[Wgcp-whc] WG Poetics--9/23,Pound/Fenollosa minutes

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

9/27/05

On Fri Sept 23rd,the Yale Working Group in Contemporary Poetics had its
first meeting of the new academic year.  The focus of the discussion was
Ezra Pound’s editing of the essay “The Chinese Written Language as a
Medium for Poetry” by Ernest Fenollosa.  Lucas Klein, Haun Saussy and
Jonathan Stalling have undertaken the project of bringing into print
versions of Fenollosa’s manuscripts with the process of various
editorial changes Pound made evident.  Pound’s engagement with
Fenollosa's work (however much of a misprision it proved to be) is of
vital importance since it led to Pound’s Cathay, a book that fairly
defined Chinese poetry for most of Pound’s fellow Modernists.  Pound’s
version of Chinese poetry (and also his performance of certain changing
ideas about the creative flexibility available to poet/translators)
would also later serve to inspire such post-war poets as Robert Bly,
Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Gary Snyder.  

Fenollosa (1853-1908) was, amongst other things, a former Curator of
Oriental Art at the Boston Museum had amasses a series of notes that he
had hoped to fashion into a book; however, he died before this could
come to fruition.  In 1913, Fenollosa’s widow passed on some of her
husband’s notebooks believing that Pound was the only one who could
finish the essays in the ways that they ought to be finished.  Part of
this confidence she said seemed to stem from the fact that Pound
demonstrated a certain antipathy to academics, an antipathy that
Fenollosa evidently shared.  In time, Pound begins to take his charge of
completing Fenollosa’s project seriously, particularly when he sees
certain ideas in the notebooks that seem tailor made (with some
editorial guidance) for advancing Pound’s developing ideas of poetics. 
In Pound’s reading of Fenollosa’s work, he felt he saw an idea of poetry
that would be able to ground poems in the specificity of particulars and
concrete images, but would also evade the stasis that was becoming
endemic to imagism, a movement that Pound himself had helped spearhead,
but had grown increasingly skeptical of.

The version the group looked at (and which was circulated via attachment
on the listserv) incorporates both Fenollosa’s original manuscript as
well as Pound’s shaping of the material.  Lucas, who of course led the
conversation, pointed out that Pound consistently weeded out the more
mystical elements as well as the passages that seemed influenced by
Buddhism.  The result of Pound’s editing is that the essay seems to
authorize and legitimate what Pound would call the ideogrammatic method
of composition.  Indeed, in looking over the essay, the group readily
identified certain passages that, although written by Fenollosa seem
like they could have been written by Pound.  For instance, Fenollosa
asks, “how can the Chinese line imply, as form, the very element that
distinguishes Poetry from Prose?”  Certainly, this question of the
difference between prose and poetry was of central importance to Pound
and that that Fenollosa provides another avenue for discussing form—an
avenue that seems to offer a useful key to exploring form and
image—would only serve to make the essay more exciting to the poet.  The
fact that this key would lie in ancient China would also provide Pound
the means for locating the origins of his genealogy somewhere other than
in English literature.   This also allowed Pound to explore an aesthetic
and cultural ideal that wasn’t beholden to Greek civilization.  It was
if Pound was able to create for himself (and thus for any who cared to
follow him) an ancient poetic tradition that legitimized all his poetic
values.

In any event, Fenollosa’s work on the Chinese character underlined an
equivalency of form and content.  “In reading Chinese we do not seem to
be juggling with mental counters, but to be watching things work out
their own fate.”  For Pound, who placed a great deal of importance on
being able to discuss poetry as participating in a kind of force or
action, such a statement as Fenollosa’s would be more than attractive,
it could be foundational.  Pound would work Fenollosa’s argument that it
was the juxtaposition of Chinese signs that created meaningfulness into
a larger theory of composition that he would call the Ideogramic Method.
 Fenollosa writes, “Two things added together do not produce a third
thing, but suggest some foundational relation between them.”  Pound’s
version of this is described by Humphrey Carpenter in his important
biography A Serious Character, this way:  [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 related to his
current obsession—and hold tem up for attention as if their significance
were self-evident.”  Clearly, Pound brings this method into the
monumental collection of Cantos.

