My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

160 POUND AND THE POETRY OF TODAY
honor of the anniversary of her father's death, which coincided with the Yale event. In keeping
with this reverential spirit, the tone of the day was solemn and studiously respectful.
In contrast, my speech would have seemed boisterous and structurally irreverent; though
insofar as this was so it was oddly more in the mood of the putative subject.
The lesson of Pound for contemporary poetry is contradictory and disturbing-for
there are elements in his work that give comfort to utopian
fantasies of a self-conscious, multivocal, polyvalent, intensely sonorous
poetry and also of a repellent, self-justifying, smug, canonically authoritarian,
culturally imperialist poetic and critical practice. Attempts to
ignore or domesticate this central problematic in Pound fail to appreciate
that the irresolvability of the problem is Pound's legacy; for while one may
prefer to dwell on the formal innovations of The Cantos, the meaning of
these innovations can be adequately appreciated only after we consider
the context of their fascist roots. If we are to take Pound, or ourselves, seri-
0usy' then we must grapple not with "structures themselves" but with the
political and historical contexts in which these structures emerge. We
must, that is, understand that our poetical practices have political and
social dimensions in terms of form over and above content-if we can
allow this distinction at all. The sanitized Pound is inert and irrelevant; and
it is evident from the remarkably thoughtful new Pound criticism by, for
example, Christine Froula and Richard Sieburth, that opening the Pandora's
box of 'The Pound Error" allows for, rather than precludes the continuing
relevance of Pound's work. ("The Pound Error" is Froula's term for
Pound's inclusions of printer's errors, misattributions, mistranslations, and
the like into the text of The Cantos so that the "history" that the poem
includes is also the history of its groping compositional process. Froula
means for "error" to also suggest errantry, or wandering. 4 ) In a similar way,
the relevance of Pound for contemporary poetry is to be found most significantly
in those works that have confronted the politics of Poundian
"textualization" and appropriation and have realized alternatives to it.
The fascist implications of Pound's work can perhaps best be understood
by contrasting two compositional techniques, montage and collage.
By definition, collage is a more general term of which montage is a type;
but I wish to make a different distinction. For Eisenstein, montage involves
the use of contrasting images in the service of one unifying theme; collage,
as I use it here, juxtaposes different elements without recourse to an overall
unifying idea. Pound wished to write a montage but produced some-
4. Christine Froula's "The Pound Error: The Limits of Authority in the Modern Epic" is chapter
3 of To Write Paradise: Style and Authority in Pounds Cantos (New Haven: Yale Unviersity Press,
1984).