Isola di Rifiuti

A Wall

A YEAR

CCCXLIII
Frottements et coïncidences,
abrupt ornery dins
and noisy dervish-
works, what’s capital
is the fence
I threw up
around the bung’d
sonorousness estructuralisti of
the impermeable metropolis,
si, si, señor.
Just a momentiño
of peel’d quince
with sassafras’ll put
the world’s indubitable
fracas to rout,
according to Sut
Lovingood, who finds
everything flustratin’. Ah,
that monstrous paw’d
importunity to hammer
somebody or get
hammer’d, intractable as
a leit motif
in a hoopskirt,
or a rind
of fatback bacon
in a box.
Glorious gore and
cherubs, putty’d up
evangelical-hard spinsters
and suet-color’d
juicers out along
the bare spine
of the mountain,
caterwaul of catamounts,
fuck the city.

—

Poe: “Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.”

Ashbery: “There are poets whose work I read because I enjoy reading it, I find it beautiful, and then there are others whose poetry seems much more stimulating. I think writers tend to read things that will stimulate their writing. I am always rather envious of the general reader who can read without taking that into consideration.”

To my knowledge, Ashbery’s never mention’d Poe in any interview. Disinclined to yak.

Edgar Allan Poe and John Ashbery

Of Note

Out of Erín Moure’s My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice (NeWest, 2009):

      My Beloved Wager stems from a propulsion to speak out, albeit restlessly. In this collection of essays, “essay” is not pronouncement by the fraught terrain of a practice, an essai or try articulated from inside the work of poetry . . .
      . . . it is not a recommendation or map for another’s writing or reading practice, for the path of any one practice is always necessarily fraught or frayed by small decisions, tumults, absence, absent-mindedness—processes that open the mind’s weave, the movements of small animals (feline) in domestic space. The trajectories of thought are as strings of a harp: all present, but only some plucked at any given moment, while the music is written as the plucking occurs. Startlingly, we can pluck some strings only by breaking them and, eventually, we must cast down the harp, for thought is not a stringed instrument at all but an organic passage within and through forces of nervousness, of dilemma, of

reason’s gloss

hieratic echo

hostis hospes “wherein host / guest’s configural.”

This record of a practice might indicate what a writing and reading practice can be, show the kinetic and lapidary nature (rature) of it. The insistinence. All assembled here in the hope (one hope) that some may find nourishment in the world

more curiously,

having read it.

Erín Moure

Junk’d

A YEAR

CCCXLII
My sulky gaps
and verges, my
pshaw-talker’s routine,
speed and its
unclarify’d demands. How
imbecilic to write
to a tempo
of days, weathering
it out. Exemplary
gradient for sub-
intelligibility domain hacks
into the heorte,
my minna, my
burthen, simply shclichtweg
I find it.
Durst I recall
green fiery days
trembling and big
with the mute
shouldering earth, its
impatient ordinary hurl
of death-fecund
love and omen?
A barn swallow
cut inscrutable lines
in the air
behind the mower
and my upturn’d
mouth pour’d out
my amass’d love-
scraps and borrow’d
curses, fodder for
the noise of
a small gas
engine. I cannot
make it cohere
the way days
select’d knock-kneed
and awkward out
of that era
cohere, with my
lines out of
books making what
I said bookish,
mistook for ambivalent.
I loved you
like a Brahmin,
like a patsy,
like a cloak.

—

Certes. The odd noise outs. Remy de Gourmont writes: “Le fond engendre la forme comme la tortue ou l’huître l’écaille et la nacre de sa carapace ou de sa coquille.” I find that in Alice Steiner Amdur’s 1936 book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound. She’s saying T. E. Hulme, who “knew Gourmont thoroughly,” likely (early, pre-1912, when Pound “started to read the modern French writers . . . with strictly practical intentions”) provided Pound with the fond of the thing, so that he mimicks it in the Cavalcanti (“the rhythm of any poetic line corresponds to emotion. It is the poet’s business that this correspondence be exact, i.e. that it be the emotion which surrounds the thought expressed”—like the shell of a turtle, supposedly.) A little farfetch’d: to make the burst wienie (to ditch the zoological metaphor) of thinking be cosset’d by the bun of feeling—that “system”—derive out of what is an argument for form’s being engender’d by what I’d call “content” (le fond: ground, fundament, stock, &c.) (There is, too, a French jeu de mot—“le fond et la forme”—that makes style itself substance.) (I drill myself noticeably deeper.) What perk’d me up in reading the de Gourmont: how it is (avant la lettre) Creeley’s “Form is never more than an extension of content” that Olson made such hoopla about. Rife the idea pre-Creeley, isn’t it? Why the hoopla?

Alice Steiner Amdur’s book preceded Hugh Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound by fifteen years. Print’d by Harvard University Press (edition of three hundred), part of a series of “Radcliffe Honors Theses in English.” (In the parallel “Harvard Honors Theses in English” one notes Meyer H. Abrams’s The Milk of Paradise.) Amdur writes that Pound “first appealed to me as a challenge”: “I could not reconcile the apparent confusion and meaninglessness of the Cantos [only A Draft of XXX Cantos and Eleven New Cantos, XXXI-XLI had appear’d] with the fact that it is impossible to keep Pound’s name out of any discussion of modern poetry.” (Chalk one up for boisterous beyond-poetical rabble-rousing and self-advertisement.) Amdur, in a somewhat uncanny (unintend’d) prognosticatory maneuvre, writes: “Surprised at first by the disparity between his exquisite early lyrics and the turbulent cantos, I now feel that they do cohere.” Too, she foresees a counter-strain in Pound criticism, marking the Pound’s “story” as that of “a man with an extraordinary flair for language and music who, after achieving mastery in a certain type of lyric and translation, deserted the field of pure art to campaign for a variety of other causes, and . . . buried his poetry beneath an ever growing mass of propaganda.”

