on Pound's "The Encounter"

	Sun, 10 Oct 1999 08:18:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: afilreis@dept.english.upenn.edu (Al Filreis)
Subject: Re: The encounter

		BELOW, IN RESPONSE TO A.C.'S QUESTION
		I INTERPRET "THE ENCOUNTER" STORY SOME MORE
		AND IN DOING SO TALK ABOUT THE DANGERS
		OF OBJECTIFICATION IN EARLY MODERNIST WRITING
		------------------

Al had written (on Ezra Pound's "The Encounter"):
------------
But they don't end up *doing* it. The speakers ends up talking about doing
it--via his imagist likening. He ends by saying she is *like* something.
But no likening is needed. She makes it clear that he can have her, but
his performance of modernism seems more urgent. She is a word, or a
word-about-a-thing, not a being in herself.

A.C. then wrote to ask:
-----------
you think that this is a "failure of Imagism" in that Pound has lost sight
of life in his desire to write about it?  or do you mean that Pound is
expressing (metaphorically) the limits of poetry to stand in for life?

Now Al tries to clarify: 
----------- 
I mean it is a limitation or problem of imagism--a wall imagism hits as it
tries to be a poetic strategy for a "revolution of the word" (a "new" kind
of poetry for the modern age). What it shows here is what bullshit Pound's
"action words" can be when you stop to consider what they mean, what they
refer to, in this supposed social scene. Cool modern people gather,
including the poet; they all talk about the cool new modes and how cool
they are (how free sexually and artistically); but the poet and a young
free woman eye each other as if to say to each other, "What bullshit they
are, *talking* the new morality as if they really mean it. So much talk!"
At that point it's clear that the poet fantasizes that what can come out
of that recognition is some engagement between the two. But what he does
next he sort of can't help; I mean, after all, he's a
revolution-of-the-word poet! He's new. Make it new! Words, words. Imagism
instant-in-time stuff. So he compares her fingers to an orientalized,
aestheticized, fragile, catch-it-while-you-can-before-it-crumbles thing.
Even within the social scene he has set up, it's a confession, at least a
slight moment self-awareness, that he'd rather use words than do. The
former lasts longer because they reify ("REE-iff-fie" - meaning to make
concrete or to make objective) the experience in ways that the human
interaction cannot.

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