5
1
‘What am I doing/Here all alone? Reviewing the/Multitudes I’ve known’.1 This is the question an elderly Charles Henri Ford asked himself, riffing on both David Byrne and Walt Whitman, in a short poem published mere months before he passed away, on 27 September 2001. The question I want to ask is a simple one: Can these lines be said to reveal anything about Ford? If so, what is it exactly that they reveal? That we are dealing here with a seemingly weary, mentally fragile, and potentially isolated poet playing one final part on the world’s stage, preparing for the last scene of all? Perhaps, though I am not entirely convinced. Nor am I sure, truth be told, that these are quite the right questions to ask. Consider, for instance, Lynne Tillman’s first-hand account of the poet’s later days. ‘Ford has made a habit of doing what he wants to do’, Tillman observes, ‘and his life is dedicated, as much as anyone’s can be, to poetry, art, and the pursuit of pleasure. He usually adheres to a self-imposed, rigorous routine, and now, just short of 93, he writes haiku poems and makes collages daily.’2 Of course, things could go either way here. We might, on the one hand, argue that Ford’s adherence to such a rigorous regime of creative activity hardly constitutes the behaviour of someone getting ready to give up the ghost. We might, on the other, feasibly assert that the ostensibly contented figure evoked in the extract above comes across as somewhat diminished. It seems fair to say that Ford would have agreed with the first of those statements, while disputing the other simultaneously. This is something that comes to the fore in another of his late poems:
Don’t forget the Sixties
Were thirty years ago
So what else is new?3
Ford appears to be as aesthetically inquisitive as ever in these particular lines, which were published in 1995 and which more significantly still seem to eschew anything even remotely approaching the condition of sentimentalism. Even at this late stage in life, it seems that Ford was still, in his own fashion, trying to make things new. And yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, the fact remains that in his late verse Ford occasionally sought solace in the foreign country commonly known as the past. We need only return our attention to the poem with which we began in order to confirm this:
Ruth posed herself – did
Everything except push the
Button for Man Ray.4
Ford is referring in this passage to the occasion in 1945 when his younger sister – the Estelle Rigault of the first ever Broadway performance of Sartre’s No Exit – had her portrait taken by none other than Emmanuel Radnitzky, that most famed of Surrealist photographers. In one sense, as intimated above, we are on familiar ground here: Ford is casting his mind back into his rich and varied personal memory-palace in order to convince himself that he – and those nearest and dearest to him – once stood somewhere near the centre of all things artistic and important. However, in this final chapter we will realize that things aren’t quite as simple as they at first appear.
This chapter considers the latter stages of Ford’s creative career. This chapter analyses his various poetic and editorial projects of the late 1970s and 1980s. This period saw the publication of Ford’s Om Krishna trilogy (1979 – 82), Public Haiku (1984), Emblems of Arachne (1986), and, arguably most importantly, a return to Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms (1989). If taken at face value, Ford’s major works of the 1980s seem incommensurate in both form and content. But I want to argue that a certain sort of conceptual unity does in fact underpin Ford’s output of this period. The 1980s represented Ford’s final phase of concerted poetic and editorial activity. As well as reminding us of his investment in Warholian Pop, Ford’s poetry of this period is filled with seemingly wistful references to his apprenticeship as a fresh-faced modernist. This is especially true of Om Krishna. As this chapter reveals, Ezra Pound was never far from Ford’s mind in the 1980s. Ford’s preoccupation with his one-time high modernist mentor gives rise to a peculiar anxiety of influence in his late works, as he struggles, at least at first, to make his own poetic voice heard. Ford’s late poetry can also be said to mirror Pound’s uneasy retreat into domesticity in the final section of his modernist epic The Cantos. These and other such similarities are clearly evident in Ford’s Om Krishna III: Secret Haiku. Whereas the first two volumes of this trilogy featured a panoramic sweep of personages and diverse geographical locations, Ford plumps for an altogether more stable spatial setting in Secret Haiku: the humble home. Ford’s choice of setting is significant here, as is his chosen poetic mode – a syllabic style once privileged by modernists such as Pound. Having considered the implications of these decisions, I shift my attention to the poet’s return to the little magazine with which he began. Published in 1989 as a special issue of the avant-garde New York periodical Unmuzzled OX – a magazine which purported, tellingly, to be a postmodern continuation of Pound’s Cantos – the final issue of Blues serves a number of critical functions. Chief among them, Ford saw in the Unmuzzled OX Blues an opportunity to document aspects of his historical moment before it faded forever from view. Further to this, the closing section of this final chapter suggests that while he does not totally succeed in freeing himself from the high modernist spectre of his formative literary apprenticeship, his return to the favoured periodical format of his youth does secure his legacy, and prevents him from getting, as Pound did, tangled up and blue, in a perpetually refracting poetic hall of mirrors.
2
Charles Henri Ford spent much of his time during the 1970s moving back and forth between the islands of Greece, New York City, and Kathmandu, Nepal. It was in the last of these places that Ford first developed a curiosity in Buddhism. Ford’s interest in the religion impacted significantly on the poetry he produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We see this in his multi-volume Om Krishna project. Originally conceived as a tetralogy, this particular enterprise in fact ended up a truncated trilogy. Om Krishna I: Special Effects and Om Krishna II: From the Sickroom of the Walking Eagles are formally and thematically diffuse poetic inventories of (among other things) Indian and Buddhist mythology conducted in rolling, Whitmaneseque chunks of free verse. The final volume in the trilogy is, by way of complete contrast, a fairly spartan collection of Ford’s Secret Haiku. In spite of differences such as these, however, even the most cursory reading of the trilogy reveals the depth of Ford’s engagement with specifically Buddhist forms of religiosity and iconography. This is certainly true of Special Effects:
Manjuri began to plow a furrow, having yoked a
lion and a griffin. Dharma Sri Mitra went
up to him and asked the way to Tibet. The
mongoose on the postern turned back his
eyes that he might not witness a fratricide.5
What we have in this passage is a curious admixture of the ancient and the contemporary. Notice in particular how Ford weaves together multiple allusions – from heraldic images of Buddhist symbology, to a modern-day master of Yoga – in a fashion that will be instantly recognizable to readers of twentieth-century experimental Anglophone poetry. Attention need also be paid to the manner in which the stanza opens. I am especially interested in the bodhisattva associated with transcendent wisdom who makes an appearance at the start of the first line. I mention this here as the topic of Buddhist wisdom is one that carries over into the second volume of Om Krishna:
Mother Saraswati is pounding the pavement of Heat
Street
Going to gather ash-blue plums (Krishna has
two of his own same size shape and color)
On the Dunes of the Ocean of Learning (her true
domain)
Those bearded crows of nostalgia won’t go away
But she is not disturbed by their cawing.6