Pound apparently read the book, enough to write a scathing reply to William Carlos Williams (who’d sent him a copy):

                                                                                        24 Jan. 1937

Deer Bull

      Thanks for Amdur’s (or Ham dure’s) thesis volumet, which ought to be entitled
      “Old Ez carried into Jerusalem on the Foal of an ass.”
      “The custom now is” said Dr Johnson “to use colt for a young horse and foal
for a young mare.”
      Booklet illustrates
      American time lag /
      conceit and snobism of Am/ Universities.
      fixed ideas instilled into jejune stewddents, snobish omission of all
ref / to W. C. Williams
      AND bloody distortion and misrepresentation of London LIFE 1908 to 1914.
      Hell, Yeats for symbolism; Hueffer for CLARITY / half dozen drawing rooms
wherein no whisper of one cenacle arrived.
      The main injustice is to Ford / 2nd is to you.
      But if they must blither about Flint / Tancred and Stroer it is is unjust to
OMIT Ernest Rhys, Newbolt, Hewlett, Robt. Bridges
      who at any rate WROTE something now and again, and however much one
disagreed with ’em, one was at least disagreeing with something.
      Nuissance to know whether one ought to publish rectification.
      Using steam roller on monkey nut?
      job MIGHT be done by reviewers or by some other PH D of Amdur’s own size.
      Usual time lag / ANYTHING new is wrong / anything the professoriate hasn’t.
yet learned is considered foolish.
      There is ONE bit of real criticism / wonder if it is author’s own or a current bit
of collegiate class room opinion / also two useful quotes from I forget whom.
      Than Q fer sending it.
      fillet of filly, ces jeunes filles or as Natalie sez: feminine of ecrivain: ecrivisse.

YRZ

EZ

Frightening how quick the paranoid’s ”they” enters in (“if they must blither”). Oddly enough, Pound did do a “rectification” of sorts in the form of a six-page letter to Amdur herself. It is dated one day before the letter to Williams, and print’d in Paideuma (21: 1 & 2). A sprinkling: “Flint is and was an ASS.” “As to Flint / do realize that WHEN people understand NOTHING that is said to them one does NOT contribute to their mental growth. Besides he is a soreheaded pup who didn’t make the grade.” “Hulme’s scattered notes were PRINTED post mortem. He was not an ass, but neither did he predominate etc / etc / there were other [rooms] and in particular ONE other room where men even then spoke of WRITING. Unless you and yr / unspeakable beanery are interested in FACT, I will leave you to find out WHERE.” (Hints, here too, amidst all the turf-claiming, of the “power-silence,” a way to fortify one against any perceived as being beyond the ken.) Amdur seems to’ve work’d as an editor for MIT Press for a number of years, and died in the late ’eighties.

Wyndham Lewis, “Ezra Pound,” 1939

Junk’d

A YEAR

CCCXLI
My unyielding receipt
of the pith-
privy notebook, its
prim savagery, its
unnaturally haughty story
of diminishment, filth
and pall. A
black cap of
weather’d basalt plunges
down through aspen-
yellow’d hay meadows
skirt’d with mature
deciduous patches lit
within by dogwoods
and redbuds, understory
froth- and color-
workers. Down with
the clayey creeks,
out where fields
sluice nutrients into
ranges and relent,
the placid tail-
twitching Herefords moony,
red and sculptural.
Down to where
the Venus fly-
trap and honeydew
bogs—tympanums of
earth—bounce muffled
and hummock’d, out
across mudflats to
anchor in ten
fathoms of brackish
water, the whole
descent mimicking a
viscous interior magma
retort to all
fervency, its earnest
dogma of ascent.
Oh, my paint-
fleck’d coevals, don’t
the thunderously august
transports of unreckon’d-
for human hatreds
place their bedung’d
hooves against your
shoulders too, like
giant cows, unresilient
and wayward with
the sudden terrible
knowledge of their
incipient and fungible
turn to lunchmeat?

—

Gassing off into the pshaw-talker’s idiocy—on effect of speed, its clarify’d demand. How imbecile (one thinks) to write to a tempo—its non-stop weathering. Sensing now that my next writing ought somehow inhabit space—a pre-declared ooze-acre to fill with no daily quota. A thing made coup de foudre’dly evident by my perusal of Paul Metcalf’s Apalache (Turtle Island Foundation, 1976), uncover’d in my weekend “hunt,” in a piece call’d “The Feare in Ye Buttocks”:

Many have trauayled to ſearch
the coaſt of the lande of Labrador,

      aſwell to th intente to knowe
      how farre or whyther it reachethe,

            as alſo whether there bee any paſſage by ſea
            through the ſame

A highly victual’d book—meaning one’s supped hearty and lengthily “on” a feast of texts in its weaning (for that single piece Metcalf lists thirty or so, mostly voyage and discovery narratives, Hakluyt, Purchas, Parkman, &c.) To make a thing durably, a thing requiring “not speaking words as they changeably fall from the mouth, but peyzing each sillable of each word by just proportion according to the dignity of the subject” (Sidney), which is to say a slowing against rabbitty-clabber’d things of the clock.

Javier Marías, out of the Margaret Jull Costa-translated Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (New Directions, 2009):

The tranquil and patient or reluctant and languid murmur . . . of words that slip by gently or indolently, without the obstacle of the alert reader, or of vehemence, and which are then absorbed passively, as if they were a gift, and which resemble something easy and incalculable that bring no advantage. Like the words carried along or left behind by rivers in the middle of a feverish night, when the fever has abated; and that is one of the times when anything can be believed, even the craziest, most unlikely things, even a nonexistent drop of blood, just as one believes in the books that speak to you then, to your weariness and your somnambulism, to your fever, to your dreams, even if you are or believe yourself to be wide awake, and books can persuade us of anything then, even that they’re a connecting thread between the living and the dead, that they are in us and we are in them, and that they understand us.

The unavoidable somnifacient that reading mostly is? Interruptible by what, the precisely cut word? (Metcalf quoting the Magnalia Christi Americana, regarding Roger Williams: “the fierceness of his talking in publick and the starchtness of his living in private.”) And the original comparing Williams to a windmill:

In the year 1654, a certain Windmill in the Low Countries, whirling round with extraordinary violence, by reason of a violent storm then blowing; the stone at length by its rapid motion became so intensly hot, as to fire the mill, from whence the flames, being dispersed by the high winds, did set a whole town on fire. . . . about twenty years before this, there was a whole country in America like to be set on fire by the rapid motion of a windmill, in the head on one particular man.

