On Ezra Pound in Italy | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review: From 1962 to his death in 1972, Pound stayed with Olga often spending the winters in Rapallo and the summers in Venice. His mood remained pessimistic, and he started to believe that his life had been a series of blunders. He told an Italian journalist, Grazia Levi, “I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered. … All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning.” In October 1967 he told Allen Ginsberg in Rapallo that his poetry was, “A mess … my writing, stupidity and ignorance all the way through,” and told him later in Venice, “… I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron … I should have been able to do better…”