There is a lot we might say about these lines, especially about the noisy ‘bearded crows of nostalgia’ that appear to be disturbing the peace. To do so, however, would be to leap too far ahead. For the time being, I instead want simply to state that Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of music, art, knowledge, learning, and wisdom. She also features prominently in Nepalese Buddhist iconography. Krishna – the proud owner of two ‘ash-blue plums’ – also makes an appearance in the passage above. And here he is yet again, this time in the playful Secret Haiku:
Krishna rushes by
Front door, chasing with his butterfly
Net a pig.7
Still, I am not, truth be told, all that interested in simply noting the number of times Krishna’s name crops up in Ford’s late project. I am more interested in describing the way in which Om Krishna contains myriad references to the varied modern and postmodern writers and artists that Ford numbered as his peers. I am also interested in considering why he would choose to pepper his late work with all these modern and postmodern multitudes. So let us return now to the first instalment of the trilogy. Consider the information contained in the following lines:
Seemingly unaware of half-elliptic reactors
He will pose for a likeness to be executed in fur-
nace slag
On completion it is given passes through the
Claes Oldenburg finishing mill
Sprayed with high temperature effervescence
It may con correspondents at the next Biennale
and be offered to Peggy Guggenheim
Who will throw a shrinkage fit and file her nails
with smyrna emery
With eyelid catalepsy she avoids the aborting of
a ewe8
This passage is found just about halfway down on the very first page of Om Krishna I. Its concerns are of a resolutely secular nature, and it stages the thematic continuity between these lines and those contained in earlier undertakings such as Spare Parts. Much as he did in that volume, Ford yokes together rapid-fire references to industrial processing plants, Pop producers, and wealthy American art collectors – so as to remind his readership of the networked fields of contemporary aesthetics, heavy industry, and global commerce. Ford was, as it happens, on very friendly personal terms with the ‘cataleptic’ Peggy Guggenheim. He had in fact known this particular bohemian heiress and socialite for the best part of thirty-years by the time Om Krishna I appeared on the literary market.9 In Water from a Bucket, Ford describes how, in October 1949, Guggenheim invited both himself and Pavel Tchelitchew to stay at her seventeenth-century Venetian palazzo. Opinionated as ever, Ford notes in his journal that Guggenheim’s world-famous ‘white marble’ abode ‘is modernized inside, walls painted in not-quite-right solid shade, a Calder mobile hanging in the foyer, and in the garden of a couple of Brancusis; otherwise her collection is hard to look at, especially the messes signed Jackson Pollock’.10 Irrespective of whether we agree with this withering assessment of Pollock’s artistic worth, harking back as it does to our earlier discussion of Abstract Expressionism, the point to emphasize here is this: in order to understand exactly what it is that Ford is trying to get at in his Om Krishna project, we need also to grasp why it is that he feels the need to pepper his late poetry with so many references to friends and former artistic acquaintances. To put it in the simplest language possible: in order to understand what is going on in Ford’s late poetry, we first need to establish what underlying purpose all this seemingly inveterate, perhaps even compulsive, name-dropping serves.
This is precisely the sort of thing that we need to keep in mind as we approach the following excerpt, which is taken from the second volume of Om Krishna:
Food comes first a sticky banana
For breakfast sheep-hustlers prefer chittlings
What is Djuna holed up in Patchin Place eating at
this moment
Clandestine the last bite swallowed by
Harry Crosby
Jean-Arthur had a date in the desert (where else)
There’s a fine connection between digestive acids
And alignment for parole.11
Carolyn Korsmeyer reminds us that the representation of ‘food in art extends from the base and gross to the most profound spiritual dimensions, and images of foods range from the decorative to the horrible’.12 She also tells us that many an artist has ‘employed foodstuffs in contexts sacred and profane; to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; to immerse the viewer in a lusty sensuousness and to catch us unawares with reminders of mortality; to tempt and to sicken’.13 We see all this and more in the major works of modernism. One need only think of Bloom’s lunchtime snack of a gorgonzola sandwich and glass of burgundy in Joyce’s Ulysses, or of the manner in which the dinner party sequence at the heart of To the Lighthouse, to borrow from Korsmeyer once more, ‘demonstrates Woolf’s great preoccupations: time, its passage, and the changes it wreaks; memory and forgetfulness; the irreconcilability of our shifting perspectives on reality’.14 Equally, one might just as soon think of the ‘unexpected excellent sausage,/the smell of mint, for example’ (LXXIV: 458) that spring suddenly to Pound’s mind among the ruins of his Pisan dream,15 or, most famously of all, of Proust’s celebrated, tea-soaked madeleine. In a similar fashion, the arrival of a ‘sticky banana’ in the extract above sets off a chain of associative reactions in Ford’s mind. He starts to reminisce about people closely associated with the formative stages of his literary career. Specifically, he begins to wonder what has become of the woman he once, in the early 1930s, thought of marrying: the reclusive modernist Djuna Barnes. Immediately after this, one of the expatriate writers Ford deigned to publish in the pages of Blues – Harry Crosby, he of that infamous felo de se – hones into view. So, too, does the man whose dress and appearance Ford strove to approximate while working on The Young and Evil in 1930s Paris,16 the crucial proto-Surrealist poet: Jean Arthur Rimbaud.
In this sort of passage, that which is absent speaks louder than what is in front of us: a sense of anxiety. A brief comparison between Om Krishna and the previously discussed Silver Flower Coo is instructive in this regard. In particular, recall how, in that earlier text, Ford would repeatedly cast his mind back into the past in order to shore up his personal sense of artistic worth in the present. That simply does not happen in Om Krishna. If anything, Ford seems to have reconciled himself with his position on the cultural sidelines, cracking wise as he now tends to do about his late poetry being ‘a poetry of post-poetry to be published/posthumously’.17 Having said that, it is important to be absolutely clear here. I am not suggesting that Om Krishna is completely devoid of a sense of anxiety, but rather, as we will soon see, that the sort of unease that we encounter in this late project – especially in the third volume – has relatively little to do with Ford’s sense of self, and more to do with the thorny, deeply unfashionable question of poetic influence. Before we broach that particular topic, however, we need to spend just a touch more time analysing the brand of anxiety-free nostalgia that comes to characterize Om Krishna. It is in this project that Ford comes to appreciate that what, to crib from Pound once again, ‘thou lov’st well is thy true heritage/What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee’ (LXXXI: 535). We see this most clearly in the closing section of the second volume of Om Krishna:
What seems like fragmentation is making all in one
Tchelitchew Excelsior of sensory disturbances
Prophet turning round and round an opening
Avian respiration in everything he did
Tidal in certain regions a medium in which to
Propagate--
Each scan of ancestry
Excess of subtlety from the enchanter’s hand.18
By turns elegiac, poignant, and evocative, there is something irresistible about these lines – lines which, on the surface of things, concern perhaps the single most important person to feature in Ford’s long life: Pavel Tchelitchew. As well as praising the paradoxically excessive ‘subtlety’ of Tchelitchew’s painterly brushwork, Ford here describes his former partner’s handcrafted creative output in terms of prophetic, nay properly auratic enchantment. This is posthumous high praise indeed. And there they are again, those most loaded of words. Auratic enchantment.
