1When one starts considering the idea of “Ezra Pound and the 20th‑century,” what first comes to mind is the necessity to address at the same time the aesthetic and political forms through which his presence manifested itself. And one of the ideas which combine both perspectives in a most intricate way seems to be that of presence itself, as both exercized and thematized by Pound. From his cult of heroic or hyperbolic presence to his elaboration of a grammar of poetic form and presentation, Pound’s concern lies with poetic presence and its traces.
2Though while the idea of presence may seem to characterize the image of Pound as literary and public figure, one would hardly associate it with poetry, unless as a paradoxical proposition. If all literature works within the desisting of the real, poetry chooses to express the blanks of absence within its very form. When form tends to demonstrate its power of presence, as with Hopkins’s sprung rhythm for instance, it usually comes out working in an a contrario relationship with itself. As to the Whitmanian attempt at conveying the multiple presence of things and people, it proves most fruitful when it partly fails and opens out on loss and melancholy. Poetry, to me, operates in accordance with the Dickinsonian pattern of the absented and the absconded. As opposed to an alleged poetics of traces, a paradoxical lack of traces might constitute the fantasmatic horizon of ideal poetry. I am thinking of the extraordinary proposition John Cage delivered in his Mureau lecture: “We must find another -activity than art. We are leaving for China. We hope to leave no trace of our visit.”Such a project of an immaterial form sounds like a perfect counter-programme to Pound’s Cantos—about which we could counter-paraphrase Cage’s saying as: “Art must become an activity. We’re leaving for China. We hope to leave traces of our visit.” Even the leaving for China, which Pound metaphorically shares with Cage, signifies with Pound, at least at the outset, the extra mark of presence of the poet, manifesting itself through the use of both a foreign language and another figurative form.
3The Italian word for presence, presenza, was chosen by Pound as a subtitle to “Canto LXXII”—and using words in a foreign language eventually proves one of the strongest means to create an effect of presence for Pound. In that particular instance of “Presenza,” the italics introduce a form of special typograph-ical presentation, and create an effect of reinforced visual presence. As for “Canto LXXII,” it also seems rather interesting to whoever wants to address the question of presence in the Cantos, since it was missing from them for such a long time, being retained by Pound, together with “Canto LXXIII,” for the alleged reason, according to Hugh Kenner (writing in 1951), that they would signify fully only when “Cantos LXXX” and sequel were written. Without being a specialist of the history of the Pound manuscripts, one might still infer from this the extreme importance of presentation as global construction for Pound, as well as the extra visibility of this canto—which comes to be further reinforced by its original text having been written in Italian (from which Pound’s translation came second and late). “Canto LXXII” remarkably signifies emphasized presence through calculated absence. One might say it is missing at its own place (translating Derrida’s phrase “absent à sa place”).
4Thus following the—half-invisible and semi-imaginary—thread of “Canto LXXII” might enable us to investigate several Poundian forms of presence, from the most textual and literal, with the presence of grammar, and the idea of presentation as a trace of Futurist or rather Unist theory, to the less conspicuous, ironical form of presence, which would open out to a wider reading of its rhythm, at the junction between aesthetics and ethics.
5What forcefully and enjoyably appears at first to characterize the Cantos is the principle of non-exclusion as formulated by Pound to Donald Hall: this search for a form “that wouldn’t exclude something merely because it didn’t fit.” Such realms of “non fitting” might include just as well something which did not fit in terms of register or expected reasonable length or classical form for instance, as something which did not fit with a principle of coherence or logics. And indeed the Cantos are characterized first by non exclusion, as manifested through accumulative presence—be it the lists of names or things that resemble collections or mantras, or be it the innummerable masks for the authority of Ego Scriptor, or else the series of quotations that transform the poem, as often said, into a kind of anthology. And then there is also the pure presentation of presence, if one may say. To this function participates a typographic and purely plastic grammar, with ideograms, but also with verbal ideograms (to avoid saying metaphorical ones), corresponding to the densified presence of the -vortex. Presence also comes to be transcribed through a phonic grammar, based on repetitions and anaphoras, as well as on the cogency of spondees, or of three or four stresses on end—as in “Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving./Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf” (IV 13): here the extreme -presence of the word is linked with its isolation, and also with its indetermination, an indetermination between name and verb, as with the Chinese ideogram (and as was revealed to Pound by Fenellosa).
