Donald Revell's Arcady has a New England/Old Testament/Puritan feel, in spite of its pagan title, the profusion of poems named for pre-Socratic philosophers, and the poet's residence in Las Vegas. I've often felt that way about Revell. The poems are short; you can read the whole book in under an hour. It's born of three major influences: the unexpected death of Revell's sister, the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, and the writings of Thoreau. The book's emotional power builds as it goes, but the most exciting writing happens in the first section where Revell seems to emerge blinking into a shatteringly bright light that surrounds his spare, slightly deformed poems. The strange brute persistence of life through death figures in "What Can Stop This":

What can stop this

I found a pleasure
I found an easy faith
One is senseless
One never shakes

What can stop this

It makes no difference anymore
What I choose

Or if I choose to walk to St Augustine
To the sea beach driving
A green orange over the sand
With a stick singing

The sympathy of friends is pleasant VIOLINS
But it makes no difference anymore TROMBONES

What Revell's version of Arcady has to do with mine I'm not sure about. Certainly these poems are not representations of the life of enriched subjectivity—the self in these poems, like the language, is vibrating like a struck string at the point of breaking. There's a radical, involuntary openness in the writing to match the Nevada desert. Arcadia as clearing, with only broken words to be the altar:

More Than a Bud but Pale

More than a bud but pale
More than ambition
A CERTAINTY
A flower forges ahead
To death and after
                              W
Ards blindly
Into the we
Llspring of the Godhead
                                    N
O one I can glori
E nowh
           Ere
Else

Blue monarchs have agonized in a strange tree
Every day more and more freedom

MORE ATOMS

The suffix "-ly" features prominently in this book. An action modified but it also causes nouns to breed: "Imagi / Cally / Lightli / Ly" ("Light Lily Lily Light Light Lily Light"). The last poem, a kind of sonnet (there are many in the book) has a public chill on it; it's probably a post-9/11 poem (the book was published in 2002):

Virgil Watched Them

Virgil watched them
Crossing the river away from him
The fathers without their children
Only a little while

Was he smiling
-Ly
-Ily
At Death the Golden Age

Falling backwards
In the Chinese restaurant
The tiniest fireman
I could see that he was smiling

Plenty of children in Arcady without fathers
Our friends long before sundown

The Virgil of the Eclogues supplanted by the Virgil who wrote of Aeneas carrying his father on his back through Troy as it burned. History comes crashing in once again.

Andrew Zawacki thinks chiasmically, or at least doubly—the thing that's there or not there and the thing that interrogates the first thing—in his new book, Anabranch. This is from one of the long poems or sequences that compose the book, "Albedo":

7

Until the dark begins to lift

Hastened from door to door

Doctor she said
it's so nice to see you

This is how I loved awoke
eyes (as in) I closed my

Tattoo (pause on the stair)

Rowing a boat in another's room
faltering under the trees

What part of night was theirs
& why

Island after island

If only edges

To share for a while

Unmoored corner my archer
my open

Pause if you will on the stair

Until the dark to lift

Monday, November 23

(5:23 PM) The waters in a surge brought out a bountiful harvest. None had the strength to climb out.

For the rest of the evening I will post little excerpts from books newly arrived here at The Bookery. Here are some instant classics (well, they're actually from 1972) from "The November Exercises" in David Antin's Talking:

Sunday, November 1

.............................................

(11:29 PM): Yung Kian went rambling to the East borne along by a gentle breeze and ran into Hung Mung, who was likewise rambling around slapping himself on the ass and hopping around like a great bird. "What are you up to, Venerable One?" Yung Kiang asked. Hung Mung went on hopping up and down and slapping his ass. "Digging the scene. Digging the scene."

.............................................

Saturday, November 7

(10:32 PM): He said "The fish come out and play among the waters. That is the enjoyment of fish." The other said "You aren't a fish. How do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fish?" He said "You aren't me. How do you now I don't know what constitutes the enjoyment of fish." "I am not you and I don't know you very well. But I know you are not a fish and therefore you can't know what constitutes the enjoyment of fish."

.............................................

Thursday, November 12

(11:17 PM): A thing is called by its name through the constant application of its name to it. How is this so? It's so because it's so. How is it not so It's not so because it's not so. Everything has an inherent character and a proper capability. There is nothing which doesn't have these. A stalk of corn, an I-beam, a deformed man and Marilyn Monroe. Things great andinsecure, crafty and strange. Frank O'Hara said that nobody could be his friend who wasn't Marilyn Monroe's friend. Was Marilyn Monroe Frank O'Hara's friend?

For my 500th post (huzzay! alarums and excursions!) I thought I'd try to put The Pisan Cantos to bed for now. I've been dwelling on the recurring Latin phrase "aram neumus vult": "the grove needs an altar." Pound's resolutely pagan vision of pastoral in these Cantos (made most explicit by the long lynx passage ending Canto 79) requires the grove or garden to be made sacred, to be a place that invites the gods to return to it. The desire for an altar makes me think of Heidegger's temple as his figure for the artwork that organizes the nature (or "earth") around it, that which "worlds." Here are some excerpts from the passage on the temple in his essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art":

A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it standout into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as holy precinct....

Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock's clumsy yet spontaneous support.... The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things Phusis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. What this word says it not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent.

