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)