Ezra Pound and the Transformation of Genital Fluid

Ezra Pound's postcript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love begins by accepting as a possibility the idea that the brain is "only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve" (295). Instead of merely being a kooky idea, however, this is a kooky idea that fits well with my reading of Pound's poetry, and in particular fits with the Apollo complex I've been developing to characterize Pound's poetic and philosophical perspective.

It's important to note that Pound uses this idea as a springboard for his aesthetic and practical concerns. In particular, he argues that Gourmont's idea "would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images" (295). There is a direct link between male sexual desire and the creative impulse. While this seems to simply play into that tired old differentiation between men and women as "active" and "passive" principles, it is important to recognize the relation of this idea to Pound's notion of the image. It is not simply that "creative thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed" (301); it is also that the "spermatozoic particle" has "a capacity for formal expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing and a form-combining?" (301).

Pound exerts a certain pressure on the genital fluid to exceed its base beginnings in order to develop into ideas, form-combinings. So my earlier reading of
"Alba" can be developed further by suggesting that the seeming peacefulness of the poem's setting actually represents a dissolution of the self and a passing of the potential energy of the speaker's sperm. Because he is sexually spent, he is also spent of ideas.

Rebel Angels: New Formalism and Blandness

One pretty obvious problem with much New Formalism is the tendency to marry the worst feature of free-verse (i.e. vapid conversationalism) with the precision of formalism. Words empty of sentiment are so much more painful when you realized that someone wasted their time ensuring plodding meter and clunky rhymes. Perhaps it's too easy to peruse the anthology to find its weakest link, but anthologies should be the best of the best. So why does a poem like Tom Disch's "Bookmark" end up in this book. It begins:

Four years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I'm past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I reach the end. I will
Slog through. It can't get much more dull that what
Is happening now

Well, I would have to agree with this last point. Very dull indeed. Disch's reflections are not particularly stunning, so the high formalism and the low content mix into a strange and seemingly unintentional bathos. The poem almost parodies itself, but it's especially hard to take in light of the polemical preface that announces for New Formalism special access to "an entire realm of pleasure [that] was being denied to them" (xvi).

Strangely, one of the topics that New Formalists seem intent on exploring in their careful ways is sexuality. I say strangely because the ragged, breathless, and contingent process of free-verse seems more conducive to frank sexuality. (The agony of restrained desire, on the other hand, is more fitting for the strictures of formalism). And yet there it is. Charles Martin's "Satyr, Cunninglinguent: To Herman Melville" begins:

Twining her fingers through
His hair, fingertips drumming,
At last she brings him to
The sweet verge of her coming:

Her passion at its flood
Overwhelms all measure;
On articulation's bud,
Inarticulate with pleasure

About the only thing to appreciate in this poem is the next line: "She flops like a caught fish / Straining to be human." I appreciate it because it is at least an interesting and imaginative figure. For the most part, the poets collected in Rebel Angels avoid metaphor, personification, and symbolism. It's almost as if the labor of cementing everyday English into rhyme and meter is more than enough effort. But to return to Martin's fish...it is also, of course, a rancid simile for two obvious reasons. First, the blunt spondee "caught fish" serves to comically belittle the female orgasm. Just as important, however, it stinks as a simile. In my experience, caught fish struggle to return to the water. They've had enough of human air, thank you very much. It's this surprising lack of care and aesthetic concern that makes many of these poems ring hollow.

Ezra Pound and the Apollo Complex

Ezra Pound's "Heather" makes use of the figure of a familiar, a supernatural spirit in the form of an animal that is linked to a person:

The black panther treads at my side,
And above my fingers
There float the petal-like flames.

The milk-white girls
Unbend from the holly-trees,
And their snow-white leopard
Watches to follow our trace.

The male is represented by black and by flames, suggesting the burning of desire and the hunting of the sexual object. The female is twice described as white and is wary of the hunter.

