Literally Absurd Poem by gershon hepner

However close to things, a word
can’t make a kingdom fall or empires wane,
those who think it can prove they’re insane,
by being literally absurd.

Pound was like a pound of flesh,
which Shylock learned could never be removed;
demanding it, quite literally he proved
words rot a mind that's not kept fresh.

Louis Menand writes about Ezra Pound in The New Yorker (June 9 & 16,2008) (“The Pound Error”) :
The seed of the trouble lies in what most people find the least problematic aspect of the Imagist aesthetic: the insistence on “the perfect word, ” le mot juste. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name. Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. “When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish, ” Pound wrote in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise. No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. This is not because individual words are too weak; it’s because they are too powerful. They can mean too many things. (“Palace in smoky light”: could this be Buckingham Palace in the fog?) So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions. President Clinton was right: “is” does have many meanings, and we need to be allowed to explain the particular one we have in mind. In “The Cantos, ” Pound became the prisoner of his own technique, and he must have found his poem unfinishable (he never did end it) because he couldn’t control the significances his images unleashed. “New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos, ” the critic Daniel Albright has said, “so the story of ‘ The Cantos’ comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound’s writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound’s interpretations of what he had already written.” The poem kept metastasizing meaning, a Vortex battening on itself.
“He was in his own way a hero of his culture, a genuine representative of both its more enlightened impulses and its self-destructive contradictions, ” Moody says about Pound. This seems fair. Pound was, in the end, a poet’s poet—he looked like a poet—and, despite the shambles of his political beliefs and the limitations of his poetics, he does stand for something. His claims for literature were free of supernatural mystification, and he believed that the proper organization of language was supremely important. If you are a poet, or any serious kind of writer, you have to believe that, whether you think Pound’s formula is workable or not. Getting the words right is, at a minimum, part of the therapy.
Pound was also, and by his own account, a failure.

6/6/08