Ezra Pound

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. Read More