Some members of the group noticed the paradox that Fenollosa (or at
least Pound’s version of him) is both suited for structuralism in a way
that would later be picked up by some of the Language poets and also
antithetical to structuralist thinking.  The emphasis on the
juxtaposition of words as a measure of determining (and challenging)
meaning seems a clear connection to some of the Language writers, while
Fenollosa’s discussion of the Chinese character as being a natural sign
would be hard to swallow for some of the writers influenced by
poststructuralist thinking.  Some important readings of Pound’s use of
Fenollosa for setting up a discernible project of American poetry can be
found in Hugh Kenner’s work as well as in Joseph Riddel’s essay
“Decentering the Image: The 'Project' of 'American' Poetics?” 

The discussion swung around to the goals of this new edition of Pound
editing Fenollosa.  While as a sinologist Fenollosa was a deeply flawed
scholar, his influence, by way of Pound, on American poetry is profound.
 As Lucas insisted, Asian language scholarship does not need Fenollosa.
 However, American poetry has indelibly marked by Pound’s
recontextualizing the work of Fenollosa, a man whom Pound never met. 
Lucas, Haun, and Jonathan, then, are in some sense making visible the
mechanisms of the relationship of Pound and Fenollosa.  In this way, it
might be said that their editing project enacts at least one of
Fenollosa’s claims.  “Things are only terminal points, or rather, the
meeting points of action, cross-sections, so to speak, cut through
actions.”  In seeing Pound’s editorial process as a negotiation, as an
act of reading, these editors show “The Chinese Written Language as a
Medium for Poetry” to be a meeting point of two prodigious imaginations.
 Thus, through their project one begins to see Pound’s thinking in
motion and with that can only come greater insights into the genealogy
and arc of American poetry inaugurated by Pound himself.  

By all accounts, Lucas’s presentation of his recent work to be an ideal
way to begin the new year for the Working Group in Contemporary Poetics.
 I should mention some things that are forthcoming for this semester.

For our next meeting, scheduled for October 7th, the group will be
reading the work of Michel DeGuy, an important poet/philosopher who will
be visiting Yale on October 3 to give a reading at the Beinecke library
that day at 4.30.  All are welcome to attend the reading and a reception
will follow.  The group will focus its discussion on a collection of
DeGuy’s poems recently published in translation by Wesleyan UP.  Copies
of this book have been purchased out of the group’s funds and will be
available to all regular group members.  When these copies arrive (which
should be any day now) I will send an e-mail to let people know where to
pick up a copy.

I also can announce that our visitor to the group this semester is Ulla
Dydo.  Professor Dydo is unquestionably the premier Gertrude Stein
textual scholar and she will be joining us October 28th.  That day the
group will convene in a seminar room at the Beinecke so that we can look
at primary documents from the Stein document.  I cannot stress enough
how great an opportunity this will be to have Ulla Dydo discussing
Stein’s work with the actual documents and manuscripts at hand.  Mark
your calendars, as they say.

I am also attaching to this e-mail a flyer for an upcoming conference on
Poetry and Philosophy that will be held in Hartford at the end of the
October.  Also, allow me to note that the 20th Century Colloquium is
bringing a number of interesting speakers this semester but there is one
that might be of particular interest to members of this group.  

On Thursday, November 17, 4:00 p.m., in LC 319: Michael Levenson,
William Christian Professor of English, University of Virginia,
"Avant-Garde or Modernism? A History in Theory."


“The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other
Friday at 3.00 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale
University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within
international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric
poetry. All are welcome to attend.”  


Onward,

Richard Deming, Group Secretary, Scribe, and Scrivener 





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