We would do well to bear these two words in mind when reading the following portion of poetry, which is positioned just in front of the one about Tchelitchew:
The Synthesis is what I made and what has made
me
But love lasts longer than fame for many another
Whatever the waves are saying will be cradled by
the wind
Leaving skull-silver mirrors to keep you wondering.19
A clear point of thematic continuity runs between these passages, concerned as they are with the notion of coalescence, of amalgamation. But what are we to make of the suggestion that enduring affection will always, in most cases at least, triumph over celebrity? What we have here is, of course, an allusion to Andy Warhol’s pithy assertion to about fifteen minutes of fame. It is one of a number of references in Ford’s late poetry to the artist whose technologically reproducible output, lest we forget, productively complicates the very notion of auratic enchantment. In addition, the line we just quoted about the ‘skull-silver mirrors’ that keep people guessing can also be said to pertain to Ford’s exceptionally famous, Pittsburgh-born friend. As mentioned previously, silver was the colour that came to be associated with the first Factory. Nor is this all. The allusion contained in this line also stirs memories of Warhol’s Self-Portrait with Skull (1977). Do we not find in this deathly image – silvery hairpiece and all – an apt visual correlative to Ford’s evocation of Warholian silver skulls? I think we do. In equal measure, however, it is important to emphasize the fact that Warhol is by no means the only major cultural figure from Ford’s past to appear in Om Krishna.
The presence of Ezra Pound is also clearly felt in Ford’s late poetry. Consider the following lines, which appear in the first volume of Om Krishna:
The lonely transvestite swooping across a mock
gun battle shines in the dark. All his bones
melt and he’s a rippling waterfall of flesh,
tripping and burning while flicking sema-
phore messages to the imps of nostalgia.
‘– But it’s got your style, Ezra’, – and that’s any
light rising in a supernatural harvest.20
Ford’s aside to that man ‘Ezra’ in this eroticized and ejaculatory passage, containing as it does suggestive references to gushing waterfalls, luminescent and code-emitting transvestites, and gloriously chiselled male torsos, is one of many similar mentions in Om Krishna. Meshing together the corporeal and the numinous, this delightfully white-hot extract, which pitches and careens excitedly across and down the page, forms part of a wider poetic and personal conservation with Pound that takes shape in Ford’s various literary and editorial projects of the late 1970s and 1980s. Note also the telling presence of certain ‘imps of nostalgia’ in this passage. Ford’s attention here seems firmly fixed on the past. This backward glance accounts in part for Pound’s appearance in Om Krishna. It is palpably evident that the man he sought out for advice at the very start of his literary career is at the forefront of Ford’s thinking in the first instalment of Om Krishna:
I fly no prayer-flags we grow accustomed to
amazement
I recognize you in the husk of what’s to come.21
Ford alludes in these lines to something that Pound wrote in his late collection of cantos, Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1968):
A blown husk that is finished
but the light still sings eternal. (CXV: 808)
To what might this image of gutted vegetation refer? It seems feasible that such a reference is directed towards The Cantos themselves. The ‘blown husk’ to which Pound refers denotes both disturbance and disintegration; it initially appears representative of a categorically completed process. Yet a glance at the dictionary reminds us of the fact that the term ‘husk’ suggests the outer membrane – or better yet, envelope – of particular sorts of seeds or fruit. In the above lines the outer shell to which Pound refers has certainly been shed – and the contents contained within this vegetal envelope delivered. Ford evidently recognizes the generative potential for dissemination implied by Pound’s paradoxical image of a spent casing.
Other examples in Om Krishna similarly reveal the extent of Ford’s preoccupation with the formally provisional late poetry of Pound:
Arcane manoeuvrings in a clouded-crystal ball.
Distended kickback of the quick-release
prong. Wrought-up pushovers require short-
er feeding periods.22
The first line of the above extract is another allusion to the fragmentary poetic drafts that close out the Cantos:
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
Who can lift it? (CXVI: 809)
In order to properly understand the sentiment being expressed in this quote, which bears the imprint of Pound’s long-standing interest in neo-platonism, we need to turn to Guide to Kulchur (1938). In this idiosyncratic textbook, Pound asserts that ‘we shd. read for power. Man reading shd./be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand’.23 As is well known, Pound had high hopes that his long modernist poem might one day be thought of as precisely such a portable, light-emitting receptacle. But history tells us that things did not turn out as the Idaho-born poet planned. He simply could not, in his own words, ‘make it cohere’ (CXVI: 810). Pound came instead to the conclusion that he was destined to leave behind ‘a tangle of works unfinished’ (CXVI: 809), that he was in fact doomed to remain ‘Unstill, ever turning’ (CXIII: 804).
What, though, does all this have to do with Ford? That is, what do all these passing references have to tell us, aside from the fact that the late Cantos were clearly on Ford’s mind when it came time for him to sit down and write Om Krishna? The rather prosaic answer has much to do with Harold Bloom’s well-trodden theory of poetic influence and anxiety. ‘How do men become poets’, Bloom asks, ‘or to adopt an older phrasing, how is the poetic character incarnated?’24 Bloom reasons that around the time a ‘potential poet first discovers (or is discovered by) the dialectic of influence, first discovers poetry as being both external and internal to himself, he begins a process that will end only when he has no more poetry within him, long after he has the power (or desire) to discover it outside himself again’.25 Bloom then goes on to suggest that while ‘all such discovery is a self-recognition, indeed a Second Birth, and ought, in the pure good of theory, to be accomplished in a perfect solipsism, it is an act never complete in itself’.26
This, then, is the rub. The aspiring versifier, try as he might, ‘is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves. The poem is within him, yet he experiences the shame and splendour of being found by poems – great poems – outside him. To lose freedom in this center is never to forgive, and to learn the dread of threatened autonomy forever’.27 All of which is perhaps to say: you are what you read and someone else always gets there first anyway. Ford seems to have been aware of this fact. And this is why his late poetic ventures are full of direct references and allusions to the man whose verses he once copied out verbatim in his journals, as a teenager. It is almost as if Ford, who was by now, ‘in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios’.28 As to what Ford would have made of such an assessment? That remains to be seen.
3
Ezra Pound’s late writing is famously difficult. ‘The poetry of the late cantos vacillates’, Sean Pryor notes, ‘apprehending then explaining, presenting then referring, painting a miniature rose then mistrusting it, flaring then disappearing in darkness, striding ahead of the reader then turning back to help or hurry’.29 In spite of difficulties such as these, we need now to come to terms with some of the myriad complexities and contradictions at work in Pound’s very last collection of Cantos. Such an understanding is important: it will enable us to appreciate more fully the nuances of Ford’s Secret Haiku and Emblems of Arachne. But first: Why was Ford so drawn to Pound’s late poetry, especially the so-called Drafts and Fragments? If we are to answer that question, we need first to understand what Pound hoped to achieve in this late collection of cantos. This volume of poetry represented a final concerted effort on the elderly poet’s part to furnish his modernist epic with a proper ending. These highly emotive poetic texts also read as an idiosyncratic attempt to fashion a stable – and tranquil – aesthetic vantage point from which the decidedly world-weary creator of the Cantos might quietly reflect on his life’s work. The remarkable opening canto of the sequence finds Pound at rest in a peaceful and ‘quiet house’ (CX: 791), inspired by the Byzantine basilica situated on the lagoon island of Torcello. Pound makes it clear that he does not want to disturb the tranquillity afforded by this Venetian domicile in the opening lines of Drafts & Fragments. Pound appears to be in a reconciliatory mood in the opening passages of this canto. Downplaying his long-standing interest in conceptions of cultural and political totalitarianism, Pound declares in this poem that he is ‘all for Verkehr without tyranny’ (CX: 791). This ostensibly contrite gesture denotes a dramatic shift in poetic emphasis in his final group of Cantos. Absent, too, is the syntactically rebarbative and ideologically conspiratorial sort of verse that dominated in the preceding sections: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959). The lyrically ‘exultant’ (CX: 791) opening lines of Drafts & Fragments are infused with a sense of playful poetic energy:
Hast’ou seen boat’s wake on sea-wall,
how crests it.
