Pound for me was always the beginning. By that I don't mean that he was the greatest -- I'm reasonably sure I don't believe in such a thing -- but that if I were to draw a spatial map of poetry, rather like the one suggested by Jack Spicer in his famous Magic Workshop questionnaire, Pound would sit at the center, like the sun in a Ptolemaic universe. More than any other poet, he is the one in which you can see & hear -- especially hear -- contemporary poetry emerge from its Victorian roots. The new Library of America Poems & Translations is a great gathering of Pound the Victorian, The Cantos are Pound the Modern. The Pisan Cantos are very nearly Pound, our contemporary. It's not the same, say, for Williams, whose early Keatsian work reads like the juvenilia it is. And virtually every other poet sits cleanly on one side of the line or the other: Frost on the before, Hart Crane on the after, Stein definitely on the after & so forth.

 

Plus Pound knew everyone. He's the Grand Central Station of poetry. More than any other poet, before or since, Pound understood the role of social organization, of simply putting X in touch with Y. His correspondence, which I once read unedited from beginning to end in microfiche while at UC Berkeley, is full of the bluster & nonsense everyone associates with his prose, especially when he's discussing something he's pretty sure he doesn't really know (that's when the Ol' Possum & Uncle Ez crap really gets thick), but underneath is that constant connecting, connecting, connecting. Just as everyone can play the Kevin Bacon game*, just as so many mathematicians have their Erdös number, based upon how many articles they co-wrote with the famous homeless genius, everybody in poetry can be connected to Pound, and thus through Pound, in some fashion. That's how you connect Alfred Starr Hamilton with Andrew Motion with Cesar Vallejo with kari edwards. As in Ron Silliman studied with Robert Grenier who studied with Robert Lowell whom Pound once praised, however foolishly. Or Silliman knew Robert Creeley who knew Charles Olson who visited Pound often at St. Elizabeth's. Or or or. What is your Pound number?

 

I first read The Cantos when I was 19 & 20 -- there was a period there when I was reading the Van Buren Cantos & The Lord of the Rings simultaneously. I'd come to The Cantos after having read The New American Poetry, but not by a lot, no more than 18 months. It obviously made an impression on me -- I even wrote to Pound, telling him how to conclude the work.**

 

At some point early on, I decided that I need a reasonably complete poetry library, at whose center Pound sat. Which meant as I began to fill in the library that I needed/wanted those books that connected his world up with present day poetry. That is a particular path, by no means the only way to track the course of time & history in poetry, but it seemed a fundamentally useful approach to me. And that meant, for example, that even if I didn't instinctively connect with the Objectivists at first, or at least with some of them, that I still felt I needed to go out & get the books &, even more, to read them. I'd already read & liked Zukofsky, but the book that really extended my appreciation beyond just his work was a chapbook published by Cleveland poet Ron Caplan -- I think that was the name -- a reissue of Discrete Series, George Oppen's first book (& still my favorite of his works). I very quickly got copies of the later books, acquiring This in Which via a five-finger discount at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee bookstore, because I didn't have the money for the book & couldn't imagine, having just seen it for the first time, not having it immediately & forever.

 

If you'd asked me at the time -- say 1968 or thereabouts -- I would have said that the Objectivists were important for connecting Pound & Williams to the present, especially to Olson, Creeley & the projectivists. But in reality, I think that reading these works in the other direct proved to be at least as important. I knew, for example, that Olson's best poetry was extraordinary, Creeley's likewise, and I felt the same with regard to Pound & Williams. But now I had a sense of how these two parts of the universe fit together -- my sense of the shape of American poetry was no longer discontinuous, this book & this book & this book.

 

That sense of continuity is important. It began to enable me to absorb more & more of my reading into an ever-evolving sense of American poetry as a thing in itself. Sense in the previous sentence is a deliberately more abstract term than, say, shape, because the way things "fit" don't always strike me as having a spatial metaphor (e.g., how Annie Finch's ear could be traced to Robert Duncan in one direction, to Lee Ann Brown in another, even as she herself comes out of a tradition quite different from [& often opposed to] either). Yet one of the questions I find myself always asking when I come across something new is "how does this fit?" Because it does, invariably, somewhere, somehow. And, also invariably, changes the shape of things as it does.

 

I don't think Pound, per se, is absolutely necessary to this approach to reading -- Cary Nelson's great achievement in Repression & Recovery is that he does much the same thing starting from a most counterintuitive part of the terrain, leftist doggerel. But I do think that Pound is the easiest place for a young person to begin, more so than any of his peers, more so than any single poet who has come after. And I do think that one of the advantages that poets attracted to Pound's Cantos have had over the past 50 years is just that -- they have an easier tasking putting together their sense of how poetry in the world comes together. If you started with, say, Richard Wilbur, you would have to figure out (a) how & why the old formalism stopped so abruptly***, (b) how & why it began again & (c) how it relates back to non-formalist poetries. Eventually that gets you to Pound again, but the process is more circuitous & I'm not sure that's of any intellectual value to a young writer, as such.