The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground. (Poetry, Language, Thought 41-42)

Now this isn't pastoral—this is a whole aesthetic theory, even a theology. When Pound talks about the grove needing an altar, he's talking about the work of the poet (really the work of the artist, which encompasses the work of the statesman—in Pound's case, unfortunately, that's Mussolini), which is to found a vision of the world. But the how of that founding is significant: Heidegger preaches a worlding that "arises without violation," and he elsewhere opposes this to the spirit of modern technology, which suppresses the qualities of things (the Being of beings) and converts them into resources for exploitation. Heidegger treats technology as an autonomous force, "unconditional production" (PLT 115), the spirit of techne run rampant; his critique is not based on an understanding of capitalism or commodity reification, which is one of his most serious flaws as a critic of modernity (it makes him vulnerable to charges of irrationality and humbug, charges whose seriousness is exacerbated by his Nazism). But in a way, my understanding of modernist pastoral is beginning to depend on the failure, the aporia in the critiques of Pound and Heidegger. Failing to come directly to grips with the beast of capital—failing even to make an accurate picture of it—Pound and Heidegger create potent fantasies of nature as the only source capable of renewing recognizably human values. The poet-thinker goes into nature (into the cage, into the clearing), the source of value both economic (Pound's Monte dei Paschi bank) and cultural (the "worlding" "thinking" that Heidegger equates with "poetry"). Both Pound and Heidegger fetishize thingness, use-value (though Heidegger may be more extreme: Gelassenheit or letting the thing be may mean refraining even from using it, let alone exchanging it). Without a working critique of capitalism (and perhaps, without a collective consciousness--I'll have to think more on that), Heidegger's pastoral gestures toward renewal are dead-ends into the merely personal. After the war and his "turn," Heidegger's Thinker (which he aligns with the terse figure of the Black Forest farmer) is a solitary figure, detached from der Volk (as Adorno detaches himself, violently, from mass culture), letting things be. He does open the path toward environmentalism, though. At his best, Heidegger opens the possibility for mythic, mimetic thought (thought which shelters Being, the thought of letting-be) to check the ravages of instrumental rationality. But he was never a dialectical thinker, and at his worst he simply superimposes myth over the rational. If we would all just go back to speaking ancient Greek, he seems to say, everything would be all right.

But Pound, Roman in many senses, floundering alone in his tent, a disintegrating mass of texts, seems at least to understand what he's missing: he reaches desperately for the bonds of affection. Thus his evocation of the lynx/Dorothy in 79 and this statement near the beginning at 80 (previously falsely attributed to Adams): "Amo ergo sum, and in just that proportion." Canto 80 adventures through Pound's past, stopping at more restaurants (including, significantly, a cafe in London that was turned into a bank), briefly eulogizing "poor old Benito"—but the tone has changed. He is uncertain now, softer, searching, exploring the boundaries of a tautology voiced by Alexandre Dumas:

The young Dumas weeps because the young Dumas
has tears
     Death's seeds move in the year
                                   semina motuum
          falling back into the trough of the sea
          the moon's arse been chewed off by this time
semina motuum
     "With us there is no deceit"
                  said the moon nymph immacolata
                  Give back my cloak, hagoromo.
                  had I the clouds of heaven
                      as the natuile borne ashore
                  in their holocaust
                      as wistaria floating shoreward
with the sea gone the colour of copper
     and emerald dark in the offing

Hagoromo is a Noh play about an Ariel-like nymph who loses her magical cloak and does a dance signifying the phases of the moon to get it back; some commentators have seen Noh as a model for the Cantos, a solution to the problem of writing a long Imagist poem. The problem is addressed from another direction late in the Canto, with the repetition of a phrase attributed to Aubrey Beardsley: "Beauty is difficult, Yeats." This difficulty is not merely aesthetic; rather, it is the difficulty of bringing the aesthetic into the political. The connection to Yeats harks back to much earlier in the Canto, where Yeats' membership in the Irish Senate is recalled:

the problem after any revolution is what to do with
your gunmen
as old Billyum found out in Oireland
         in the Senate, Bedad! or before then
         Your gunmen thread on moi dreams
         O woman shapely as a swan,
Your gunmen tread on my dreams
Whoi didn't he (Padraic Colum)
         keep on writing poetry at that voltage
"Whenever you get hold of one of their banknotes
(i.e. an Ulster note) burn it"
                  said one of the senators
                  planning the conquest of Ulster
This he said in the Oirish Senate
         showing a fine grasp of...
                  of possibly nothing,
If a man don't occasionally sit in a senate
         how can he pierce the darrk mind of a
                                                 senator?

Now, it could be that Pound has legitimate reasons (within his kooky system) for denigrating the unnamed senator's (neither Yeats nor Colum [another poet] but certainly associated with them) proposal, but I'm tempted to read the breakdown signified by those ellipses as Pound's loss of confidence in his own critique. This gets turned around by a kind of protest: why wasn't he, Pound, a senator? Why don't poets have real power? But perhaps when poets do, they end up attacking money (like Pound himself), unable to free themselves from fetishization, from nominalization. Yeats the "smiling public man" is a warning to Pound: beauty is difficult and the more so in government. There may be in fact no place in government for the beautiful. Pastoral provides a flight out of government and history into beauty—but Pound is alone there with the shades: "[Only shadows enter my tent / as men pass between me and the sunset,]".

So I see I've completely failed to dispose of the Pisans entirely. Next time I'l make another push, at least through the "what lovest well" canto—the emotional climax of this decad. I'm curious as to how this beginning of a withdrawal from meddling in political affairs will be reconciled with the "advice to princes" that the bulk of the remaining Cantos are said to consist of. Perhaps it will be a floating antimony. Or perhap Pound's renunciation will be incomplete.

