Some weeks back someone asked about EP's connections to Dada / Surrealist
avant-garde moves. I couldn't remember the details then, but they just came
back to mind, so hopefully this is still of some use. Here's from an ad for
a talk in NYC last month, & it was that essay by Richard Sieburth I was
thinking of, as it connects EP and Picabia.


    "In late 1920, age thirty-five, nel mezzo del cammin, Pound found
himself at a crisis point in his career: the Cantos were not progressing,
he had just been fired from his position as the Athenaeum’s drama
critic, his most recent volume of verse, Quia Pauper Amavi, had been
poorly received, and for a brief period, he apparently even considered
returning to America to take up the study of medicine in the footsteps
of his friend William Carlos Williams."
    This is how Richard Sieburth, in his essay _Dada Pound,_ characterizes
Pound’s state of mind as he was about to meet Francis Picabia, "the
dynamic behind Dada," in 1921. Sieburth sees in their meeting,
enormous consequences to Pound’s elaboration of the section of the
Cantos that were produced right after. The strategies of quotations
and misquotations, of displacement and fragmentation—which were
part of Dada’s overall attempt to disrupt the semantic function of the
ideological sign system that made World War I possible—will eventually
find way in Pound’s Cantos, together with explicit quotes from and
references to Picabia.
    Richard Sieburth will revisit his text, which was originally published
in The South Atlantic Quarterly, in 1984, by way of an informal
conversation with A.S.Bessa. (that happened last month at the White Box
Gallery in NYc -- unhappily I was not able to attend & thus cannot
comment --

Pierre

________________________________________________________________
Pierre Joris
6 Madison Place
Albany NY 12202                 "É melhor ser cabeça de sardinha
Tel:  (518) 426-0433            do que traseiro de baleia"
Fax: (518) 426-3722
Email: joris@ albany.edu
Url: <http://www.albany.edu/~joris>
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