Poetry as Criticism

Part of the appeal of poetry as criticism, which I discussed in my last post, is the idea of a poem that can explain itself, with no intervention needed from bothersome critics imposing their own interpretations. While the lyric poet’s ideal might be a poem that has no need of explanation, a poem whose meaning is somehow self-evident, second best might be a poem that comes along with its own explanatory apparatus—that tells us, in effect, how to read it. The self-explaining poem is thus a kind of meta-poetry; it is a poem that is also about poetry, that reflects on the conditions of its own making. Such poetry acknowledges that the boundaries of a poem extend beyond the words on the page, and gestures toward critical discourses and the work of other poets that hover just outside the poem’s margins. 

I’ve talked elsewhere about the method of poetic parody I used in my book 100 Chinese Silences. I chose parody not only because it offered a way to poke at the poems I was critiquing, but also because it allowed me to initiate a conversation about poetry from within. To critique a poem from the outside, in prose—something I’d done before—felt too safe, too easy given the task I’d set for myself. This time, I wanted to try to critique the poem from within, to implicate myself in the very language I sought to hold up to the light.

Without a doubt, the poems that were most difficult for me to write for this collection were the ones that took on revered modernist classics, particularly poems by Ezra Pound, which I read as a wellspring of the American poetic orientalism that I sought to critique. The advantage here was that unlike with some of the contemporary works I parodied in my collection, Pound’s poems would almost certainly be familiar to readers. But that was also the disadvantage: I wondered how readers would respond to my takedown of such profoundly canonical works.

To imagine Pound himself as the exile of the poem’s title was no great stretch, of course. Like many of his American contemporaries, Pound spent most of his career living in Europe, bemoaning in an early poem the fate of those left behind in America to be “broken against her, / A-stray, lost in the villages.” I reimagined Pound as the speaker of my poem who addresses his fellow poet-expatriate, T. S. Eliot. The conceit allowed me to turn Pound’s orientalizing gaze back on the scene of Anglo-American modernist poetry; in lieu of Pound’s Chinese place-names, I included pseudo-exotic landmarks like “the bridge at the River ‘Thames,’” Eliot’s “desk at Faber-Faber,” and the journal “Po-Etry.” I also examined this early phase of Pound’s career through his later turn toward fascist politics and his idealization of Mussolini: “And there came also the ‘True-man’ Ben-it-o to awe me, / Playing in the death-mask of Jefferson.” 

When we read Pound today, we have to grapple directly with his fascism and antisemitism, which he expressed during the World War II radio broadcasts that led to his arrest for treason in 1945. (Pound’s subsequent imprisonment at Pisa is rendered in his own Pisan Cantos.) Pound scholars have often treated Pound’s racist, right-wing ideology as an aberration, associating his bigotry with his later career and rarely reading this ideology back into the rarefied aesthetics of his earlier “Chinese” phase. Part of what I hoped to do in my poem was to bring “Exile’s Letter” down into the dirt of Pound’s reality, drawing details from Pound’s Pisan imprisonment (“Steel cages, two books set on a packing-crate table”) into his earlier, wistful depiction of exile. 

This mode of poetry-as-criticism gave me tools for critiquing Pound that are not typically available in scholarly writing. The invented dialogue with Eliot, for example, allowed me to use quotations from Eliot’s work to provide commentary on Pound, from a remembrance of the “hyacinth girl” of The Waste Land (which Pound, of course, had a major hand in editing) to Pound’s own reply in The Pisan Cantos to Eliot’s famed line that the world would end “not with a bang, but with a whimper.” I also allude to Eliot visiting with Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, the hospital in Washington, D.C. where Pound was held for 12 years after being found insane at trial. The point here was not to hold Eliot up as Pound’s better—particularly given Eliot’s own history of antisemitism—but to pry open Pound’s orientalist persona and return it to the dialogic, often problematic context from which it came. 

To render all of these facts in the restrained, elegant, elegiac language that Pound understood as the voice of Chinese poetry—and that he subsequently bequeathed to American poets—was unsettling, yet also revelatory. The process of writing these poems made me see how the incorporation of China into modern American poetry was not purely an aesthetic choice, but was always bound up with history and politics. The history of China in modern American poetry is tied to orientalism, imperialism, racism, and war. And it is that historical residue in the poetic language, which we still use, that my collection of poetry-as-criticism sought to excavate.