What panache?
paw-flap, wave-tap,
that is gaiety,
Toba Sojo,
toward limpidity,
that is exultance,
here the crest runs on wall. (CX: 791)
Fred Moramarco argues that ‘generative forces’ structure this passage and contribute to the ‘bounding’ appearance of lines of verse that ‘themselves reflect an energetic, vital movement toward clarity’.30 Such analysis would seem to reinforce the view that Pound has, in these final cantos, somehow managed to break away from the dense economic and monetary allusions that had underpinned the earlier Rock-Drill and Thrones. The playful ease with which the opening portions of Drafts & Fragments skip across the page is characteristic of a more general move towards lucidity on Pound’s part. This also accounts for the reference he makes to the Japanese Buddhist narrative scroll painter Toba Sojo (1053 – 1140). Pound evidently admired Sojo’s finely observed, graceful depictions of flora and fauna.31 The landscape evoked in lyrical opening lines of canto CX resembles the sort of luminescent natural panorama usually associated with Sojo:
The water is blue and not turquoise
When the stag drinks at the salt spring
and sheep come down with the gentian sprout,
can you see with eyes of coral or turquoise
or walk with the oak’s root? (CX: 791)
Pound delights in the simple pleasures afforded by the natural world in these lines. However, poetic images celebrating the invigorating forces of natural motion – displayed in lines such as ‘che paion’ si al vent’ (CX: 791) – are soon struck ‘dumb’ (CX: 791) by an encroaching notion of almost funereal fixity:
Laurel bark sheathing the fugitive,
a day’s wraith unrooted?
Neath this altar now Endymion lies. (CX: 793)
This tonal shift relates to Pound’s earlier evocation of ‘2Hår-2la-1llü 3k’ö’ (CX: 791). The ceremony of the indigenous Na-khi tribe of Southwest China at first seems to correspond with the previously mentioned forces of generative motion that Moramarco associates with canto CX. This phrase can be translated as ‘wind sway perform’ and Pound is keen to emphasize such a fact, describing it as the ‘2Hår-2la-1llü 3k’ö’/of the wind sway’ (CX: 791). But it is equally important to note that this particular ceremony is one in which, as William Cookson notes, ‘the demons of suicide are invited, propitiated and exorcised’.32 The ominous undertones attached to the rituals of the Na-khi come to temper the overall tone of canto CX. The initial tranquillity of Drafts & Fragments subsequently gives way to Pound’s melancholy admission that if ‘love be the cause of hate,/something is twisted’ (CX: 794). The reader is now confronted with numerous images of sterility as ‘bare trees walk on the sky-line’ (CX: 794) and of reversal: ‘mountain sunset inverted’ (CX: 794). The contradictory, fluctuating nature of this increasingly morose canto is perhaps most fully embodied in the following passage:
Falling spiders and scorpions,
Give light against falling poison,
A wind of darkness hurls against forest
the candle flickers
is faint
Lux enim –
Versus this tempest. (CX: 795)
The falling creatures featured in the first line of this passage provide protection and ‘give light’ against an unidentified form of poison. The portentous tone of the passage is emphasized by the ‘wind of darkness’ that is being violently ‘hurled’ against the forest. The apparently unrelated image of the flickering candle that follows in the fifth line reinforces this negative perspective; and the illumination provided by the light – or perhaps better, the life sustaining – candle buffeted by the blustering winds is worryingly feeble.
We need to account for the sudden appearance of the raging ‘tempest’ that now threatens completely to overwhelm the tranquil scene evoked at the outset of Drafts & Fragments. The surprising – and admittedly morbid – answer has much to do with Pound’s famous conception of Imagism. It is important here to bear in mind that Pound breaks with dense historical and economic didacticism and belatedly returns to the formal and conceptual precepts of Imagism in the Drafts & Fragments. Often characterized by what a younger Pound might have described as a ‘sense of sudden liberation’,33 these fragmentary poetic drafts are replete with patently imagistic details that direct our attention to ‘the blue flash and the moments/benedetta’ (CXVII: 815). On the one hand, these lucid final cantos feature a strikingly high proportion of radiant poetic nodes and unsullied imagistic clusters which recall an earlier period of Pound’s writing life, ‘when the snow was like sea foam/Twilit sky leaded with elm bows’ (CXVII: 815). While imagistic respites such as this come as a welcome relief to the committed reader of the programmatic and otherwise obscure late Cantos, one must, on the other hand, also recognize that they carry with them attendant, implicitly cadaverous connotations.
Imagism arose, as we know, out a profound sense of cultural and poetic dissatisfaction. Precocious first-generation modernists such as Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and Richard Aldington had grown tired of the ornate verbiage and clichéd linguistic discursiveness prevalent in the stereotypical romantic poetry of their Victorian predecessors (and their Georgian contemporaries). Reacting against this, the so-called Imagist poets developed a style of unsentimental, rigorously precise, and classically inflected writing that stressed syntactical exactitude. Daniel Tiffany posits that the Imagist aesthetic ‘is exemplary in the sense that it entails and portrays the conversion of literary Decadence into a formation of the avant-garde – a metamorphosis that is reiterated in countless other manifestations of modernism’.34 Imagism most definitely played a crucial role in Pound’s personal poetic development. Tiffany argues that the ‘emergence’ of Imagism in Pound’s literary career ‘coincides with his repudiation of what he calls the “corpse language” of late Victorian poetry (which includes most of his early poems)’.35 He also suggests that Pound’s turn to Imagism should be understood as an early attempt to ‘rid his work of an illicit – and obviously Decadent – infatuation with dead bodies and ghosts, which in turn sustains a poetic language exemplified by these figures’.36 As to whether Pound succeeded in ridding his work of such things? Tiffany has his doubts. This is why he describes Imagism ‘as a largely unsuccessful attempt by Pound to bury – that is, to modernize – his earlier and more archaic conceptions of the Image’.37 Significantly, Tiffany suggests that Pound’s morbid infatuation with deathly Decadent poetic tropes persists long after the poet’s interest in Imagism began to wane. In fact, Tiffany asserts that a residual – and decidedly Decadent – hidden ‘corpse language’ underwrites all of Pound’s post-Imagist poetry. According to Tiffany, the presence of this residual corpse language is in this sense indicative of ‘a preoccupation with death and memory that impedes [Pound’s] formalist agenda’.38 Residual textual traces and poetic emblems of this corpse language certainly persist in the Drafts & Fragments. The ghostly and suicidal figures that populate the poetic landscape of this final collection of cantos preclude the possibility of achieving aesthetic tranquillity and impede Pound’s drive towards formal limpidity. Pound’s belated imagistic homecoming thereby proves problematic and somewhat ironic. Indeed, we might say that Pound’s late approximation of an imagistic poetic mode is inexorably fraught and painful. This is because the poet is tacitly aware of the fact that he is belatedly returning to the compromised poetic form – and thus the originary scene of his largely unsuccessful attempt to rid his early verse of illicit infatuations – that was designed precisely to combat the Decadent and deathly elements that before too long begin to bubble-up to the surface of his purportedly reposeful Drafts & Fragments.