Why, now (I am speeding, evidently, out along a spur track, my slowing faltering) do I think of J. H. Prynne’s assessment of F. R. Leavis’s analysis of metaphor (most particularly Shelly’s “tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,” in “Ode to the West Wind”):

. . . in the sequence of overt or implied metaphor or simile the initial ground for comparison from which the figure rises often has less primacy in the direction of later development than the new areas of reference introduced by the figure: and that this induces confusion and exemplifies a damaging, central weakness of mind.

And isn’t that sheer breakaway uncontrollable flightiness (“the figure rises”) precisely the beauty of metaphor, that it clambers up as replacement? (Clearly I am having a rather unconvincing conversation with myself. What’d be less painstaking and durably-made than a series of divergent “flights” harum-scarum off the space of this world?) Weekends do that—stretch’d by tenterhooks across three states, diving into too various a chorus of books. Or plunging out into the physical word, a burgeoning junk heap along the Huron, examining defunct industrial crud for its formal properties. What if language only diminishes the world—“tree” delimiting that magnificent red oak there, skinny’d down to its sparse clay-color’d leafage—, isn’t that reason enough to eschew it? This, out of David Batchelor’s Chromophobia, keeps palpably nudging. He’s talking about Aldous Huxley’s “peyote-induced hallucination” of “‘fragments of stained glass’ and ‘huge precious stones’, both of which ‘seemed to possess an interior light’”—along with a raft of similar visions (see Ezekiel) as recount’d in Huxley’s Heaven and Hell:

For Huxley, it was not in itself the rarity of these stones that explained their place in the literature of paradise; it was, again, their colour. For this colour—intense, heightened, pure, unqualified—offered a glimpse of the ‘Other World’, a world beyond Nature and the Law, a world undimmed by language, concepts, meanings and uses. In a way, Huxley’s other world may be as much an Oz as it is an Eden—at least there is very little he says about this realm that doesn’t sound a bit like Dorothy’s ‘somewhere’-that-is-no-longer-Kansas. In Huxley’s writing, mescaline or LSD take you to the ‘antipodes of the mind’, a largely unexplored continent populated by exceedingly improbable’ metaphorical mammal and marsupials—about as improbable as the inhabitant of Dorothy’s vision. One the near side of the rainbow, in the land of the laws and orders of consciousness, there are also similarities between Huxley’s and Dorothy’s pictures. Dorothy’s Kansas, as we know, is grey; Huxley’s Kansas is language, as language greys the world around us. ‘Colour turns out to be a kind of touchstone of reality. That which is given is coloured’, he says, but the intellect, the conceptual structures and the symbol systems we impose on the world are in themselves abstract and colourless. And they in turn drain our perceptions of the colour that is around us.

“Language greys the world around us.” Is it for that that one fires the cotton of language itself, gussying it up, making it rip like a muhfuh?

Paul Metcalf, 1917-1999
(Photograph by Jonathan Williams)

A Wall

[If I occasionally grouse mightily how mere (and readily evident) sycophancy (and its devil dog, study’d and rigorous “power-silence”) drives what’s “discuss’d” in the “community”—Kent Johnson (a useful and necessarily pesky fly to have at anybody’s sit-down self-celebratory “brunch”)’s got here a more finely-comb’d and consider’d study of it—resolutely focussing on Steve Evans’s annual round-up of titles at Attention Span. Questions. Why doesn’t Steve Evans duck the Oz-rôle of impresario, step out of the curtain’d corner and, he, too, entre en jeu, toss in a bet in the form of a list? Why doesn’t the “Marooned on a planet of slackers” roger-dodger and self-styled caller of winners Ron Silliman offer up a list? Mute-complacency of the hits-collector? Why doesn’t Jennifer Moxley, or Ange Mlinko? Why doesn’t Jordan Davis? Why doesn’t everybody? Why the tendency—exacerbated by Evans’s culling of top “vote-getters”—to treat the annual assembly as a “best of” delivery system and not as an exploratory bibliographical tool, a “suggest’d readings,” an opening of the field as opposed to what’s become, effectively, an instrument of its narrowing? Replies, and replies to replies welcome. Or, consider commenting here. My own list is here. —JL]

The Question of Attention Span (At Bourdieuian Angle)

Steve Evans is justly regarded as a talented critic, and his Third Factory blog is a long-standing, ongoing record of the seriousness of his own reading in innovative poetry. That record of Evans’s reading reflects a decided aesthetic bias, to be sure. I’ve no doubt he would readily admit to the selectiveness of his concerns.

On Monday, November 16, Ron Silliman devoted his post to a quick recap of the 2009 Attention Span book rankings, an influential “post-avant” survey Evans has been overseeing, on an annual basis, for seven years. For the latest Attention Span episode, sixty readers had listed their ten (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) favorite books of poetry (or criticism) for the year. It is possible to prepare what is really a balance delicately hung on a thread of quartz, and to see that when a ray of light plays on one side of it, at once the balance turns.

The complete results (from 633 total items) were, as always, tallied up by Evans and precise numerical breakdowns made, i.e., which single title was mentioned by ten readers, which two titles were mentioned by seven readers, and so on, all the way down to the forty-two titles that were mentioned by two readers. [Nota interesante: Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies, which has just been named winner of the National Book Award, is in this trailing group.] The rest—those titles mentioned only once (almost 90%)—are not listed in the final wrap-up, and one has to read all sixty individual submissions to know what and by whom they are. In any case, the quantitative logic and drive of the total project is a dream made in heaven for the famously number-crunching Silliman. It is strange to know that the early experiments for ballooning were actually made with soap-bubbles. “Impeccable” is what Silliman deemed the sixty-person line-up of selectors presented by Evans—nearly all of them good-pedigreed and well-connected names on the “post-avant” scene—about two months before the final results were offered.