6Most interesting perhaps in what I call Pound’s grammar of presence is his use of a non-comparative grammar, or even a grammar of non-comparison. If the poet is to disown the rhetorical practice of defining things in terms of something else, then it means he must define a thing in terms of itself, -standing as close as possible to the thing in order to eventually present it as “self-existent” (XXXIII 161). Pound denounced in Gaudier-Brzeska for instance the weakening effect comparative syntax and analogical practise could have: “‘Pourquoi doubler l’image’ asks Barzun, in declaiming against this ‘poésie farcie de comme’” (121). As opposed to such weak and confusing doubling or redoubling of the image through comparison, the Cantos effectively demonstrate how powerful paratactic (non) presentation or “pure” presentation can be.
7Pound’s insistence on the right word, le mot juste, or his passion for cutting, carving the precise line of sculpture tend to the reflexive presentation of form itself: the high relief of intaglio or manifesto, as well as the high-sounding relief of consonants open out on reflexivity, and possibly tautology. In “Cocteau’s bricabrac” (LXXVI 473) for instance, the assonances ironically suggest a reflexive doubling of Cocteau in his bricabrac. Coming back to the use of italics in “presenza,” they also ironically redouble the Italian language by the Italian printing type. And among the most forceful exemples of the reflexive presentation of form is to be mentioned that of several cantos ending by pointing at themselves in pure presentation—as with the last line of “Canto LXIV”: “End of this Canto” (362), which borders on performative tautology.
8The effect of presence is thus bound up with the autonomy, the isolation even, in which are placed the elements, words, sounds, ideograms too, or carved images,‑etc. Such construction of disconnected or unconnected fragments is fraught with the danger inherent in any paratactic practice. Among the several critics who have often underlined that, there is for instance Michael Palmer, who in a recent interview, in Regions of Unlikeness, evoked Pound’s use of “a kind of intuitional ideogrammic juxtaposition that, in hindsight now, suppresses a kind of rational analysis of social and historical forces” (Gardner 283). It is striking to see how such a remark could equally be applied to the practice of collage in plastic arts, insofar as collage does away with articulation and commentary, so that the reader or looker-on is left on his own to freely rearticulate the juxtaposed items. Collagists too were often taxed for the undecided links and ambiguous signification inherent in their practise—such was the case with Schwitters, or the Futurists, among others.
9Actually the influence of Futurism and the potential analogies with Unism constitute a momentous aspect of the form and ideology of presence in the Cantos, especially as they introduce the temporal dimension of presence and of presentation—opening out on a form of present.
10Though Pound eventually chose to keep at a distance from Futurism, he went on sharing some of its aesthetic principles, as well as the idea of art being inseperable from action. So that he borrows from Futurist manifestos and works of art several forms of plastic or historical presence—including the tone and typography of the street poster, for instance.
11“Canto LXXII” also seems to be interesting in that respect, especially some lines among those devoted to an elegy for Marinetti:
“Goodbye Marinetti
Come back and talk when you want to.”
“PRESENTE!” and after that shout, he
added sadly
“I followed vain emptiness in many ways […]
Both of us blind, me to the inner things
you to the things of today. (433)
12The poet’s farewell to Marinetti (who had just died, in 1944) is followed by an invitation for his spirit to come back and talk to the poet. Which triggers an immediate surrealist answer on part of Marinetti: “PRESENTE!” “Presente!” being the exclamation signifying “Here I am”—is fraught with at least three connotations at once. It obviously evokes the Italian Fascist vocal salute. But at the same time, a double ironical meaning, more specifically linked with Marinetti, is inherent in the idea of presentation here. First Marinetti presents himself when dead, which makes of the exclamation a fantastically surrealist one. And then the reader thinks of Marinetti primarily as being the inventor of Futurism, that is an aesthetic and political movement that would advocate blunt presentation and representation of contemporary facts and things. Besides, “PRESENTE!” remains in a rather undecidable language (even if Italian is the only language that makes complete sense, it still reads in French, and it is plastically understandable in English—with a mistake). Such ambivalence gives extra relief to the word while it multiplies its semantics. Relief is further redoubled by the capitalization of the letters.