Ford’s desire to engage with the Drafts & Fragments in his collections of haiku has a number of unexpected poetic and theoretical consequences. He effectively internalizes certain of the lessons, mistakes, ‘errors and wrecks’ (CXVI: 810) previously outlined in Pound’s late poetry. Chief among these internationalizations is Tiffany’s aforementioned conception of a specifically Poundian sort of residual corpse language. Ford’s preferred mode of late poetic delivery is important in this regard. Here is what Ford had to say about haiku while being interviewed by Asako Kitaori:
The thing about the haiku is it’s very flexible as to content and the form is fascinating because of its brevity and it can be a very concentrated content. It’s the most flexible form of poetry, much more so than the sonnet. I think [that’s] the first thing that attracted me to the haiku, but it’s not what attracts me now particularly, but it ends up being surrealist because of the superimposition – two unrelated things that make a whole which seems to be a collage.39
There is a lot that could be said about this statement, which resonates when considered in relation to a number of Ford’s earlier ventures and long-standing artistic passions. Does not, for instance, Ford’s remark about ‘superimposition’ bring to mind the creative processes undergirding his major graphipoem ventures of the mid- to late-1960s? To take another example, what are we to make of the point of continuity that Ford moves to establish between the haiku and the sort of chance aesthetic encounter that has traditionally been associated with Surrealism? Given what we have already said about Ford’s career-long investment in all things convulsively incongruous and beautiful, such a gesture surely makes more than a small amount of conceptual sense. Yet I want to suggest that Ford’s late haikus often read as more Poundian than Surrealist. Pound famously looked to the concise form of the Japanese haiku while developing his precise poetics of Imagism. Ford would have been well aware of the well-documented links between high modernism and the classical Japanese haiku. In this fashion, Ford’s fondness for the haiku also leads to an alignment with long-deceased modernists such as Pound. However, it is important to recognize that Ford’s fondness for the imagistic – and thus implicitly modernist – form of the haiku proves problematic. With a bold rhetoric flourish, Tiffany posits that the ‘influence of Japanese haiku on Imagism, for example, can be understood as an exotic means of formalizing and dignifying a poetic suicide’.40 In Tiffany’s reckoning, ‘distilled to a handful of syllables, the Imagist poem derives its power from its resistance to language, from the perilous condition of its own medium – a form that is inherently self-destructive.’41 Tiffany’s comments about the self-destructive aspects of Imagism are worth bearing in mind when considering Ford’s formal haiku of the 1980s. As we will now see, something akin to a destructive corpse language soon begins to creep into Secret Haiku and Emblems of Arachne. Moreover, this corpse language is reminiscent of the sort that we previously identified at work in his predecessor’s Drafts & Fragments.
Ford holds his late haiku up to his modernistic precursor’s imagistic Drafts & Fragments. Secret Haiku and Emblems of Arachne share a number of thematic concerns with Pound’s final collection of Cantos. Like Pound, Ford wants to establish a stable – and peaceful – vantage point from which to contemplate his literary career. Much as it did for the aged and housebound Pound, domestic space comes to dominate in Ford’s late modernist haiku. Sometimes the sanctity of the domestic enclave (along with the attached garden) is figured in relation to the natural world:
He took honey from
The walls of his house – that’s where
The bees hide their lives.42
The same can also be said of the following haiku. Calling to mind Pound’s famous account of the ideogrammic method and his equally well-known evocation of ‘the rose pattern driven into the dead-iron filings by the magnet’,43 as well as the evocation of the natural world that we encounter in the opening canto of Drafts & Fragments, Ford delights in satisfyingly simple feats of organic beauty in the domestic textual enclave provided by Secret Haiku:
The bedraggled rose
The young gardener brought
Has become a beauty.44
In keeping with the mystical propensities of the earlier volumes of Om Krishna, the comfort of the tranquil domestic enclave is also infused with quasi-spiritual potentiality in Secret Haiku:
Who walks barefoot in
The house with dusty floors?
Unexpected Glory.45
Like the preceding Secret Haiku, Emblems of Arachne is rooted in the realm of the domestic:
Indra; my house; the
Garden. A work of fiction,
Assembled by me.46
Much like the generative and limpid opening lines of Pound’s Drafts & Fragments, Ford’s tone in the similarly domesticated haiku of Emblems of Arachne is also relaxed and often playful:
Crows in the fog, dogs
In the dew, honey in the house
And so are you.47
Upon first inspection, the sense of domestic ease established in the earlier Secret Haiku appears to persist in Ford’s Emblems of Arachne:
A place in which to
Talk to oneself, while a child’s
Kite flies in the rain.48
The hearth of the home seemingly provides a place for peaceful reflection in the final haiku of Ford’s Emblems of Arachne. However, the more closely we look at these late haiku, the more clearly we can appreciate that something has already disturbed Ford’s assembled domestic idyll:
Invisible envelopes,
A standstill afternoon.
A rain of merde.49
Original emphasis and all, this frustrated outburst implies that things aren’t quite what they seem in the domestic setting of Emblems of Arachne. The following haiku offers a further clue as to why:
The weather is mild
And noble. Mummies of
Reminiscence parade.50
The ‘Mummies of/Reminiscence’ that ‘parade’ through Ford’s home are responsible for disturbing the domestic peace. They also bring with them a residual corpse language that threatens the tranquil domestic scene of Ford’s late haiku. A peculiar kind of oppressive ‘Dampness in the air’ starts to descend.51 Has our elderly poet found a secure, peaceful place to rest his weary head? It is, ultimately, impossible to say either way. Thus the final haiku of Emblems of Arachne appears to ensure that Ford’s long and varied poetic career ends shrouded in a dampening mist of ambiguous uncertainty.
