My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

P 0 U N DAN D THE POE TRY 0 F T 0 DAY 159
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
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"
requires 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. And let's not
forget that one aspect of this elective tradition is a commitment to difficult
writers and difficult writings.
In "Canonade", Jerome McGann takes up some of these problems from
a somewhat different point of view by providing a critique of those who
would construct their literary canon based on moral virtue. McGann's
piece is a rebuke to the ever-resurgent idea (on both left and right) that
art should be uplifting. Indeed, McGann won't let us forget that range of
poetry that dwells, without disavowing-that is, dwells in ways that make
readers anxious-on the foulest thoughts and darkest visions of a culture.
He quotes Blake's idea that "The greatest Poetry is immoral" but also
Byron's "He left a [Poet's] name to other times, / Linked with one virtue,
and a thousand crimes" (to use the substitution for "Corsair" that McGann,
in effect, suggests). McGann goes on to say about T S. Eliot's most notorious
poem: "Yet what a remarkable poem-indeed, how remarkable
exactly because it has sunk into its own disgusting imagination! ... Serpentine,
garage-door, phlegm: all have, like the beast Ahab, their humanities.
Their eyes are watching God, even when they watch from that
cesspool titled 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales."'3
* * *
I wrote a follow-up speech to "Pounding Fascism" (in A Poetics) for the 1985 Pound
Centennial at Yale: an occasion at which at I was made to feel (and no doubt also made
myself feel) very unwelcome. I was just about the youngest person invited to speak, and
the only Jewish one; it didn't seem a coincidence that I was also the only person to raise
the question of Pound's fascism at this occasion. The spirit of the supposedly academic
symposium was set by Pound's daughter asking us to observe several minutes of silence in
3. Jerome McGann, "Canonade", New Literary History 25, no. 3 (1994): 487-504.