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.
For many years an internationally-engaged environmental activist, Gregory holds an interdepartmental BA in History, English and Philosophy, an MA in English, and has done post-graduate work at UC Irvine and at the UCLA Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology. His previous books include Mr America Drives His Car (selected poems, Post- Soviet Depression Press), re: Play, Hunger Weather 1959-1975, and The Valley Floor.
A co-founder of the Bisbee (Arizona) Poetry Festival and of the Central School Project artists cooperative in Bisbee where for ten years he hosted the Poets Voice reading series, since the early 70s, he has lived off-grid in the high desert of southeast Arizona ten miles from the US-Mexico border, the setting for much of his writing. His website is at www.michaelgregory.org.