4
Or does it? In 1989, three years after Emblems of Arachne, a tenth edition of Ford’s Blues was published in New York. Blues 10 was issued as a special edition of Michael Andre’s avant-garde little magazine: Unmuzzled OX. Ford’s return to Blues was somewhat belated.52 Some sixty years had elapsed since the publication of the first issue of the magazine. Ford had long hoped to publish a tenth edition of Blues. In a letter dated 14 October 1951, Ford wrote excitedly to James Laughlin that the ‘inspiration has come to me to edit a quarterly of new poetry and call it BLUES 52’.53 Turning to the 1960s, we can see that Ford’s Blues impulse saw little sign of abating. In a letter dated 18 March 1964, Paul Bowles confirms as much. ‘Blues Ten sounds good’, Bowles writes, ‘but I feel sure that by now it’s a project of the past, since you do change your mind with the wind, don’t you?’54 But Ford did not change his mind. Consider the letter he sent to Charles Boultenhouse on 6 March 1978:
The prime reason for this aerogram is to alert you to my latest active project (it’s been in the back of my mind for some years): i.e. I want to edit BLUES 10, there having been only nine numbers in 1929–30. Kay Boyle has indicated her willingness to write an introduction. I will give a clarion call to all the surviving contributors, recruit new names, plus delving, where possible, into the archives of Blues contributors now deceased. For this latter group I have in mind, notably, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein and our ever dear and drastic Parker. Can I depend on your to select a few PT MSS which you must know – perhaps already in the Texas archive, perhaps still in your possession…? Do help me on this important mission.55
And as Andre tells it, Ford’s desire to return to Blues was just as strong in the 1980s:
At tea at the Dakota Charles told me about Blues and said ‘I want you to publish it as an issue of Unmuzzled OX’. He may just have said ‘I want you to publish it’ but I can still hear those six words. Charles’ voice was rising as he delivered them. It was the assertion at the end of the narrative. It was a very characteristic change in his speaking voice.56
As Andre suggests, Ford was extremely keen to grasp the opportunity to push his magazine back into the literary limelight after an extended absence.57 Among other things, the tenth Blues represented a last chance of sorts for the marginalized, ‘hermitized’ Ford to renew his dialogue with Ezra Pound and to make his presence felt once more in contemporary literary circles (while also reminding people of his various achievements).58 At the same time, Ford’s belated return to Blues was always going to bring with it the promise of a potentially problematic sort of personal closure, a type of closure that was noticeably absent in his final haiku. To return to Harold Bloom, we might say that the ‘wheel’ of Ford’s modernist apprenticeship came ‘full circle’ in what we can characterize as a postmodern historical moment. We have already seen how conceptions of domestic space filter through into Ford’s haiku in the 1980s. Now we will see how the same can also be said of Ford’s editorial return to Blues in 1989. The original Blues was one of the foundational sites of Ford’s literary apprenticeship. We might even say that the 1929 Blues was Ford’s first literary home. The original Blues was the idealized home – the symbolic domestic enclave – of Ford’s pubescent apprenticeship. Some sixty years later, Ford returns to the symbolic site of his modernist apprenticeship to take stock and reflect. The tenth issue of Blues thus offers Ford a final opportunity to find a domesticated ‘place in which to/Talk to oneself’ in quiet, peaceful reflection.
However, it seems that even here Ford cannot shake the spectre of Pound. The belated appearance of the tenth Blues brings with it a large helping of irony. The reason behind this irony has much to do with the immediate context in which the magazine emerged. Recall that what turned out to be the final Blues was issued as a special edition of Andre’s Unmuzzled OX. Issues 23–26 of Andre’s Unmuzzled OX were alternately known as ‘The Cantos (121–150) of Ezra Pound’. Andre thought of these issues as ‘tabloid extensions of Pound’s cantos’. The Unmuzzled OX Blues was the fourth part of Andre’s proposed continuation of the Cantos. Much as it did in Ford’s late haiku, the ghost of Pound in this sense lingers in the Unmuzzled OX Blues. Indeed, Andre draws attention to this fact in an editorial interjection entitled ‘Ezra’s Last Words’ in Ford’s tenth Blues: ‘Pound phoned again on Tuesday and I said, “Ez, you’re dead.”’59
All jokes aside, the spectral presence of Pound is felt in other, more persuasive ways in the Unmuzzled OX Blues. However, in order to more clearly demonstrate how Ford’s tenth Blues is ostensibly indebted to Poundian modernist imperatives, we must first differentiate it from the other issues of the Unmuzzled OX Cantos. Broadly speaking, the three issues of Andre’s Unmuzzled OX Cantos (23–5) that immediately precede Ford’s tenth Blues sought to critically evaluate the lasting legacy of Pound. For example, Unmuzzled OX 25 (also known as ‘Ezra Pound’s Interview’) closes with an interview of the poet Galway Kinnell. In this interview, Sarah Barnett presses Kinnell on the topic of Pound’s influence and legacy. Kinnell concedes that Pound has influenced him in the same way that he has everybody else, ‘in the sense that he’s opened up some of the limitations we would have taken for granted otherwise in poetry, as far as jumping from thing to thing to thing, as far as intermingling quotations with our own work’.60 In equal measure, however, Kinnell distances himself from Pound’s personality and politics: ‘But I don’t think I’ve been greatly affected in any personal and deep way by Pound. I’ve really always been put off by his anti-Semitism, his fascism, and by his alienated ego. And so these three things have just created a wall.’61 Despite offering little in the way of significant critical insight, it is important to note that Kinnell’s Unmuzzled OX interview is part of a wider – and often more nuanced – critical treatment of Pound’s modernist legacy that takes place in the various issues of Andre’s magazine. This is especially true of the radically experimental contributions of the anarchist poets John Cage and Jackson Mac Low in Unmuzzled OX 23. Tyrus Miller notes that Cage and Mac Low ‘were engaged enough with the work of Pound to subject the Cantos to an elegiac “writing-though,” a textual reprocessing of Pound that may be in equal measure and mournful of their oversized modernist predecessor’.62 In Miller’s appraisal, Cage and Mac Low quite literarily weave the name of Ezra Pound through their poems ‘as a paleonymic ghost who may be forgiven and perhaps even admired’.63 We can look to Mac Low’s contribution to Unmuzzled OX to see how this technique works:
he olD En’s nZe
piRe r’s fAll;
Place gOuty-
footed.
StUbborn gaiNst ilteD Ers tZ,
e eRa,
to-
dAy Past,
‘Contemporary’.64
As we can see, Mac Low’s process of writing-through provides a suitably fragmentary commentary on the ‘shattered’ figure of Pound. To be sure, Mac Low’s unusual typography ostensibly mimics the idiosyncratic approach privileged by Pound. But this is where the comparison ends. Instead, Mac Low proffers a thinly veiled critique of Pound’s ‘StUbborn’ personality and individual shortcomings. Mac Low seems in this respect to be arguing that a famously poor, ‘gOuty-/footed’ decision-making process has contributed to Pound’s fall from poetic grace in contemporary literary circles. In this reading, in an ironic twist on his own dictum about great literature, Pound appears to be old news.65
What, though, of Ford? Turning to the tenth Blues, one is struck first by the marked difference between Ford’s issue of Unmuzzled OX and the three that precede it. There is, for one thing, nothing comparable to Mac Low’s ambivalent textual reprocessing of Pound in the Unmuzzled OX Blues. Indeed, on first inspection, it seems as if Ford has simply chosen to dispense with the investigation of Pound’s legacy that so preoccupied the three preceding issues. Ford is less interested in debating Pound’s legacy than he is with shoring up his own. Hence the inclusion of Ira Cohen’s ‘In Japan You Have The Right To Kill Someone Who Is Destroying Your Inner Space’ in the tenth Blues:
The Aeroflot plane which Charles Henri Ford
was not allowed to board was hijacked today.
