Is it really possible to write poetry while gleefully ignoring Ezra Pound, or relegating him to cartoon?

I just stumbed on the 9 x 9 site and one of the questions reads thus:

During World War II Ezra Pound openly and actively supported fascism in Europe. Does this affect how you read his poems? Why or why not?

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE has a very intelligent, reasoned, actually informed answer, first questioning the bald-faced question, then looking at subtleties of response, though I wonder what we would do if Zukofsky never befriended Pound. I mean, wasn't the last straw of the Olson-Pound friendship (Olson traveling to St. Elizabeths to visit) Ezra's insistent belittling of WCW because of Williams' 'impure' blood?

Anyway, Ezra Pound is the Ezra Pound of American poetry. I just don't understand just sort of dismissing him, whether you 'like' him or not (do poets reall just stick to poets they 'like'? isn't that a little delusional, like the Bush administration sticking to policies and idealogies they 'like'?). It's there, it happened, we're in its shadow and pretending we're not doesn't seem to make it less so. Anyway, some responses to the Ezra question:

JIM BEHRLE :

I don't really care about Ezra Pound. I don't read his work. But I'm not sure why we continue to single him out. There are lots of poets with asshole opinions. It's not as though we're dealing with the poems of Mussolini or Hitler. I guess if I read one of his poems and didn't know it was him and liked it and then found out it was him I might be caught up in a wave of guilt. But if we cast out every poet who had dopey opinions from being read or enjoyed, we'd become an inconsequential art.

SOFIA MEMON :

Nothing about Ezra Pound's work ever really appealed to me. I can't help it. I never liked it. Like I never liked William Blake. Not only do I not like it, I find it sort of frumpy and annoying, even when it's trying to be vehement and universal and profound. And I read them that way before I knew Pound was a fascist. But it's very possible that the characteristics that make Pound's writing heavy handed and reminiscent of bad dark wood paneling are the very characteristics that made him sympathetic to a particularly dumb, paternalistic and racist kind of nationalism. More generally, I think poets will inevitably and should be, though not exclusively, read in the context of their lives. I think one very sound and interesting way to read poetry is like historical fiction like a very human, very visceral way to get a handle on the world as it has been and the people who have lived it. So were I to be able to stomach Pound's poetry, that might be the most useful way for me to read it.

MOLLY RUSSAKOFF:

I was very relieved to find out about Ezra Pound's political leanings/ravings because I was never a great reader of Pound, we just did not get along. It gave me a good reason to discard him, especially in speaking with intellectuals.


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Do budding philosophers do this? 'I don't really dig Wittgenstein, plus he wasn't a nice guy, beat his students when he was a schoolmaster and so on, so it makes me happy that I don't have to bother with him.' That seems a little ridiculous. The answers above make me feel as though we're still stuck in the poetry-as-self-expression meadow. I mean if one doesn't really 'read Ezra Pound' who does one read? Just Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan over and over again? (or, if one doesn't listen to, say, Colin Powell because one doesn't really 'like' what he says, who does one listen to? Wolfowitz and Rumsfield over and over again?)