Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Personæ: The Shorter Poems (1908-1920, collected 1926)

2141 Ezra Pound: The Cantos

But I haven’t read, and so must revert to

2140 Ezra Pound: Personae: Collected Poems

A train of thought recorded while reading:

Interesting that looking up a single obscurity so frequently feels like it sheds significant light on the whole poem. Perhaps the research mindset simply primes the mind for the task of synthetic interpretation. Investigating any given word helps one comprehend that the task at hand is investigative, which for better or worse it is. The effect might be the same if I read the dictionary entry for a word in the poem I already know. It helps with the problem of coping with allusion; one tends instinctively to take the current limits of one’s own knowledge to be inflexible – allusion to the world outside the poem and so possibly outside that limited knowledge can seem gratuitous. But using the dictionary reminds us that any word is an allusion to its own meaning; that everything the poem could possibly be about is “outside.”

This relationship of inside to outside is always a challenge in reading. There is an implicit promise that reader+book are a self-sufficient unit – “all you need is your own two eyes…” – but this promise is almost always broken; what’s needed is, in general, outside the unit. Only if you happen to have taken it into yourself prior to meeting the book are you prepared to understand.

I’ve read a bit more of it at this point but poetry still strikes me as an unreliable affair, especially as it tends toward profundity. The deeper a thought, the more other thoughts it contains (or rejects, or uses). The only way to zoom directly to the apex (or the nadir, I guess, if “deep” thoughts are metaphorically lower altitude) is to ensure that the shoulders-of-giants are already agreed upon and in place. But poetry ensures nothing – it sketches and gestures, and we must recognize its gestures to move with it. I may recognize that a poem is ascending some kind of invisible ladder to talk about something in the sky, but if I don’t already possess the ladder myself, I have to watch from a distance. Poetry is for people who share a culture. When that culture is the culture of being a human being and smelling things, regretting things, fearing things, there’s a strong chance that communication is still possible. But when that culture depends on all sorts of historical contingencies, on a particular kind of upbringing and schooling, on having read the same book as the poet last night and had the same conversation with the same other poet, and then waking up with the same string of thoughts that led to the thought in the poem – invisible ladders all. Unless the poet is building the ladder as he goes.

In my experience people are not generally very good at the task of estimating other people’s likelihood of comprehension of a given thing. Poets are very likely taking into consideration that other people may not know what they are talking about, but then are too much themselves to correctly gauge how much help they will need. Then, of course, people tend to savor ambiguity, not to mention savor the emperor’s new clothes, so the poets generally never receive the “sorry, I don’t copy” feedback that would help them hone their communication skills.

I respect James Joyce because I think he was, during Ulysses, anyway, very aware of how far was fair; his obscurity is not based on self-centeredness; it’s calculated and constructed. Then in Finnegans Wake I think he dared a little too much; the temptation to believe those voices that say “it’s brilliant, we’re with you!” must be very great. From what I’ve read of it, it seems likely to me that there are thoughts he put into Finnegans Wake that will never be extracted; the only context in which they “sounded” was his own brain. I think he might have believed – and I think a lot of poets might believe – that a sufficiently attentive reading would allow the reader to recreate his brain within theirs and thus understand everything he understands. But that process of mirroring, I think, has practical limits. People that for years I have loved or lived with very closely I can generally mimic, internally, to a fine degree of accuracy – but fine only from the exterior! I can’t say with any confidence what something will remind them of, or what a given word feels like to them. I can guess what will make my girlfriend feel sad but I can’t tell you what kind of aesthetic connection she might or might not feel between her life right now and the landscape of Greek myth. Not unless she told me outright. So if she wrote a poem about that, it would still have to explain itself pretty clearly. And James Joyce is not my girlfriend.

Neither is Ezra Pound.

The book was bought new – not often stocked these days but it just happened to be at the little bookshop down the street – but is now a bit worse for the wear, as somewhat seen above, because I knocked some water off my nightstand while lying on my back and trying to throw my pillow high enough to touch the ceiling. Still haven’t succeeded at doing that – we have high ceilings – but I have finished the book.

I do not recommend the poetry of Ezra Pound.

My principal criticism – and I mean this to be thoroughly damning – is that he certainly seems to be interested in poetry, but not in life.

A good majority of the writing here is in response to study of the troubadours, or of ancient Chinese poetry, or classical Greek poetry, or various other interests of a poetry student, and seems to aspire to achievement only in the realm of showing a smug mastery and ownership of those fields. The loves and ladies and regrets and flowers that form the content of these poems is, if not pure affectation, certainly 100% secondhand. None of it is his own observation, and I am unable to see merit in his project of giving this stuff newer, truer life – if that is indeed the project – because nowhere here was I given cause to believe that he had any particularly astute understanding of the subjects of ladies or love or regrets or flowers as they occur on earth. When he lets his poetry venture out into the modern world around him, it is characterized almost exclusively by disdainful ego, and – only occasionally – by the superficial soft-focus impressionism that the self-regarding pretentious young man injects into his thoughts to remind himself that he has a gift. Every effort to show that his mind is a rich soil in which great things grow quickly runs aground on his being, quite obviously, an asshole.

You can say, you Poundistes, that the following is not an important work and that it comes from a period of intentional, experimental brashness – but I say to you that knowing that the poet ever had it in him to write this – and this is on page 83, folks, this isn’t like his first childish scrawl – makes all too clear to me what’s going on underneath much of the rest.

TENZONE

Will people accept them?
      (i.e. these songs).
As a timorous wench from a centaur
      (or a centurion),
Already they flee, howling in terror.

Will they be touched with the verisimilitudes?
      Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.
I beg you, my friendly critics,
Do not set about to procure me an audience.

I mate with my free kind upon the crags;
      the hidden recesses
Have heard the echo of my heels,
      in the cool light,
      in the darkness.

Many of the “modern” poems also have what to me seemed like a leering misogyny; the “you think you’re so hot but I’m a poet and I see how pathetic you really are” brand of sour grapes, directed at shop girls or people he saw in the park. The big work here is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Contacts and Life), an elaborate, obscure, riddled-with-allusions poem about, so far as I can tell, a young smarmy poet who hates everybody. And possibly also some other poet who isn’t as disdainful and is therefore, it is implied, not as good.

The obscurity and allusiveness of the poetry, which gets worse and worse as the book wears on and Ezra gets older, represents a serious challenge. I grew more and more confident, as I read, that there was no reason at all to rise to that challenge. (The stuff above about looking up words was written quite early on, while I was still reading the lyric Medievalist early stuff). Not a single glimpse of truth came through the web to tempt me inward with the machete of research.

Nabokov, not exactly my hero, but someone whose work I respect infinitely more than anything I found here, called Pound a “venerable fraud.” I’ll get behind that.

The one pleasant thing in this book is the section called Cathay, Chinese poems by Li Po, reworked by Pound, who spoke no Chinese, from translations by Ernest Fenollosa. Pound may have chosen the words on the page, but these poems are not by him, and in this obnoxious book, they’re a breath of clean fresh air. I’m happy to give him credit for his contribution. The man seems to have been a genuine and intelligent poetry enthusiast. Just not a genuine and intelligent poet.

Apropos of what I said last time about bigotry and Turgenev – Ezra Pound’s asshole politics are again, to me, relevant to his art because they are an indicator that his worldview was ill-formed. The difference is that unlike Turgenev, with Pound that was screamingly obvious from the work itself.

This was a blackboard-scrape of a chore to get through and I don’t know what I’ll do if I get assigned the Cantos.

Read them I guess.