Pound and Slams

© Edward Moore 2015

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000.

~ Ezra Pound

Conspicuous by the absence of an entry devoted to him -- in the recent A New Literary History of America, ed. G. Marcus, W. Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009) -- is the expatriate but still American poet and scholar Ezra Pound. One need not seek too strenuously the reasons for this exclusion. Most people with an interest in literature know of Pound's rather buffoonish but still revolting anti-Semitism (later repudiated, rather too late, in a statement to Allen Ginsberg: "the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism"); his admiration for and support of Mussolini before and during World War II, which resulted in Pound's arrest and indictment for treason; and his unrelenting devotion to his own idiosyncratic conception of fascism (despite later lame attempts at retraction, he nevertheless gave the fascist salute upon his return to Italy in 1958). This potent cocktail of political incorrectness (to put it mildly) has been sufficient to place Pound on the outskirts of contemporary literary criticism and history. That said, I find it curious, if not hypocritical, that the editors of A New Literary History of America had no qualms about devoting a section to Malcolm X, who before his conversion to mainstream Islam preached that whites are of the devil's race, that he would welcome a race riot, and declared violence an acceptable way to deal with whitey (among other unsavory -- at least to rational persons -- "ideas"); even after his so-called conversion he still used the phrase "by any means necessary" -- which it does not take a linguist to read as a rubber stamp for violence against whites. The dubious literary quality of his "autobiography" was deemed by Marcus and Sollors sufficient reason to devote an entry to X, while relegating a vastly more important and influential literary figure to a few scattered references.

The many poetry anthologies that I have consulted either include a mere smattering of Pound's early work, such as the well-known "In a Station of the Metro" or "The Garden" -- short uncontroversial stuff, easily digestible by students -- or exclude his work altogether. Harold Bloom, in his anthology, at least displayed intellectual honesty by stating outright his disdain for Pound as a human being; but Bloom still provided a brief essay on the poet and an unrepresenstative poem from Cathay. So, if an original, difficult (but rewarding), and highly influential poet is cold-shouldered by contemporary academia for his odious political and social views, one is justified in feeling that the writer in our age -- like the writer of 150 plus years ago -- must meet certain moral and ethical expectations if he is to be honored by posterity. There is no better way for the writer to achieve this desired acceptance than by dealing with topics that speak of or to a group holding some sort of moral high ground -- for example, oppressed ethnic minorities, or wounded veterans, or victims of abuse (especially the sexual kind) or any other "marginalized" group one can discover or create. Deeply personal writing is generally ignored if it does not speak to -- or better, for -- a group whose members can identify with the writer and claim him or her as "one of us." But an introspective and deeply sensitive writer, one who is -- for better or worse -- preoccupied with his or her own attempts to impose meaning upon the litter of impressions, emotions, and responses that constitute daily life, will avoid any identification with a group, in order to maintain originality and -- most importantly -- that increasingly commodified boon of life known as individuality. For the intellectual, personal experiences are filtered through and by a tradition, captured in writing, to which he or she is heir (as T. S. Eliot explained in his famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"). By reading works of the past, and seeking therein a common existential theme with which one can identify, the first step is taken in the construction and management of a personal meaning, which the conscientious writer will in turn communicate to posterity. While it is impossible to read everything, the truly creative person will choose carefully the collection of works that will serve as a standard for expressive excellence; he will not permit a group to choose these works for him. Just as every person is -- in the terms of classic personalist philosophy -- a unique, unrepeatable entity whose inner life is radically unknowable by the "other," so the collection of past works that serve to ground the writer in his or her own private tradition are equally -- in the interpretation given to them by the developing writer -- unique and unrepeatable. Writing, and all art, demands privacy and autonomy of thought -- until the moment the work is unveiled to the world.

Using his "ideogramic method," Ezra Pound selected from his vast reading material (as well as artworks, news reports, music) anything he found to be significant or germane to his concerns of the moment. He then used these occasional pieces, if you will, as ideograms, i.e., symbols to present and illuminate ideas, without extraneous comment. As Pound himself put it: "The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment." This compositional style led Pound to produce what many have felt to be works of excessive and unnecessary obscurity. As one of Pound's biographers, Humphrey Carpenter, remarked, the ideogramic method "consisted simply of selection rather than analysis. He would pick out items -- works of art, lines in a poem, pieces of music, snippets of news, whatever happened to catch his attention and seemed to relate to his current obsession -- and hold them up for attention as if their significance were self-evident" (A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound [New York: Delta 1988] p. 170). This method dominated Pound's style during the 1930s and '40s, and remained later on, as he began to struggle to impose some sort of form or over-arching theme upon the megalithic volume of Cantos that had accumulated throughout his life. Here is an example from one of the more "obscure" Cantos (53):

Then an Empress fled with Chao Kang in her belly.