Like other such statistical rankings, the project’s results exude an undeniably axiological air. In fact, it’s possible to say Attention Span has become something like a crude Nielsen Ratings of “post-avant” poetry, a sort of index of who is read and who is not, who is up and who is down, who counts and who does not. The name of the project, even, vaguely suggests the measurement systems and outcomes of Nielsen research: When all the attentions for all the shows are added up, which shows most often fall within the preference span of the sampled group? And, like the Nielsen ratings, the Attention Span rankings have a built-in, self-reinforcing dynamic: The top-ranked programs (poets) will stand a better chance of continued viewing and advertising (reading and critical regard), at least for some measure of time. If we went up in a balloon above the clouds, we should find ourselves in brilliant sunshine, even when it was almost as dark as night to the people on the earth below. People’s attention spans are to some extent driven by the previous rankings; buzz is created and inertial capital is accumulated by the winners.

But I think that’s as far as the analogy goes. Because the Nielsen project, after all, is assiduously impartial and demographically far-reaching in its sampling criteria and practices. And the participants from whom the results are drawn are quite uninfluenced by personal connections and cultural debts that might lead them to lend more attention to this or that show, or to withhold it from this or that other one. Indeed, the Nielsen’s reputation and relevance is premised on the statistical breadth, disinterestedness, and objectivity of its methods and results. If, for example, houses seem crooked above a street fire, it is because light is bent by the various things through which it passes.

None of that, it should be clear, is the case for Attention Span. As Evans himself has noted, the core of his sample pool, shaped in the late 1990s, when the venture was in its formative phase, is purposely drawn from a closely connected group: poets he has been actively in touch with, who know each other, who praise each other, and who share a general but discernible poetic predisposition. The sea was first made by the water that was in the air falling into all the deep places on the earth. And truth is, I’ve been wondering (with a stress on the “wondering,” for I offer what follows in a hypothetical spirit) if Evans’s “popularity spreadsheet,” in all its earnestly positivist packaging, is possibly about something quite other than an innocent, helpful, “accurate measurement” of aggregate esteem—assuming, that is, the sense of “accurate measurement” is taken as a set of results flowing from methods meant to control for favor-seeking advances, compensatory transactions, or retributive exclusions. Though I realize Evans might well say such “position-taking” effects are of secondary concern to his project . . . In point of fact, in a comment under the aforementioned post by Silliman, he does suggest as much.

And not that those orders of behavior can in any way be fully evaded, for they deeply inform the habitus that is shared, at base, by actors in the literary field. They are, as Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out (I’ve already been using some of his key terms), both immanent in and constitutive of the agonism that is the life force of cultural production, and all who enter the literary field’s operations are subject to them—as addresser or addressee—in fluctuating degrees. The world is full of mysteries and of wonders, and there is no need for us to puzzle ourselves by making any that do not really exist. The adversarial animus that informs the behaviors is not a matter, in the end, of bad faith or “moral” failing on the part of these or those individuals. It is the ontological matter, rather, of the system proper. As Bourdieu stresses, “[I]t [the result or sum of these operations] has nothing in common with that emanation of some human nature which is ordinarily assigned to the notion of interest.”

Bourdieu doesn’t mean by this that cultural actors are without agency, as if they were something like ciphers of difference with no positive terms. Anything that is stretched is apt to be thrown into vibration, or made to tremble, by the force of the air blowing against it. Actions of individual and communal “interest” do inflect the conditions of the larger field. But the configuration of those “interests” and the range of choices for their expression are, as in a game of Go, primarily given, circumscribed by structural pressures at work in first instance, beneath the tangle of moves that is the daily, habitually euphemized stuff of cultural commerce.

Assuming there may be something to that general Bourdieuian idea, therefore, and because the novelty of the Attention Span project seven years on has arguably begun to dull into seasonal rite, I think it may be relevant and useful to ask: What is the meaning and purpose, really, of a “self-selecting survey pool”* pointing up its more favored denizens—while pointing up through dearth and absence its less favored ones—fall after fall, in such obsessively quantifying ways? Might the measuring act in fact represent a kind of structural excrescence of those above-named interactions the community claims, in moments of propriety, to “morally” abhor: a collectively unconscious means (however modest the device) for their rationalization and extension—a kind of instrumentalist prosthesis, as it were, to enable the more efficient unfolding of the essential competitive energies and tensions of a subfield? Two Frenchmen, brothers, made balloons of silk and linen and filled them with hot air and smoke, and after making balloons which carried animals, they persuaded some men to be carried in this way.

Very possibly so, I think. Bourdieu, again, is suggestive in this regard. I’ll offer, a bit in allegorical spirit, some extended quotation here from his classic Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field:

[The] struggle about the boundaries of the group and conditions of membership is by no means abstract . . . It follows that any enquiry aiming, for example, to establish the properties of writers and artists at a given moment predetermines its result in the inaugural decision delimiting the populations to be subjected to statistical analysis. . . . The struggles over definition (or classification) have boundaries at stake . . . and, therefore, hierarchies. To define boundaries, defend them and control entries is to defend the established order in the field. In effect, the growth in the volume of the population of producers is one of the principal mediations through which external changes affect the relations of force at the heart of the field. The great upheavals arise from the eruption of newcomers who, by the sole effect of their number and their social quality, import innovation regarding products or techniques of production, and try or claim to impose on the field of production, which is itself its own market, a new mode of evaluation of products.

It would be thought-provoking, I think, to consider Attention Span in that light of “boundary defining” and “entry control.” What if the project, in light of the “self-selecting” make-up of its membership (participants and ideal audience alike), were grasped as a kind of collective-reflex attempt to maintain order and rank against the productive overplus inherent in the set—a symbolic excess and redundancy which constantly threatens to overwhelm, even, the value of its aspiring cultural capital and the very rationale for its management? After all, as Bourdieu points out elsewhere, relatively “marginal” literary groups require, for the successful promotion of their members within the ever-recycled struggle for position in the larger field, an assimilated sense, however abstract and unresolved it might be, of internal order, rank, and worth. Many brave men in fine ships went into the gloom and silence of the frozen regions in the hope of discovering the Poles. Techniques for the rationing of entrance assist such control.