This is a fairly typical scenario in that it relies on standard sexual roles, but there are a few things about this poem that make it worth discussing. First, it reflects the sort of "Apollo complex" identified in other works by Ezra Pound. I use the phrase Apollo complex to refer to a man's recognition of his own sexuality and the simultaneous recognition that he must control that desire in order to control himself. This tension is a fundamental aspect of male subjectivity. Again recalling the Apollo and Daphne myth, the girls "Unbend from the holly trees," suggesting that the spark of sexual desire is rekindled as the girls transform from tree back to human form.

There is also the suggestion that the girls' familiar, the white leopard, is in some sense the hunter: "And their snow-white leopard / Watches to follow our trace." The leopard follows the panther, and can be read as a sort of snare that catches the men -- just like Daphne, chased by Apollo, turns into a tree, but ends up encircling Apollo's head in the form of a wreath.

The concept of women ensnaring men is also found in Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme," in which women are depicted as a Sargasso Sea waylaying sailors. These are more than just unattractive portraits of women (although they are that); these poems are also condemnations of the drive to pleasure in men. Sex is a dissolution of self (as seen in "Alba"). For Pound, it is better to sublimate desire into forms of control.

Vernon Shetley and Poetic Difficulty

Vernon Shetley argues that poetry must become intellectually and personally challenging again. But part of this challenge is to chart a middle path between the opposite poles of a variety of continua of poetic practice. Or perhaps a better way of saying that is that there's a Golden Mean that exists between the too radical poetic ideals marking the twentieth century.

As one example Shetley discusses the difference between difficulty and directness, which, following Richard Poirier, he represents with T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, respectively. Adding layer after layer of mythical references distances one from the immediacy of real life, while blunt immediacy denies one the aesthetic experience that challenges readers.

Another useful example is the opposition between New Formalists and Language poets. In their extreme forms, the former avoids the inequities of the social status quo by trying to recover past modes, while the latter interrogates so vigorously that it squeezes the life out of things.

Justin Quinn and American Errancy

Justin Quinn's American Errancy begins with some of the same building blocks used in Rob Wilson's book (e.g. the sublime and American imperialism), but for Quinn these coalesce around the notion of errancy or antinomianism. He examines how the work of various poets relates to the direction of American social and political history. So, for example, T. S. Eliot is seen as an expatriate who escapes American waywardness by attempting to reclaim orthodoxy in English culture and religion; A. R. Ammons naturalizes ideology and isolates American life as universal; and Jorie Graham details the small, personal acts of life in order to investigate the lost promise of America.

Rob Wilson and the American Sublime

I'm not sure if Rob Wilson's The American Sublime is a good book, but it's definitely a tiresome one. It's written in that hyper-theoretical style that distances itself from making immediate sense. That isn't to say it doesn't make sense, but the reader who struggles mightily through the dense, jargon-laden, poorly-crafted prose is often not quite sure. And by "the reader," I mean me. And a good example comes quickly; here's the first sentence of the introduction:

"If there is strength in America's size and numbers, there is also a threat posed to the subject of that sublimity: "Hey you! I say to the H-bomb. / Miami Vice says to me" is the way Bob Perelman stages this struggle between the democratic ego and the forces of technology and information that now threaten to magnify, dwarf, and abolish it."

Prose this bad should never have been published. I'm driven crazy by the first use of the word "that." What does "that" refer to? Well, America's "size and numbers." And why does the author so boldly assume the reader is going to agree that America's size and numbers are sublime? It would seem the author's priority, as an academic writer, would be to support such an assumption rather than sneak it in. And to develop a complex argument by both refusing to state it and relying on a poetic snippet to (barely) exemplify it is inefficient and off-putting. All of the parts of the book I read utilized this same frustrating style. There's also a befuddling attempt on Wilson's part to employ the word sublime in some form or another in nearly every sentence.

