“Guido, I haven’t learned it yet!”
Cavalcanti

1One of the most moving pages to emerge from Pound’s final decade of anomie is his small obit for T. S. Eliot, which begins, “His was the true Dantes-can voice” and ends, “I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM” (SP 464). Pound’s urgency, now close to a century old, is revealed clearly here but its goal of getting from the page we read to the true voice of poetry remains elusive. That elemental demand, READ, when we apply it to Pound himself, leads, not out of, but directly into the ethical, poetic, and epistemological labyrinth that he has bequeathed his readers.

2Pound insisted that Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese characters at sight; is it possible to imagine a reader who could read The Cantos at sight? Should we count Mussolini in “Canto XLI”? Not really: he instantaneously “catches the point” of what was apparently Pound’s oral recitation. There is the testimony of the American poet Diane Di Prima, who states that she could see light emanating from the pages of The Cantos. But, again, that’s not reading. Reading, in Pound’s scenarios, is not a long-lasting activity; it often quickly yields to the higher, more elemental activity of seeing. There’s an implicit hierarchy of activities in the Gaudier-Brzeska anecdote: he could read Chinese without ANY STUDY, “Of course you can SEE it’s horse” (ABCR 21). For Pound, seeing is the highest state; study can be honorable; but reading? The famous sentence in Guide to Kulchur, “The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand,” does not praise reading, especially when we continue on to the next sentences: “To read and be conscious of the act of reading is for some men (the present writer among them) to suffer. I loathe the operation” (GK 55). Reading as an unregulated, generalized social activity is often treated as comic, or worse:

“Buk!” said the Second Baronet, “eh…
“Thass a funny lookin’ buk” said the Baronet
Looking at Bayle, folio, 4 vols. in gilt leather, “Ah…
“Wu… Wu…wot you goin’eh to do with ah…
“…ah read-it?”(XXVIII 139)

3Most of us, I suspect, do actually read Pound, and had to study to do so. I want to examine this process, which I find increasingly enigmatic, even as my experience of reading Pound continues to be one of instantaneous recognition. But what, finally, am I recognizing? This question leads to others: What is involved in learning to read Pound? Having learnt, what does one then know, beyond that particular expertise? More pointedly: Is learning to read Pound a long, difficult acquisition of folly? The polemic word, “folly,” comes from Basil Bunting’s great poem, “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos”: “There are the Alps,/ fools!” More on that later.

4Pound’s contradictoriness is now a familiar lesson: no poet in the 20^th Century did more to enliven English-language poetry; but for long stretches he hardly uses the English language at all. No poet insisted more on the circulation of crucial fact; none was more secretive and eccentric. None was more generous; none more possessed by phobic hate. The enemy of all beaneries; the Provost of the Ezraversity. Modernist; 19^th-century medievalist. Inventor of the 20^th-century epic poem; “minor satirist.” Polymath; bluffer. Pedagogue; solipsist.

5Reading is at the heart of these contradictions. Yes, there is Pound the passionate pedagogue, author of ABC of Reading; but the alphabet, that foundation of sequence and convention, became increasingly impossible for him to use without deforming orthography or escaping to other systems of notation. Yes, there are many moments like his urbane questions in “Propertius”: “But for something to read under normal circumstances?/For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?” (CSP 207); yet the phrase “normal circumstances” designates a concept that is the site of tremendous conflict. For Pound, who wrote, “Quite simply, I want a new civilization,” normal circumstances are not desirable. Normal circumstances are, increasingly, the production site of sullied pages. Just how sullied is made clear by the Hell Cantos, at whose the center we find the printing press, the published word: “howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house,/the clatter of presses […] dung hatching obscenities/inchoate error/boredom born out of boredom/british weeklies, copies of the… c, […] a continual bum-belch/distributing its productions” (XIV 61 ; XV 65). Hell, it seems, overflows with uncontrolled reading matter.

