Pound and Parody
TLS October 30 2009
from Christopher Reid's review of Helen Carr's The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists:
Reid's comment on Pound as pastiche helped me understand an editor's comment on the ghazals I submitted. He said, "They read like the most exquisite parodies of Pound translations from Chinese and Japanese, yet they also do work as original poems do." The slipperiness of imitation, translation and parodies! I did not write the ghazals as parodies, exquisite or not, but now I see how they could be read that way. This reading offends the Neo-Romantic ethic of sincerity in me, but it also pleases me to think how modernist it makes my writing look. I have been thinking about how to take modernism into account in my work, and lo and behold it is here among us.
A modernism not of Eliotian fragmentation, but of Poundian translation. How would the politics of this work out? It is easy for critics to dismiss my work as overly imitative (parodic) of the English poetic tradition, as colonial hangover. Neo-romanticism is still so powerful, in the UK, US, and in Singapore influenced by the USK, with its insistence on originality and individuality, and so parody, that parasite, is judged as inferior. One has to change the climate for parody. Not only to read every poem as always a parody of another, but also to sense behind every language "some imagined original in a foreign tongue." Parody: parallel song.
from Christopher Reid's review of Helen Carr's The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists:
. . . it does seem that, for Pound, authenticity of voice could only, or most reliably, be attained through translation or adaptation. Even those poems of his that might have come about solely as expositions of the pure Imagist manner--miniature masterpieces like "In a Station of the Metro" and "The Garden"--wear an air of pastiche, as if behind each of them lay some imagined original in a foreign tongue, most likely Japanese or French.
Reid's comment on Pound as pastiche helped me understand an editor's comment on the ghazals I submitted. He said, "They read like the most exquisite parodies of Pound translations from Chinese and Japanese, yet they also do work as original poems do." The slipperiness of imitation, translation and parodies! I did not write the ghazals as parodies, exquisite or not, but now I see how they could be read that way. This reading offends the Neo-Romantic ethic of sincerity in me, but it also pleases me to think how modernist it makes my writing look. I have been thinking about how to take modernism into account in my work, and lo and behold it is here among us.
A modernism not of Eliotian fragmentation, but of Poundian translation. How would the politics of this work out? It is easy for critics to dismiss my work as overly imitative (parodic) of the English poetic tradition, as colonial hangover. Neo-romanticism is still so powerful, in the UK, US, and in Singapore influenced by the USK, with its insistence on originality and individuality, and so parody, that parasite, is judged as inferior. One has to change the climate for parody. Not only to read every poem as always a parody of another, but also to sense behind every language "some imagined original in a foreign tongue." Parody: parallel song.
Comments
Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turn'd Criticks next, and prov'd plain Fools at last;
Some neither can for Wits nor Criticks pass,
As heavy Mules are neither Horse or Ass.
Whoa, hang on a minute. Neo-Romantic=original creativity. Modernism (a la Pound)=pastiche. This makes your writing "modern". This is such dangerous reasoning. MAKE IT NEW. Pound was not into pastiche as a modernist strategy. Yes, it exists in the poems of "Hilda's Book", through "A Lume Spento", certainly in "A Quinzaine for this Yule" etc, but by the time of Imagism and Vorticism, Pound was well beyond parody. His translations from "Cathay" are not pastiche. "Homage to Sextus Propertius" was an ironical attack on translation and pastiche. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is definitely not pastiche. To say that...JLK's poetry is reminiscent of Poundian Modernism because it exhibits elements of Poundian pastiche isn't true. The test of Modernism in Pound's sense would be The Pisan Cantos. Sorry, I don't get this line of thought at all. It's the kind of statement encouraged by some editor who really does not know his Pound...who knows a lot about Pound...but does not read the poetry of Pound authentically.
He should have his ass smacked with a mackerel by my aunt Susan. She is a lunch lady. And no one I know understands how handle twelve-year-olds better. Or editors.
You are a champion, but I read the tone of the editor's positive comment differently. Perhaps I have misled the reader by quoting only part of his comment, but it was the part I wanted to think about and blog.
You know I have not read Pound with any kind of seriousness, and so am talking through my ass when I think aloud about him.
But I think there is something here in the link between translation and modernism. Not just actual translations, but the feeling that all poems written now read like translations of something older, more original. I was provocative in using the term "parody" to stand in for "translation," but I was thinking of the slipperiness of both terms, what they share in common etc.
I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday reading Pound's "Cathay." From one angle they read like good translations, from another, like interesting original poems, and yet another, like pastiche. I think they can be read in different ways, not just one.
Pound says, "Make it new," and not "Make it authentic." Isn't astonishing that a man who said "Make it new" dealt so much with the old. Much as I prize authenticity, I also think it is a problematic concept. Much of the time, I find myself describing poems as "authentic" when the truth is I like or am persuaded by its artifice. A life can be authentic in the sense of actions matching one's words or behaving according to one's beliefs, but a poem?
About that tone of apology: not at all. I want to change a whole climate of opinion. I want to be the weather in which poems are read. Delusions of grandeur, yes, but apology, no.
I think I probably agree with how you judge a poem to be "authentic," but I rarely use the word authentic myself.
I tend to look at poems as contraptions that either work or they don't. I evaluate them based on how the interior organic logic or structure of the piece intersects with my own experience of the world. It's like that old saw about music, "I don't know what it is: but I know it when I hear it." Be it Bach or the Beastie Boys.
I am not sure I feel that all poems written now feel like they are translations, or parodies of some impalpable poetic ideal. I think that is uncharitable to both ourselves and our contemporaries.
But I do feel that poets have allowed themselves to be relegated schools with very specific codes of thought: Language Poets, Formalists, Free Versers, Spoken Wordists. Maybe the problem is how we are taught to classify ourselves as collections of competing political constituencies rather than as individuals: the fractured identities we are trying to assert are not our own.
Perhaps, dear Brutus, the fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.
As for the editorial comment...clever but smarmy.
It is a good point indeed! We are taught the Romantics in Universities...their passion for originality. Actually, no one was more derivative than Shelley who believed that the poetic image was a synthetic image referring back to prime forms, as in Platonism. Not an exactly original concept! But this Romantic movement is very much something that "we" have imposed on poets. The same with The Movement. The same with Imagism. This camp mentality encourages allegiances and commitment to dead ways of writing. The US, more than the UK, has created this cult of deadness--though it likes to attribute it to the infamous school of quietude lurking clandestinely in the UK.
I remember one class I took at the 92nd Street Y in New York. We read a panegyric on the spiritual wonders of losing one's identity in another person's by a certain Polish poet who shall remain nameless. We went around the table and discussed our reactions.
Everybody took the teacher's lead in the class that this was a wonderful and imaginative description of love until they got to me. I pointed out that, physically, part of the fun with sex comes from the friction between body parts. I said the author wasn't paying very close attention to the practical application of what he was saying.
I then added, philosophically, that I rather liked who I was and that I found the idea of dissolving my identity into another person's somewhat repugnant. Everyone disagreed with me, very voicferously, until the man who I was sitting next to spoke up.
He was an elderly man, a baseball player, who, I believe, was somehow connected with the American Negro Baseball League. I will never forget what that man said to the class. "It took my people a very long time to establish identities for themselves. I like who I am. I like who we are. I think I agree with him."
The silence in the room after he spoke was deafening.
It was a workshop class. Not a single one of my poems was read or critiqued in class after that discussion.
Interesting thoughts, as ever.
J
I was also very much thinking of my Mexican Poet poems when I wrote the post. Then I began thinking about my regular resort to personae, and what that may mean.