If value must be found in the opening sentence, it is that it gestures toward Wilson's primary argument (if parsed very carefully). According to Wilson, the American sublime involves one's interaction with a vast landscape of nature and technology that gets internalized, creating a subject implicated in American power and ambition. Through the twentieth century, the form of the sublime changes strategies in its relationship with American power, ending with postmodernism, which challenges "the long-standing American sacralization of force" (10).

I'm honestly not certain what I make of this argument, as it often comes across as tautological. For example, one of Wilson's goals is "to provide a definition of the American sublime as a poetic genre that implicates the lyric ego in the production of America as a site of the sublime" (9). So the sublime produces the sublime? Um, okay.

Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

I suppose anyone dealing with Ezra Pound and Imagism must respond to "In a Station of the Metro." I'm going to provide what is likely an idiosyncratic reading, but one I believe is made available by the text itself and Pound's critical statements.

Before I attempt a closer reading, I want to take note of a point made by John T. Gage in his brilliant analysis of Imagism, In the Arresting Eye. He argues that many Imagist poems work by simply juxtaposing two scenes without identifying one as the "figure" and the other as the "ground." That is, the poems are made up of comparisons, but are unlike similes or metaphors in that they don't privilege one of the terms and use another simply to clarify it. By simply giving us the two scenes without a way to relate them, the poem introduces ambiguity.

The part I don't understand about Gage's argument is his contention that the function of this device "is to promote a belief in the harmony of words and things" (86). How does that happen? Gage suggests that this interchangeability indicates an underlying order. But I find this ambiguity potentially more upsetting. I disagree with that large collection of scholars, including Herbert Schneidau, who argue that Imagists seek or achieve some sort of objectivity, or even "the object" itself. Pound is very clear that he doesn't present the object. Instead, Pound defines the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." In short, he presents a complex, not an object. The critic's task is to read the object as a means toward understanding the complex.

***

"In a Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This is admittedly a complex poem. All I can do is try to offer a compelling interpretation, not necessarily the only interpretation. I'm going to start by suggesting that the two scenes have a much closer relationship than is often posited. Most critics suggest that the two descriptions are quite distinct from one another; the poem's meaning is created by the radical juxtaposition of the two statements. But I think they may be part of the same scene. In particular, I'm interested in the conflation of "faces" and "bough" into an image of human trees.

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous, but it gains more credence when one considers how frequently and powerfully Pound uses the myth of Daphne and Apollo in his work (in which, according to Ovid's version, the love-struck Apollo chases the nymph Daphne until her only escape from his lust is her metamorphosis into a tree). Pound's very early poem "The Tree" is explictly about the myth, and "A Girl" retells the transformation from Daphne's point of view. Other similarities can be found throughout his work, for example, from "Heather" ("The milk-white girls / Unbend from the holly-trees") or from "Dance Figure" ("Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark"). These examples provide a context for reading "In a Station of the Metro" in a similar way. The poetic speaker (or poetic "noticer," since there isn't a figure who takes the role of poetic speaker), mentally metamorphoses the faces into petals on a tree branch.

There are a number of tensions comprised in this fused image. It's perhaps a bit vulgar to rely on simple binaries, but here goes. First, there's insubstantial/substantial. An "apparition" a strange sight, but it's also a ghost, something airy or ethereal. This is contrasted by the heavy clinginess of the petals on the wet, black bough. Even the meter of the second line suggests heaviness with its final three stressed syllables.

A second and related binary is mobility/immobility. "Apparition" acts almost like a verb, like "to appear." The faces and the crowd can be imagined as in motion. But the petals and the bough are stationary, unable to move.

These binaries replicate the tension between the drive toward pleasure and the restriction of that drive. The reader understands that people in motion in the first line are made still in the second line; the animate is made inanimate. Like Daphne's metamorphosis, the move from the first line to the second is a restriction of (Apollo's) pleasure.