A couple pages later, if on a slightly different tack, Bourdieu extends his discussion of literary groups and their internal competitive drives, presenting one of his key conceptual tools, “illusio”:

The struggles for the monopoly of the definition of the mode of legitimate cultural production contribute to the continual reproduction of belief in the game, interest in the game and its stakes, the illusio—of which the struggles are also the product. [my emphasis] Each field produces its specific form of the illusio, in the sense of an investment in the game which pulls agents out of their indifference and inclines and predisposes them to put into operation the distinctions which are pertinent from the viewpoint of the logic of the field, to distinguish what is important (‘what matters to me’, is of interest, in contrast to ‘what is all the same to me’, or in-different). But it is just as true that a certain form of adherence to the game, of belief in the game and the value of its stakes, which makes the game worth the trouble of playing, is the basis of the functioning of the game, and that the collusion of agents in the illusio is the root of the competition which pits them against each other and which makes the game itself. In short, the illusio is the condition for the functioning of a game of which it is also, at least partially, the product . . .

A bit later, Bourdieu discusses “acts of credit,” and though his examples here pertain to the visual arts, it is easy enough to take them as analogous to common practices in poetic politics:

The collective belief in the game (illusio) and in the sacred value of its stakes is simultaneously the precondition and the product of the very functioning of the game; it is fundamental to the power of consecration, permitting consecrated artists to constitute certain products, by the miracle of their signature (or brand name), as sacred objects. To give an idea of the collective labour which goes to produce this belief, it would be necessary to reconstitute the circulation of the innumerable acts of credit which are exchanged among all the agents engaged in the artistic field: among artists, obviously, with group exhibitions or prefaces by which consecrated authors consecrate the younger ones, who consecrate them in return as masters or heads of schools; between artists and patrons or collectors; between artists and critics, and in particular avant-garde critics, who consecrate themselves by obtaining the consecration of the artists they champion . . .

And consecration accumulated, in the latter case of “avant-garde critics,” perhaps, by the creation and supervision of competitive ranking “games” (these assume various forms, and Evans’s project would be but one, albeit industrious, example), through which a subcultural community engages in the labor of mutual credit-exchange as a function of proto-canonical production—an activity Bourdieu analyzes as a hallmark feature of “avant-garde” group-identity formation and joint position-taking. The boys and girls who lived long ago, in Athens or Rome, were just as fond of stories as the children of today.

Some of this is getting a tad wordy, I suppose. But the chief, more specific point, as anyone reading this far has probably intuited, would be this: Regularly gathering poetic lists, scoring their results, and archiving them in rigorous, statistical array will tend to seem natural, practical, and innocuous enough. A kind of public service, some might say. And on one level, indeed, it will be all those things. No one, again, is up for any fault. But it is those things (if someone like Bourdieu has anything to offer on the topic) because it is always and already something else, too: a clustering of effects, like proverbial filings taking form above a magnet, out of a deeper field of ideological force. This was found out last century by John Tyndall, and you would never guess the reason. That such arrangements are taken as “natural” is, of course, precisely to the point, purpose, and meaning of the ideological. The consciousness may be false, but it helps people make sense of their world.

Be that as it may, more detailed evaluations of the Attention Span project in light of sociological and psychological dynamics informing such hierarchical lists might be pursued by others better trained in such topics than I. Indeed, we are finding out a great deal about early times by the opening up of many tombs underground, especially in Egypt.

In the meantime, onward and upward, one could say, with our “post-avant” chariot races . . . Some of the most remarkable events in history have been due to mistakes of this kind. There is no stopping them, as Bourdieu suggests. But so long as we’re here, fans and players as we simultaneously are, more reflection on the Rules of the Game can’t hurt the finer understanding, or even the pleasure, of the spectacle. For if you take a card with a gate drawn on one side, and a person upon a horse on the other side, and spin it, you will see the horse jumping the gate.

—Kent Johnson

* The term is used in a comment by Jordan Davis, under the post by Silliman cited above. Passages by Pierre Bourdieu in the post are taken from the chapter “The Author’s Point of View: Some General Properties of Fields of Cultural Production,” in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Stanford, 1992.

Steve Evans

A YEAR

CCCXXXVIII
My ascendancy camber’d
to dip down
like a pole
bent by a
sturgeon the size
of a skateboard,
or a meal-
worm sized frown,
oh my immutable
Omaha, my Aeschylus, my
grillwork! The highly
cumber’d back flat
where the stage-
hands work feverishly
to crank up
the deucèdly god-
like machina of
my proscenium-arch’d
fuck with a
gigantic white swan
“hat” obscuring my
entirety, orange-enamel’d
prick-antics included.
So randomly down-
at-the-mouth
I go, plotting murderous
little nothings, Birnam
Wood dress’d in
its company outfit,
Samarkand a scrim-
lower’d desert off.
Dour and diffident,
a rabbit corner’d
by the snarling
rapacious dogs of
the uncollapsible physical
world. Occasional hay
fever Claritin-controll’d
and a desire
to bring down
the fourteen-point
buck of my
brain-pang, that
tinny-sounding “receptacle.”

A Tangle (Grasses)

A YEAR

CCCXXXVII
My sommers flowre
summons up sweet
lash of summery
breeze. Up, mizzenmast,
up, my cheek.
Feign’d majescules, sirrah.
Feign’d aimless impiety.
My dickering with
the common welter.
My moaning un-
abash’d, my sloth,
my godless impropriety.
I love it
the way stealth-
menacing content bats
ungainly along beneath
form’s radar, colossal
abrupt, yawing. Yawning,
sirrah. I doubt
the pedigree of
what the tender
chorle makst, what
plops niggardly into
the bucket. Constrain’d
into a beast.
Hang it all.

