The bizarre thing about this was that my interest has always been primarily not in poetry but in fiction, which was something that Pound obviously had very little understanding of. On Pound's recommendation, I wound up reading an enormous amount of Trollope instead of Dickens, which puts me totally out of sync with those in the academic world who study literature.

I certainly don't know that taking three years of college Greek, two of Latin, and a year of Chinese was of much benefit to me. I certainly remember almost none of any of those languages now. I do recall that a few years after I finished college, someone asked me if studying Greek had affected my own writing and I looked at him in bewilderment. By that time, I'd forgotten why I'd studied it in the first place.

There's definitely something that one gains by learning to understand another language, though. I reached the point in Russian and French which I don't think I ever reached in Greek and Latin (much less Chinese!) where I was actually understanding a different way of thinking. I don't know that it's affected my writing though.

We are lucky that we live in a state where one frequently hears poetry and song in a foreign language. (Well, foreign to us speakers of English, anyway.) I'm not great appreciator of Hawaiian culture, but still, there's definitely a certain something that even I get from hearing words or songs in Hawaiian, even though I can't understand a word without a translation.

Now, some forty years later, I've finally gone back and looked at Pound again. For one thing, I've done what was mostly not possible in the late Fifties, namely to look at all the books which attempt to explain the Cantos. (Well, no, not all of them by any means. But quite a few.) Quite interesting and enlightening.

I can actually see how a lot of my writing now reflects Pound's ``ideogrammic method'' and some of his other principles: the use of the specific in order to communicate the general, putting apparently unrelated items side by side in the hope that the reader will understand something that goes beyond these specific items. (This was very noticeable in the essay-substitute I gave you, Susan. It never occurred to me when I was writing it that what I was doing had anything to do with Pound.)

And here I am about to lead a class discussion on the ABC. Damned if I know how I want to go about doing that.

One thing I would like to do is to read aloud Canto 17, which I prepared for Steve Curry's class. It takes about six minutes and I'm not sure I can do it sitting down. This will fit in with the theme of performance poetry and I think that hearing Pound's stuff read aloud is a big help in understanding what he was trying to do, although certainly the way I read him is nothing at all like the way he thought his stuff should be read.

When I read Pound's prose now, I can understand how much he and I were alike when we were young, and consequently understand why his writing had such a powerful attraction for me. Pound was a nerd, extremely bright and especially talented at learning languages, but nobody ever praised him for having deep insight into his fellow humans. I guess almost everybody has read Gertrude Stein's comment: ``Met Ezra Pound. Didn't much like him. Found him to be the village explainer. Very useful if you happen to be a village; if not, not.''

Like many, if not most, great writers, Pound was able to take his limitations and make a virtue of them.

Let's face it, most of us are never going to read Calvalcanti and Dante in the Italian, Homer in the Greek, and Horace and Ovid and Catullus in the Latin. But we now have the advantage of being able to read the Cantos. And while at first one wonders why anyone would even bother, I think that there's an enormous amount that one can learn about poetry from the Cantos. I think that one can learn in fact from the Cantos a great deal of what Pound learned from Dante, Cavalcanti, Homer, Horace, etc.

And although not many of us would want to imitate Pound's prose style, I think that it has some virtues (aliveness, clarity of a sort) that we can learn from.

And many weaknesses as well. Pound tended to write in terms of slogans, and a lot of the sentences in the ABC would make great bumper stickers.

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: ``Very useful if you happen to be a bumper; if not, not.''

To Pound, good writing is something that happens on the micro level: on the level of the line, or the sentence, or the word. This is where Pound's own writing excells. (I'm referring mostly to his poetry, especially the Cantos, not his prose.)

What is conspicuously lacking in Pound is what Lorca called duende. (I'm sure most of you have been required to read Lorca's essay, probably in a class taught by Frank Stewart.)

About Whitman, Pound writes (p. 192), ``From an examination of Walt made twelve years ago, the present writer carried away the impression that there are 30 well written pages of Whitman; he is now unable to find them.'' Yes, someone whose approach to literature is to look for really good lines, or even pages, would not much care for Whitman or Melville or (in my opinion) Proust. These are writers whose greatness stems not from an impeccable craft on the micro level, but from an overwhelming duende at the core.

In Pound, one comes away with the sense that his poetry succeeds despite the lack of having anything at the core to say. The magnificence of his achievement was that he managed to produce great, and in some ways profound, poetry despite this lack.

I guess if I have to pick issues for us to discuss in class, I would start by going back to this question of tradition, which Pound stresses even more than Eliot.