Of course, the immobility of the transformation is merely (Apollo's) desire made perpetual, not the satisfaction or quelling of desire. In Ovid:

"'Although thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt
be called my chosen tree, and thy green leaves,
O Laurel! shall forever crown my brows,
be wreathed around my quiver and my lyre"

Apollo carries this desire, this frustration of satisfaction, wreathed around his head and "quiver." Pound's poem captures this feeling not just by the substitution of trees for people, but by the stasis of the image. Pound's description of the genesis of this poem is also helpful:

"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another, and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion" ("Vorticism").

The appearance of the beautiful faces was followed by the recognition that he could not obtain them, and it was only through the poetic image of the wet, black bough that he was able to obtain them. I would suggest that the poem's juxtaposition of images, without elaborating a logical connection between them, leads to the psychological complex about pleasure's unattainability. Like Freud's notion of the dream-work, in which a dream's manifest content is made up of condensations and displacements of the latent dream ideas (or wishes), this poem is an example of the dream-work. It requires not merely rhetorical analysis to make sense of it, but also psychoanalysis.

Postscript: I added the label "Apollo complex" to this post when I came up with the term on October 25, 2009.

Ezra Pound and Coherence

In Canto 116, Ezra Pound admitts to the inevitable outcome of his poetic project:

But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

Though this seems like a stark admission of failure, he has actually been admitting this failure all along. The poems in Lustra, for example, show the provisional nature of any poetic creation. While he has great faith in his "songs," he also admits that they are naive ("Salutation the Second") or ineffective ("Further Instructions"). Pound's blustery poetic voice and the fierce imperatives addressed to his poems can be countered by the anxiety and tentativeness available to closer readings.

Rather than writing direct poems with pictures of the world, Pound wrote many poems in which the poet addresses the poem. While definitely lacking a "picture," I believe they do present an image (i.e. an emotional tension between two perspectives, which usually has the outcome of endangering an unproblematized perception of the self). In effect, there's a sort of doubling going on in these poems. That is, the poet exists as a maker, but the made objects are spoken to as if they are themselves actors in the world. The poet is the creator god, but his creations bound through the world, interacting with it in various ways. The tension caused by these poems is effected through their ineffectiveness, as in "Further Instructions":

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bady end.

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that

I almost see you about me

Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

Pound recognizes an inevitable failure in poetic speech, but then he addresses his newest poems, speaking of his hopes for them. Poetry, from this perspective, is not just an iterative process, but a never-ending process. Like Lacan's chain of desire, Pound is always moving outward, searching. His songs are versions of the truth, examples of his passions, creations of himself that are always failures, but are the failures necessary for being.

In a way, his most emblematic poem is "Ortus," which means birth or a springing outward. Whether spoken to the poem, the reader, or the poet himself, the final stanza insists on the primacy of speech and artistic labor in bringing forth one's being:

I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say "I"
When I question you:
For you are no part, but a whole;
No portion, but a being.

Albert Goldbarth and Spiritual Detritus

Albert Goldbarth is a prosy poet, given to creating small narratives full of vibrant and humorous detail. Rather than employing objects in nature, Goldbarth often includes the peculiar odds and ends of everyday contemporary American life. One of my favorite Goldbarth poems is "Sumerian Votive Figurines," which begins with a contemporary archaeologist's contemplation of the religious significance of ancient figurines and ends with the protagonist's trip past a lawn ornament shop. The descriptions of the ornaments are fantastic:

bulbous-bottomed hausfraus with their bloomers comically skewed,
globe-helmeted deep-sea divers with overspilling treasure chests,
a number of Iwo Jima flag-raisings, artichoke-derriered mermaids
and their trident-bearing paramours, guardian lions, borzois
. . . . . . . .
Okay then, pray for my people, he tells them.

What makes this poem work is the connection between ancient and modern, the recognition of continuity in our spiritual needs. The archaeologist's family troubles, especially, reveal the need to displace our concerns into another (even silly) figure to act as an intercessor between us in our earthly life and the prayers needed to see us through.

