oh, ezra!

“During the war, Pound tried to persuade a number of bureaucrats in Italy that the cultivation of peanuts would solve Italy’s food shortages – just as he later had syrup-producing American maples planted near Brunnenburg Castle in the South Tyrol, but in the process only managed to introduce poison ivy into the region.”

(note to Canto 74.812 (“and the wops do not use maple syrup”) in Richard Sieburth’s edition of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, p. 130.)

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