 

In contrast, I have never felt any difficulty building backward, say, from Pound. Or toward "anti-Poundian" writing. Pound's is the poetry that seems to me to lead most easily to Milton & Chaucer & to The Prelude as well as to those European modernists who were very much his antithesis.

 

My non-fiction or theoretical reading, by contrast, has never had a figure who played such a connective role. The closest might be Walter Benjamin, or more likely some conjunction of him, Wittgenstein & Marx. But I've gone through periods where I read a lot of theory & others where I read very little. Right now, other than Watten's Constructivist Moment, I'm not reading a lot. Rather, my weblog has made me conscious of the degree to which American poetry has moved on since the 1980s, say, and that there is a map of younger writers waiting to be painted. So I've dramatically increased the amount of reading I'm doing of work by younger -- by which I mostly mean under 40 -- poets. Which has been great for me -- I've discovered people like Tsering Wangmo Dhompa or Graham Foust or nearly one hundred other poets, who are completely new to me & doing interesting, often fabulous work. So this is the part of the library that right now I'm most interested in building, in working on.

 

But another way that this question might asked, or answered, is which reading, non-poetry wise, has proven of the greatest value. In part, the answer is obviously all of the above, but the other part is that the reading I've done that has proven of greatest value, from the perspective of my own poetry, falls into a few specific categories:

 

(1)         Linguistics: especially the writings of Saussure, Roman Jakobson (Six Essays on Sound & Meaning is criminally out of print, but it's the most important work), George Lakoff & the current generation of cognitive linguistics. From the perspective of poetic practice, tho, Chomsky's work was a giant waste of time. From my perspective, Wittgenstein & the analytic philosophers fit here.

(2)         Western Marxism: all of it, for its variants & connections, from Sartre & Gramsci & Kautsky, to the early books of Fred Jameson & Perry Anderson. The Frankfort School is key here, tho I disagree with most of its adherents -- Adorno's aesthetics are really bad. Althusser is another one of those people who needs to be read just so you can argue with him -- he does have the one reasonable definition of ideology, but his version of Capital is the worst sort of economic determinism. For me, coming out of this reading, the whole history of continental philosophy & that version of postmodernism, makes a kind of sense it never would have without the necessary background.

(3)         Discourses ancillary to poetry: art criticism, music theory, anthropology -- fields that enable me to look at my practice with a different perspective. Barrett Watten has written of how Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object was critical to my development as a poet, & basically he's right about that. I could stick Wittgenstein & Quine et al here also.

 

If you were to catalog my house by shelf space, you would find roughly 36 shelves devoted to poetry (plus another dozen or so "mounds"), a dozen shelves devoted to non-fiction -- a ratio that is misleading given how slender so many important books of poetry have been (so that there may be a 25 to 30 to 1 ratio in actual number of books) -- and, if you look at a single bookcase next to the furnace room, a little over six shelves devoted to fiction. If I go hot/cold when it comes to reading theory & nonfiction, I've been a far more steady reader of novels (and maybe once a year a collection of short stories). Steady but slow -- it's my bedtime reading or for those rare occasions when I decide to soak in the tub. I began to think about fiction seriously when I was in college & specifically when I began to think of the prose poem -- at that time I was focused almost exclusively on Moby Dick, Ulysses & three or so of Faulkner's novels, all works in which the role of the sentence is particularly powerful & important. My reading here is far less systematic -- I'm slowly making my way through Proust, one volume every year or so, reading W.G. Sebald (at Gil Ott's insistence), David Markson, some of the Phillip K. Dick reissues that have shown up of late. And a fair number of the ones I complete I don't bother to save -- I'm never going to read those Robert Parker "Spenser novels" again, even the ones I liked.

 

 

 

 

* As in "Charles Bernstein was in Finding Forrester (2000) with Sean Connery. Sean Connery was in The Dream Factory (1975) with Eli Wallach. Eli Wallach was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon." Or "Kathy Acker was in The Golden Boat ?(1990) with Jim Jarmusch. Jim Jarmusch was in The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera (1996) with Tim Robbins. Tim Robbins was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon." Both taken from The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia. Everyone is connected to Kevin Bacon. My sons go to school with Hannah Pilkes, who is in The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon.

 

** With a high contrast photo of the Hong Kong harbor, ancient rattletrap Chinese junks alongside giant cargo ships, all functionally in silhouette. I saw The Cantos as moving not just toward ideogram, but toward image as such. I have no idea if Pound ever got the letter; I never got a reply.

 

*** There were virtually no major formalists born in the 1930s, which accounts for the gap betwixt "old" & "new."