My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

158 po UNO AND THE POE TRY 0 F TOO A Y
ings 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.
Yet Pound's poetry is never simply a direct reflection of his politics;
indeed, I would argue, quite to the contrary, that Pound's work contradicts
his fascism. The fascist reading of Pound's poetic practice is valuable as one
approach; it is not a final or definitive reading; as with all critical methods,
it illuminates some issues while obscuring others. Of course, as Casillo's
book and other Pound criticism shows, it also may push the criticism
to the polemical and even hysterical, as if the critic feels she or he is
wrestling with a demon more than interpreting a poem. This too needs to
be historicized and contextualized before it can be judged.
Pound told Allen Ginsberg he suffered from that "stupid, suburban prejudice
of anti-Semitism,"} as if he should have been immune from such a
low, "suburban" consciousness. But one thing that is notable about Pound
is that he does not appear to have been "personally" antisemitic, which
would have been in no way unusual for a person of his generation and
background. His attacks on Jews are not related to his hatred of individual
Jews nor his desire to be a member of an "exclusive" country club. His views
of Jews are highly theoretical and structural, projecting ]ewishness, more
than individual Jews, as the core force in the destruction of the most cherished
values of the West. This demonization is not a "stupid suburban prejudice",
it is the systematic paranoia-producing ideology that has come to
be called by the word fascism. (Burton Hatlen: "we will all seriously misunderstand
fascism if we insist on seeing it as a 'right-wing' political movement.
For fascism ... blended an authoritarianism usually associated with
the 'right' and a 'populism' usually characteristic of the 'left'" [145].) Marjorie
Perloff is quite right to point to it in Pat Buchanan and the fundamentalist
right; they too have gone well beyond "stupid suburban prejudice",
even as they bank on it. It is scary to see the degree to which fascist
ideas have rooted themselves so deeply in mainstream American life, often
in the guise of family values and consonance with a natural order. Pound's
most fascist polemics resonate in an eery way with the current wave of
attacks on the arts, gays, the disenfranchised poor, immigrants, feminism,
and the cities. I say this because there is often a tendency among Americans
to exoticize fascism; Pound did his best to bring it home.
Pound's work, it seems to me, not only allows for but provokes an ideological
reading; it insists that it be read, form and content, for its politics
and its ideas. And it is precisely this that is one of the enduring values of his
2. Cited in Burton Haden, "Ezra Pound and Fascism", in Ezra Pound and History, ed. Marianne
Korn (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1985), p. 158.