Editing Ezra Pound (section)

===Meeting Ginsberg, Reck, and Russell===
Pound's biographer, Michael Reck, claimed to have had an encounter with Pound at the restaurant of the Pensione Cici in Venice in 1967,<ref name=Reck1986/> during which Pound told [[Allen Ginsberg]] and [[Peter Russell (poet)|Peter Russell]] that his own poems were "a lot of double talk" and made no sense, and that his writing was "a mess", "stupid and ignorant all the way through". Reck wrote about the meeting in ''[[Evergreen Review]]'' the following year. "At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron," Pound reportedly said. He "looked very morose" and barely spoke: "There is nothing harder than conversing with Pound nowadays," Reck wrote.<ref>Reck (1968), 28–29, 84.</ref>

Pound had offered a carefully worded rejection of his antisemitism, according to Reck. When Ginsberg reassured Pound that he had "shown us the way", he is said to have replied: "Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things." Reck continued: "Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.{{'"}}<ref>Reck (1968), 29; Carpenter (1988), 898–899</ref>{{efn|In 1988 [[Christopher Ricks]] took issue with Pound's use of the word ''mistake'', which he wrote was "scarcely commensurate with the political and spiritual monstrosity" of Pound's antisemitism.<ref>Ricks (1988), 54</ref> [[Anthony Julius]] argued in 1995 that Pound's use of the term ''suburban'' was the result of "an arrogance that broods on the descent from an ideal of greatness rather than on the injury which that descent did to others".<ref>Julius (1995), 185.</ref>}}