Ezra Pound looks both querulous and almost

slightly shifty in Walter Mori’s

black and white photograph taken

on the Fondamenta Nani, Venice,

in the winter of 1963,

the ageing poet in overcoat and scarf.

 

The photographer was creating

a series of images of cultural

phenomena. He has his subject stand,

not in one of the usual settings,

like St Mark’s Square, but on this narrow path

beside the Rio San Travaso –

one the busiest, most direct walk ways

from the Grand Canal to the Zattere.

For cognoscenti, over Pound’s right shoulder,

dimly is the Squero di San Travaso,

one of the oldest gondola boatyards.

 

Caught in the image is a passerby

who has walked on then suddenly turned,

a man with startlingly large, black rimmed

spectacles, like a burlesque foreign agent,

who has stopped as if amazed or appalled

by what he has just seen – hence perhaps

Pound’s expression, his paranoia

overcoming his vanity. Like

some provincial tragic hero

in self-exile –  his hubris, by his own

confession, ‘that stupid suburban

prejudice of anti-semitism’ –

he poses reluctantly in a city

of decaying labyrinthine passage ways,

surrounded by unending waters.

 

A much younger man, during the First World War,

he wrote about poetry, charmingly

and dogmatically denigrating

the Fin de Siècle’s ‘…rhetorical din…

luxurious riot…painted adjectives…’.

His reputation suffers, in retrospect,

from what might be termed the Wagner Syndrome.

Genius and fascist – how is it possible to

both approve and condemn?