Thanks to wood s lot for alerting me to this Alan Sondheim review of last year's Spineless Books production, Mike McGuire's palindromic Drawn Inward. Which is an amazing little book, as you'll see from Sondheim's quotes; I think he's right to find a "classical" quality in their mixture of foregrounded rigor and playfulness.

Been reading Fredy Perlman's anarchist de-construction of world history—all of it—titled Against His-story, Against Leviathan!. You can read an excerpt here. It has the deliberate naivety of a children's book, and its narrative of the evolution of state power as an undead "worm" or Leviathan (a la Hobbes) persuades by accumulation. It was instructive to pick up a copy of Bruce Catton's Grant Takes Command—one of several handsome editions of Civil War histories owned by my father—after reading Perlman; Catton practices the same kind of personification that Perlman does when he ascribes thoughts and feelings to such Leviathanic entities as Washington, the Army of the Potomac, and Mississippi. The Civil War was suddenly revealed as one Leviathan eating another, suggesting this logic: if the South had slavery, the North had the South. That this reading effaces the immediate moral devastation of slavery shows that a history like Perlman's cannot replace existing empirical histories, but is an effective dialectical negation of them. I suspect the same effect is created by the people's histories of Howard Zinn, whom I've never read. But I'm gonna.

Cognitive dissonance this weekend in New York: first the terribly sad memorial service and a small wake afterward, then seeing an absolutely gobsmacking documentary about Imelda Marcos with Nada and Gary. I now feel I know more about recent Phillipine history than Imelda herself does. Unbelievably, the movie ends with her two children being elected to public office. Gary and Nada are tremendous fun to hang with and I hope I can entice them back up to Ithaca in the near future.

So now I'm back in Ithaca and I've finished reading The Pisan Cantos but not quite done meditating on them. I will probably do a preliminary summing up in the next day or so and then move on to Rock-Drill (hopefully resuming my previous pace of a decad every day or two). Tonight at the Bookery I'm delighting in a new book from Coffee House, Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. It's like a third volume of that series Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute, but tuned up for our 21st century concerns. (Which are as yet perennial: what is today's "handover of sovereignty" to the Iraqis but yet another in a long series of abuses of language? How many permanent military bases are we building there?) There's a rich brew of stuff in the anthology (priced to move at $18!): contributors include Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Robin Blaser, Alice Notley, Cole Swensen, Joanne Kyger, Eileen Myles, kari edwards, Lorenzo Thomas, Barbara Guest, Beverly Dahlen, and Ammiel Alcalay. It screams to be used as the primary text for a future seminar or workshop. One thing it brings home for me, even in the subtitle, is how inseparable poetics and politics have become (indeed always were, as Waldman slyly shows by envisioning Plato traveling through airport security on his way to an MLA conference). Poetics encompasses thinking about poetry, which always raises the question, What is poetry for? That's politics. An epic may be a poem including history, but a poet who includes his or her own history is a political poet. Which leads me to this extremely useful passage I found in Robin Blaser's talk: "For me, the central figure in my working definition of postmodernism is that it is nothing more than and certainly nothing less than the correction of modernism . . . politically, socially. Particularly politically and socially. That would of course include sexism, racisms, and so forth." That doesn't quite solve the question as to how and why the most politically progressive poets have latched on to the poetic practices of political reactionaries, but it does seem basically and elegantly true.

The Pisan Cantos break open in 79. Pound begins in a reflective mood, with the rage that keeps erupting throughout The Cantos more or less at bay; it's also weirdly coded racially. At the top of the first page: "Moon, cloud, tower, a patch of the battistero / all of a whiteness"; at the bottom, "I like a certain number of shades in my landscape / as per / 'doan' tell no one I made you tht table". The "shades" are being made to refer not just to the usual classical dead people but to Pound's fellow prisoners, nearly all black men. For between these two lines, in the middle of the page:

present Mr G. Scott whistling Lili Marlene
               with positively less musical talent
               than that of any other man of colour
                   whom I have ever encountered
but with bonhomie and good humour

And on the next page: "whereas the sight of a good nigger is cheering / the bad'uns wont look you straight". This would be disheartening if Pound weren't already so firmly established as an anti-Semite and racist. At least he evinces some compassion, even affection and gratitude for these men (that "table" made for Pound by one of the inmates to "get you offa the groun" becoms a minor leitmotif in these Cantos). And the endurance of affection grows into the major theme of the Pisan Cantos as they draw toward their conclusion, building toward the famous lines in Canto 81: "What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross." What's extraordinary about Canto 79 is the introduction of the figure of the lynx at line 136, which dominates the Canto until its conclusion. A figure for his wife Dorothy (Sieburth's note refers to "the private feline mythology" they shared; where can I learn more about that? it sounds positively Yeatsian), the lynx is also an animal I associate strongly with pastoral. Aside from being sacred to Dionysus and associated with Pan, who was said to wear a lynx-skin, there's the line "The lynx stood awestruck" from Virgil's Eighth Eclogue, in which the lynx is one of the animals mesmerized by the song of the shepherds. Somewhere I read that the lynx is not native to either the "real" Arcadia (in Greece) or to Theocritus' Sicily; to introduce a lynx into a pastoral poem is a kind of emblem of the poem's fictionality. A difficulty I must resolve is the relationship between my notion of pastoral and Pound's pagan mythos; is his paganism merely literary, or does he actually believe it? He goes on at such length about the lynx that I think it might be the latter. After introducing the lynx, and then detouring to a memory of Henry James comes another inscription of Pound's remorse, ambivalent as usual—but beautiful, too:

         The moon has a swollen cheek
and when the morning sun lit up the shelves and battalions
of the West, cloud over cloud
                 Old Ez folded his blankets
Neither Eos nor Hesperus has suffered wrong at my hands

             O Lynx, wake Silenus and Casey
             shake the castagnettes of the bassarids,
the mountain forest is full of light
      the tree-comb red-gilded

Perfect merging of realities, there, that "Silenus and Casey": Silenus is a companion to Dionysus while Casey was a corporal at the DTC. The "Old Ez" parallels the original ending to the Pisan Cantos, the end of Canto 83: "Oh let an old man rest." It's a plea for mercy, prefacing his insistence that he has harmed neither dawn nor evening ("Eos nor Hesperus"). This could be read as a claim for his overall harmlessness: he has damaged nothing permanent. But of course to claim these two entities as not having "suffered wrong at my hands" implies that other entities—and people—have.

There's more to say about the lynx/Dorothy and the absolutely pastoral interlude with her that Pound evokes, but right now I have to catch a train from New Jersey (where I'm staying with my dad) into New York for that memorial service. So it's Pound the mournful, not Pound the deranged warrior or Pound the lover who's uppermost in my mind.

I'm totally tickled by this paragraph that Christian Bök has written about Fourier Series.

More Pound by and by.

There will be no report on the Toscano/Elrick reading from me this Saturday because I have to go into New York for a funeral (the son of a dear friend has died). And last week a student at the massage school where Emily works was killed in a car crash. Meantime the sun is shining and the dog chases a woodchuck through the fence, comes back scratched and smiling. Strange days.

The poet as a nexus or node of voices, texts, sound bites, images: Pound was scrubbed raw in the cage at Pisa and discovered naked textuality where his self used to be. Canto 78:

Cassandra, your eyes are like tigers,
    with no word written in them
You also have I carried to nowhere
    to an ill house and there is
                   no end to the journey.

The unheeded word goes unwritten. The personal is stained by the textual and political both; remembering Lorendo di Medici "who left lyrics inoltre / that men sing to this day" slides ineluctably into nostalgia for the republic that never really was at Salo, "to dream the Republic"—from this to memories of visiting his daughter, to a Scottish translation of the Aeneid, another tale of a city founded: "and belt the citye quahr of nobil fame / the lateyn peopil taken has their name / bringing his gods into Latium". It amazes me how much of the previous Cantos keeps surfacing and resurfacing in the Pisans: attacks on usury and increasingly plaintive prescriptions for a new tax and monetary system; signature lines from Cavalcanti (E fa di clarita l'aer tremare, "and make the air tremble with clarity"); bits of Confucious ("definition can not be shut down under a box lid," from Pound's translation of The Unwobbling Pivot); restaurant names (oh, how hungry he must have been!). Mixed in with apologia for Mussolini "hang'd dead by the heels before his thought in proposito / came into action efficiently" yet ending with

there
are
no
righteous
wars

But this is qualified by the lines above it, "In the spring and autumn / In 'The Spring and Autumn'"—that seems to suggest there are no righteous wars in those seasons. I will have to go to Pound's translation of Mencius to see if that's the loophole he's left for himself. Where is Pound the subject in all this? In his memories of his daughter, of dead friends? They are words now: the daughter, "'Gruss Gott, 'Der Herr!' 'Tatile ist gekommen!'; the friends, "Gaudier/s word not blacked out / nor old Hulme's, nor Wyndham's," or WCW grousing "'how the hell can we get any architetcture / when we order our columns by the gross?'" It's the repetition of key phrases and characters that suggest there's some planet to justify their orbit, but the surface of ths planet we never see. And I continue to be struck by Pound's influence in this regard. I'm reading Rodrigo Toscano's hugely entertaining Platform in preparation for his reading here Saturday. His text is a whirlpool of vocabularies from political theory, industrial catalogs, academese, pop culture, onomatopoetic nonsense, and high literature (in what seems an uncharacteristic move he informs us at the end of one poem that its quotations are taken from Milton, Ovid, and Donne). "A Beginner's Guide to Day Trading" reminds me of some of what I read in Laurie Elrick's book: a fluid and rapid attack on the illusion of subjective action offered by this seemingly direct engagement with capital. It works by overwhelming the reader with the global context that the day trader's computer screen reduces to manageable codes:

give!
me!
my!
value!
I don' care
what I said!
the client state
to the clientele

---

telecom
-mune
-ism
fibers
of the world
ignite!
liberal schliberal
front

---

chuh' chuh'
chaii
-na!
the pace is strange
chuh' chuh'
chaaina
jus' tryin' da' find a
funda'

---

of course not
not forgot
what it's wrought
likkud
who could
with shas
exacerbate hamas
re-tally yr. stock's loss