6Without the intervention of a live, authoritative voice, words on paper are dead, or deadly, for Pound. Consider this quote from Rock-Drill:

Justinian’s codes inefficient
     “abbiamo fatto un mucchio…
(a haystack of laws on paper)
             Mus. viva voce:
“We ask ‘em to settle between ‘em.
      If they can’t, the State intervenes.” (LXXXVII 585)

7Words on paper can only catch the shadow of the great man. As Pound writes of Lenin, “he was of interest, technically, to serious writers. He never wrote a sentence that has any interest in itself, but he evolved almost a new medium, a sort of expression half way between writing and action” (SP 74).

8But at this point I hear the voice of Poundian common-sense, that oxymoron, asking if it hasn’t become increasingly possible and even easy to read Pound. Yes of course it has. We have been living in the Pound Era or, more precisely, the Golden Age of Pound Studies for close to half a century. This period arose, antithetically, out of the initial post -War moment, explosively articulated by Pisa, Pound’s non-trial, and the Bollingen controversy, when there was no cultural space for reading Pound, only for saving or condemning the name and the person, Pound. Led by the work of Hugh Kenner and the faith of James Laughlin, decades of work have followed, during which Pound’s already-published writing was read assiduously; much of the huge bulk of his other public and private writing was published; the ramifications of his references were exfoliated, his ellipses were spelled out, the ideograms were translated and, when necessary, turned right-side-up. His Fascism and anti-Semitism were mostly moved to the side, glossed variously as stress, irascibility, naivete, paranoia, tragedy. A minority position, represented by Casillo among others (I’m in this camp), made these aspects central to Pound’s poetic address. This stage of explication, annotation, supplementation continues; arguments about the degree of Fascism or anti-Semitism present in a given work or passage are likely to remain vexed. In fact, arguments about cultural meanings of any of Pound’s work are likely to remain vexed. Ron Bush’s recent essay on the textual history of the Pisan Cantos, “‘Quiet, Not Scornful’?” is exemplary in letting us read Pound much more accurately than before. But what we are reading is “almost a new medium, a sort of expression half way between writing and action”: we factor in Pound’s many contradictory actions and reactions before and during his incarceration at Pisa, making the import of lines like “The enormous tragedy in the peasant’s bent shoulders” or “Pull down thy vanity” less and less knowable. Pound was fond of quoting Ford’s dictum: “get a dictionary/and learn the meanings of words” (XCVIII 703). But there is no Poundian dictionary that can be separated from the experience of reading, deciphering, and adjudicating his work.

9This might not immediately seem like a problem. Wouldn’t the process of learning-Pound-by-reading-Pound be similar to the anecdote of Agassiz’s fish where the student is led first to dismiss received ideas, then fustian nomenclature, and finally is brought to the source, the fish itself? But that anecdote encodes a simulacrum of learning. To summarize my account from The Trouble with Genius: Agassiz demands that the student describe a fish. “That’s only a sunfish” is an insufficient answer; so is the learned term—which “is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge.” Next, the student’s essay is rejected. Finally, after long staring at the decomposing fish, punctuated by interviews with the laconic Agassiz, “the student knew something.” (ABCR 17-18). Decades back, I found this a captivating picture of the necessity of empiricism. But now it strikes me as odd science. What does that student know? There are no communicable terminologies; in fact, the narrative presents language and the written word as obstructions to learning. Knowledge resides in the unchanging Agassiz, who is beyond everyday linguistic circulation. What looks initially like a commitment to empiricism will lead finally to authoritarian idealism. By the late cantos Agassiz is a Dantescan heavenly figure: “Agassiz with the fixed stars” (XCIII 639).

10The terms and proper names in Pound’s writing tend to be proper only to his own system. They are his stamp scrip, to be redeemed in his own valley. How usable any of it will be in the world outside that system will always be a question. But the more fluent we become in Pound’s language where plain-spokenness and eccentrically-coded reference cohere in a tight knot the less pressing such questions become. As we learn the intricacies of this Poundian knot, we do not simply leave ignorance outside as we gain entrance into a Tempio of knowledge; inside, the light is powerful, but like the light in a black hole, none escapes the crushing gravity of Pound’s collapsed historical assumptions. We have to leave the Tempio to learn that Agassiz was an crusader against Darwin and a foundational figure in the development of 19th-century scientific racism. We will not learn it from Pound.

