-while preserv
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intervention). Though I can anticip
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eturns, repetitions, etc., is perme
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From: Benjamin Friedlander Subject:
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shrewd, often polemical presence of
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eadings, recognition. Being inside,
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If I resist the idea of a literary
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From: Susan Schultz Subject: Commun
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From: Patrick Phillips Subject: The
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From: Steve Evans Subject: the soci
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The tradition of the oppressed teac
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My wobble is social, not theoretica
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From: Dodie Bellamy Subject: Spicer
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From: Dodie Bellamy Subject: Re: Gh
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Hermit Crabs Don’t Cry to Politic
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From: Robert Creeley Subject: Chick
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From: Jed Rasula Subject: Re: Olson
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BED… (P.S. Just in Baltimore and
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From: Ron Silliman Subject: Motivat
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From: Steve Evans Subject: Motives
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past year or so, despite the fact t
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It seems clear to me that some of t
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To clarify one general point in clo
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the most "out there" manifesto we
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Actually, the question of age is a
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indulges in "increasingly modest fo
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From: Tony Green Subject: calling G
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From: Ron Silliman Subject: Flaming
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parataxis, collage, sonnets, whatev
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From: Larry Price Subject: Anachron
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From: Ron Silliman Subject: Exile o
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From: Paul Hoover Subject: politics
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From: Aldon L. Nielsen Subject: lat
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Every site glides away toward absen
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Certain aspects of desire were regi
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whatever chaotic way) offer the abi
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From: Susan Schultz Subject: notes
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mouth, thick with money and piety a
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From: Steve Evans Subject: Shake Th
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From: Susan Schultz Subject: haoles
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From: Ron Silliman Subject: Univers
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From: Steve Evans Subject: Universa
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From: James Sherry Subject: Re: Uni
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From: Wystan Curnow Subject: Re-Aca
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From: John Cayley Subject: Experime
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From: Marisa A Januzzi Subject: dis
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Two senses of disorder, as also man
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At its best, Language poetry never
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hymed couplets I’ll be a langpo w
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From: Leslie Scalapino Subject: Re:
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From: Tom Mandel Subject: Re: apex
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From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re:
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language fails to describe their ex
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From: Eric Pape Subject: Re: apex o
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All every night walk by the venue i
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From: Ira Lightman Subject: CALL FO
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From: Bob Perelman Subject: Governm
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independence and possible sense of
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imagination, and often introduces t
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From: Ron Silliman Subject: Boy Tal
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From: B. Cass Clarke Subject: Quan
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Look at it this way-email is one of
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From: Nada Gordon Subject: where th
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From: Cynthia Kimball Subject: Ghos
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From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: boy
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I do not want to be a woman all the
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i yam what i yam a world-changing f
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SAME TIME TO EXPLORE THEORIES OF SE
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From: Kali Tal Subject: Re: Boy Tal
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From: Ann Louise Vickery Subject: D
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From: Colleen Lookingbill Subject:
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7) Denial is an important part of t
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equirement of having to "pay dues,"
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From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: Close
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From: Maria Damon Subject: more on
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From: David McAleavey Subject: Re:
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From: Kenneth Sherwood Subject: Int
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From: Hank Lazer Subject: close rea
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d’appui). It is easier for studen
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7a. Most probably that the monolith
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From: Eliot Katz Subject: more on c
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emancipatory elements which a reade
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From: Maria Damon Subject: Re: what
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in the culture through coercion of
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From: Kali Tal Subject: Re: what do
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their experience in a potent form-t
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From: Tom Mandel Subject: Re: Conse
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From: Colleen Lookingbill Subject:
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But her [Stein’s] account of firs
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ecognized as "man." In the cane-wei
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From: Alfred Corn (forwarded by Sus
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From: Ron Silliman Subject: Value i
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From: Alan Golding Subject: Howe No
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so-called so-called Language writer
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Page 239 and 240: From: Alfred Corn Subject: More For
Page 241 and 242: From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Jor
Page 243 and 244: From: Ron Silliman Subject: Childre
Page 245 and 246: From: Kevin Killian Subject: A happ
Page 247 and 248: From: Mark Wallace Subject: bland a
Page 249 and 250: From: Mark McMorris Subject: Re: bl
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Page 253 and 254: While I agree with Jeff Hansen’s
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Page 261 and 262: From: Jeff Hansen Subject: wild blu
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Page 267 and 268: From: Jerry Rothenberg Subject: on
Page 269 and 270: I cannot make it cohere. I can read
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Page 273 and 274: So why am I still conflicted about
Page 275 and 276: typos!) once a poem was in print. S
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Page 283 and 284: From: Dick Higgins Subject: Web Poe
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