The political, pointy teeth of the economic maw, leaps out to bite the reader on the ass. Fragments of text assert the uncomfortable nowness of history; as Radiohead says, "This is really happening." Pound is always grasping after the past tense or prescribing for a future; as I mentioned before, the most immediate records of his suffering and remorse tend to be deferred into foreign languages. Toscano's poetry includes history in a paradoxical way: self-consciousness about the mediated (textual) nature of history and the politcal NOW attempts to render history im-mediate. His most successful strategy in this regard (one in keeping with Atelos' stated mission comes in poems which directly address the situation of poetics: he calls these "Satires" (some titles: "On a Literary Journal," "A Brief Retrospective of Chump De Ville's Poetic Oeuvre over the Last Decade," [note Chump's initials: "But CV, knowing where the goods are, goes there"]; "My target Audience, As It Is an Issue..."). When Pound foregrounds his situation as a literary one, he does so through allusion, name-dropping, or the repetition of his famous edicts for Modernism. Toscano has his likely reader's number, calls it out, and answers it himself: these poems are about the impossible situation of a poetry that wants to be praxis. From "My Target Audience":

is much like fresh gum stuck on yr. pant leg
from under a lounge booth
upon just arriving—
wearing new pants—
you can't afford
anyway


         to be party to, or declaim, or resist—


ALL THOSE OVERDETERMINED SOAPBOX CRATES

(brought up from under the dry critical cellar, encasing now
ethically sour wines, to be drunk by demoralized re-moralizing
drunkards!)


           and thse, paired with


ALL THOSE UNDERDETERMINED COINAGES

I won't quote the whole poem; it's on the long side. In some ways these poems remind me of Gary's great How To Proceed in the Arts, and Toscano has his own "Lester Bangs of poetry" moments:

   ...are they to be packed with paleo-moral ice to freeze—off? or
   cut out, and later ideo-pragmatically patched over? or
   pulled clear off   now

—throw your pants out!


huh
   huh


       huh
huh—

(into the crowd)

You get the idea. Fighting poetry as a commodity leaves you "Stark motha' nekid / re-vocalizing / hope". Of course the poet never had any clothes; I think Pound in the Pisans is slowly being draw toward full recognition of his nakedness, the grim joke of authorship. Toscano is pomo enough to revel in the nakedness, to demand it, to be outraged by the pants of purchased subjectivity. If his poetry's any indication, we're in for one heck of a show on Saturday. It's Pound punk'd.

Congrats to Matt Shindell for his darkly witty contribution to the new APR.

And I've changed my tagline again. It struck me that nearly all of it was redundant. I would have called it "Adventures in poetry" but that name's taken.

The poem including history also excludes history to reveal itself as a poem. That is, as a poem poeming, transforming its materials into poetry; when those materials include historical documents, the poem becomes literally history-in-the-making, for history is always only recognizable ex post facto as text. History as such, like the sublime that Romantic poetry pursues, registers only as an aporia, an inaccessible Real as invisible and inescapable as air pressure ("atmospheres"). The poetic process ("The wind is part of the process / The rain is part of the process") surrounds and transforms the document and citations, marking them as made, compressing and condensing their qualities as historical documents—their quiddity, the contexts trailing behind them, their authority (centering the poem, decentering the poet). Pound has a couple of lines near the middle of Canto 77: "Ils n'existent pas, leur ambience leur confert / une existence" (They do not exist, their surrounding confer on them an existence). Pound's ambience here becomes the poem itself.

I think it's been established that most Chinese characters are not the "ideograms" that Pound claimed them to be; many are phonetic, for instance. The notion of the ideogram as providing unmediated access to the thing it represents was an attempt, as if by algebra, to realize Williams' "No ideas but in things" at a single stroke. So it's interesting how Canto 77, which has perhaps more ideograms in it than any other (the Confucian Cantos not excepted), and for which Pound even provides a glossary at the end, deploys many ideograms that are neither concrete things nor philosophical concepts (like his favored cheng ming, "right word" or "le mot juste") but particles, possessives, and odd bits of speech: how (is it), not, one's own, and, is, and my favorite, bi gosh. They're like signposts (the right margin of one page is filled with 'em) of what Pound's attempting to do, to concretize the process of the poem's making. If "and" and "is" are ideograms, they're halfway to things—it's the opposite tack to that taken by Gertrude Stein, who materializes conjunctions and simple verbs in their strangeness and quiddity through repetition (and a sly sense of humor alien to Pound's own heavy-handed ironies). There's also some Joycean onomotopoeia: in Canto 77 we get some thunder: "k-lakk.....thuuuuuu / making rain / uuuh". These kinds of materializations of language go hand in hand with Pound's notion of seeing for oneself contained in the word "periplum": "not as the land looks on a map / but as sea bord by men sailing" (Canto 59). Here is an ethical and aesthetic claim of Pound's that still seems valid and useful; though as a cousin to his "Go in fear of abstractions" the bare concept remains subject to abuse (fostering a simple rejection of abstraction, that is, theory. Taken to its edge "periplum" becomes an anti-intellectual bit of shorthand, a refusal of rationality. But here the ideograms and periplum are staked on behalf of personal sovereignty in resistance to others' myths: Pound translates the Chinese characters on a page describing various religious rites, Catholic and pagan, as "not one's own spirit and sacrifice is flattery[,] bi gosh" or "To sacrifice to a spirit not one's own is flattery (sycophancy)."

Materiality of language also comes up more amusingly when Pound muses on the language of his fellow prisoners or "trainees": "the army vocabulary contains almost 48 words / one verb and participle one substantive [Greek "hyle," matter or in this case, shit] / one adjectiev and one phrase sexless that is / used as a sort of pronoun / from a watchman's club to a vamp or fair lady." Words are shit: I'll bet someone's done a Freudian thesis on that coupled to Pound's crazy ideas about money, which like words also represents without (Pound sez) having any intrinisc value of its own.

Oh, and I forgot to mention a truly strange detail from Canto 74: Pound mentions the hanging of a prisoner named Till "for murder and rape with trimmings"; he's referred to again as "St. Louis Till" in 77. Sieburth's note informs us that Louis Till was none other than the father of Emmett Till, whose murder in 1955 galvanized the Civil Rights movement. How bizarre are the eddies of history.