At the beginning of the semester, Susan asked whether we find the academic study of literature helpful or harmful to our writing. I responded that I think it can sometimes in some ways be harmful. In creative writing courses, there tends to be an emphasis on craft rather than substance (or, as I said above, duende). And critical courses often emphasize thematic criticism, since that's the easiest kind of criticism to do, rather than criticism that simply points to things in the work worth paying attention to.

Pound is a great one for pointing to. But perhaps a little bit more explanation to go along with the pointing would not be out of place.

Actually, ``pointing'' might not be quite the right word for a lot of what Pound does. He stands there and jumps up and down and waves his arms around and yells inarticulately. But if you can figure out what he's trying to tell you, it's sometimes quite enlightening.

One might note, though, that the tradition Pound talks about is in very large part a tradition created by people writing with a very different agenda than the one Pound is recommending --- a traditionless attitude in large part. We can't know much about the epic tradition that preceded Homer (there is only one pre-Homeric poet that survives: Hesiod), but it seems clear that Dante and Chaucer and Cavalcanti and the Provencal troubadors did not begin by making an exhaustive study of the existing literary tradition. I think that most of these writers created their work much more in the spirit of contemporary rap artists, or the West Indian writers discussed in Barthwaite's book.

Since we had the film about performance poetry, it might also be interesting to discuss some of the performance poets who I try to be influenced by: Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Lord Buckley (the black jazz hipster from the Fifties). I'd really like to make up a tape to bring in, but I guess that would be going too far afield from the topic of the course.

It does seem to me that there's something very wrong with the fact that university courses in poetry teach almost nothing about performance.

Well, I can read my Pound Canto anyway.

The other question we might discuss is the issue of learning literature in foreign languages. But I don't know whether any of you have much experience with that.

----------
To write naturally, especially in verse, is one of the most difficult things in the world; naturalness does not come easily to the awkward human race, and is an achievement of art.
     --- Edward Muir, The Estate of Poetry

>...but I'm still wondering what
>you're going to do, practically, in class tomorrow! I suggest
>concentrating on one or two issues that you care about (related issues
>best) and asking questions that will lead the rest of us toward a
>conclusion, or at least the acknowledged failure to conclude. If you do
>use the Canto, try to make a firm tie-in with ABC.
>I have tapes of Pound reading. I'll bring in a bit.

What I'm going to do in class.... Well, it beats me!

As I look through the ABC again, I realize that I really enjoy Pound. Extremely entertaining. But it's like one of those teachers where you really enjoy the class, and everyone is laughing the whole way through, but then afterward you wonder... ``What the hell did he say today?''

Maybe me leading the class on Pound was not a good idea. It brings out the Pound persona in me, and if I'm not careful, pretty soon I'll start using a lot of CAPITOL LETTERS!

Okay, one or two issues. It seems to me that, to start with, we can pretty much discard Pound's reading list. I'm sure these are all great works, and we could learn a whole lot from them, but the list is over 60 years old at this point, and besides, these are Pound's obsessions, not ours.

The claim according to Susan was that this is Pound's attempt to create his own poetry community, or poetic tradition. So if we were doing this, what would we want to create? If we could tell the world what books to read, so that they'd be ready for the books we want to write, what would be on our list?

I think that really, though, tradition is a side issue here. The important issue for me is that Pound's focus is on craft, and he sees craft on the level of language. Pound won't help you learn about structure, or plot, or characterization, or even point of view, for that matter.

Pound is concerned with images (phanopeia), sounds (melopeia), and this word mythopeia, which can not easily be translated; it's more than just ``meaning,'' but it's the complex of associations that a word has within it (and with_out it!).

What we do not find Pound talking about is content (having something to say in the first place) and, most especially, the emotional impact of one's writing. I think that Pound is not especially comfortable with the whole business of emotions.

Anyway, for each of us in our writing, to what extent do we focus on craft and to what extent to we focus on finding that core something within us that wants to be expressed?

And how do we learn these things? Do we learn craft, as Pound suggests, by studying other writers? I know that many of us find it uncomfortable to admit that we might imitate other writers, and yet jazz and rock musicians very commonly learn their craft by imitating other musicians. I think that painters commonly start by imitating other painters. Actors study other actors.

If we are willing to admit that we try to learn writing by studying other writers, what are the writers each of us have studied? I have to admit that my own list is rather embarrassing. At one time, I studied some novels by Iris Murdoch rather closely, trying to figure out how one puts a novel together. I've also studied Ann Beattie, trying to figure out how she manages to make short stories work that, to me, don't have anything in the way of structure.

I find that reading a little by someone like Raymond Carver will help me find the voice that will enable me to get a story started.

My fiction teacher last year said that he realized that he was not much good at plot, so for a few years he devoted himself to learning to plot. He said that he studied John Irving, as someone who is good with plot.