Suzanne Juhasz and Object Relations

Utilizing object relations psychoanalytic theory, Juhasz theorizes women's writing and reading as atempts to work through the primary relationship in life: the mother-daughter relationship. Desire, from this perspective, is not an essence of the biological body acting through or agains the world, but rather a result of the baby's subjective interaction with the caregiving mother. Literature, as written and read, enacts something like a psychoanalytic therapeutic session based on transference.

Jorie Graham and the Complication of Subjectivity

It's productive to read Jorie Graham's Swarm after reading Kristeva, for the concept of boundaries is pointedly interrogated in the series of poems with the title "Underneath." "Underneath (13)" suggests that existing explanatory systems fail:

needed explanation

because of the mystic nature of the theory

and our reliance on collective belief

I could not visualize the end

the tools that paved the way broke

While explanation is broken, it is still needed. What we have has been ossified as myths, like Freud's Oedipus complex. The difficulty becomes enacting a challenge without disestablishing the self. Like the abject, Graham's underneath is ejected from the body and forms a horror beside us, a doubling based on rejection. Graham brings us face to face with the form of this abjection:

this is the mother tongue

there is in my mouth a ladder

climb down

presence of the world

impassable gap

pass

I am beside myself

you are inside me as history

We exist Meet me

While the concept of the abject cannot be laid seemlessly over Graham's poem, the concern with surfaces as boundaries that contain the inexpressible hints at the void within the subject created by abjection. What remains after abjection is an ongoing epistemological struggle in which the one is two and the two are one. When Graham says "you are inside me as history," she insists on retaining the memory of the rejected detritus of being; she recognizes the corpse within us that is also the newborn separated from the mother. Existence is a matter of continually meeting the past and future corpse, the terminal ends of life that resist the efforts of the symbolic realm.

Julia Kristeva and the Abject

Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is not an object opposite the ego, but it is that part of the subject rejected by the superego. It is the rejected part of being which exists alongside the subject. Kristeva grounds the abject in the pre-object phase of separation from the mother:

"Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (10).

The abject is an instance of the failure of the symbolic to organize experience. The examples of the abject that Kristeva finds in twentieth century writers are related to an uncovering of a breakdown in the symbolic order, a passing away of stable meaning. She points out that Dostoyevsky's abject is found in both murder and suicide; for Proust it is in the proximity of the sounds of sex and death, the inevitability and uncleanliness of sexual intercourse. These are proximities of boundaries; these boundaries replicate the one between the self and other. Kristeva calls it "boundary-subjectivity," and credits twentieth century writers with the disruptions of narrative that reveal the abject. While Kristeva doesn't exactly celebrate the abject, she calls attention to its ability to reveal "the bankruptcy of the fathers" (172).

Harold Bloom and Poetic Influence

Harold Bloom constructs a complicated system of literary history based on poets and their anxieties in relation to their poetic influences. Bloom, employing Freudian concepts, describes a poet's relation to his influences as the struggle between father and son. He breaks down this struggle into six different possible dynamics: swerving, completing, purging, daemonizing, curtailing, and flooding. (Of course he gives suitably arcane names to these processes, which I have a hard time remembering, so I utilize some of his secondary terminology). In all of these processes, the later poet reacts to the power and authority of the earlier poet(s).

I suppose this theory of poetry is useful in keeping the critic focused on literary history rather than approaching a poet with a naive sense of that poet's originality, but I find in Bloom a more interesting underlying argument. Foundational to the primary notion of the oedipal struggle is the argument that poetry "takes as its obsessive theme the power of the mind over the universe of death" (34). He values the poet's struggle not just against his poetic forebears, but also the struggle for individuation, the attempt to establish the subject apart from nature's laws. So, for example, he praises William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" because it "awakens into failure, and into the creative mind's protest against time's tyranny" (9). I find this a persuasive argument not just because it's emotional implications can be discovered in so many poetic texts, but because it characterizes the process of individuation that compels a tentative and endangered subjectivity that remains open to the anxieties Bloom describes.