11I’m writing this talk as a poet formed by the Ezraversity. Although it’s doubtful that I graduated, my casual attendance there was crucial for my writing and my thinking about poetics. One of the first lessons I received, and still the most permanent, was that poetry was valuable to the extent that it connected with an ambitious sense of its communal usefulness: thus my impatience with such sterile coinage as “Agassiz to the fixed stars” (XCIII 639).

12At the root of my impatience—which of course echoes similar impatience in Pound—was a vision of perfectly vivid reading and writing. This semi-primal scene of reading didn’t involve The Cantos, which initially was simply a forbiddingly attractive badge of poetic difficulty. I must have opened the book, but have no memory of the pages. For me, the first conscious traces were left by ABC of Reading and soon after, Guide to Kulchur. I was an aspiring poet and Pound’s panache, humor and aggression won me over completely: as Pound revealed it, poetry was a vast, learnable field, always lively, always immediate.

Knowledge is or may be necessary to understanding, but it weighs as nothing against understanding, and there is not the least use or need of retaining it in the form of dead catalogues once you understand process.
Yet, once the process is understood it is quite likely that the knowledge will stay by a man, weightless, held without effort.
About thirty years ago, seated on one of the very hard, very slippery, thoroughly uncomfortable chairs of the British Museum main reading room… I lifted my eyes to the tiers of volumes and false doors covered with imitation bookbacks which surround that focus of learning. Calculating the eye-strain and the number of pages per day that a man could read, with deduction for say at least 5 % of one man’s time for reflection, I decided against it. (GK 53)

13Here was that weightless feeling of certainty; a live voice set off from the mass of useless writing, false doors and imitation book backs, which could be confidently dismissed. It was a compelling understanding what it was to be a poet. Like many moments in Pound, it offered an instantaneous glimpse of the Ezraversity. Learning there was anti-systematic, intuitive, instantaneous; in fact, perhaps it wasn’t learning at all, but recognition. I enrolled immediately.

14But, now, decades later, the question: Recognition of what? I’d now say this scene presents a battle in which books are mastered, where not-reading is as important, if not more important, than reading. Pound’s commitment to reading as commonsense efficiency changes over the course of his career into a position where literary discrimination between good and negligible work becomes conflated with his obsessions over racial and social contamination: the pointed observation in ABC of Reading, “The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden,” leads to such moments as this in Rock-Drill:

To Kung, to avoid their encirclement,
To the Odes to escape abstract yatter,
     to Mencius, Dante, and Agassiz
          for Gestalt seed,
pity, yes, for the infected,
                   but maintain antisepsis,
let the light pour.
(XCIV 649)

15Over the latter decades of his career, most reading matter was toxic to Pound; and he never tired of sounding the alarm.

16“Fratres Minores” presents an instructive picture of Poundian reading. This occurs in the version of “Fratres Minores” published in the initial issue of Blast and censored after typesetting at the request of the printer, John Lane. It is a small, not particularly wonderful poem written in the persona of a Roman epigrammatist; but the typographical conflict visible in the inked-out lines, indicating larger social conflicts, and the poem’s place at the beginning of Pound’s turn from Imagisme to larger polemical violence of Vorticism, Volitionism, and totalitarian synthesis give it real significance.

17If we don’t attempt to peer behind the three thick lines of ink, the poem reads as follows:

FRATRES MINORES.
[blocked out line]
Certain poets here and in France
Still sigh over established and natural fact
Long since fully discussed by Ovid.
They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted meters
[blocked out line]
[blocked out line]

19These lines could be called “Projective Verse” if we mean that in Freud’s, not Charles Olson’s sense. Pound projects onto the unnamable French and British poets qualities similar to those that he himself manifested as the author of that small masterpiece of delicate and exhausted meter, “The Return.” “Fratres Minores” is part of Pound’s revisionary commandeering of the Classics: Ovid here is an early version of the authoritative “male of the species,” to cite the later Poundian epithet for Mussolini. His name is a stick to beat effeminate poets, in a brutal elision of the social-poetic battles over the Classics that had raged during the half century before “Fratres Minores.” Notable participants and sites in those wars included Matthew Arnold; the proto-Lesbian dyad known as Michael Field; Oscar Wilde; the pseudographic “Songs of Bilitis.” The Arnoldian view, where the classics were touchstones of unchanging social value in support of liberal gradations of cultural capital was utterly antithetical to the Paterian/Wildean use of them to represent a utopian proto-homo-sexuality or Field’s Sapphic imitations and the Bilitis hoax, both of which were rallying points for an emerging lesbian culture. In this historical context, designating “Ovid” to mark “established and natural fact,” i.e., heterosexual erotic truth, is unintentionally ironic in the same way as is Pound’s description of H.D’s poetry as “straight as the Greek.”