Well into the Pisan Cantos now. (Can't help but hear Helium's high-pitched, delighted "Peeeesans!") It's easy to get fed up with the apologia for Mussolini in the first Canto, 74, not to mention this truly vile bit—remember, it's 1945:

from their seats the blond bastards, and cast 'em.
    the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle
in gt/ proportion and go to saleable slaughter
with the maximum of docilitv.

Okay, that last word is a delicious pun (was Pound aware of television? It was around, but the culture of television that makes "docilitv" work as a pun really wasn't). And Pound may not have known about the death camps yet. But it's almost enough to make me want to throw the book across the room and say the hell with Pound. How strange, though, to be here at the Bookery and pick up Laurie Elrick's book sKincerity, which wears its progressive and feminist politics on its sleeve (its skin), and recognize the verse form (page as field + citation) that Pound more or less invented. From "Serial Errant":

3

Towns used to sue to keep prisons out
          (This won't hurt a bit now, just a little . . .)


Inoculation:


          "We need
          J-O-B-S jobs . . .


          and a CURE (citizens united
          for the rehabilitation of
          errants)


          to keep our uh . . . heh heh . . .
          hotels full."



(Crack / Down but
market's a
gangsta)

Who knows how much Pound, if any, Elrick's read (actually she's reading in Ithaca this Saturday at 4 PM at the Lost Dog Cafe with Rodrigo Toscano, so maybe I'll ask her). But I think she offers as good an example as any as to how pervasive Pound's techniques have become in the service of writers with progressive or radically leftist agendas. Really I suppose it's the "including history" part that works so strongly, and the diminuition of the authority of the "I" that happens when you import others' texts. Of course in Pound the diminuition of authority can start to seem like an evasion of responsibility. Many of the statements that might be construed as expressions of regret or remorse are masked by being rendered in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, or what have you. The Greek word "Dakruon" meaning "weeping" or "of tears" appears three times in one line in Canto 76—but who is weeping, and for what cause? Immediately following this comes the cryptic "L. P. gli onesti" which Sieburth glosses as "L[aval]. P[etain]. the honest [or honorable ones]." You don't have to know very much about WWII to know that "honor" is not the first epithet anyone but a die-hard Fascist sympathizer could ascribe to Marshal Petain. (There's just the glimmer of the possibility of irony here, as in Marc Antony's "honourable men," but I doubt it.) Immediately following, however:

                              J'ai eu pitie des autres
probablement pas assez, and at moments that suited my own convenience
                         Le paradis n'est pas artificiel,
                                   l'enfer non plus.

Paradise is not artificial, nor is hell. What are we to make of this repurposed Baudelaire, coming as it does after praise for Fascist collaborators and Pound's muttered admission to his own failures of compassion? Paradise is not to be made by man (and this brings us to the problem of who is addressed by the famous repeated line, "Pull down thy vanity," which I'll get to later this week)? Paradise is real, and the hell of Pisa is real? Are paradise and hell being asserted as transcendencies beyond human action and influence, or they immanent to human experience, part of our nature? I have no answers as of yet. But he owns his remorse with the "Je," while elsewhere expressions of grief stand half-mute and isolated: "lisciate con lagrime / politis lachrymis [Grk. WEEPING]".

In Canto 76 there's a grudging revision of the disrespectful synagogue scene in Canto 12 that I complained about a few weeks ago. Pound's paganism strains to make a democratic turn when he retrieves the phrase "each on in the name of his god" from the Hebrew bible (Micah 4:5) so as to open a channel for Jews to participate in his kind of religiosity, which is a polytheism of texts opposed to monotheist beliefs:

So that in the synagogue in Gibraltar
     the sense of humour seemed to prevail
     during the preliminary parts of the whatever
but they respected at least the scrolls of the law
          from it, by it, redemption

A little lower down he admits "there is no need for the Xtns to pretend that / they wrote Leviticus." Not my favorite piece of the Torah, but here Pound shows a glimmer of respect for Jewish texts and textual practices. His hatred of the Talmud seems deeply perverse, given the Talmudic explosion of interpretations and constellary texts that The Cantos both invites and is. But that blindness is probably typical of a) Pound's probably psychosis and b) the tendency of anti-Semites to use Jews as a repository for disclaimed parts of their own ego: their perceived weakness, effeminacy, uncleanness, what have you. This is I believe the basic argument of Robert Casillo's book The Geneology of Demons, which should probably be required reading for any would-be Poundian. This doesn't reduce Pound's culpability, or my absolute contempt for his beliefs. But I feel strangely sympathetic toward him too. He was so lost, and he put so much faith in books, to the point of believing his literary company would save not only himself from loneliness but the entire world from the inhumanities of capitalism. (And I think Pound's progressive impulses are genuine when they manifest as a critique of capitalism and not simply as the reactionary rejection of modernity—that perhaps is how he could call himself a "leftist Fascist.") That's the kind of idealism I recognize, somewhat uncomfortably, within myself, and within many of the writers I admire.

I would like to thank Janet for the gift of Strindberg + helium. Oh, the humanity! I may have to purchase a T-shirt.