Fou-hi by virtue of wood;

Chin-nong, of fire; Hoang Ti ruled by the earth,

Chan by metal.

Tchuen was lord, as is water.

CHUN, govern

YU, cultivate,

The surface is not enough,

from Chang Ti nothing is hidden.

According to Carpenter, in this Canto, as in many others, "Ezra assumes that the reader already understands the main outlines of what he is trying to convey, and gives only surface details without explanation of their significance" (A Serious Character, p. 570). To the charge of excessive obscurity, and of not giving the reader of his poems any guidance in arriving at a meaning, Pound responded that he did not aim for obscurity, but rather demanded a real investment of thought by his readers, amounting to a sort of co-creatorship. As early as 1921 he told Thomas Hardy that "I am perfectly willing to demand that the reader should read [my poems] as carefully as he would a difficult latin or greek text." As for Canto 51, it is quite clear that a pregnant empress is fleeing from some danger with the aid -- it seems to me -- of elemental forces governed by demi-gods. There is certainly mystery here, and this poem does "resist the intelligence / Almost successfully" (Wallace Stevens, "Man Carrying Thing"), yet this resistance lessens "as the audience begins," in the words of Gertrude Stein, who succinctly (though with her trademark sloppy syntax) describes the relation of writer to reader:

When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing ... ("What are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them")

In other words, the writer will include in his work anything and everything that he feels to be meaningful; but the reader, who has not the same emotional and intellectual attachment to the work as the writer, will exclude whatever seems superfluous, for the sake of rescuing and cultivating the parts that are -- to use Pound's term -- luminous.

Preference for the written over the spoken word led Pound to include actual Chinese ideograms in several of his Cantos, and even at one point a musical score. A slow and careful deliberation on the part of the reader was clearly intended, for the meaning that Pound packed into each piece requires readerly dedication to unpack. That this unpacking involved the reader in the creative process was Pound's intention, and his great contribution to modern poetry. A reader expecting to have his hand held as he navigates the Cantos will be disappointed, indeed, his time will be wasted. As Basil Bunting put it, in a poem likening the Cantos to the Alps:

There they are, you will have to go a long way round

if you want to avoid them.

It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

("On the Fly-Lead of Pound's Cantos")

Ever impatient with academic, analytical interpretations of poetry -- indeed, of all art -- Pound did not seek to provide, along with the typical poetic tropes and symbols, what I. A. Richards called poetry's "prose sense, its plain, overt meaning" (Practical Criticism, part I). Pound, who claimed to have always struggled with prose, did not see the point in writing poetry if, after the metaphorical dust has settled, one is only left with plain meaning. Setting two poetic statements side-by-side, with no explanation, will not simply produce a third statement or idea, but rather will "suggest some fundamental relation between them" (in the words of Fenollosa, a compiler and translator of Chinese literature whose work Pound was given to edit after the former's death). As much as Pound seemed to enjoy (sometimes) reading his poems aloud, he knew that their real impact would only be achieved when the reader sat and studied the poems as one would a classical text. Very few people do that nowadays, preferring instead the immediate impact of a performance over the gradual unfolding of a work of discursive art.

I recently listened, via a popular online media site, to recordings of several of my favorite poets (Pound included) reciting their work. What struck me more than the readings themselves were the comments posted by other listeners. A well-known and admired poetic performer, Dylan Thomas, was berated as "pompous sounding," "lacking guts," while Sylvia Plath was regarded less for her work (and her reading of "Daddy" chilled me to the bone) and more for her suicide (one lout posted his opinion that Sylvia was a "whiny whore" -- such is the level of insight to which one is often treated in the pandemonium of the Internet). T. S. Eliot's rather placid reading of Prufrock (a 1943 recording) did disappoint me, and others. However, Ezra Pound, whose bombastic recitation of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley -- exaggerated brogue, excessively rolled 'r's, improperly pronounced Greek -- met with general approval, even admiration. Very strange, thought I, this approbation of a recitation of a poem that only unfolds its multifloriate effects through slow careful reading and re-reading. Apparently, it was Pound's eccentric performance, not the content of the poem, that pleased the listeners, several of whom commented at some length -- one "poster" described Pound's almost self-parodic recital as "lofty, dignified" (go figure). It was at this point that I came across a reference to something called a "poetry slam." I did the requisite search and am now somewhat familiar with this phenomenon (apparently there are "story slams" too).