13Throughout the Cantos one finds formal echoes of Futurism, like a -recurrent motif which is also a tone and a mode, essentially that of the manifesto. (The mode of the manifesto characterized Futurism from the early aesthetic self-proclamation to the late political manifestos, not to forget how such mottoes were often reproduced in paintings—Severini, Balla,‑etc.) A most striking instance of Futurist presence in Pound’s poem is the political exclamation EVVIVA—reproduced in capital letters in the text: not only is it an icon, but it also often triggers the rhythm of a political text, the rhythm of excitement, the hammering scansion.
14One of the faults Pound found with Futurism was their radical refusal of the past and their excessive insistance on the future. In the same dramatic elegy for Marinetti, further on in “Canto LXXII,” the poet addresses another spirit, that of Torquato Dazzi, translator of Mussato, saying:
You making a pair with Marinetti
You wanting the past too much, he the future
Too much eagerness shoots past the mark
He wanted to clear away too much
and now we see more destruction than he wanted. (433)
15This posthumus commentary on Marinetti’s theoretical stance seems to point out Pound’s preference for the poetic present. In Blast 1914, a debate had taken place about vorticism and its temporality. Wyndham Lewis was in favour of the present: “With our Vortex the present is the only active thing […]. The Past and Future are the prostitutes Nature has provided.” While to the reverse, Pound advocated a use of the worthy part of the past, reenergized and presen-tified (“All experience rushes into this vortex”). Thus Pound’s present sounds like an extended one, a present “with” some past and future inflections—something like a present-for-ever. I am borrowing the phrase from Henri Meschon-nic, who says about French abstract painter Pierre Soulages that the temporality in his paintings is “not the future but a present, for ever” (“Pas le futur, le pré-sent, pour toujours” [113]). By the idea of a Poundian present-for-ever, I do not have in mind any Romantic horizon of fame, but the catching hold of a form, the seizing of a form in the present, with so much energy that the present expand backward and forward, as if it had existed before, and were to “hold” in the future. That modality of apprehending a form is a constant feature in the Cantos, the variable element being only the degree of abstraction—as between, for instance, “The flames patterned in lacquer” (XVI 69) and “three forms became in the air” (XXVI 131), or “Taking form now” (as in XC 627, “Taking form now/the rilievi,/the curled stone at the marge/Faunus, sirenes,/ the stone taking form in the air…”). “Taking form now” seems to be equivalent in sheer force of presence to the deictic-performative mentioned earlier (“end of this canto”) in so far as both evince a perfect coincidence between poetic object and process of presentation, and also between poetic place and time. One might tentatively suggest that the Chih3 ideogram represents for Pound one of the possible conceptions for such poetic stance in the present—considering the way he expatiates on it in his translation of Confucius’s Analects: “there is no more important technical term in the Confucius philosophy than this chih3, the hitching post, position, place one is in, and works from” (232). This “place one is in” evokes both the presence of the poet and the present moment the poem is, the core of a techne that allows for the “taking form now”. (A confirmation would be added by the fact that in “Canto LVII” Marinetti regrets not having read Confucius.)
16Most striking indeed is the oneness of space and time, of poetic stance and poetic object too. It seems that a deeper plastic and theoretical analogy (than with Futurism) might be found between the Cantos and Unism, Strzeminski’s movement. And that would actually be true of all the movements invented by or linked with Strzeminski, from the functionalism of a.t. (revolutionary artists) with its logic of form and search for condensation, to the movement of architectural functionalism, interestingly named Praesens (1928); and of course to Unism (1931)—intent on the desymbolization of the work of art and structural homogeneity (as expounded in Strzeminski’s Calculations of Spatio-Temporal Rhythm). Still to be found in Unism is the utopian belief in the existence of a link between artistic form and social order, the idea (but then to be found also in Futurism, among others) that plastic form implies or even constitutes action.
17The Unist utopias are partly shared by Pound, whose “omniformis” (XCII 634) is quite unistic or monistic, in all the violent naïveté of the monolithic enterprise. And to come back to “Canto LXXII,” in “PRESENTE!” are to be found both the Utopia of poetic action and the delusion of the possibility of an absolute present—the irony of which being of course underlined by the improbable presence of the spirit.