Linda Hutcheon and Postmodernism

Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism argues that postmodernism is a contradictory, historical, and political set of aesthetic practices. She attempts to carve out a middle path through the wildly disparate versions of postmodernism and its implications. Postmodernism is neither the revolutionary dissolution of metanarrative truths, nor is it a complicitous conservativism that serves consumer capitalism. It's primary feature, according to Hutcheon, is its ability to both establish and problematize truth. Postmodern works challenge the prevailing order while recognizing their own historical development from that order. So, for example, postmodernism's tendency to complicate the subject, or in fact dissolve the subject, never fully succeeds because the attempt dissolution requires an understanding of its cultural foundations. But these very foundations give rise to the problematized subject. Postmodern cultural texts, such as the historiographic metafiction upon which Hutcheon focuses, are always involved in what they contest. The primary tone of this involvement is ironic or parodic. If Hutcheon's "poetics" could be distilled into a single feature, it would be postmodernism's parodic treatment of a past from which it cannot escape but which it is determined to challenge.

Helen Vendler and Aesthetic Criticism

Helen Vendler advocates "aesthetic criticism," which she suggests is not primarily about determining meaning or declaring cultural value, but is rather about describing the artistic workings of a text. In other words, criticism should not just describe "what happens," but should also uncover "the music of what happens."

There's something immediately appealing about this bold argument made at a time when Theory was so insistent no such thing was truly possible, much less desirable. Vendler's is a call to get back to the text as a work of art and not just a puzzle or a political statement.

Unfortunately, this perspective is flawed. Yes, it is important to agree that literary texts are works of art; and, yes, the critic's task is largely comprised of exploring the operations of aesthetics; but the crucial and meaningful step in criticism is the contextualization of aesthetic principles in the cultural forces which give rise to aesthetics in the first place.

The biggest problem with Vendler's approach is that her social views determine her aesthetics, rather than the other way around. A good example occurs in her analysis of Adrienne Rich's two uses of the constellation Orion. Vendler approves of an earlier Rich poem ("Orion" from 1969) because it is "unsettled," but dislikes the later poem because it has "become more rash and violent" (383). And yet, looking at the poems, one sees that they both use Orion in a rather figurative way, once as a protector and once as a destroyer. I don't see that either view has any more or less aesthetic value. To decide which poem is more insightful, interesting, or powerful becomes a process of verifying its truth claims. Vendler has clearly done this (and declares for the former poem), but she does not elucidate the verification process, how the poem's art has led to the insight. In fact, she conceals her decision-making process under the guise of aesthetics. Committed writing become unartful, even if it is figurative and compelling, like the poem Vendler maligns:

Orion plunges like a drunken hunter
over the Mohawk Trail a parallelogram
slashed with two cuts of steel

A night so clear that every constellation
stands out from an undifferentiated cloud
of stars, a kind of aura

All the figures up there look violent to me
as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country

The Confessions of Sylvia Plath

The temptation to jump neck-deep into Sylvia Plath's biography is strong, primarily because her life was tragic and important, but also because her life appears in her poetry. But it is significant, also, that her poetry did so much more than "confess." In fact, the term "confessionalism" wrongly suggests some kind of straight talk that objectively reveals personal feelings about autobiographical events. Or I should say that the term applies to some less careful poets, but poets like Plath get short-changed by such a label. Her work is carefully crafted, laden with pointed symbolism, and set in a gruesome phantasia of dangers. This transcends mere talk. Take the following, from "Edge":

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

Life is frozen into a cold and mythological approximation of life. The four heavily stressed syllables ("Each dead child coiled") emphasize the critical accoutrements of the perfected (i.e. dead) woman. But they are not just children; they enter they mythical by becoming serpents, suggesting the dangerous result of the promise of the tree of knowledge. Children are the notice of our mortality. As the poem describes, they live in symbiosis with the maternal body, at once a parasite and the petals of a rose. Plath is also a poet who uses nature as a figure for human experience, but not in a straightforward way. The garden stiffens in a process meant to signify death, but we also get the personification of odors that "bleed / From the sweet, deap throats of the night flower."