—

Javier Marías, out of the newly-translated (by Margaret Jull Costa) third volume of Tu rostro mañana, English’d to Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (New Directions, 2009), with a trail of Proustian languor, or what one character’d call “loquacious introspection”—here, trigger’d by a reminiscence of “sharing a bed while awake” with one “young Pérez Nuix,” and how that activity

. . . arbitrarily marks the frontier between discretion and trust, between secrecy and revelation, between deferential silence and questions with their respective answers or, perhaps, evasions, as if briefly entering another’s body broke down not only physical barriers but others too: biographical, sentimental, certainly the barriers of pretense, caution or reserve, it’s absurd really that two people, having once entwined, feel that they can, with authority and impunity, probe the life and thoughts of whoever was above or below, or standing up facing forward or backwards if no bed was needed, or else describe both life and thoughts at length, in the most verbose and even abstracted fashion, there are people who only screw someone so that they can then rabbit on at them to their heart’s content, as if that intertwining had given them a license to do so. This is something that has often bothered me following one of my occasional flings, one that lasted a night or a morning or an afternoon, and, in the first instance, all such encounters are just that—flings—as long as they’re not repeated, and all encounters start out the same with neither party knowing if it will end right there, or, rather, one of the parties knows, knows at once, but politely says nothing and thus gives rise to a misunderstanding (politeness is a poison, our undoing); they pretend that this relationship isn’t going to come to an immediate halt, but that some really has opened up and there’s no reason why it should ever be closed again; the most terrible mess and confusion ensues. And sometime you know this before you’ve entered that new body, you know you only want to do it that one time, just to find out, or perhaps to brag about it to yourself or to shock yourself, or you might even make a mental note of the occasion so that you can recall or remember it or even more tenuously, have it on record, so that you’ll be able to say to yourself: ‘This happened in my life,’ especially in old age or in ones’ maturer years when the past often invades the present and when the present, grown bored or skeptical, rarely looks ahead.

Which—is it the lazy needling persistence of the interrogatory?—invades reading itself, so that the immediacy of one’s mental and physical “husk” is implicated, becomes charg’d with a kind of staticky cling-aura trailing off . . . I’d just earlier had a “fling” with a book of letters between Pound (goading the flabbiness of Ford’s “impressionist” miasmas: “The half of you that is english, conduces to englishness; namely tangential. ¶ The god damn Briton do not go at a thing straight / Shx. [Shakespeare] play wright / / mebbe began it.”) and Ford Madox Ford (goading back: “Our distinguished colleague has always hated prose.”)—mostly scouting for the story of Ford’s late brief sojourn at Olivet College (just down the road) and attempts, circa 1937-8, to haul Pound there (“Does Olivet USE my text books? Will the clog-dancer [Olivet’s president: “Fordie” ’d mention’d how he, Joseph Brewer, “impressionable and youngish and ready to learn,” “is also one of the best clog-dancers in the world”] . . . GET a printing press / LINO or monotype / I.E. practical and not fancy hand arty machine for the DISTRIBUTION of knowledge and ideas?”), to make him part of the “extremely meritorious” experiment (“to create a number of chairs for imaginative writers who won’t do much lecturing but sit about and be Influences.”) Fail’d, naturally (“I do NOT propose to go into any sort of YOKE.”) What remains: the perennially lilt’d pettifoggery of “Cantico del Sole,” song of the blameless “servent” overlook’d—“The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation / Troubles my sleep. / Nunc dimittis, now lettest thou thy servant, / Now lettest thou thy servant / Depart in peace.” Differing somewhat off what Ford call’d Pound’s “wearisomely incomprehensible” “1892 O Henry stuff”—“Get the waiter at your hotel to write your letters for you; he will at least write comprehensible dog-English.”

I think I am trying to write about reading, its aberrances, invasions, its drifts and velocities and listlessnesses. I am wholly uncertain of that, I am sidelined, spur’d out. Truth is, I keep thinking of how Bhanu Kapil recently talk’d about the “grid” and how it may “extend the range of what we see.” She numbers it (number is a grid):

2. The grid is an imaging technology. Maybe part of the work of prose writing is to invent a form that disturbs the given field of information, even if that information is beautiful.

I love that. Numbering itself capable of disturbing “the given field of information.” Truth is, I slug’d off to sleep reading Marías, though, as it occurs regularly enough, roused up a little later, refresh’d, and turn’d to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), a thing “intend’d” for weeks now. It is there that Kapil’s grid and numbering (one’d say, perhaps: “arbitrary markers of the frontier between indiscretion and trust”) lodged up alongside Marías’s languor and brag. Maggie Nelson manages (partly by cyanophilia, that motif of blues, though largely, I think, by the simple expedient of a writing atomized into discrete propositions Wittgensteinian, how it allows an uncanny copiousness to emerge, how it bends the autobiographical against itself, denatures it, makes it “of use”), Nelson manages, I say, to keep a fraught and obsessive narrative of a fail’d love affair out of the homily-recycling depths of mere prurience—in a way, she, too, like Marías, is working out of “loquacious introspection.” She veers, she collects, she assembles quotes, she confesses, she wheels unsignal’d between ornate preciosity and the unclutter’d blunt:

18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

19. Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

Too, stories of saints, of looking, here poised against one “image of the intellectual” as “a man who loses his eyesight not out of shame (Oedipus) but in order to think more clearly (Milton)”:

56. There are, however, many stories of women—particularly saints—blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity, to prove that they “only have eyes” for God or Christ. Consider, for example, the legend of Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind, whose name means “clear, radiant, understandable. What seems clear enough: in 304 ad Lucy was tortured and put to death by the Roman emperor Diocletian, and thus martyred for her Christianity. What is unclear: why, exactly, she runs around Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it. Some say her eyes were tortured out of her head in her martyrdom; some say she gouged them out herself after being sentenced by the pagan emperor to be defiled in a brothel. Even more unclear are the twinned legends of Saint Medana (of Ireland) and Saint Triduana (of Scotland), two Christian princesses who were pursued by undesirable pagan lovers—lovers who professed to be unable to live without their beloveds’ beautiful blue eyes. To rid herself of the unwanted attention, Medana supposedly plucked her eyes out and threw them at her suitor’s feet; Triduana was slightly more inventive, and tore here out with a thorn, then sent them to her suitor on a skewer.

57. In religious accounts, these women are announcing, via their amputations, their fidelity to God. But other accounts wonder whether they were in fact punishing themselves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation.

58. Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci).

59. There are those, however, who like to look. And we have not yet heard enough, if anything about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head. “I love to gaze at a promising-looking cock,” writes Catherine Millet in her beautiful sex memoir, before going on to describe how she also loves to look at the “brownish crater” of her asshole and the “crimson valley” of her pussy, each opened wide—its color laid bare—for the fucking.

Brash, feverish, intractable, exploratory, and terribly “touchant” Nelson’s Bluets is, I am remind’d for some reason (it’s in Marías) of Rimbaud’s line: “Par délicatesse / J’ai perdu ma vie.”