Instead of being hijacked he records his temperature
and takes a Tentex Forte (ayurvedic aphrodisiac
coated with silver). He knows the party has peaked
& considers removing the excessive sexual references.
Charles Henri Ford is definitely a seminal poet, he
approves the crab remoulade & savors a glass of
Courvoisier. After all, his blood has been sent
by diplomatic pouch to California, albeit under a
fictitious Nepali name. He is a living corsair of
modern poetry. Can’t you hear the feathered feet
stamping in the abandoned subway of history? (Blues: 10, 71)
Cohen’s tribute is effusive and effacing in equal measure. He acknowledges Ford’s outsider status in contemporary literary circles and seeks to redress such a critical imbalance by raising our ‘seminal’ subject to the status of an important poetic diplomat,66 but only after having poked fun at what he perceives to be his friend’s personal extravagances and pretentions. The poem also includes a passing reference to Ford’s internationalism. When read alongside the playful reference to samples of Ford’s poetic DNA being mailed in a Malatesta-esque ‘diplomatic pouch’ from Nepal to California, Cohen’s poem hints at the transnational, alternative networks of communication and poetic exchange which Ford sought to establish throughout his career. Yet he also depicts Ford as having come to the conclusion that the party is about to end. In short, the suggestion that Cohen is making here is that the ‘feather-footed’ Ford has realized that his own ‘historical’ moment has passed.
This helps to explain why the opportunity to guest-edit an issue of Andre’s Unmuzzled OX appealed to the elderly Ford. He saw in the Unmuzzled OX Blues an opportunity to preserve certain aspects of his historical moment before it faded from view. Ford envisaged the Unmuzzled OX Blues as a poetic vessel, a repository in which to showcase aspects of his poetic and aesthetic legacy. The writers selected for inclusion in the tenth issue of Blues were chosen mainly because of the way that their contributions gesture towards Ford’s personal investment in a variety of diverse literary and cultural movements scattered across the decades of the twentieth century. We can divide the contributions to the Unmuzzled OX Blues into three main categories. First, we have the writers whose work refers back in some shape or fashion to the original Blues: Paul Bowles (‘P.B. in 1929’), Edouard Roditi (‘Childhood Memory’), and Parker Tyler (‘Dostoevsky and the Scandalous Dynamic’). What we have here is another instance of Ford’s literary apprenticeship coming full circle. But the decision to include these writers in the 1989 Blues should not be attributed to a simple case of nostalgia on Ford’s part. He is responding to something Bowles said in his contribution to the tenth Blues: ‘Nineteen Twenty Nine was a real year, I suppose, but now it has little substance for me. I mean that I remember what happened to me, but I have no clear idea of the sort of world where it happened’ (Blues: 10, 56). The 1989 Blues was designed to combat the sort of historical forgetfulness mentioned by Bowles. That is to say, Ford envisaged the Unmuzzled OX Blues as a repository where individual impressions, recollections, and past personal associations – especially those pertaining to him – could be documented before they faded into the ether.
We also find a number of contributions that attest to Ford’s involvement in a wide range of modern and postmodern artistic movements. Included in this category are artists like Pavel Tchelitchew, the Pop artist Ray Johnson, and first- and second-generation beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Harold Norse, and Anne Waldman. Finally, we have those writers whose work was directly influenced by Ford. For instance, the sexually explicit content of prose pieces like Lynne Tillman’s ‘Diary of a Masochist’ and poems such as Sky Garner’s non-normative ‘Fin de Siècle’ bear the imprint of Ford’s foundational text of queer modernism: The Young and Evil. In a similar manner, the contributions of younger American Surrealist poets like Andrei Codrescu, Ted Joans, and Valery Oişteanu also feature prominently in the Unmuzzled OX Blues. In this manner, Ford marshals a lifetime’s worth of literary contacts and aesthetic associations for the sake of posterity in the Unmuzzled OX Blues. The situation seems to be comparable to the scene Oişteanu describes in his contribution to the final issue of Ford’s little magazine:
Body-snatchers and necrophiliacs
Dancing on the edge of my crypt
Go away my nightmare! pass!
I am trying to sleep
Focusing on posterity (Blues: 10, 70)
Ford is, to be sure, firmly focused on posterity in the Unmuzzled OX Blues. He also tries to assert his poetic authority by effectively effacing any trace of his modernist mentor from his issue of Unmuzzled OX. With the exception of a heavily truncated version of Pound’s ‘Program 1929’ (originally published in the Blues of March 1929), there is scarcely a mention of the poetic master of Ford’s apprenticeship to be found in the Unmuzzled OX Blues. In this respect, we might well surmise that Ford has wholeheartedly embraced the opportunity finally to shake off the anxiety-inducing ghost of his poetic and editorial apprenticeship.
Yet the great irony of Ford’s attempted effacement is that it cannot prevent his Unmuzzled OX Blues from fulfilling a basic Poundian imperative. Pound famously, if half in jest once wrote of his desire to construct a ‘portable substitute for the British Museum’.67 Replete with luminous historical details and filled with cultural artefacts, The Cantos came to symbolize Pound’s attempt to do this. However, given that Pound himself doubted the viability of ever producing such a comprehensive portable archive, it is perhaps unsurprising that the project seemed destined to fail. For fail it did: with disastrous personal consequences for the author. Late in life, beaten down by the forces of history and irrevocably damaged by individual political and economic folly, Pound had cause to rethink his position. No longer conceiving of his modernist epic as a portable archive for the treasures of the world, The Cantos came instead to resemble a symbolic poetic space where Pound could cling rather desperately to that which he held dear. We have already established that the simultaneously physical and metaphorical space that Pound initially comes to rest upon in the Drafts & Fragments is rendered in explicitly domestic terms: the aforementioned ‘quiet house’ of the sparsely populated island situated at the northern end of the Venetian Lagoon. But it is equally important to note that the faded grandeur of the Byzantine basilica assumes a more humble form later in the Drafts & Fragments. The basilica of Torcello is replaced by a ‘Town house in Hartford’ (CXI: 796). However, this space is soon rejected. So, too, are numerous others:
No more the pseudo-gothic sprawled house
out over the bridge there
(Washington Bridge, N.Y.C.)
but everything boxed for economy (CXIII: 802)
Pound wants to return to a far more humble, domestic, and private space: ‘And to this garden, Marcella, ever seeking by petal, by leaf-vein/out of dark, and toward half-light’ (CXIII: 802). The drift towards the domestic in the late Cantos seems to provide Pound with some semblance of personal peace. However, we also know that the sense of domestic tranquillity does not last long in the Drafts & Fragments. Past failures return to haunt Pound and the initially peaceful Byzantine basilica comes to represent a more ominous, deathly ‘tomb, an end,/Galla’s rest, and thy quiet house at Torcello’ (CX: 794). What he once thought a portable compendium of cultural achievement finally becomes a binding poetic mausoleum. The ‘quiet house’ in which Pound hoped to store what he ‘lov’st well’ turns, in this fashion, into something akin to a sepulchre.
