PORTRAIT D'UNE FEMME by Ezra Pound

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,

London has swept about you this score years

And bright ships left you this or that in fee:

Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,

Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.

Great minds have sought you- lacking someone else.

You have been second always. Tragical?

No. You preferred it to the usual thing:

One dull man, dulling and uxorious,

One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit

Hours, where something might have floated up.

And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

You are a person of some interest, one comes to you

And takes strange gain away:

Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;

Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,

Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else

That might prove useful and yet never proves,

That never fits a corner or shows use,

Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:

The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;

Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,

These are your riches, your great store; and yet

For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,

Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:

In the slow float of differing light and deep,

No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,

Nothing that's quite your own.

Yet this is you. - -

DuPlessis on Pound

from Blue Studios


Chapter 6 "Propounding Modernist Maleness"

DuPlessis writes on Pound (the poet and his practices) as an example of "managing" the women poets, thinkers, artists that might have otherwise moved more fully into the modernist circles inhabited by Pound and his contemporaries. Specifically here, DuPlessis gives a reading of Pound's poem "Portrait d'une Femme" which is presented as a poem addressed to a generic woman (as muse, inspiration for and subject of the poem), but is more specifically, in actuality, about Florence Farr, a woman artist and actor who was active in the respective artistic and literary circles of her time (barely a generation earlier than Pound), and was on good terms with the poet Yeats, among others.

"A postformalist reading strategy...must look at the deep formal mechanisms of literary texts with New Critical Care yet link formal moves to the issues that purist New Criticism rejected: social substance, biographical traces, constructions of subjectivity, historical debates, and ideological strata" (122).

In the poem Pound moves Farr from status as real person (woman) to a place of "figured representation as muse" (124) and thereby removes any agency that she might have/had. Through both content and formal strategy, he presents the female figure of the poem "as virtual lack, inadvertent creativity, and compromised ability" (125). In this way (without agency and possession) she becomes the generic muse figure.

"The poem becomes a muted, backhanded tribute..." to her own modernist tendencies and strategies, both acknowledging and "disparaging" the "source" of the artistic production (of her own work and of her place as real in his poem) (126).

In her own life, Farr "played the muse but also mused the play" in her relationships with other artists and through her own "critical agency"; "she situated herself on both sides of the muse-agent compact" (127).

"...for females entering modernity, artistic agency and erotically charged inspiring with free love bravura are mixed together and give tremendous professional power and satisfaction in ways that the pure stereotyped form of "muse" wisdom-in-passivity-and-sublimation cannot articulate" (127).

For a time, it's possible that Pound felt like a rival to Farr for the attentions of Yeats on his own (Pound's) work (128).

"Pound produces [this] work by the thematic occlusion inside it of the work of the woman on whom the poem is based" (130).

"The real figure has been transformed from a critical, powerful, influential, outspoken, and original historical woman to a textual "femme"--one of a muse of modernism--an inadequate, anonymous and displaceable female figure...Pound's poem is a mechanism in the service of one kind of male subjectivity by the active creation of a shallow but provocative female muse for the containment of historical New Woman effervescence and achievement. This is an important transposition in the relationship of modernism to modernity. By representing a female figure in this way, Pound has contained, grounded, or stalled consideration of the impact-laden presence and agency of the "real person" on whom the poem was based, making the figure an Old Woman with useful muse properties, an exemplum of old stuff that still somehow inspires. Poetic representation masters this female figure, using poetic institutions like "muse" in order to deflect attention away from the historical achievements of Farr, the hidden subject" (133).

"Making an coequal historical woman into a poetic muse thins her...evokes the past of poetry as an institution obscuring her...the muse is a mechanism that takes a modern subject--a New Woman-- and changes her into an encumbered, static, nonmodern subject...moves Farr backward...creating female belatedness from a woman pioneer in order to consolidate a male pioneer from a man's sense of his own belatedness...The resistance to acknowledging females as modern subjects...may be said to begin, in Anglo-American modernism, with poems such as this one" (136).

"Pound uses poetic convention to protect himself from historical shifts around gender" (136).

madness is a medicine from which the length / has slid
--lyn hejinian, writing is an aid to memory


across the angle narrated along a sentence minute particulars find themselves placed/placing degrees of image of sense

rattles under each syllable like the convenient displaced notion confronting only fragments of what i can recall -- lemon-scented stickiness spread thin like an original idea -- the page refuses to interrogate just what she meant by the severe separation of tense

each frame holding her own against
the tendency to blast history

otherwise responding to winter a blast of mist breaks away the squirrells having eaten all of the bulbs your screeching quiet thought working its way toward multiple pages and i don't even know after all of this time how to create an argument - there was a change in the weather but it helps little how no one ever cultivated the precise moment of epiphany or the particular ability to record oneself onto the page or how to create a self with no memory - i have no stakes in this having little relevance to the way that limb moves and the blood daily a concrete description - of little more than what repeats - a circular fragmented present -

behind yellow ink

shiver

break this cold spell

through the language designed to inform

identity

or one’s place

in regard to many places

at the carnival, observe entangled color

and sparkle

marginalized images circulate

fit into pieces

of a modern suggestion

between spaces of syntax

and topography

the observer breathes crowded

air, dreams of the arctic,

finds letters dismembered

shuffled into a pile

and begins to assemble

glass

will see you over
through
those words

silence of words

misused misplaced

cannot see you
through
fog

(or use thesauraus to insert
appropriate inaction
here: _____)