A "poetry slam" is quite simple. Poets sign up at these events, which usually take place at a coffee house or some other such "artsy" place, and are given a certain amount of time to recite their poetry to the audience (all of whom, one would expect, are poets themselves, or at least consider themselves such). At the end of the event, prizes are given. One can accumulate prizes at the local, regional, and national levels, at which point one gains laureate status in that world. I assume -- having yet to attend one -- that the "winners" of these events are not necessarily the most technically polished poets, nor the ones whose work is the most aesthetically and intellectualy nuanced, but the ones who manage to establish a "stage presence" and to use successfully the age-old technique of the sophist, summed up so well in a lyric by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull: "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think" (Thick as a Brick). Tapping into the energy of a group is not what poetry is about. A poet is not a performer or entertainer, but an artist. That distinction has been lost today, in an atmosphere of critical laxity in the face of "people coming together." When people come together and the distinction of persons is obscured, we indeed see only one giant face that grimaces or smiles in unison with the nameless particles of which it is composed. This is the sort of behavior one encounters at sporting events, or more to the point, at a professional wrestling match, from which the term "slam" is obviously taken, and intended to invoke that hokey (but admittedly fun) atmosphere. At such events the crowd behaves in predictable ways, depending upon which wrestler happens to be in the ring, a "good guy" or a "bad guy." The crowd cheers or boos on cue. The wrestlers talk trash, then bash each other which fists and chairs, and yes slam each other. The predetermined outcome of the match "hangs in the balance" as the audience, disbelief dutifully suspended, cheers and jeers the whole thing on. It's all a lot of fun, and one sees some excellent performances and comes away feeling most adequately entertained. But it is not art -- and that is OK, for it doesn't claim to be. Poetry "slams," on the other hand, claim to give "artists" a chance to "have their voices heard." This in an environment where everyone is a poet or would-be poet seeking to grab the spotlight for a moment and get that prize and the bragging rights that go with it. I wonder how an authentically critical response can occur in such an environment. It seems to me that it would be rather like a bad conversation, in which each participant is waiting for the other to finish speaking so he or she can spout in turn. No one in such sad social ping-pong matches ever pays a stick of attention to what the other is saying; the one is merely awaiting his own turn to serve.

Now as I admitted, I have never been to a "slam," nor do I have any desire to attend one, much less participate. At this point my reader will surely object that, lacking the experience of a "slam," I do not know of what I am speaking (writing). I can only reply by comparing what I have read of "slams" to what I have experienced in a very similar venue. Years ago, when I was a much younger man, I went with my folk-rock band, The Bag Snatchers, to an "open mic" night at a local coffee house, and encountered the atmosphere I described above. It was a waste, for no one actually listened to anyone else's music; all were too hyped up over their own turn to perform. No one gave any feedback; applause was uniform until a scantily clad female bassist and her hunky singer-guitarist boyfriend (I assume) took the stage. Of course, no one heard the music. The applause was deafening. As Kierkegaard put it, "the crowd is untruth."

* * * * *

Later in his life, pushing eighty, Pound (suffering from depression and other medical problems) began to reflect upon his legacy, specifically what he had intended as his magnum opus, the Cantos. In a 1966 interview with Daniel Cory he dismissed that work as "botch." Lamenting the fact that he did not read enough, nor come to know important things -- necessary, as he put it, to accomplish successfully a work like the Cantos -- Pound demonstrated his awareness of the problematical nature of the ideogramic method:

Ain't it better to know something about a few things if you're trying to do a work like the Cantos? I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that's not the way to make ... a work of art.

Despite his own harsh judgment of his great contribution to literature, notable individualists and not a few great poets demonstrated their ability to engage in co-creatorship with Pound, and to bestow meaning upon the luminosity of the Cantos in the best and only truly artistic way possible: to write more poetry. Ginsberg, visiting Pound in 1967, told the old master that "the sequence of verbal images [in the Cantos], phrases like 'tin flash in the sun dazzle' and 'soap smooth stone posts' -- these have given me, in praxis of perception, ground to walk on." As Pound persisted in denigrating his accomplishment with phrases like "stupid" and "irrelevant," Ginsberg responded with a personal statement that expresses precisely the relation of writer to reader necessary for the emergence of meaning:

I'm a Buddhist Jew whose perceptions have been strengthened by the series of practical exact language models scattered through the Cantos like stepping stones, because, whatever your intentions, their practical effect has been to clarify my perceptions.

The clarification of perceptions through language models -- this is the genesis of poetry, of all fine writing. It sounds so simple, but we have seen how Pound, eager to capture all the luminous moments of his own aesthetic perceptions, produced a work that has inspired, yes, the elite among writers, and has caused no small difficulty for the less creative readers who have attempted the Cantos. Indeed, the Cantos were a torment to Pound himself, proving that, whatever value a reader may assign to the Cantos -- and to Pound as a person -- his authenticity as an artist should be beyond doubt. For of the Cantos he wrote, "Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made." And on a more positive note, he urges the readers of his Cantos "To be men [we would nowadays write "human beings" or "persons" or some other less gender specific noun] not destroyers." There are many ways to destroy. Allowing yourself to be absorbed into, and diluted by, the group or the crowd is perhaps the slowest but also the most effective way to destroy your most precious possession, individuality. And when that goes, creativity goes, and the artist disappears -- or rather, she becomes an entertainer.