FIFTH COLUMN
Of Marcello Veneziani
If I think about November 1st 1972, when he died Ezra Pound, A black gondola appears in my eyes as it carries the poet's body in a sober chestnut coffin on its final journey to the Island of San Michele.; his thin, curved, hieratic body, his head framed in a mythical white crown on his head and around his face, which shone in the sun like a hieratic aura. Every time I go to Venice I can't separate what I see from what I remember, every gondola seems to me to preserve the memory of him, the remains of the mad poet, who loved Italy and its tradition, Dante and Cavalcanti.
For days we have been talking insistently about Pound in relation to current events, indeed to political-judicial news. They are indignant that a movement like CasaPound he “appropriated” that name. And, for goodness sake, Ezra Pound House cannot be a besieged fort or an alternative social center for young political militants; but let's remember into which house Pound was forced by the beautiful democratic and Western world: the Pisan cage of a concentration camp, the Saint Elizabeth criminal asylum… Of course, the real Pound House is not a closed place, it is the sea of Venice, the city of art and poetry like Florence, the glorious sky of Rome.
But it's not a question of domicile, indignation hits the appropriation of Pound by a "fascist" movement. Let's look at the issue from both sides, on the side of the users and the author. To the guys at CasaPound and to those who hear the poet's name through them, it can only help to get closer to Pound, and through him to poetry, to literature, to greatness. Or more simply reading, to culture, to thought before action. And for Pound that reference takes nothing away and adds nothing to his genius. Great authors are like fountains open to all, Nietzsche noted in Gay Science, everyone drinks as they want and maybe clouds the water, “the kids dirty it with their own rubbish” and other passers-by throw in “their current affairs” and “their rubbish”; but we are deep and “become clear again”. Times pass, the poets remain.
Geniuses are universal and everyone is free to venerate the genius they want and everyone is responsible for what they do, certainly not the poet. And geniuses like Pound who chose the "wrong" side include almost all the great authors of the 20th century.
But then in Pound's case, it is not a question of misappropriation or distorted use of the poet. I tell this to his daughter Mary who appealed to the judges against CasaPound, I say this to Claudio Magris who dedicated a beautiful portrait to the poet a few days ago but with the idea of removing him from the connection with the fascists. And I say this above all to the group of intellectuals who signed the usual "hands off" Pound because he is a universal poet: but you only find out now, hypocritical and biased teachers? Until yesterday you damned him, you disgusted him precisely because he was a fascist. And precisely as a fascist, Pound had a tormented life and never received the Nobel Prize. Where is the scandal then if the "fascists" refer to Pound?? How can you forget his passionate and delusional speeches – but poets are sometimes delusional – on the radio in support of fascism, its harmony with the social republic? And after the fall of fascism, how can you ignore the verses of the Pisan songs on “Ben e la Clara a Milano”, hanging by the heels? And the Cantos donated in person to Mussolini, the book Jefferson e Mussolini, his battles against usury? How can you forget those beastly months in the Metato concentration camp, in which the poet was exposed in a cage, under the headlights, even forced to defecate in front of everyone, like a monkey, precisely because it was considered fascist? There, where Pound composed his Canti pisani… Atrocious fate.
And then, interned in a criminal asylum in the United States, for thirteen, long years, which truly led him to the threshold of madness and mutism, always for having betrayed America with fascism... Even the last one, old Pound accompanied by Piero Busqueoli visiting Ferrara, who silently caresses the fasces of Palazzo Diamanti... In that silent caress there is an entire ancient and modern love that cost him damnation. You can't step on it twice, the first to make him pay for his fascism, the second to deny it. He paid dearly for it, that platonic love, at least have the decency not to make him pay a second time. Here a doubt creeps in: but all this ambaradam serves to evict CasaPound or deep down you want to evict him, the Poet, remove it, delete it? Let the poets play, they are divine children; even when they seem crazy to you, they are playing creation with the gods.
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P.S. Of “Christ the King”: Pound was a great poet. He wasn't Catholic. Some aspects of his thinking are not, Therefore, shareable.