18In the Cantos at large, one finds a frequent dramatization of the poet’s -wishful thinking or delusion as to his capacity to encompass the whole—of the world of the poem, or of existence. Among the fragments from what was to have been “Canto CXII,” we can read for instance: “Here from the beginning, we have been/here from the beginning” (804). In those lines, the plastic layout on the page, cutting the line after “we have been,” creates the effect of an eternal return. To that delusion of a present that might extend its presence back to its origins corresponds symmetrically a wishful extension of it to the instant of consumation, when in “Canto LXXIV,” the poet reproduces the Latin formula “Est consummatum, Ite” (452), borrowing the capacity of liturgy to repeat an abstract performative speech-act referring to its own endless ending.
19Oddly enough, Pound lines here with the artistic movements or individual artists in the 20th‑century who kept announcing their own end or dissolution, such as painter Ad Reinhardt who, in the fifties painted the same ultimate black painting for two decades, or such as the 1915 Futurist exhibition in St Petersburg entitled “0,10: Last Futurist Exhibition.” An echo of such terminal announcements or practises may be heard in Pound’s “Est consummatum,” or in the self-pointing lines from Fragment (1966), “these lines are for the ultimate CANTO” (824): here the terminal announcement produces a situation of multiple irony, owing to the doublebind of deictic presenza and the dramatic denouncing of its delusiveness.
20So there might be such a thing then, as an ironical presence of the poet in the Cantos, which is to be questioned before the ethical viewpoint can be addressed.
21Fortunately indeed, to the other side of EVVIVA (which darlky evokes the cover of the Roman paper FUTURISMO, the issue of October 28, 1933, “Evviva il genio futurista di Benito Mussolini”), we find the deceptions, delusions and disappearances that multiply in “Canto LXXII” and in the Pisan Cantos. For whatever persistance in not recanting his views and sayings, the texture of the Pisan Cantosis composed of death, loss, disaster, and destruction of what was already a reconstructed architecture of loss—as with the Malatesta temple. All of which testifies to the ironical delusion of presence, to a melancholy presence. Which melancholy allows us to consider Pound from an ethical point of view, eventually.
22What makes Pound part of the common fate of the 20th‑century is the way his poetry too comes after the ruins. Since it all started in a way as a memorial to Gaudier-Brzeska, so that “Gaudier’s word [be] not blacked out” (LXXVIII 499). Since the form of the series or the list or collection (of material things, names, foreign words,‑etc.) tends towards the elegy (“la collection est élégiaque” says Jean-Michel Maulpoix [Du Lyrisme 192]). Since Pound’s present-for-ever includes that of memory, the “tu mi fai remembrar.” As to the provisions made for his death, the “ultimate CANTO” as quoted above (with CANTO in capital letters for the monumental quality of the tomb), they have an almost Duchampian ironical quality. But a rather non Duchampian desolate quality comes to be added in this line from “Canto XCVIII”: “There is no substitute for a lifetime” (711)—one of the meanings of which being the ironical defeat of the poetic monument. Besides, in a more literal way, with “Cantos LXXII” and sequel we pass on to immediate, historically dated, ruins, when the -present has become peopled with ghosts.
23But the poet’s persona too can be touched with the ironical quality of presence. What makes his persona acceptable is its fluid quality, with its so many masks, or rather its so many “half-masks” (LXXXI 540). Half-mythic, half-heroic, or half-undone and half-dissolved. In the vortex of his visages one can find the versatile elusiveness of ego scriptor. His elusiveness is such that it can reach a point of dissolution, as in “Canto LXXIV” where the lyrical voice declares “OU TIS/‘I am noman, my name is noman’”. Outis, the Greek term signifying nobody, null, nothing.
24The character of the persona also loses itself in the vortex of tones, most of all through a double hesitation proper to the Poundian technique of appropriation: for all quotations, the reader is made not only to hesitate between the original artist and the quoting instance, but also to waver as to the tone of the appropriation itself, for which the scale ranges between reverence and pastiche. Such ironical authentification gives its real presence to the poet’s signature—farthest from ego scriptor and its preposterous alienating mock density, farthest from “(‘My authority, ego scriptor cantilenae’)” (LXII 350). Pound might share that too with Duchamp, or at least with his concept of the ready-made: the moment when the signature comes to authentify what it no longer is.
