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3. Interpretation and the Limit Text: An Approach to Jackson Mac Low’s Words nd Ends from Ez
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3 Interpretation and the Limit Text an approach to Jackson Mac low’s Words nd ends from ez It would be perfectly in order to approach Jackson Mac Low’s poem Words nd Ends from Ez (WNEFE hereafter) as an exemplary text of neo-picturesque detail , embodying the variety and fragmentariness that forms the central core of picturesque poetics (outlined in chapter 9); it would be equally pertinent to examine the affinities between Mac Low’s work and Ronald Johnson’s method of corrosive reduction in his Radi os, discussed in chapter 2. However, I wish to examine Mac Low’s poem through a different non-aesthetic matrix in a discussion that can be considered a prelude to the longer chapter on John Cage that follows this one. Long ago in Democratic Vistas, Whitman called for a Hegelian bard, the supercessionary spirit of Homer and Shakespeare who, in a confluence of poetry, spiritualism, and science, “will compose the great poem of death” (82). I wish to argue that Jackson Mac Low’s WNEFE is arguably American poetry ’s extreme achievement in “death-writing.” Mac Low reads The Cantos mechanistically and systematically to radically unsettle its complex sign economy, eliminating vast sections of the work and then, like Eliot’s Fisher King, shoring together numerous textual fragments that, in Mac Low’s case, consecrate and celebrate the name of Ezra Pound. A profoundly authorless text, WNEFE simultaneously effects the death of Pound’s epic and the exhumation of Pound’s name. Pound’s view of the fragment might be deduced from his Confucian beliefs that structure the relation of parts to a whole. As Peter Makin comments: The metaphysic of the Confucian Chung Yung or Unwobbling Pivot . . . is that things are not heaps of contingent dust-drift, but have essential principles , which are durable; which are part of an overarching tendency or Principle in the universe and which, being a shaping and therefore good principle operative in man as in other things, a man may come to under- 42 Chapter 3 stand. This metaphysic is all about the relation between wholes and fragments . The mosaic is not its little glass and gold-leafed fragments; the Virgin shines down from the apse at Torcello when, or if, half of the fragments that make her have fallen. (235–36) Whether or not the original Cantos shine through in “virtu irraggiante” is not to be debated here; suffice to say Mac Low’s strategic method might be likened to the willful production of fragmentation, to the revelation or return of letters to their elemental material base as the building blocks of language for the most part stripped of content. Such a comparison, however, would be superficial and would do great disservice to the full extent of Mac Low’s achievement, for WNEFE is a highly structured and constructed text. However, the “destroy-to-exhume” procedure does not result in a nembutsu—that sacred meditation on the name of Amitabha Buddha perfected in Japanese poetry—and though Pound’s dictum via Basil Bunting that “dichten = condensare” seems uncannily apposite to Mac Low’s reductive textual achievement, the actual outcome is far from constructive . Indeed, the poem offers itself to its readers as an uncompromised application of a veritable poetics of demolition. That, of course, need not be taken negatively, as Walter Benjamin reminds us a demolition site is often a source for teaching a theory of construction (The Arcades Project 95). Mac Low’s oxymoronic economy of creation-through-destruction fittingly accords with Benjamin ’s description of the angel in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, who perceives a “single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” hurled “in front of his feet” (Illuminations 257). In Klee’s new angelic manner, Mac Low pulverizes The Cantos, reducing them to a systematic, engineered paradox. Less dramatically, we might situate the text as part of some Oulipian corpus in what Serge Gavronsky estimates to be the final formalist hurrah. Mac Low utilizes a strict procedural method of text generation, the diastic chance selection method (hereafter DCSM). Related to the acrostic, the DCSM is a procedure designed specifically to facilitate a systematic reading through a text in order to isolate certain letters that repeatedly spell out a “theme” or “index” name. WNEFE records a reading through The Cantos in which the theme name isolated is that of Pound himself. The defining feature of the method concerns the placement of the letters that spell out the eponymous name. Each...