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)