25Finally, Poundian irony alone sustains the possibility of an ethical -perspective in so far as it may work against projects endowed with a too solid presence. Thus is the integrity of the poet to be found in the very disintegration of the unique project, or any time the commentary follows a diverging route from the initial object and plan. Generally speaking, the poet’s (part of) integrity is bound up with what I would call the disobligeing quality of the poetic persona—la désobligeance. Pound can hardly ever be said to be complacent with his reader (still less than Sterne, from whose Sentimental Journey I borrow the acceptation of authorial “désobligeance,” as ironically metaphorized in the “désobligeante,” the carriage which can accomodate only one person, and in which the author selfishly rocks himself). In that respect the initial Poundian phrase about the principle of non-inclusion, the search for a form “that wouldn’t exclude something merely because it didn’t fit,” can be relevantly inverted into the search for a form “that wouldn’t include something merely because it fitted.” Nor would Pound add an exegesis to facilitate interpretation. Nor would he either -translate in order to help his reader, but just the reverse. Translation proves a case in point, being the most enlightening example of extreme presence through denial. Pound most of the time fails to translate at all, or even fails to transcribe the Greek alphabet, thus disobligeing most readers, having them face an -obstacle, the unpassable barrier of nullified understanding. And thus does he grant his text (his text, as appropriated) an enduring quality of presence as resistance. If ever Pound happens to translate, he will probably warn the reader not to trust the -translator. There are numerous instances of such games on part of the disobligeing poet as translator. Thus in “Canto XCVI,” the routing of the (English) reader is ironically foreseen: “PANTA ‘REI, said DuBellay translating” (from French to Greek, neither making sense for the English reader?); and again, for instance in “Canto XCIX”: “(This is a mistranslation)”—the good one is then missing (730).
26The Poundian reader can never rely on the poetic persona, nor trust any set system to repeat itself. He can but vaguely prophesy that verbal objects will recur, because some mechanism of repetition is obviously at work, but he can never guess when nor what.
27From a wider perspective still, rhythm obviously prevails as what gives and takes form now. And then it is everything but regular, presenting surprises, irregularities, and arythmicalities. For that reason rhythm seems acceptable to me as the ultimate word on Pound and presence—since it cannot be reduced to an aesthetic (theoretical or material) principle. The seductive power of rhythm fortunately fails to palliate an uncompromising irregularity. Rhythm can go beyond the literal devices of presence analysed earlier, because it patterns them together with the signs and images of ironical presence just evoked, into a higher form of presence—which can be characterized as a principle of presence (ousia, the Greek term for presence as existence, or being).
28Rhythm in Pound comes to be present as occurrence. Melopeia, the music-poetry, reflexively beats its own rhythm, as superbly expressed in the famous line from “Canto XL”: “the sound ply over ply; a cymbal beat against cymbal” (200). Here is the pure beat, marked through the double epanalepsis. Here is also the musical image, and eventually the substitution of cymbal for symbol (which might humorously account for the whole of modernism).
29Repetition with surprises holds the poem together: there is no end of -surprise repeats in Pound, nor of the various contexts in which reappear the motifs, quotes,‑etc.—ranging from the arborescent motif of the Malatesta temple to the recurrent phrase “Make it new.” The finishing touch to the strategy is that the “great bass” itself, or “basse continue,” is used by Pound as a recurrent intertextual motif and underlying coherence between Gœthe, Kandinsky, Gaudier-Brzeska and himself.
30If the first etymological meaning of rhythm is flow, flux (“flowing, ever unstill” [CXIII 806]), its second meaning is form. Then only can we get the full -meaning of form as in “form, not the form of anything” (Pound quoting Jacob Epstein in Gaudier-Brzeska 98), or in “Taking form now”—form or rhuthmos.