mechanics

list sized over a multiple (sites of what's repressed

cannot recall

due to an imposition of language

and association

can happen to anyone

normal

psychical

do not liberate what is

not pleasure)

sense of how many indeed will participate

in the theoretical process

of forgetting

palindrome

the hysterical moment captures

bliss instinct particle of snow lodged between

scenes remembered

not eating, sleeping, an instance of

trauma cannot break through

the precipitation, a tuesday, a repetition

of intent hidden under the lid of mind

comes just before, or after the blue

haze of future caught through past

unmoving

still

good practice?

i'm trying to write "regular" poems... is it working? is it worth it?

no idea

just practicing, working on a new mss that will include more traditional "looking" things and i don't know what the content will be doing, from one to another, across the body of the thing...

am i giving up innovative use of form and space on the page?

no

though in either case that is/would be difficult to see/determine from this blog format

in any case, line breaks or no, listening to sound and movement of language on and off the page

dotting the landscape

Such pleasant office have we long pursued

Incumbent o’er the surface of past time

--W. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book IV

because for each piece of snow

that fell against

on a day

when I was 11

a moment now like old crystal

the light hits

through the afternoon window

they were married in 1905

mittens on string threaded

through the arms of a

coat

limbs

impervious to everything

winter

at the instant of x

Brutes abstract not.

--John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

the way that I can put each number

against the cool of your skin

lingering above

cotton

the ratio matching nature

greek symbols across the sidewalk

like hopscotch for theorists

explaining each dimension

of yard grass limb

stretching over moments

from the very first

when you stood, brown corduroy

and i listed the mathematics

of inclination

thoreau, hawthorne, or how the west was won

the pace at which

or a train moving

progress

the movie was called dodge city and it was

cowboys cowboys

and guns

mayhem

lacking civic (drink responsibly)

the sheer movement into nothingness

an explosion

violent speed

of apocalypse

if the sheriff can’t save us

this time

relates

“Of this kind is the distinction betwixt figure and the body figur’d;

motion and the body mov’d.”

--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

your marble sphere my box

dimensional

the words laid one on top

across

broken letters

an articulation of history through space

on the page

who was defeated

whose artifacts

weapons

kiss me present tense against shining marble

does not move

its form holding together

molecules

straddling

how much means

across letters objects

viewed from every direction

will not simply show and tell

sliver paper

how her mouth curved
the impossible
hands breaking black
parade
solid eyed blackbird (how many ways)
the taste of barbaric glass
drum silver and tell me
about the straw paper words
lurking hysterical
silver sliver inside
lice tinfoil glass
curves

giggle inside words
breaking children glitter

an offering
for em

‘i shed before walking out the door’ she writes in hopes that he stays this time, that he comes back that he begins to breathe a sense of place, fills his lungs with sitting still and listening. there are birds here. a river. a lake if you attempt the stroll. ‘this is my intention’ she thinks. ‘to distinguish you from the flowers. to paint you into this everyday.’ you breathe deep, deep enough to hold distant places in your lungs so deep those places fill your eyes, you don’t see her skin shiver before you turn into the heat, into the horizon, ask for more and return with nothing, or do you return, or does she imagine it, next to the kerosene lamp, pieces of pottery at her feet, watching what she remembers of your skin, revolving.

This

breaking bowl

this bowl falling and breaking

broken and lying at my feet

is this your bowl

shards i’m afraid

only shards are left

and pieces

pieces of shards of this bowl

at my feet

07 - thought 1 -

be in the moment, present tense, first word best word, a rose is a rose is all you can do is start here, keep starting, consider this, and consider...

writing having fallen off toward the end of a semester... a bind not simply double but multiple...which moment in which what occurs that may or not be writing. to write, to think, to read...to do homework and write something else...

begin this year again. writing. there is little hope in this present/future tense for publishing... no single pieces, no whole books. dusty manuscripts. lovely and friendly rejection notes. this accumulation of historical (all moments until this one particular, every particular moment turning into history, into memory if i could remember other than this, single, instant), pieces of, unmoving, seeming circular in one single space.

begin again. continue to begin. continue with the single instant.

picasso's mirror

Mirror framing blue lines a circle swirl of green can you see how this moves like an image reflected like present and past a single moment the tip of green a wave frames white or transparent so called glass background of squares circles she leans her head away from so called glass reflects pale skin a single strand of hair (yellow) tinged cannot see through this at all red like the horizon of

flowered walls
intend
concrete
old ballroom glass
lights shimmer
(violently, lovingly, ferociously, lovely)
a thought to its third degree
maintains itself
green
(the wind tears chill)
old hotels and a river
without politics
waits for the return
of politics
and coffee
a red chair
ambiguous sentiments
and dusk

hold my hand yellow moment
juggling fire outside the window
a crowded afternoon
start again

tanbourines clang like faces
on the mall
demonstrate
organge jumpsuits represent
clang like without faces
corner crimes

how do you feel about squares
with dotted line edges
as if each square
can be punched
out