20None of this prior fifty years of unresolved cultural din is audible in “Fratres Minores,” which aims for a tone of imperturbable sophistication. This tone is somewhat belied by the confused satire that emerges from the uncensored version and, on another level, more thoroughly belied by the censoring lines of ink in the Blast version. When we read the uncensored version we find an attempt at a dispassionate anatomical perspective, but the satirical point is muddied as the unnamable poets turn into jaded roues by the end. It becomes hard to separate Ovid’s “natural fact” from their overfamiliarity with untranscen-dent orgasm:

With their minds hovering above their testicles,
Certain poets here and in France
Still sigh over established and natural fact
Long since fully discussed by Ovid.
They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted meters
That the twitching of three abdominal nerves
Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana. (CSP 148)

21The censored version is more consequential in Pound’s poetic trajectory. The lines of ink are visually powerful. To paraphrase Gaudier-Brzeska’s remark, “Of course you can SEE… ”—but what can you see? The power of social stupidity, it seems, since society still outlaws Ovid’s natural fact. This puts society-at-large in the same camp as the unnamable poets, which has the further consequence that Ovid’s “natural fact” is not at all established.

22Here we have something like the blueprint for Pound’s subsequent overde-termined poetic rage. The black lines are visual proof of “the time lag” or “the historic blackout” he complains of so frequently. Two thousand years ago, Ovid discussed natural fact—fully. Yet bad poets delay the news and deflect it into poetic nullity, while contemporary society—the printers, the courts, the populace—block it out completely. And those thick black lines have all the visual power. Thus Pound’s would-be urbanity occupies a precarious marginalized position.

23But the black lines work another way as well: they can be read, not as stigmata applied by society to the poem, but as powerful boundary markers wielded by Pound to keep profane readers out. Pound will repeat such gestures persist-ently: for example:

The Duce and Kung fu Tseu equally perceive that their people need poetry; that prose is NOT education but the outer courts of the same. Beyond its doors are the mysteries. Eleusis. Things not to be spoken save in secret.
The mysteries self-defended, the mysteries that cannot be revealed. Fools can only profane them… It is quite useless for me to refer men to Provence, or to speculate on Erigena in the marketplace. (GK 144-145)

Sero! sero! learned that Spain is mercury;
that Finland is nickel. Late learning!
S……doing evil in place of the R
“A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor and no man learned anything from them for their speaking in figures.”     (C/Addendum 813)

25The ellipses are transparent to one fluent in Pound (or to one with access to Terrell’s Guide). We know that S is Sassoon and R is the Rothschilds. But such “knowledge” leads with the most banal predictability straight to Pound’s manias. The intended urbanity of the last lines with their world-weariness over the inability of most poetry to teach anything is deeply antithetical to the ellipses, unless the dynamic of the black lines is applied to it. The word whose meaning remains most eccentric here is “learning,” late or not. Pound’s time-lag is not something that can be ameliorated by long periods of study. Only the initiated, who already know, are worthy of learning. The dynamic of recognition and/or secrecy hold sway along all the fronts of Pound’s rhetoric.

