Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

And it is precisely this that is one of the enduring values of his work. The
dystopian aspects of Pound’s work are important to fully explore, even with
tempers flying off the page, because he is a fundamental a part of that elective
tradition (thinking of Christopher Beach’s useful sense of Pound’s influence in
his ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic
Tradition) that, as Beach and others have noted, consists mostly of poets whose
politics and economics differ so radically from Pound’s. But the more
important Pound is for that tradition, then the more important it is to understand
the disease that consumes his work, which cannot be disentangled from what is
"good" about it. Nicholls, for example, notes how Pound’s insistence on
"making it new" made for an affinity with related fascist ideals. The
significance of "the Pound tradition" requries that we interrogate it for what it
excludes as much as what it makes possible: interrogate the assumptions of
poetic lineages not just to acknowledge their effects but also to counteract their
effects. (Perhaps one aspect of this elective tradition is a commitment to
difficult writers and difficult writings; after spending some weeks lately writing
about Laura (Riding) Jackson, that possibility is hard to miss.)
Marjorie urges us to "begin at home" with our political concerns, to look
around at what is happening in 1996 in America. Given the context of her own
life experience, her warning is all the more ominous, all the more to be headed.
But also, I would say, I hope within the spirit of her wake-up call, but also in
the spirit of "debate", that in the context of this Poetics list, taking on Pound’s
fascism is also a way of starting at home.