I wanted to, but did not, suggest to him that if he wanted to learn plot, he would have been better to study John D. McDonald or even Agatha Christie.

The first major science fiction story I wrote was a Raymond Chandler pastiche. (It was both science fiction and a mystery; it was funny but not very good; it's on my web page: ``Teddy Bears Are No Picnic.'')

I had been trying to start a story, and one of my sentences was, ``The hill was very steep.'' When I reread it and came to that, I realized that it was time I made an effort to learn to write more interesting sentences, and I decided that Raymond Chandler would be a good person to study to learn to write really interesting sentences.

Later I tried to write a story in a Damon Runyon voice, and studied a lot of Damon Runyon stories in the process. I could never figure out how he makes his plots work though.

I've studied Hemingway a lot. But I scarcely know Faulkner.

I often play Tom Waits a lot before I start to write, because I'd love to be able to do what he does. I'm not sure I've ever learned much craft from him though.

Also I've tried to learn from certain painters, trying to understand the mood they create and trying to figure out how I could create the same mood. Edward Hopper. Vermeer. Maybe Van Gogh to some extent. Some day I'll definitely write an Edward Hopper story, but maybe Van Gogh is beyond my abilities.

I don't know exactly how I learned to write dialogue. It was not by studying anyone like John O'Hara or George V. Higgins who is really known for their dialogue. It was just a realization, through reading a lot of not very distinguished fiction, that it's really important that dialogue be unpredictable, and that it's fairly rare that one character's speech is a direct answer to the other character's. Instead, each character moves the dialogue off into a new direction that's related to what the other character said, but is not a direct answer to it.

I guess mostly what happens is that I'm reading something and I get a really strong response to it. Maybe this happens on one page, or maybe it's a response to the whole work. And then I start wondering, how did he achieve that? So I go back and look at it really closely, trying to figure out how the author got that response from me.

But I digress. (Of course!) So now that I've made my true confession, what authors have you guys studied in order to learn craft?

Or what other ways do you have of learning craft?

Going back to Pound, when you write (or read for that matter), how aware are you of images? Sound? Logopeia? Sound is my weak point. I think I have a really good sense of rhythm, although I'm rarely aware of the ways sentences scan in a technical sense. But otherwise, I need somebody to point out for me the way the sounds in a piece of writing are interesting. I guess that's one of the main reasons I have a hard time relating to poetry.

I've found it useful to do what Pound suggests, trying to think of a piece of poetry sung to a melody. (This is a recent discovery of mine.) Learning to read aloud has been extremely useful to me. I look at a poem and the first time I read it I get nothing out of it. Then I look through it and try to find the one line that will show me that tone of voice to read it in. If it's Yeats, I start hearing it in my bogus Irish accent. And then see if it's a song, or a chant, or a mantra, or a declamation. For me, this takes a lot of effort.

What ways have you guys found to help you understand literature? What helps you to look at a work of literature in the way Agassiz looked at a fish? (C.f. the ABC, p. 17.)

And speaking of Agassiz and the fish, the other thing Pound stresses is the ability to use language to describe things very precisely (ABC, pp. 65 and 74). (Actually, I found reading the ABC to be a lot like being in a course taught by Morgan.) This is one quality that one can value in literature.

Hemingway may be very good at precise description, but what people remember from reading Hemingway is the mood he creates. I tend to value mood above precise imagery.

What about you guys? What are the qualities in a work of literature that make you say, ``This is really good"?

``Good writers are those who keep a language efficient,'' Pound says. Well, I think that leaves Proust out. I'm not too sure about Walt Whitman, either.

Pound says that what makes a classic classic is a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. Harold Bloom, on the other hand, in The Western Canon, says that the essential quality running the all the great classics is strangeness.

I guess for me, what's essential is the emotional impact it leaves on me. But then my own personal list of classics is quite eccentric. What's yours?

I hope so. I have to go to bed.

>Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 09:30:04 -1000
>To: Susan Schultz
>From: PY
>Subject: Values

>I'm back on line. Been reading all the class emails. Sounds like I missed a
>good discussion last week.

Um, well, one thing we certainly didn't have was a discussion. It turns out I'm not much of a discussion leader. We don't do discussions in the Math Dept, you know. ``Just sit there and shut up and write down what I say!'' I should have gone with my original plan and read Canto 17 aloud, but obviously nobody was bursting with desire to hear it.

It's pretty clear that the whole idea that a writer should try to systematically learn his craft the way a musician or painter does left everybody pretty much bewildered.