31In L’Homme sans contenu, Giorgio Agamben equates rhythm with presence, ousia: “principe de présence qui ouvre et maintient l’œuvre d’art dans son espace originel” (160—the principle of presence which opens up the original space of a work of art and maintains it within that space). Of this definition I think the Cantos might possibly be a most powerful demonstration. Let us consider fragments, for instance from “Canto XCIX,” these lines, which are part of a long scansion:
Catholicity,
Woven in order,
as on cords in the loom
cognome, indirizzo (pien1 hu4
sincerity, simplicity, red: South, and naïveté
meng2, the people, the many, the menée,
the perishing. (715)
32Here Pound is reflexively weaving Latin, Italian, Chinese and French with English, along a narrative line that can evoke the war (that other form of unity, much more sophisticated than the unistic one). But he is also weaving the dual rhythm of ideogram and narrative.
33Now if, on a wider scale, we consider the fragments at the end, “Cantos or Frag-ments CX to CXVII,” we can see how they make obvious the way rhythm is all that “holds”—since these fragments “hold” just as well as the longest cantos—and belong just as centrally to the operatic voice of the poem. That is achieved by contrast and tension and juxtapositon, by dissonnance and consonance.
34One of the best ways to define the Poundian rhythmic might be to take up his own suggestion and apply to poetry Kandinsky’s ideas about painting: “The image is the poet’s pigment; with that in mind you can go ahead and apply Kandinsky, you can transpose his chapter on the language of form and color and apply it to the writing of verse” (Gaudier-Brzeska 86). We might then more specifically follow up his cue as to Kandinsky’s notion of composition, thus formulated in “The language of forms and colors”: “the combination of rhythmical and arhythmical patterns on the same surface” (“la combinaison du rythmique et de l’arythmique sur une même surface” [Kandinsky 132]).
35We may now recall the often quoted announcement made by Pound in 1922 in a letter to Felix Schelling: “Having the crust to attempt a poem in 100 or 120 Cantos long after all mankind has been commanded never again to attempt a poem of any length, I have to stagger as I can.” It is certainly a long way between the hazardous connotation of “stagger” and the confident view of the way “Cantos LXXII” and “LXXII” would fall into their right place only when they fell in resonance with the cantos to come. But in the latter proof of an extremely sophisticated—if intuitive—patterning, or scansion, we find the same -rhythmic dynamism (Pound said “rthythmic vitality”) as in “stagger”.
36Rhythm could thus be equated to a form that holds—but that just barely holds. It should be underlined how Agamben’s formula “a principle of presence” is far away from the unmaintainable idea of a full presence. The principle of presence almost amounts to a defect presence. While presence has proved to be always ironically undermined, and the fragmentary and the uncertain to always prevail, rhythm is called up to constitute, through its material immateriality, a possible space for the poem. Being the non presence of a thing, being the non presence of a sign, rhythm merely points at the occurrence of a form.
37Worlds apart from a compelling unicity, this occurrence of a form suggests however the possibility of a unique composition. Rhythm is signature. Agamben points at what was already present in Hölderlin’s vision of a poem: “any work of art is composed of a single rhythm” (texts collected by Bettina von Arnim—Agamben 153). Not the total, complete, ultimate poem then, but against the poet’s radical dispossession, the signature of a unique rythm.
38It is no surprise then to read how Pound ties up rhythm and emotion: “I believe that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it” (Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts 201). And it is most interesting to see that he himself connects rhythm and signature: “A man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable” (Literary Essays 9—both quotations also in Albright, “Pound’s Particles—Units of Rhythm”).
39The very existence of the poem and the uniqueness of the poet would be found then in the scansion and perhaps in the basse continue—which had never ceased announcing the all-importance of crystal, the coming advent of splendour and the underlying presence of loss.
40But even though this superb form for a principle of presence may be extracted from the violence of “PRESENTE!”, it cannot erase the original form. It cannot palliate the absolute character of unicity which implied the faithful, blind, adherence to a total belief, the mud with the light.
41Besides, the absolute force of rhythm, as present, presence and presentation at one go still implies and expresses the danger of absolutism.
42If rhythm has come to be substituted to presence, it has inherited its perplexities, as well as its dangerously different acceptations. Rhythm then might well be the place where all stakes are to be taken—as Derrida suggests in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre: “Je crois qu’en tout c’est avec le rythme que je joue le tout pour le tout” (81: “I think that in all things it is with rhythm that I put everything at stake at one go”). The whole of presence and of presentation, that is of poetic presence, is still at stake with rhythm.
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