Park Josephine Nock-Hee - Ezra Pound in the present: essays on Pounds contemporaneity

Ezra Pound in the Present

Ezra Pound in the Present

Essays on Pounds Contemporaneity

Edited by
Paul Stasi and Josephine Park

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

The seeds of this book began in 2013, when we each found ourselves teaching The Cantos. Noting the number of Poundian themes that seemed in the airfrom the recognition of the sins of finance capital, to a renewed interest in China, and a fetishized investment in the founding fatherswe found ourselves rethinking many of our assumptions about his work. In light of contemporary events, Pound seemed differentand relevant all over again.

Our half-serious shorthand for the set of questions this raised was Would Pound have joined the Tea Party? Given the strong populist strain in Pounds thinking, with its characteristic combination of progressive and reactionary elements, we could hear his voice in the Tea Partys outrage at the government bailout of the financial industry. He would have appreciated, too, their hatred of taxes and felt at home among their veneration of eighteenth-century American leaders. At the same time, he would have found their anti-intellectualism appalling and, despite his well-documented and famous intolerance, he would have rejected outright the xenophobic nationalism of the American right-wing.

Indeed, Pounds critique of nationalismhis investment in world literatures, distinct from the category of world literature as it is currently understoodremains one of his most compelling intellectual efforts. Writing at the time of an emergent globalization that has fully bloomed in the contemporary world, Pound attempted to find a polyglot poetic form adequate to that world, without homogenizing its component parts into something like a world culture. That is to say, he required national boundaries and national particularities, even as he worked to transcend them. Perhaps his work could be relevant for our present conversations about comparative literature? And what could Pounds seemingly prescient desire to connect the United States to China have to say about the forms of economic interdependence that have linked these nations in the twenty-first century?

To raise these questions is also to recognize how deeply interconnected Pounds varied lifelong interests were. Economics, aesthetics, governments, and anthologies were all of a piece for Pound; and in a time of widespread financial crisis, when the relationship of all areas of life to the larger economic conditions of the world is harder and harder to ignore, might not Pounds claims about the relationship between art and economics have something interesting to tell us? In short, the world seems to have caught up with Pound, making him seem less and less like the lone voice in the wilderness that was one of his most cherished personae. Rather, his maverick economic and political determinations engage with some of the most important developments of this last century, and his conviction in the force of the work of art seems welcome, mired as we are in the very material conditions he addressed with acts of aesthetic making.

As we mulled all of this over, the idea for the book began to take shape. We generated a list of contemporary interests, some intellectual, some historical (a false distinction if ever there was one). Our goal was to engage both those thinkers who had powerfully shaped our existing sense of Poundand might be willing to rethink some of those ideas in light of the present dayas well as newer scholars whose recent approaches to Pound might animate his relationship to the contemporary. The collection that emerged took our incipient thoughts in new and challenging directions, situating Pound in ways that help us reimagine his work while simultaneously suggesting how that work might help us reimagine our present moment.

The chapters

Divided into three partsPounds Methods, Pounds Worlds, and Pounds Valuesthe chapters in the book all take seriously Pounds idea that artists are the races antennae, a phrase often invoked to valorize the artists prescience (SP 229). What immediately follows it, however, is telling: The effects of social evil show first in the arts (SP 229). These lines resonate in at least two ways with Pounds work. First, and most obviously, they suggest the ways in which a familiar range of twentieth-century social evils made their way into Pounds art. More subtle, however, is the idea of registering that the metaphor of antennae suggests, for Pounds oeuvre provides a record of the contradictions of his moment, many of which persist into the present day. None of the chapters ignores Pounds flaws nor suggests that these flaws should themselves be dismissed. Rather, what unites these chapters is the shared conviction that Pounds efforts to include history inevitably reveal the ways history included him, and that these historical engagements are of a piece with his aesthetic achievements.

In doing so, they cast new light on many of the old chestnuts of Pound criticism. Charles Altieri returns to Pounds image to identify an alternative to the epiphanic lyricism that dominates poetry today. Distinguishing the construction and intensity of Pounds early lyrics from the standard of visual epiphanies and aural refinement installed by his fellow imagistes, the chapter rereads Pound against Vincent Sherrys recent claim for a lingering decadence in modernist verse. Reconsidering the sights and sounds of Pounds imagismin which we do not see pictures but relations, in music that does not make impressions but patternsAltieri reads these works as a movement toward concrete states of mind that establish their own complex realities. These states and realities form the platform for The Cantos, and in marking this through line into Pounds epic, the chapter uncovers the certitudePounds ideogram for truth, a person standing beside his wordby which the private self contributes to public culture. Altieri signals the remarkable conviction of the composing intelligence of Pounds image, whose ability to manifest alternate worlds and independent beings is sorely needed in our present scene of lyric.

If Pounds images establish patterns and relations, they also build the archive of materials to which The Cantos continually turn. Considering this archival structure in relation to what we have come to call big data, Josephine Park queries the resonance of Pounds reading guides with the present digital turn in literary study. Considering Pounds literary data alongside Morettis distant readingboth stunts against the conventional reading practices of the classroomthe chapter identifies a shared desire for ever-larger data sets as modes of capturing ethics, on the one hand, and the elusive history of style, on the other. It is no coincidence that this longing for big data sends both of these literary iconoclasts to China, the ultimate storehouse in the Western imagination. Park reads the onslaught of the China Cantos as the longed-for appearance of pure data in Pounds epic, while Morettis turn to the Chinese novel becomes a refuge away from the close reading he eschews in his accounts of the Western canon and its swaths of lesser works. China is a strangely easy read in both cases, and both forays expose their grounding methodological assumptions. Against Morettis literary history routed through quantitative exploits, however, Pound is a through-and-through media historian; the chapter concludes by positioning Pound within the modern epistemic break of media history, typing out data at once transparent and distant.

Aaron Jaffes chapter also reads Pound as a theorist of media, though here the history is no longer literary but geological. Taking up Pounds notion of the osmosis of persons, which describes the intercourse between humans and things, Jaffe develops a reading of Pound in light of contemporary theories of deep time. Pounds osmotic yield of permanent, classified, or uncorroded value traces a technical drift across semi-permeable membranes, that suggests our constant exposure to invisible agencies and hidden mechanisms of value. Jaffes chapter centers on the Twelfth Canto, often lost between the grandeur of the Malatesta Cantos and the calm of the thirteenth, to show how its simultaneous consideration of aesthetics, Roman architecture, and speculative business endeavors demonstrates the range of inhuman processes that structure our lives.