Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

"The Pound Error": error as much in Joan Retallack’s sense of typos and
errancy as in political misjudgment: it’s all there.
Poetry is not worth reading because it is comfortable or happy or
understandable or uplifting, any more than history or philosophy is. Nor does
reading for a politics of poetic form mean that forms are liberating; more often
we find, as Ray DiPalma once wrote, that "all forms are coercive". If one starts
with the assumption that a poetry should be truthful or beautiful, that it’s
meaning should transcend the circumstances of its production – then of course
talk of the politics of Pound’s poetic forms will seem dismissive of Pound’s
work, since it pulls that work down from the heights of poetic vanity into the
real-politics of the actual poem in actual history.
People say, Pound was deluded, Pound was insane, Pound was paranoid, Pound
was delusional, as a way to explain away, or possibly contextualize, his
fascism. I don’t doubt this, but it doesn’t get me anywhere. Fascism itself was
(IS) delusional and paranoid, and Hitler and Mussolini and Goebbels are
certifiable in my book, as are the shouting Brown Shirts pictured in Triumph of
the Will (don’t we call this "mass hysteria"?). [Highly recommended, in this
context, is the recent documentary on Riefenstahl, "The Wonderful, Horrible
World of Leni Riefenstahl".] I agree with Pierre Joris that what’s important to
understand as we approach the end of this long century is the nature of this
delusion, of this insanity, that has attracted so many otherwise admirable,
sometimes brilliant, people, groups, indeed cultures. Of course Pound was
delusional during the period of his Radio Speeches; reading Pound means
reading through these delusions, trying to come to terms with them. It doesn’t
mean that in making these judgments one is free of one’s own delusions, or that
such a reading gives a complete account of this poetic work, which demands
multiple, contradictory, readings.
Pound was not just a fascist; he had different politics, and poetics, at different
points in his life and even at some of the same points. Nicholls notes that from
1930 to 1937, Pound was eager to keep a dialogue open with the American
Left; and earlier in his life his views seemed more Left than Right, although,
reading Nicholls, one begins to see this as much as a weakness in the
Life/Right distinction as an inconsistency on Pound’s part. Nicholls also shows
that "perhaps the most disquieting thing about [Pound’s] savage propaganda is
that it was to some degree an extension of ideas that had governed the earlier
Cantos." Indeed, Nicholls’s tracings of the (de?)evolution of the practice of
"authority" and "ideological closure" in Pound’s work is crucial for
understanding a fundamental dynamic of modernism.