More or less refreshed. I'm going to table the fiction idea for the time being—lord knows I've got enough on my plate. Like the Pisan Cantos, which I'll probably start reading at the Bookery this evening. Curious that Ron has brought up those Cantos today in the context of The Godfather, because I've been thinking myself how my experience of getting into Pound reminds me of my interest (and the interest of lots of other people) in the great HBO dramas (chiefly The Sopranos and Deadwood—have you seen Deadwood? It's something to see) and even the comedies (Curb Your Enthusiasm). These are marvelously written shows featuring characters who range from the flawed to the utterly despicable, yet the quality of the writing and acting makes you sympathize with them. (Six Feet Under is more conventional but still impressive in the way it gets you to care about people who in life you'd find deeply annoying.) Reading Pound is like that: he's mad, bad, dangerous to know, often pathetic, often infuriating. You read those radio speeches or the second Salo Canto or any of the Fascist apologia/homage in The Cantos, even the Pisans, especially at their beginning ("Thus Ben[ito Mussolini] and Clara a Milano / by the heels at Milano / That maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock") and their end (according to Richard Sieburth, Canto 84 is an angry postscript triggered by the death of his friend the translator John Penrose Angold while serving in the R.A.F.), and you just want to kick him in the teeth. But of course he's already been kicked in the teeth. Pound's sufferings in Pisa were real and acute (though not of course comparable to what Jews were suffering and had suffered): kept in an iron cage exposed to extreme heat and rain (there's a photo of the cages on the cover of the new edition and they're starkly terrifying, evocative these days of Camp X-Ray at Guantanomo Bay), not permitted to speak to anyone except the R.C. chaplin, and completely ignorant of his fate (would he be shot? would he simply be left there?). And the poetry does, as Ron says, rise to great heights of beauty. Is there genuine contrition in the Pisan Cantos? That's one of the things I'll be on the look-out for. I don't expect to forgive Pound, but reading him, listening to him—isn't that more than forgiveness? It's a kind of acceptance. On the other hand, I've learned to care about the angst of Tony Soprano, and I've been moved by the stifled aspirations of Christopher. But that doesn't mean I don't want to see the bastards pay for their crimes, especially the murder of Adriana. I'm a little surprised that Ron didn't address the moral complexity a comparison of the Pisan Cantos to The Godfather implies. A well-meaning, talented, patriotic young man becomes a ruthless, paranoid, morally blindered thug—that's the arc of the Godfather films. That he offers us spectacular entertainment doesn't mean we should forget his crimes.

Experiencing Pound fatigue. Took the day off. Played some Morrowind. Spaced out.

As happens once in a blue moon, I had the kind of dream from which I awaken eager to write. In this case I found myself writing something that looked an awful lot like prose fiction—characters, a setting, the works. I wonder if I should continue with it. I have a theory that poetry is more fun to write than it is to read, whereas fiction is the opposite. Which doesn't mean there isn't pleasure in reading poetry, it's just that I find that pleasure to be most intense when I feel that I am in some way participating in the writing—when the text requires me to bring my full intelligence and experience (literary and otherwise) to it. Likewise, fiction is pleasurable, but if I find myself distracted by the mechanics of it, or if I myself am attempting to manipulate those mechanics, I get incredibly bored very quickly. Moving characters around, constructing backstories for them, exposition, dialogue, pretty much everything that falls under the concept of "craft" I find dull, dull, dull. (I realize here that I'm basically re-articulating Bathes' thesis about "writerly" versus "readerly" texts, the text of pleasure and the text of jouissance. The difference may be that I'm speaking from inside the experience of writing, not speaking as a critic.) The fiction I admire either makes its craft invisible (a classic token of mastery) or leaves as much of it as possible out: this is the territory of lyrical fiction or fiction motorized by a (non-discursively presented) argument rather than a plot. Carole Maso and W.G. Sebald are good examples of the former; Renee Gladman is a good example of the latter. Many if not most fiction writers, I suspect, would argue that making craft invisible is more difficult and thus more worthwhile, but there tend to be a heap of unexamined assumptions under that: principallyy assumptions about the normativity of representation and narrative as telos. I worry about normative representation because of what it leaves out; the telos of narrative is even more questionable because it's basically theological, proceeding along the Rosenzweigian lines of creation, revelation, and redemption. I wholly support and celebrate creation, which affirms life and the earth. I believe in revelation but only as the product of serious thought and critique, as opposed to something proceeding from faith or handed down from a supposedly transcendent source. Redemption is the most problematic (and most popular) element of narrative—it's the happy ending we're all addicted to, even when we know better. The trouble with redemption is, how to separate it from affirmation? Which ties it back into the problem of representation, of reproducing the world as it is. I can't and won't write Molly Bloom's Yes no matter how badly I want to hear it unless I feel it to be true, to be possible—it can't just be a trapdoor out of history. Beckett represents the major alternative, the fiction of negativity and repetition--though I do hear the faintest echo of redemption even in his formulation "I can't go on, I'll go on." So if I do attempt a prose narrative, I have to negotiate these questions. Really it's simply a question of not becoming bored with my own story, the way I never do with a poem. How to write fiction as if it were poetry—not a poetic product, but the poetic process? That's the only way I could find it worthwhile.

