The essays in this volume of Paideuma have been arranged chronologically by poet, beginning with two essays on Ezra Pound and continuing through H. D., Mary Barnard, and Charles Reznikoff, concluding with several figures associated with the post-war generations that first came to prominence in The New American Poetry. The chronological presentation is not entirely adequate to the material surveyed: the last essay, by Tony Brinkley and Joseph Arsenault, looks at recent poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, Barbara Guest, and Alice Notley, but with a conceptual framework established through close readings of Hegel, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. Since the first essay in the issue, by Robert Stark, digs deep into the archive of Scots dialect poetry to illuminate the antiquarian diction of Pound’s earliest poems, the eight essays form a circle of sorts, beginning and ending with the eighteenth century. But the twentieth century is emphatically on display here: as traumatic event for Aimee Pozorski, as material culture for Kaplan Harris, as a confluence of social forces for Andrea Brady. History also informs Patrick Barron’s essay on Edward Dorn’s western landscapes, while Sarah Barnsley discovers a poetics of history in the Imagist landscapes of Mary Barnard and H. D. In Barnsley’s account, poetry becomes “a series of compressed, ground-up moments carrying marks of other moments much as sand carries traces of all contact with rocks and waves.” For Sean Pryor, poetry is instead a series of moments of instruction—vexed and vexing ones, since he is looking at Pound’s late cantos.
The essays are as various and complementary in method as in subject. Several of this volume’s authors draw on archival material, none more so than Andrea Brady, who surveys and reads the John Wieners papers at nine institutions. Robert Stark and Kaplan Harris instead turn to print culture, the former historicizing Pound’s “jargoning,” the latter “the ubiquitous presence of pills” in the work of Ted Berrigan. Sarah Barnsley’s rich account of Mary Barnard’s poetics makes judicious use of manuscript material, while Aimee Pozorski’s powerful reading of Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust looks at the author’s source materials and notes in light of trauma theory. Critical theory also informs Patrick Barron’s reading of Edward Dorn, which demonstrates the value of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space for ecopoetics. Tony Brinkley and Joseph Arsenault read Hegel, and also, to a lesser extent, Heidegger and Deleuze, but the theory most important for their essay is Wordsworthian. That poetic practice implies a theory is a key tenet for Barnsley too, and also for Sean Pryor, who examines the pedagogy of Pound’s “Ezuversity” and discovers a fissure, another reason why the Cantos “cannot make it cohere”: “the pedagogic structure of guidance and instruction is in conflict with the occult structure of illumination and revelation”; “the poem brings the great ball of crystal, only to discover that this avails nothing, for the crystal cannot ever be lifted, entered, or known.”
We are also happy to be publishing seven reviews encompassing primary texts by Ezra Pound and Ernst Fenollosa, and new scholarship on Pound, George Oppen, Black Mountain poetics, and the modernist occult.
With this double issue Paideuma shifts to a biannual format (the journal has been a de facto biannual since volume 14), and for the foreseeable future the year’s two issues will be printed together as a single annual. Our primary aim is to streamline the publication process, in order to get the journal back on a regular publication schedule. We believe that this format is best suited to the goal. Note that the date range assigned to this volume brings the current issue in line with the current calendar year. Volume 37 will cover the year 2010 and feature an eighty-fifth birthday tribute to Mary de Rachewiltz edited by Richard Sieburth. We also look forward to publishing in this forthcoming volume essays by Joshua Clover, Evelyn Haller, Sean Pryor, and Jeffrey Westover.
National Poetry Foundation 