Maggie Nelson

Yellow Leaves

A YEAR

CCCXXXVI
My escutcheon is
dexter’d and my
music is shot—
nowhere is withdrawal
a snap. My
dicking around hardly
equals condensare, oh
senescence, oh cant.
To pin one
fierce verity down
without the simpering
choral sketches of
the contextual. To
rout the sap
inveigler and carney
filibuster of niche
stability, three throws
for a dollar,
win a wind-
up talking bear.
To see it
stretch’d out royal
to a pinning-
board, and stiff!
I think of
Martha, the mite-
quashing taxidermy, iridescent
skittish shine dull’d,
a pigeon zoo-
mort in Cincinnati.
Or Ishi, any
nameable in advance
of the caravansary
of l’innommable. Thousands
of opusculi perish’d.

—

Out of Paul Vangelisti’s new magazine, OR (#3), the one with Pound intently de-scabbing a thumb on the cover—and a scrawl’d note:

O. K
        send ’em
along

subject       verb       object

E. P.

Though the K is fortuitously mimicking an R, honeying the nomenclature. Magazine in the style and format of Vangelisti’s Invisible City: newspaper-like (whiter, heftier paper), lots of space for graphics (lots of graphics), two-color (red and black), international emphasis (particularly Italian). A sampling. Ray DiPalma’s notational attentiveness to what he calls “Tagewerk— / The vexing tangles of the thinking day / With a lean appeal if not ascetic” and adds “Nothing is to be wasted” (out of If to why):

2 /5/09

Falling in parallel folds secured
at the hip with wide knots
pleated sashes intersect
across the torso

Presented tribhanga—in three bends

Set against the leafy branches of a tree

On a lotus base carved with rhythmic incised lines

Bordered with diamond-petaled florets

The reverse is rough hewn

. . .

2/22/09

The posited voice—sometimes subtle—
but a weak and graceless instrument
of thought—that even half-noticed embraces
all to affirm little or complete nothing—ever more
innocuous in its patient amazements at whatever
is distant but traceable and coordinate
Thus in a half-naked sort of way is
the living aspect of these obscure phenomena
through which we must stray set in motion
to the detriment of other all kinds of idle
and trivial strains of thought assuming
the shape of any great impulses struggling
to accomplish the celestial promise
the undeniable position of blankness and exaltation

(A jampack’d and solacing place, one could stray therein endlessly . . .) Valentino Zeichen, translated by Paul Vangelisti and Brunella Antomarini:

Crimes

If the assassins of feeling
possessed an infallible aim
the surprised lovers would share
even in the world beyond
an endless unknowable anguish;
but missing their targets,
the shots meant for the heart
swerve in random trajectory
striking the head’s lofty observatory.
There the bullets bore openings
not unlike little portholes
through which light enters,
sister to the light of reason:
diffusing studied doubts
and clearing the fumes of passion.

Too, some “Onesheets” by Brian Blanchfield (with titles like “A Page on Sardines, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source” and “A Page on Completism, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source”). Out of the “Sardines”:

Ordained confinement wherein embrace is organized as a situational necessity is recognizably the ground floor of my erotic imagination. My early fantasies and even dreams were perforce arrangements of closeness with boys, ingenious scenarios that late Cold-War tropes helped to prepare: root cellars during a tornado scare, bomb shelters, prisoners’ quarters, deep dry wells, or dens within caves demanded that another haplessly subterranean boy whose form I could barely make out in the pitch black must stand or lie squarely against me. Endless stimulation of the fort-da wiggle room between speculation and the highly conditional permission to touch: Does he feel what I feel? and then, We have no choice, we have to be like this.

An essay by Dennis Phillips titled “Leland Hickman: Against Taxonomies,” preface to Hickman’s forthcoming Tiresias: The Collected Poems (Nightboat Books, 2009):

From its title, its length, and its complex arrangement,* Great Slave Lake Suite—the bulk of Hickman’s mature work—decidedly follows a High Modernist tradition. Yet he seems to have jettisoned the modernist tendency to “impersonalize” the poetic work by using autobiography as the core of the poem. Though the work is very personal, by dimension and mythic ambition, it’s not confessional. There is a seeping narrative, the but the poem’s not narrative in any conventional sense. And there is a dense and shifting lyricism, symphonic in its scope, that might seem Romantic were it not for the thoroughly contemporary dissonance that Hickman deploys to challenge the very musicality that drives the work.

A consideration (“Efficient Detail”) by Bill Mohr of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet:

      The Alphabet contains many passages of vigorous language and memorable detail, but all too often, especially in the final 400 pages, one feels that one is having one’s attention called to something that is not worth noticing, or at least that the language used to call attention to the perception is not worth one’s devotion. “At the service / station / a man / in a brown / jumpsuit / slowly waves / a customer / into / the proper bay.” A certain kind of monotony sets in, rather like someone having the same kind of pancakes every morning, 365 days a year.
      Perhaps Silliman does not care if a reader decides that an old joke is one too many (“I pick up the paper to read the latest lies”) and puts his poem aside. I can’t say that I would scold anyone who did not finish this poem. “Whoever lives by the aphorism dies by the cliché” appears on the same page as, “Returning in the rain from the old brick bank to the car, I realize that I forgot to feed the meter, had scurried right past it in my hurry to stay dry, only to have gotten by without a ticket, little gift of fate.” Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg were equally self-indulgent in presenting extracts from their diaries, and while their audience tolerated it with good humor in public, I wonder how long they actually leaned and loafed on their living room floors, mulling over the pertinacity of such an anecdote to the imperatives of their circumstances?

(Brilliant to summon Whitman there.) Mohr wonders, too—regarding Silliman’s grandly announced Universe—“whether there is actually a need for another long poem by Ron Silliman.” “If so, it would have to be radically different in content to make it worth the trek,” Mohr writes, adding that Silliman’s “new project might be best served by an essay or two in which he discusses what urgent surprise is missing in The Alphabet that so desperately requires its enunciation in The Universe.” And ends:

“Can I trust this poet?” each reader has a right to ask, and she deserves a sincere answer. In general, the avant-garde is the province of the young, and it is not exactly blessed with a reputation for appreciating sincerity or trust. Perhaps Silliman could continue to change that reputation. How much of a contribution his next long poem could make, in terms of intermingling ineluctable form and innovative content, to the avant-garde will depend on how much he is able to redefine “trust” so that it re-organizes every point of contact with the distant intimacy that has marked his writing up to this point.

