How does Ted Nugent connect to Ezra Pound? Read Michael's essay. Creative Commons photo, source.
When A Non-Euclidian Perspective came out, I noted that it contained what I thought was the best RAW essay yet on how to deal with Ezra Pound's art and politics. More recently, I mentioned Pound while talking about Poul Anderson.
Michael Johnson references both that classic RAW essay and my Poul Anderson posting in what I think is one of his best Substack pieces, "The Ezra Pound Problem."
Here is how Michael formulates the problem:
The Ezra Pound Problem in General: that conundrum faced by any of us when confronted by a favorite artist’s bad behavior, whatever it was. We make ongoing negotiations with this.
The Ezra Pound Problem in Particular: What any of us who like Ezra Pound’s work does with his ugliness. I’m mostly interested in what other poets and writers have thought about this, and some critics who seem compellingly informed.
Rather than trying to summarize what else Michael writes, I'll just suggest that everyone read it.
In one of his footnotes (Michael puts good stuff in the foornotes, you have to read them too, maybe his little homage to The Widow's Son?), Michael writes, " RAW had, by 1968, been reading Pound closely for 20 years. Anderson’s mistakes didn’t stand a chance with him. Are we all like this?"
Yes, I think so. I suspect that Wilson fell in love with Pound's poetry before he learned much about Pound's politics. I know I felt really blown away by Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, a hard science fiction novel with little emphasis on politics, and I think that left me open to being able to tolerate Anderson's mistakes and lesser moments. (If you have read a lot of science fiction, you can't help but notice that many science fiction writers, including many of my favorites, are decidedly inconsistent in quality, as compared to, say, Vladimir Nabokov, who to my knowledge never wrote a lousy book. This may be because many SF writers to stay alive had to write very quickly. Roger Zelazny is one of my favorites, but I'm not going to recommend To Die in Italbar to you. I once heard Zelazny say that after he quit his day job to be a full time writer, he had to write many books in order to make a living, but that every few books would be a "bear down" book that got his full attention. So Anderson sometimes putting out mediocre stuff doesn't make him stand out in the genre.)
BTW: One of the points Michael seems to document is that RAW did his best thinking about Pound in that early essay, and his discussion of Pound apparently deteriorated through the decades.
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5 comments:
Thanks for the nod, Tom.
On that last bit: I think RAW had some fine writing on Pound after that 1960 piece, but the 1960 one was, I thought, his best on the Pound Problem. On that Pound Problem he does seem to fade a bit, but in writing on other aspects of Pound he was always interesting to me.
The assertion that we're all capable of both beauty and ugliness, while true, would seem trite and preachy if he had reiterated it over and over for 50 years. You have to re-write that riff in order to get it in, and the idea does show up in RAW's subsequent writing quite a lot, just not within the context of Pound's ugliness.
But there's some fine writing on Pound after 1960.
Such as "The Goddess of Ezra Pound" from Illuminati Papers.
"Mammary Metaphysics" in Coincidance seems to extend ideas from Pound's Spirit of Romance. In that same volume, "How to Read/How To Think" is highly Ezratic, and picks up from Pound's idea of the poet as seer that Ginsberg also took up: Poet As Distant Early Warning System. Ideas about engaging in poetic trance and then foreseeing more of the future, etc.
One thing I find curious is how RAW would answer Qs from interviewers about his influences, and he'd always name Pound and Joyce, more than once riffing on these two: "The crazy man who knew and the blind man who saw," etc. And yet there were far more allusions to Pound in his work than outright essays about him. This might be part of his own Pound Problem. There are scads of allusions to Pound, his ideas - especially economic ones and those of the numinous - in Illuminatus!, Schrodinger's Cat, and even the 18th century-based historical trilogy. (Sigismundo Celine is related to Sigismundo Malatesta, etc.)
That Markoff Chaney uses Pound's name within his Til Eulenspiegel-like pranks: the subconscious motivations there?
I suspect RAW as a teen liked "Uncle Ezra's" advice on how to write better. And there's quite a lot there. But also: EzP's ideation: tying the monetary system to their own poverty and "mental" illnesses. But of course: Ez's eccentric, learned takes on the history of literature: fancy a 16 year old choosing to read this kind of stuff, on his own time, today?
There's a passage in Illuminatus! where Dorn and Hagbard are talking about Hagbard giving up his leadership to a teenaged girl, and Dante's first Paradiso Canto and "you who are sailing in a very small boat astern of me," and readers not being able to fully understand because they didn't have the Vision. And then Hagbard comments on how he was "behind" the teenaged girl in "understanding" and says he "should get the Ezra Pound Award for hiding emotion in tangled erudition." (431-432)
Also lurking in RAW's work, scattered here and there, are ideas about creativity that verge into full-on metaphysics and which seem very much influenced by Pound. But it's just not spelled out for any ordinary reader to see.
Of course, there's RAW's antipathy to prisons and how Pound, Reich and Leary had ideas that were threatening to the State, a huge topic throughout RAW's oeuvre and his frequent larger topic of "heresy."
I set out to write the essay you're pointing out, hoping to keep it under 2500 words, but I seem incapable of writing until I think I got enough about my topic in...and it was 4500 words. Which no one likes. I can't help it, truly...
EX: I had a lot to say about the rhetoric of EzP's fascist broadcasts but couldn't fit it in for brevity's sake. If you've read any of Pound's essays you notice he will slip into this sort of "cracker barrel" voice. He's enormously erudite, but trying to sound like a hick. Rhetoricians call this tapinosis. I think it's the source of RAW's claim to EzP being funny. Pound would use tapinosis while writing about non-hate-filled stuff, and it was funny. But he also addresses the US troops pretty much throughout in this voice, and it gets very, very weird. EX: in an early broadcast, Ol' Uncle Ez is talking about classical music the way some hayseeds would talk about ballplayers, and Vivaldi had some stuff that's better 'n that "Johnnie Bach." At any rate, the Jews are tryna erase Johnnie Bach...which is so ludicrous you don't even know where to start with this shit.
I mean, "Johnnie Bach" strikes me as both bizarre and hilarious but embedded in the larger structure of the broadcasts: what 19 year old from Paducah is actually affected by this line of patter?
I think Wilson’s discussion of Pound improved over the decades.
Michael and Eric: Of course, RAW's discussion of Pound throughout RAW's career is interesting. But I'm struck by the fact that his best statement about how to think about Pound came in that early essay, and that toward the end of his life RAW was (according to Michael's piece) defending Pound's radio broadcasts as "free speech radio" and telling his students that Pound was not an anti-semite.
This does not seem to me like "his best statement about how to think about Pound." I think Bob wrestled with Pound and Pound's ideas for over fifty years. I think he had little interest in arguing about some aspects of Pound's thought, so he made provocative statements about Pound. In the late 90's Bob invited me to participate in a discussion group at "Zero Theater Ampitheater" to discuss Pound. Alas, I don't remember my password. In that group he criticized me for judging Pound too much. He compared me to St. Paul.
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