Of Marcello Veneziani
Marcello Veneziani held the 16 November 2018, at the Goldoni Theater in Venice, a conversation about Ezra Pound, before the theater show Ezra in the cage”. We publish a summary of it.
Here is the Poet. He's crazy, it's cursed, it is prophetic, he is a martyr to his vision, he is silent, it is hieratic, it is a sacred animal. He had all these requirements Ezra Pound which also had a face, the gaze and aura of the poet. In fact they considered him crazy and locked him in a mental hospital for thirteen years. They caged him and then interned him because he was cursed, on the wrong side. He was a prophet in the delirium of his poetic and political visions, and in his condemnation of usury. It then closed in a long, profound silence, like a defeated oracle, locked in the mysteries of Eleusis, when did the time for silence come?.

And he was hieratic in manner and figure, of a sacred beauty when he became old and a halo of white hair and beard surrounded his face, illuminating it. But he appeared sacred from a young age: a sculptor who sculpted his bust, Gaudier, baptized him Hieratic head, and it was the 1913, Pound was not yet Pound, he was only twenty-eight. And to conclude on a high note, the poet died in Venice, and four gondolas paraded in mourning took him to the cemetery of San Michele, in a farewell ceremony that only in Venice can make the death of a poet blacker and more sacred. Marinetti had also gone to die in Venice.
Thinking about his life, you have the impression that the imago, that is, the hieratic aspect marked Pound's sacred and delirious destiny. And that his life was a whirlwind, a dizziness. But it was precisely imagism, it was precisely vorticism, the name that Pound chose to indicate his art and his poetry. The vortex is the point of maximum energy, he explained, it's the point where everything starts to quickly revolve around a center, a whirlwind of emotions. And if one thinks of the Cantos who accompanied Pound for almost his entire life, a masterpiece that lasted sixty years and perhaps more, the idea they leave you is precisely of a vortex in which images swirl, visions, pieces of the present, fragments of the future, artefacts from the past, in a chaos of elements, because every age is contemporary says Pound. This is vorticism. If you want to get an idea of ​​vorticism, think of the XXVI canto of hell, when Dante describes the tragic end of Ulysses' feat of challenging the unknown and crossing the Pillars of Hercules. “From the new earth a turbo was born” “three times the fè revolves with all the waters”. Here's the vortex, the new land is America from which Pound comes, in the ocean the vortex sucks the ship and its daring navigators. And Pound wrote the Divine Comedy of the twentieth century; God was missing, its order and its perfection, but there was no lack of nostalgia for the gods.
His poetry is in step with his times, with the artistic avant-gardes, with the experimentalism of the early twentieth century. But Pound's strength and originality is that together with modernism and the criticism of the Victorian age, the passion for the original resonates, for the ancient, for the Provençal Middle Ages, polite and stylish. Because his poetry does not want to break with tradition, yes Dante you pre-Raphaelite, does not disdain the glories of the past, as futurism does instead, but it envelops them in its vortex. His poetry, Giorgio Agamben was right, marks the unprecedented fracture of tradition; he inhabits the devastated Earth, something different from his friend Eliot's Waste Land. The edges of tradition swirl like rubble, in a kaleidoscope, between flights of fancy, absurd assonances. The Cantos are a disconcerting workshop, delusional. But poetry, per Pound, must “fill the chaos, popular solitudes, multiply images, and mark a sterile path to paradise". The poet has a task: “fill the void with stars”. Almost a divine substitute, fill an essential loss.
Ma Pound, like the greats of his time, in the first place d'Annunzio, it is for the total poetry that pours into action, which is economical, Work, history and politics. Hence his hope in fascism, his enthusiasm for the Renaissance and the rejuvenation of Italy, the myth of the Dux, ancient history that returns to the fascists, in the struggle between gold and work, the resurrection of the civilization of Dante and Cavalcanti.
But "if a man is not willing to take some risk for his ideas or his ideas are worth nothing or he is worth nothing". E Pound, with the recklessness of the poets he meets his fate in prison, madhouse and damnation. They will even deny him a Nobel for his "fascism". But he responds in verse, that it was not vanity "to have gathered a living tradition from the wind" or "from a beautiful ancient eye an inviolate flame".
In the end, you will see his meeting again with Pasolini, who interviewed him for Rai in '67. Pasolini hated Pound but then discovered that something pushed him to look for him. When he was in his presence he addressed him with Poundian verses: “I make a pact with You. I've hated you for too long now. I come to you as a grown child who had a hard-headed father. I'm old enough now to make friends. You were the one who carved the wood. Now it's time to cut down the new forest together. We have only one stem and one root. May relations be re-established between us". And Pound welcomed the friendship. They were carved from the same wood: peasant civilization, love for Tradition, the rejection of capitalism. Both scandalous, apocalyptic and "unadaptable" as Pasolini said of Pound. Pasolini also defined himself as “a force from the past, in tradition it is my love". And he attended the “Afterstoria”, come Pound, “from the extreme edge of some buried age”. In the end Pasolini bowed to timeless greatness, more scandalous than his, to the poet's aura. They both died, in very different ways, on the bridge of the dead, three years later. Pound had written: “Let such a flame arise from my tomb that anyone who passes by will feel its heat”. That flame and that heat inspired this journey around Pound, the mad and sacred poet. In the end, “What you truly love is your heritage”.
MV, 17 November 2018
SOURCE: http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/scandaloso-pound/