26This dynamic is my model of what is involved in reading Pound. I want to contrast it to the one suggested by my good friend, Charles Bernstein, in “Pounding Fascism,” where he claims that Pound has systematically misinterpreted the nature of his own literary production… Pound’s great achievement was to create a work using ideological swatches from many social and historical sectors of his own society and an immense variety of other cultures…

[Pound’s work] is filled with indeterminacy, fragmentation, abstraction, obscurity, verbiage, equivocation, ambiguity, allegory… [he] has made the highest art of removing ideologies from their origins and creating for them a nomadic economy… in the abstraction of aestheticization and the irresolution of the jarring harmonies of incommensurate sound. (i 24)

27In spots, this is a quite accurate description of Bernstein’s own poetry, which is quite often “the art of removing ideologies from their origins” and in which we always hear “the irresolution of the jarring harmonies of incommensurate sound.” But to apply this to Pound? Perhaps my own approach to fluency in Pound has blinded me—deafened me—to the freedoms that Bernstein sees-hears. But I’m afraid that I never find any ideological detaching going on in Pound. What can be seen, on just about any page of The Cantosis a fantastically intricate verbal-visual surface, which can simply be treated as surface, which happens in Cage’s “Writing Through the Cantos” and Mac Low’s Words and Ends From Ez. These are important works; and they never would have existed without Pound. It’s not just that he provided the source text, but that, without Pound, no Zukofsky; without Zukofsky, no procedural poetics. When it’s stated that abstractly, of course it’s arguable: many others contributed to the development of proceduralism—Duchamp, Bob Brown, Moore, etc. But it’s not arguable to say that Pound’s practice was the crucial instigation for so much of what’s interesting in American poetry in the 20^th Century: Olson, Creeley, Ginsberg, Melvin Tolson, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews, to begin listing.

28But to get back to the particular impossibility at hand: reading Pound. Cage and Mac Low are not reading him; they areprocessing his words. Their procedures function like Perseus’s shield against the Gorgon: going through each word, each letter systematically guarantees immunity from Pound’s initiatory address to the reader.

29Can Pound be read? Basil Bunting’s poem, written on the actual book, seems to say “No.”

ON THE FLY-LEAF ON POUND’S CANTOS
There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l’on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! (110)

30As I read it, this poem is not optimistic about the possibilities of any one person actually reading Pound. There are only runic mountains, glaciers, jumbled materiality, foreign music—no reading. The picture is not a man holding a ball of light in his hand, reading for power; rather, it is the sardonic estrangement of “There are the Alps/fools!”

31This brings me back to my initial polemical word, and my troubled conclusion here. To make a schematic reduction: both the initiate and the reader for whom Pound is not legible are fools, of different types perhaps. Outsiders are called fools specifically: “The mysteries self-defended, the mysteries that can not be revealed. Fools can only profane them,” to re-cite Guide to Kulchur. But the more fully one “enters arcanum” the more one is committed to reproducing the privacies of Pound’s mysteries.

32But such a conclusion echoes the problematic binarism that so plagued Pound. Made too simple, my model turns Pound’s writing into nothing but proper names, authoritatively beyond all social linguistic fluidity, and black lines where the powerless, censored poet censors back. As readers, we are left with nothing but the blinding certainty emanating from “Ovid,” “Mussolini” or “Kung” or the utter darkness of damning ink. While that may be the ultimate systematic implication of Pound’s address, it’s not true to any actual moment of reading.

34As I first presented “Fratres Minores,” I assumed we wouldn’t peer behind the black lines. But of course we do. In my Black Sparrow reproduction, the ink is not as transparent as Iris Barry says; but it is a little bit translucent. It is the same in the the poet Steve MacCaffery’s first edition, once the property of Major Douglas’snephew, James Douglas. This Douglas has pencilledinwords above the blocked out lines. Again, it seems typical of Pound that there would be a textual crux of sorts. Contrary to the fully-printed version, Douglas writes the first line out as follows: “With their minds still hovering about their testicles.” We can confirm the accuracy of this by peering closely through the ink: “about” is indicated much more strongly than “above.”

35Now, if you like, it would be possible to load a lot of significance on this. It forms a variant of an I Ching hexagram: “minds above testicles”: that’s the kind of mental retreat from the body that Lawrence loves to castigate. With “minds about testicles,” on the other hand, suddenly the unnamable poets are sex-obsessed.

36But I don’t find this change all that crucial. If I had to, I’d choose “above their testicles” as the more accurate version. But either way, the crucial thing is us reading—which involves the effort of peering through estranging ink toward words we hope to recognize as belonging to our language.

37Does this make us fools?