I’ll try to begin with a past-life regression. In this case, the past life is one of my own that happened in the year 1955, in Hailey, Idaho.

Hailey is famous in literary circles as the birthplace of Ezra Pound, who was a founder of the poetic movement known as imagism, and a defining voice in the cultural movement known as modernism. For those of you who don’t remember modernism, it came before post-modernism, otherwise known as That Of Which We Do Not Speak.

Pound did not found anything while he was in Hailey. His parents moved to Philadelphia in 1887 when he was two. Even if he had wanted to stay and work in Central Idaho’s silver mines instead becoming a successful poet and broadcaster, he yet lacked the words to mount an effective argument for a dangerous and poorly-paid life underground.

It’s difficult to remember things that happened to you when you were two, but a small hint of Pound’s life in Hailey can be detected in The Cantos. Here is an excerpt from “The Garden,” from 1916, that most fatal year of the First World War:

Pound had obviously not been to the Belgian trenches, where those filthy sturdy infants were dying by the millions after being ordered by their officers over the ramparts and into machine-gun fire. He must have instead been thinking about his birth place, where, for awhile, those infants did live to inherit the earth, at least the mined-out, falling-down, starve-acre part of it that was the town of Hailey.

I was one of those infants. My father was one of the men who went down in the mines that lay beneath Idaho’s sagebrush-covered hills. He met my mother in the summer of 1941, at a dance eleven miles north of Hailey in the resort town of Ketchum, famous in literary circles as the location of Ernest Hemingway’s 1961 death. My mother was a nurse at the Hailey Hospital, but by the time I was born in 1950 she was working as a nurse at the Sun Valley resort hospital, where the wages were marginally better and the patients were mostly young and sprained, instead of crushed in the mines or riven with silicosis or cirrhosis or dementia. Our family was living in company housing at the Triumph Mine on the East Fork of Wood River, halfway between Hailey and Ketchum. In literary terms, my life fell midway between the birthplace of a fascist and the killing ground of a suicide.

In 1957, two years after the past-life I’ve promised to begin with, the mayor of Hailey wrote to Ezra Pound in Washington, D.C., at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane, where he had been confined since being arrested in 1945 as a traitor. Due to the anti-Semitic nature of his aid and comfort to the enemy, and the photos and stories out of the death factories of the Nazi empire, it’s likely that if he hadn’t been declared mad, he would have been hung. But the Hailey mayor, sensing Pound’s imminent return to sanity and consequent release, invited him back to his birthplace for the 75th anniversary of the town’s founding. They declared him a native son and invited him home to what honors a town of sturdy unkillables could provide.

Pound wrote back to the effect that if he could have left the Godforsaken town of Hailey in the Godforsaken state of Idaho even before his birth, he would have.