People obviously didn't much care for Pound, either. There are all sorts of things about the ABC of Reading that are hard to appreciate, but the one real virtue, once you push aside all the details, is Pound's absolutely fanatical dedication to craftsmanship.

A hard sell for this audience, though, here on the far west extreme of the nation. I realize that I'm a long way from home, both in place and in time.

I agree with Susan that it would have been good if we'd talked more about value. I agree that value is one of the main ways artists organize a community.

The thing is, there's value and then there's a value.

There are so many different kinds of value, it's so easy to decide that one should just reject value altogether and decide that everything's subjective. But I think that that's wrong. Yes, different people respond to different values. The particular values one chooses to favor may be a subjective choice, but still, within that choice, some things are definitely good and some are definitely bad.

Creating a community involves, among other things, making a hard commitment to certain values. Wishy washy people can't create a community. And almost always, part of this involves vehemently rejecting the prevailing values. Pound and the other modernists had to reject the values of the romantics in order to establish the claim of their own values. More recently, those whose value is diversity had to reject the values of Pound-Eliot traditionalism/classicism. Phrases like ``dead white males'' are one way of stomping on the prevalent values in order to assert the values of diversity.

People commented in class about the ABC: ``Notice the lack of women or non-Europeans in Pound's list.'' Actually, Pound was a strong advocate of Chinese culture, even if he did call the people Chinamen. And he also championed the Indian poet Tagore and did some translations from the Japanese. But that's beside the point. The point being that some of us have learned to look at literature through a filter made up of values very different from those Pound was supporting.

But even the champions of diversity don't assert that every live non-white non-male's work has equal value. It's just that the value is based on other qualities than those Pound supported.

Pound would say about diversity: ``This is totally wrong-headed.'' (This is probably the word he would use.) ``You're saying that what matters is who wrote the work rather than how well it's written.''

But that's not so completely crazy. When we read a piece of literature, we do enter into a sort of relationship with the author (or at least the authorial persona). A lot of us don't like Milton (or Eliot, for that matter, or Pound) because we simply don't like the person who speaks to us through their work.

But also, new voices also offer us new subject matter. So our liking for Sandra Cisneros or Alice Walker or Lois-Ann Yamanaka (or Virginia Woolf, for that matter, or even Jane Austen) is largely because they tell us about a world that is different and interesting to us.

Which after all, is why we like Dickens. In my opinion, at least. Of course the fact that he presents his world very skillfully helps make it real to us.

So once again there is the question of content versus craft. Content is definitely a value, and I think it's important to some extent to all of us.

Me, for instance, I will never much care for Ansel Adams. I wouldn't pay $20 for one of his photographs (unless I thought I could sell it for more). He may be one of the world's great photographers, but he's a nature photographer, and nature doesn't much interest me. In order for me to want to look at a photograph, it's got to have people in it, and preferably in an urban setting. Or an interior setting, preferably someplace dark and smoky. Give me Nan Goldin or Helmut Newton.

Likewise I have no interest in Monet. I can admire his craft, but water lilies bore me. I'm sure that Toulouse-Lautrec and Mucha are much inferior in terms of skill, but their values are ones I respond to.

I mentioned in my last letter that I think that great artists tend to make virtues of their limitations. Pound was definitely not strong when it came to content. He wanted to write a great poem, and to some extent he did (the Cantos), in spite of the fact that he didn't have anything great to say. His value was craft, because only by emphasizing craft could he evade his limitation.

For most of my life, the same was true of me. I've always been interested in style and I like playing games with style. It's only in the past ten years or so that I've been gradually discovering that I do have things that are worth saying.

>Significances are consequently less stable than meanings. One generation's
>judgments will often be contradicted by those of its successor. But such
>contradictions are often exaggerated. The continuum that constitutes the
>history of any national literature is certainly not a plain, but neither is
>it broken up into a series of mountain ranges, as the textbooks tend to
>assert. One of the functions of the scholar-critic is to demonstrate that
>the history of a literature is a gradual and continuous slope.''

Well, I just don't agree with this. Exceptional artists come along, like the Pound-Eliot-Joyce axis, and they are like volanoes, changing the slope of the whole landscape.

>Okay, my question is (I think): does this have anything to do with your
>discussion of values last week, and about some values being more valuable
>that others? Are values related to significance? Can values be separated
>from meaning? Arrghh. I meant to clear my thoughts by explaining them to
>you all, and now I'm more confused than ever. Values seem to me to be more
>related to the idea of significance -- changing political, economic, social
>viewpoints or ``values'' in society -- than meaning, although meaning is
>prerequisite to significance. Shoots...here we go again. Does this have
>anything to do with aesthetics vs. politics? Meaning/aesthetics vs.
>significance/politics?

--Lee