From: afilreis@dept.english.upenn.edu (Al Filreis)
Subject: Re: ***now two new poems to discuss***
To: toksman@sas.upenn.edu (Tahneer N Oksman)
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 22:00:47 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: swalker@dept.english.upenn.edu, toksman@sas.upenn.edu,
        88v@dept.english.upenn.edu
Sender: owner-88v@dept.english.upenn.edu
Precedence: bulk

On Ezra Pound's "The Encounter," Tahneer wrote:

| well, further than just 'objectification' of women, i think there is an 
| imagist idea going on here. that isif imagism is for objects, pound is 
| showing how the woman is a type of object and no different from an 
| inanimate object. besides the politics of this, he's making a person into 
| a thing to further the imagist theme ofmaking a poem out of a one-level 
| description. in this way, we are not supposed to think of the woman as a 
| three-dimensional human, but rather as a one dimentional object so we can 
| get the full effect of a person working or just being an object that 
| creates a surface level image.


Is she not, thus, LIKE the thing to which things are likened in an imagist
poem? Once he COMPARES her in the pithy imagist way, he retreats from the
potential of walking the walk (if he's taken her up on her implicit offer to
commune) and goes back to what "they" are doing--talking the talk. 

The poem begins with a separation: they are talking the new morality; but she
and the speaker seem to be interested in something more, something more
direct. She looks at him and when he returns the gaze he turns her into an
"oriental" fan (as in a haiku). Thus ends the distinction between them and
the others. But Pound, the creator of the little scene, clearly believes he
has made something distinct for his speaker. So we see something he doesn't:
we see a speaker who tries to see a woman and to DO (rather than just write)
but who fails to do anything more than write her into his poem; he sees a
speaker who "takes in" a woman as an activity distinct and special.

The poem nicely suggests what's finally wrong with imagism: it has a static
quality and doesn't do quite as well with people as it does with things.