These are effective lines whether they are drawn back to Plath's biography or not. Their power comes not because they act as documentary, but because they harness our imagination and tempt it to follow the treacherous path, to contemplate death, to experience the full range of human emotion.

Poems about Albas

I find so many of Pound's poems in Lustra vexing because they don't work like "Alba." They don't give us the naturalistic picture that "Alba" and other Imagist poems do. Many of them are the poet's addresses to his poems, or songs. Here's a brief example:

"Ite"
Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take your wounds from it gladly.

The difficulty in approaching these poems lies in the fact that they don't seem like poems; they implore poems to do things, and as such do not work like poems themselves. I've been considering these poems in light of (my conception of) Pound's theory of poetic images. My conception, again, is that the poetic image is a conflation or tension between two things that leads to a productive and meaningful burst of insight.

I would argue that there's an aspect of the image even in "Ite." The surface reading seems pretty straightforward: the poet requires that his songs be held to the highest of standards. But underneath that reading is the understanding that perfection is never possible. There is a tension between moving and standing. The poems are told to "Seek ever" toward the possibility of stasis, the ability to stand in one place. The poet wants the poem to stand "in the hard Sophoclean light," as if that is the great achievement of being, but the poem is inevitably wounded in the glare of that light. As Ruthven points out in "A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae," Sophocles is invoked to refer to cutting through the dreaminess of the poetry of the 1890s. His essay "A Few Don'ts" encourages poets to eliminate unnecessary words, working toward greater concision. But the poem that seeks this light is ever wounded, suffering continual amputations toward perfection. Being, for the poem, is most fully realized by submitting to the ultimate concision that erases it from being. The tension of this paradox is the image.

Albas

I guess I've made a promise to write about the poetry of Ezra Pound.... Whoever wrote my oral exam paper proposal promised to shed light on "the structure of desire" in Ezra Pound's early poetry and poetic theory. And now I have to do it...and soon.

My most significant problem is that Pound's theory and his practice don't overlap very well. After reading some of the theory ("Vorticism" and "A Retrospect"), I was convinced that Pound was not interested in -- or at least not only interested in -- a poetry of scientific precision and concision. To me it seemed clear that he saw the image as a productive sort of confusion of objects, a conflation of attributes. The tension or energy of these conflations cut through sentimentality, flaccid commentary, and our received ways of knowing.

This seemed fitting when I read H.D.'s "Oread" and the examples in Pound's critical work. Then I read the poetry, mostly from Lustra. Now I'm confused. At times, I run across examples of Pound practicing what he so fervently preached, but not very often. "Alba" is a great manifestation of his principles (as I see them):

As cool as the pale wet leaves

of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn.

The most immediate contrast here is the simile that links the lover to physical coolness rather than the warmth of an embrace or of lying next to each other. The cognitive difficulty of this simile slowly disrupts our habituated notion of lovers and warmth. We recognize that the lovers lie together at the end of a night together. Warmth is lost; passion has concluded. The surface tension of coolness where we might expect warmth leads us to the underlying concept of this poem: a contrast of beginnings and endings. As an alba (i.e. a poem about the dawn), the poem celebrates the beginning of the day. But at the same time, it mourns the passing of night's passion. If one takes the beginning of day as a poetic figure for the beginning of life, then we live in a post-pleasure, postlapsarian world. This fits with the origin of lily-of-the-valley in Eve's tears after expulsion from Eden.

So far so good, but then there are so many poems in Lustra that simply don't work this way. Since it's getting late, I'll have to pick this up on another night.