The Adams cantos are oddly balanced by the Confucian ones that precede them: a "Decad" each means that one admittedly very important man's life is made the equivalent in significance to 3,000 years of Chinese history. An inevitably Orientalist Chinese history at that, given that Pound's source was written by an 18th century Frenchman. But the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment, is key to Pound. Immersed in post-Romantic habits of thought as I am, I'm often surprised by my own affection for the Enlightenment attitude as refracted through a can-do faith in rationality and (in English) its Latinate prose style. Clearly the pairing of Confucius and Adams is meant to imply a kind of continuity: the intensely scholarly Adams (who read Thucydides in Greek but was even fonder of Cicero) is part of another dynasty that sought to create a new order on one end and lamented industrial capitalism's overwhelming of that order on the other (I am thinking of the Henry Adams of The Education and Brooks Adams, author of The Law of Civilization and Decay). This evening at the Bookery I'm leafing through the new David McCullough biography of Adams and enjoying the excerpts from his diary, presented in the context of his life and in considerably less abbreviated form than they are in The Cantos. There's something about the forthrightness with which these nonetheless complex sentence structures yield up a person's character that endears the era to me; this at least partly explains my affection for the Patrick O'Brian novels, which so effectively emulate this style in the characters' conversation and correspondence. In addition to seeing him as a kind of reincarnation of Kung, Pound seems to have been drawn to Adams for his agrarianism (though I don't happen to identify Adams with that as strongly as I do his friend and rival Jefferson—incidentally, I did love learning that they went on a tour of the English countryside together in the 1780s), his reluctance to be involved in European wars (Pound emphasizes a passage from a letter speaking against this kind of intervention with a thick black line in the margin), and his opposition to Hamilton's federalism and desire for a central bank (making him a kind of proto-usurer in Pound's eyes).

I don't have the book in front of me so I can't give you any quotes; maybe tomorrow morning, just to give the feel, which is mostly surprisingly rational given that he wrote them in the late 30s and was already making his radio broadcasts. Speaking of which, I got a delightful yet disturbing package from Ben Friedlander in the mail this afternoon—it was a little like receiving a copy of the videocassette from The Ring). There was a CD with a picture of Pound giving the Fascist salute in Naples on it, transcripts of two broadcasts, and (just in time!) a tiny (maybe an inch and a half tall) little copy of the Salo or Italian Cantos translated into English, the most outspokenly Fascist of the bunch (Pound never translated the second one, which celebrates the martyrdom of a raped Italian girl who leads a troop of Canadian soldiers into a minefield—in the voice of Guido Cavalcanti, natch), along with a summary of Ben's attempts to get the tapes of Pound's radio broadcasts in some kind of order. There he is: Pound at his absolute ugliest. I will take some time to consider the Salo Cantos tomorrow before I launch into the Pisan Cantos, the most celebrated and controversial book of the bunch.

To go to the hot spot first: I do not claim that choosing to live on not much money in any way alters my fundamental class position. I was brought up an upper-middle class white Jewish boy in the Jersey suburbs and nothing will erase that, nor do I want to erase it. I have accrued tremendous advantages over most people in the same tax bracket thanks to that background; my position is a privileged one. And furthermore I do not live in anything even vaguely resembling real poverty, and I do plan to make a middle class living as a professor someday, though I don't ever expect to be rich. But I do think choosing to be a poet in this society means stepping, willingly or not, outside of normative systems of value that say how much you earn is how much you're worth. There are working-class poets for whom poetry, when practiced in academia, does represent upward mobility, but only a very intelligent moron would choose poetry as their ladder out of the ghetto. Saying "I am poor doing this!" may or may not be very attractive, but it's just the marker of privilege, not the privilege itself, which is a very rare one: to spend most of one's time reading and writing. Yet privilege is bad, isn't it? Would we even use words like "perk" or "privilege" if we thought they had been earned in some way? Privilege is one of the things that Gary seems to mean by "the given." His position seems Levinasian: you are called upon by the Other to yield up your privileges, your givens, whatever they may be. The poet who publishes a book is expected to act in humility because he simply occupies a position that might well have been occupied by someone else. This raises the Unreliable Other Variable or UOV factor well above the others; anyone can Work Hard (provided they've been given the tools to do the work; that's where class comes back into it) and scads of people have Talent. Maybe we need to do a better job of defining the UOV, because without that we aren't likely to come up with anything resembling an image of justice. Which seems to be the main thing on Gary's mind. How to increase participation to the maximum, indeed to an infinite (the only just) degree? How to end privilege by extending it to all? I need better tools than I've got right now to wrassle that question into a limited and therefore answerable form—that is, to confine the question to poets, readers, and the academy without worrying about the extension of the more fundamental privileges Gary brought up: a decent home, good work, plenty to eat.

As for confusing the "act of writing" (being a writer) with "writing," well, I think that sort of conversation is almost always a shorthand, sometimes a necessary shorthand, for things that can only be really well communicated by writing. I would take it further and say that most things worth talking about can only be casually discussed in reified, noun form. You can talk about being a rock climber, but rock climbing is another story. So you toss around the names of famous rock climbers and peaks they've scaled; maybe you talk about the gear they endorse; you talk trash about other rock climbers who haven't climbed as high. This kind of thing is annoying, sure, but I'm not convinced it injures the experience of actual climbing. And only sometimes can questions of personality or a writer's social position be divorced from the writing they do without injury to that writing; without blinding yourself to the context in which it was produced and in which you receive it, which is a part of the content (Gehalt) of the writing I tend to find most interesting. I want as much web of the world as a given poem, book, or node can draw along with itself. To adapt Heidegger's language, I'm mostly interested now in poetry of the world. A lot of what gets called School of Quietude poetry is poetry of the earth: poetry that attempts to make contact with a pre- or a-human experience of nature. Some of this poetry is magnificent and beautiful; some of it merely a diversion. But it's not where I'm at right now. If I'm drawn to pastoral—another way of referring to the poetry of the earth—it's because it's always a state of exception from the world. And it always returns you to the world, more or less prepared for historical work than when you departed. It's that "more" or "less" that most concerns me right now, with Pound, the modernists, and the poetry of the present—including, of course, my own.