"Allen Ginsberg Forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews" is a verse essay, a form that allows the exploration of ideas and associations as well as the use of documentary material. The stepping off point for the poem is a 1992 interview I did with Allen Ginsberg while writing "The Jew in the Lotus," when Ginsberg made very clear his deep Jewish roots, but also his strong criticism of conventional Jewish American views. (For instance, Ginsberg affirmed that he agreed that "Zionism is racism.")

I've always considered Ginsberg one of my poetic fathers, but at the same time, one incident in particular bothered me greatly: that he went to Venice and accepted Ezra Pound's apology for his anti-Semitism. I always thought that took chutzpah. Especially because the Pound people later waved it like a flag to show that their master really didn't hate Jews. The truth is that he did, and so did many of his followers and associates.

I found a description of the Pound-Ginsberg interchange in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Pound, "A Serious Character." I used to believe some were attracted to Pound's work in spite of his anti-Semitism; I came to understand that some were attracted because of it. Pound's apologists tend to overlook his errors. Instead of reading honestly, they simply skip over the unpleasant parts. Pound himself was more honest at the end of his life, frequently criticizing his work as a failed project. But considering that he broadcast for Mussolini during the war, "suburban anti-Semitism" is a gross understatement of his views. And I think Ginsberg should not have let him off the hook.

On the other hand, I was fascinated by the gesture of forgiveness, which was in many ways inspired by Ginsberg's Buddhist practice. The idea of forgiveness, of learning to forgive, is so important spiritually and in many ways it has been absent from our contemporary Jewish discourse. In that sense, the real subject matter of this poem is neither Ginsberg nor Pound, but my own wrestling with how in some way to forgive both of them. We can't choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.