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Three Succession and Supersession, from Z to “A” Patriarchal Poetry connectedly. Gertrude Stein, “Patriarchal Poetry” 1. Men of Letters Certain cautions apply to literary-­ critical uses of letters, including the sets of letters crucial to this book. The letters in any selected edition appear by an editor’s best judgment at the time; in addition, untold texts may be lost.1 Letters are an emotionally invested practice in which contestation, raillery, intimacy, revelation, and exposure are staged. Because poets with a preternatural sense of their historical career may write for the archive, not, or not only, for the recipient, sincerity may be particularly performative. Reference problems can be startling: letters are allusive, deploying initials for poems and persons, nicknames, typographical play or suggestive error, glancing, unclear allusions, unfilled-­in pronouns, and shorthands of all kinds. In letters, one sees graphic inscriptions sometimes almost minute to minute within the time of writing , the little adjustments and articulations involved in creating a serious working bond; misunderstandings and quarrels, jokes and teasing, self-­ interest and manipulation get frozen, exaggerated, and magnified. Letters among poets mix narratives of desire, success, and the frustrations of never having enough recognition. Indeed, the arrival of letters may stand symbolically for recognition and fame, which explains their uncanny affective power. Letters are driven both by the writer’s response to another and by a self-­ mirroring process that the epistolary genre encourages. Hence letters show figures making and remaking themselves in “correspondence,” speaking to the self by speaking to someone else. In letters emotion is visible before it hardens, literary hopes are exaggerated or confessed, and particular, even random or thoughtless turns of phrase become talismanic . Hence through letters a critic constructs—as Andrew Epstein proposes—not “biographies of these friendships” but rather “defining dialogic encounters and their effect on literary production” (Epstein 2006, 60 part one 10). So epistolary intimacy is both welcome and fraught, and letters are rhetorically tricky, dense, layered, and full of guarded nuance. Thus they are susceptible to close reading. Becoming a literary leader (the switchboard, the go-­ to man) was one of Pound’s achievements, and his construction of networks of correspondents was key. Even if he made parallel statements to many people, even if some letters became repetitiously formulaic, the power of his epistolary intimacy was defining. Pound energetically affirmed in galvanizing bulletins that “the fate of culture” depended upon instantaneous and full-­ scale action on fronts he defined (Timothy Materer in Pound 1985, xi). As early as 1915 T. S. Eliot felt that “an attitude of discipleship” was what Pound demanded (Gordon 1999, 102). An antic, intense emotional charge emerges in the “dialogic encounter” between Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky (Epstein 2006, 10). Many of Pound’s letters, but a number of Zukofsky’s too, are written in a distinctive cant (James Laughlin calls it an “Ezratic lingo”)—allusive, orthographically creative, imperially multidialectal, sardonically seriocomic, almost as if the poets were morphing among rapidly changing social positions (Laughlin 1987, 50). Pound assumed this voice habitually in his correspondence; it was catchy and catching, probably because, as Michael North has argued, assumption of racial or ethnic dialect is a masquerade encapsulating a sense of vulnerability and a desire for power (North 1994, 77–83). 2. Maleness, Mentorship, Mastery As Christian Bök suggests, “Your mentors become your tormentors .”2 In mentorship, two conflicting pedagogic models structure different social metaphors of maleness (Brown 1988). In Wendy Brown’s discussion of political theory and manhood, the fraternal model depends on mutual, lateral self-­ fashioning and interactive learning, the aggressive friendship that Andrew Epstein titles Beautiful Enemies and that Peter Quartermain calls “instructive kin” (Epstein 2006; Quartermain 1992, 68).3 The paternal model postulates a fountain of wisdom and male power from which, as suppliant, one imbibes—as from the oedipal ­father or the pre-­oedipal father. Harold Bloom has dramatized this as one high-­ stakes oedipal struggle, ignoring the possibility that in the poetry world (not the monotheistic critical world of canon formation) alternative figures might desire to assume this patriarchal role and that the “applicant” actively chooses and may even shift among different pedagogic figures, succession and supersession, from z to “a” 61 as both Christopher Beach and Zukofsky suggest (Bloom 1973; Beach 1992; Zukofsky [1967] 2000, 135). The relationship of Pound and Zukofsky is an episode in mentorship within patriarchal poetics, in the ambitions both men articulate and in the particulars of negotiating both scope and autonomy for Zukofsky. But their...

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