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> ____________________________________________________________________________ _ >