My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

POUND AND THE POETRY OF TODAY 161
thing far more interesting in the process. The underlying idea of his montage
has been varyingly described by many of the critics who wish to make
a claim for the overall unity of The Cantos. Suffice it to say now that his
appropriation of prior texts (the quotations, citations, and transductions)
were intended as an evaluative, "objectively" discriminating-and hence
hierarchical and phallocentric-"ordering" of these materials. The "objective"
historical synopsis of human culture (what we might call the subtextual
curriculum of The Cantos) and its claims to ground the poem in an
extra literary reality have made the work especially attractive to many
Pound scholars, despite the objectionable and elitist premises of this synopsis
and the fact that The Cantos implodes the very "objective" and ideological
aims it purports to articulate.
Understanding The Cantos as montage provides a framework for the
poem's implied positivism, which also helps to explain those theoretical
statements of Pound's that seem to fly in the face of his actual poetic practice:
his insistence, variously, on "the plain sense of the word",5 on the "direct
treatment of the 'thing'" and on the unswerving pivot whose Imagist
distillation was made possible by eliminating any word that did not directly
"contribute to the presentation"6-a poetics commonly taken as a
refutation of the artifice of Symbolist and Swinburnian modes as well as a
rejection of the excessive verbiage of contemporary conventional verse.
Pound vilified fragmentation and abstraction as debasing the "gold standard"
of language, yet his major and considerable contribution to the poetry
of our language is exactly his rococo overlayings, indirection, elusiveness.
His fast-moving contrasts of attitudes and atmospheres collapse
the theater of Ideational Representation into a textually historicist, unfinishable
process of composition by field-a field of many voices without
the fulcrum point of any final arbitration, listening not judging: a disintegration
into the incommensurability of parts that marks its entrance into the
space of contemporary composition. Insofar as contemporary poetry does
not wish simply to admire or dismiss Pound's work but to come to terms
with it, these competing dynamiCS must be reckoned with.
It took the arrogance of Pound's supremacist and culturally essentialist
ideology to give him the ambition to imagine a work on the scale of The
Cantos, a poem that theoretically encompasses nothing less than the
story-history-of the determinately seminal strains of human culture.
That no person has an adequate vantage point to "make it cohere" is of
course a lesson The Cantos teaches but that Pound never fully learned. It is
5. Ezra Pound Speaking, Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 283.
6. Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect", in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and
Warren Tallman (New York Grove Press, 1973), p. 36.