venuti

Margin 229sleep on a middan.bombs no kulchurl value.IF possible to educate from the top??where there is any top. but at least from where one IS.(12 August 1950)Pound’s adage-like directive to Blackburn—“Acc/Kung”—seems tosuggest that preexisting cultural materials are “necessary” forinnovations, however regressive those materials might appear (“thedirt”). And indeed this paradox is signified in Pound’s fracturedlanguage, “Acc/Kung,” a pun on “Achtung” (“attention”) that madethe adage at once Chinese and German, a recovery of Confucianismwith a fascistic overtone—the topical resonance of “Achtung” wouldhave been more pronounced, and more ideologically significant, to anEnglish-language reader in the Cold War era. Blackburn’s reviewtransformed this passage from Pound’s letter into a directive that thecritic allow the current cultural situation, however regressive, todetermine the “requisite labor,” the sort of commentary that willchange that situation into one more favorable to Pound’s poetry(Blackburn 1953:215). In the case of Kenner, this meant educating theeducators (“the top”) about Pound’s “form or technique or thematerials, or what follows from them, what they lead to” (ibid.).Blackburn charged Kenner with “a too-simple discipleship” while hehimself presumably exemplified a more complicated one, as we nowknow, apparent in his plagiarized quotations from Pound’s letters.In this plagiarism, Blackburn at once assumed and qualifiedPound’s identity, recommending a strategic appropriation ofmodernism at a moment when it occupied a marginal position inAmerican culture. Blackburn’s strategy required an interrogation ofPound’s modernist cultural politics, revising it to intervene into a latersocial situation. He faulted Kenner for an “uncritical” acceptance ofPound’s modernismwithout facing the economic and social axes of his criticism, and theconclusions these entail. The poet, this poet, as economic and socialreformer, is a dilemma all of us must face eventually. It must befaced before it can be worked. The problem cannot be ignored, norwill any uncritical swallowing of the man’s facts and theories do.And it is useless and ignorant to abuse him, simply. There is morethan one madhouse in Washington these days.(Blackburn 1953:217)