Pound Laundry

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Begun as a poet's journal of his reading of Ezra Pound's The Cantos, Michael Gregory's POUND LAUNDRY is a multi-faceted genealogy of Pound the man and the 20th-century modernism he played a major role in producing. Fragments of POUND LAUNDRY have appeared sporadically over the past twenty years; the complete work is presented here for the first time. Poets on the left (Sandburg, Zukofsky, Carruth, Ginsberg, and Bernstein, among others) have spoken highly of Pound's accomplishment and have recognized The Cantos as a seminal text for modernist and postmodernist poetics. In POUND LAUNDRY, keeping one eye on the easy embrace of anti-Semitism, fascism and the like by Pound and other intellectuals and artists of his time, and the other eye on our own era's surge to the right, Gregory sees Pound in the context of contemporary, historical and mythical sources that inform (and deform) his writing--times and places, people and languages, images and ideas, passions and larks--bringing some old chestnuts into new light and some latterday notions into relation.