Michael,

Thanks for the Huang Guiyou tip. I had cast the net pretty wide; I didn't
expect quarks and nipples; so I appreciate your good faith. "King Sacripant
regains his long-lost treasure;But good Rinaldo mars his promised
pleasure"(Ariosto, 'Orlando Furiso,' Canto I).

Gan Xiuyun



At 06:48 PM 12/13/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>I note that we can depend on the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review to
>elucidate the position of those reading in bad faith.
>
>No particular sloppiness or insanity here, Mr Davis.
>
>Rather, Pound was engaged by ancient Chinese texts, and tries to
>communicate to
>the reader his attitudes and appreciations towards these works.  And it is he
>that relates them to the 20th century. I think, therefore, that Mr. Davis'
>many
>complaints are actually with Pound, not with this individual reader.
>
>I don't think the subject of why Pound read ancient Chinese texts, and
>what his
>understandings might mean for us now, should just go away.
>
>I'd be curious to know how others on the list responded to the book
>Whitmanism,
>Imagism, and Modernism in China and America, written by Guiyou Huang (1997).
>Quoting from its cover: "The author examines how classical Chinese literature
>affected the birth of American modernism as represented by Ezra Pound; he also
>investigates how American literature contributed to the formation and
>development
>of China's New Poetry."
>
>Michael
>
>[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> > To the Pound List,
> >
> > Without stealing Charles Moyer's thunder, I would like to take up Michael
> > Springate's challenge and examine his question in further detail:
> >
> > "What are the salient relations between Pound' s poetics and classical
> > Chinese texts, and how might these be relevant to the political
> situation of
> > our world today."
> >
> > For those reading in bad faith, this question sounds something like, "What
> > are the salient relations (caution: ponderous language ahead, probably to
> > harden later into pseudo-rigorous academic analysis) between (between:
> so we
> > are not looking at the object of literature itself but at its
> relationship to
> > something else.) Pound' s poetics (assuming that can be defined as one
> entity
> > rather than several, and if several, then which one are we discussing?) and
> > classical Chinese texts (Classical Chinese texts? All of them? Since the
> > plural is indicated here, one can safely assume that Mr. Springate
> means more
> > than one classical Chinese text which means that Mr. Springate is sloppy or
> > insane. His question has now left the realm of the stuffy, and probably
> > fruitless, comparative literature seminar and entered the company of such
> > pensees as: what are the structural analogies between sub-atomic quarks and
> > the nipples of Julia Kristeva?), and (and? There's more?) how might
> these be
> > relevant to the political situation of our world today (HA! So, if I'm
> > reading Michael Springate correctly, and let's pretend for the moment that
> > such a thing can be done, he wants to know how the "salient relations"
> between
> >  the poetics of a dead American poet [1885-1972 I believe] and the whole
> > corpus of Chinese classical literature [2000BC- 700AD let's pretend]
> > correspond to the current [read 2001 here] political situation of the whole
> > world!)
> >
> > Either Mr. Springate has been reading too much of the short fiction of
> Alfred
> > Jarry, or I smell a bad dissertation on the way....
> >
> > Garrick Davis
> > editor,
> > Contemporary Poetry Review
> > (www.cprw.com)