Tons, like they say, more. Marinetti’s “Technical Manifesto of Literature” translated by Vangelisti (“In some cases one must link the image two by two, like those chained iron balls that level a whole line of trees in their flight”). Vangelisti’s “Conversation with Mary de Rachewiltz.” Reviews of Stacy Doris’s Knot, of three Norma Cole books, of Mary Barnard’s memoir, Assault on Mount Helicon, at twenty-five. Memoir piece by Neeli Cherkovski.

OR’s put together semi-annually, free of charge: “send ’em along.”

* Phillips notes here that “the full title of Great Slave Lake Suite, Tiresias I:9:B: Great Slave Lake Suite, suggests a grand and complex form.”

Paul Vangelisti

Leafage

A YEAR

CCCXXXV
My languorous doubt
ply’d with ‘narcosis
and dirt’ sub-
dues the sentimental
klaxon in me.
Color is everything.
White vying with
certitude, discrepant, elegiac.
An industry-hue’d
saucer put out
with ouzo—load’d
with pale orange
apricots, knuckle-sized.
Delirium of grandly
damnable red, its
bladderwort synth ruckus,
it hubris exhumed.
Green what’s to
query green? Loco
quintessence of blue,
vulgar and piercing,
or a smudge
unextinguish’d. Yellow of
the implacid flâneur.
Off a streetcar—
a flying violet
stole the length
of a leash.
A cash-patent’d
light emitting diode
indigo like an
dime-thin slice
off a star, unhamper’d
by whatever piece-
meal conniption color’s
made to fit.

—

Stray undigest’d tidbits out of K. K. Ruthven’s 1990 Ezra Pound as Literary Critic, a thing chief emunctor Bobby Baird toss’d out and lit fire to here. I read it surround’d by big eat fixings and hellions, found it jampack’d with goods (Ruthven seems to’ve read everything Poundian), highly readable, tetch’d (slightly) with the now rather outdated discourse markers of ’eighties critical theory. Alors, some siftings. How Pound’s ridiculing of “the Germanic ideal of scholarship”—“an ensemble of such diversionary activities as the study of Privatleben trivia (what an ‘author wore and ate’ [why, suddenly, do I think of Barrett Watten’s Grand Piano reports of wearing—how’d it go?—an “ox-blood red shirt”—near kin to the Nixonian “respectable Republican cloth coat”—“is” we back to Privatleben-esqueries so soon?]) and insoluble textual cruxes (trying to decide whether the lection seca was preferable to secat in an epigram ‘not worth reading’)” grew out of a crisis in the American academy, one of its periodic bouts with some form of supposedly scientistic “rigor”:

Developed by men whose professional nightmare was to be accused of dilettantism, scholarship of this sort had blinded its practitioners to ‘the beauty of the classics’ and discouraged students like [Pound] himself from reading Latin ‘widely and for pleasure.’

Plus la même chose trigger’d the deconstructivist exuberance and fury, I’d wager. I used to underline the word “rigor” in every book: a sign of—one supposes—a whole discourse’s fear of flaccidity. Pound, though, whilst (according to Ruthven) scorning “the philological processing of literary texts under a Teutonic régime of scholarship,” isn’t going to toss off disciplinary hardness. He had, Ruthven says,

earned the right to be a critic after submitting himself to the discipline of philology. This was to be the stand he would take later against any artist who moved straight into an avant-garde style without first having worked through the dominant traditional modes in a recapitulatory fashion. ‘The strength of Picasso’, he wrote in 1921, ‘is largely in his having chewed through and chewed up a great mass of classicism’, which is what set his work apart from that of ‘flabby cubists’ incapable of doing anything else. Pound saw his own poetic experiments with Provençal forms in English as analogous prentice work, which qualified him to experiment with vers libre: ‘no one can do good free verse’, he told Iris Barry in 1916, ‘who hasn’t struggled with the regular.’

Hence, Pound’s “contempt for ‘the subsequent easy riders’.” (Elsewhere, Ruthven, in the course of remarking how the man who claim’d it ‘better to produce one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works’, allow’d, too, “as early as 1909 that he himself had already ‘written and burned two novels and three hundred sonnets’.”)

All-pervading the reminders of the Grand Pianists: Pound telling James Laughlin that ‘when a man writes his meeemoires that a sign that he’s finished,’ or, to an American academic: ‘wd. not interest me in the least to write my literary autobiography.’ Though, Ruthven makes it plain that what’s need’d in studying groupuscular arrangements—is exactly what the Pianists fail to provide: “a brief sketch . . . of who met whom, through whose agency, and with what consequences . . . a full-length study of the social micro-networks in which literary criticism was produced . . . would reveal the hidden imbrication of critical predilections with socio-sexual opportunism.” (Reminding me of Kent Johnson’s brilliant line: “I am interested how all literary theory, however disinterested it may seem, is driven by the sex-drive, tell me honestly it’s not.”) Ruthven:

Within weeks of arriving in London Pound had come to understand something of the social pressures under which so-called ‘literary’ judgements are made, and the importance (as he phrased it in a letter written to his father in March 1909) of ‘being in the gang & being known by the right people’. The point of making friends with ‘the two hundred most interesting people’ in England, he was to write a few years later, is that ‘what these people say comes to pass’.

And how forget the tail end of the Poundian hierarchy—‘inventors’, ‘masters’, ‘diluters’ (‘more flabby’), the unnamed thousands ‘who do more or less good work in the more or less good style of a period’, and, butt end of the queue, ‘starters of crazes, the Ossians, and Gongoras’. The Flarfists, I wager Pound’d add. As F. W. Bateson, “who managed to avoid mentioning Pound’s name” whilst grabbing outright the categories for a textbooky-sounding 1950 volume call’d English Poetry: A Critical Introduction, put it: ‘decadents . . . reduced to “stunts” to get new effects out of the exhausted tradition’.

Ezra Pound, c. 1918
(Photograph by E.O. Hoppé)