While Pound and Ford’s biographies are, of course, completely different, the fact remains that the respective forms of their late poetic projects end up being strikingly similar. That is, while Pound and Ford have taken very different routes to get there, they eventually arrive at the same destination as they move into old age. By bringing together what he ‘lov’st well’ in the ‘quiet house’ of Unmuzzled OX Blues, Ford’s final editorial venture does begin unintentionally to mirror, albeit on a much smaller scale, the sort of symbolic refuge favoured by Pound in his late, domesticated Cantos. What we have here is an example of a sort of conceptual internalization. Somewhat ironically, the tenth Blues registers the Poundian imperative towards preservation on a basic conceptual level. Consequently, it seems feasible to posit that the Unmuzzled OX Blues is far closer in spirit to Pound’s late Cantos than Ford seems either able or willing to recognize. Similarly, we might also reason that Ford’s focus on posterity subsequently transforms his tenth Blues into a personal ‘crypt’ (Oişteanu): something reminiscent of Pound’s ‘tomb’ in the suitably spectral, concluding Drafts & Fragments. However, the very form of the Unmuzzled OX Blues prevents Ford’s final editorial project from slipping into the sort of everlasting mausoleum evoked by Pound in what proved to be the concluding, binding section of the Cantos.
Charles Baudelaire once argued that modernity is best characterized as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the one half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable’.68 Perhaps Shari and Bernard Benstock had this in mind when they suggested that modernist little magazines are very much ‘ephemeral forms, dependent on the conditions of history’.69 The ephemeral and historically contingent form of the Unmuzzled OX Blues ensures that Ford’s last major literary venture resists binding finality (while simultaneously harking back to the roots of Ford’s originary modernist apprenticeship). To put it another way: while Ford’s tenth Blues is undoubtedly preservative, it also strives to be proactive and projective; it is illustrative of Ford’s absolute commitment to remaining open to the possibility of building fresh aesthetic networks in which to house both old and new friendships and poetic associations. It also offers a snapshot of a diverse grouping of a few people moving through a rather brief moment in time. In this regard, the contingent and ephemeral little magazine format of Ford’s 1989 Blues resembles something akin to a mobile home: a projective, temporary aesthetic archive of no fixed abode. In this sense, then, while the elderly Ford does not totally succeed in freeing himself from the ghost of his formative literary apprenticeship in his late poetic and editorial practice, his belated return to the modernist form of his youth prevents him from getting, as Pound did, ‘stuck’.70
Notes
1 Charles Henri Ford, ‘One Hundred 69 Haiku for Charles Henri’, Milk Magazine: 3 (2001). Online Edition: http://www.milkmag.org/poetry3.htm#Charles%20Henri%20FORD (accessed 15 May 2012).
2 Tillman, ‘Cut Up Life’, ix.
3 Charles Henri Ford, ‘From The Minotaur Sutra’, in 50: A Celebration of Sun & Moon Classics, ed. Douglas Messerli (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), 174.
4 Ford, ‘One Hundred 69 Haiku for Charles Henri’.
5 Charles Henri Ford, Om Krishna I: Special Effects (New York: Cherry Valley Editions, 1979), 18.
6 Charles Henri Ford, Om Krishna II: From the Sickroom of the Walking Eagles (New York: Cherry Valley Editions, 1981), n.pag.
7 Charles Henri Ford, Om Krishna III: Secret Haiku (New York: The Red Ozier Press, 1982), 31.
8 Ford, Om Krishna I, 9.
9 Guggenheim died on 23 December 1979.
10 Ford, Water from a Bucket, 63.
11 Ford, Om Krishna II, n.pag.
12 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 8.
13 Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 8.
14 Ibid., 212.
15 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996), 458. Hereafter all quotations from Pound’s long poem are cited by canto and page number in the main body of text.
16 Ford once told Tyler that the Blues contributor Roberta Thoma ‘is an intimate of cocteau who is ill often on opium so he cant see him. i look like cocteau’s lover what he rescued from the french navy (r.). i look like rimbaud looked (jacques bossard). c. makes up like you do. the uniforms of the fr. sailors are cuter than t.u.o.t.a.s. the pants and jacket are dark blue; a light blue collar falls over half the back or all the shoulders: in front a sweater with horizontal blue stripes against white can be seen for a V. the cap is dark blue and stiff brimmed flat on top and the top has in the middle a red pompom’. Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 18 July 1932, container 8, folder 2, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
17 Ford, Om Krishna II, n.pag.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ford, Om Krishna I, 15.
21 Ibid., 14.
22 Ibid., 15.
23 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, [1938] 1970), 55.
24 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1973], 1997), 25.
25 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence 25.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 26.
28 Ibid., 15–16.
29 Sean Pryor, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 179.
30 Fred Moramarco, ‘Concluding an Epic: the Drafts and Fragments of the Cantos’, American Literature 49, no. 3 (November 1977): 310–11.
31 Ford’s Secret Haiku includes a number of minimalistic line drawings by Isamu Noguchi. These drawings bear more than a passing formal resemblance to the twelfth-century scroll paintings of Sojo.
32 William Cookson, A Guide to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Anvil Press, 2001), 265.
33 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, 4.
34 Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 20.
35 Tiffany, Radio Corpse, 20.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 53. Taking a slightly different critical tack in his wide-ranging account of Anglo-American modernist cultural production and media theory, Julian Murphet argues forcefully that we need to read the deathly and destructive impulses adhering to Poundian Imagism in relation to the threat posed by emergent mass cultural structures. ‘Whereas in the official system of the arts taking shape under the shadow of the nascent Culture Industry’, Murphet writes, ‘poetry was kept artificially buoyant as a decorative and nostalgic lodestar, Pound’s deeper sensitivity to the actual redistribution of effects across the media ecology discerned the logical consequence: impending cultural irrelevance. Rather than participate in a pathetic, terminal decline, Pound’s poetics impel the medium to the very brink of extinction’. Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 118–19.
38 Tiffany, Radio Corpse, 20.
39 Quoted in Asako Kitaori, ‘Charles Henri Ford: Catalyst Among Poets’.
40 Tiffany, Radio Corpse, 49.
41 Ibid., 48.
42 Ford, Om Krishna III: Secret Haiku, 14.
43 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 152.
44 Ibid., 12.
45 Ibid., 35.
46 Charles Henri Ford, Emblems of Arachne (New York: Catchword Papers, 1986), 27.
47 Ford, Emblems of Arachne, 23.
48 Ibid., 27.
49 Ibid., 15.
50 Ibid., 16.
51 Ibid., 23.
52 One sometimes gets the sense, reading through Kitaori’s interview with Ford, of a conceptual jigsaw falling into place. ‘I was exposed to blues and jazz’, Ford notes, ‘that’s why I named my magazine Blues. Now, in the haiku that I’m writing, sometimes the words from the old blues songs come back and get put in.’ Quoted in Asako Kitaori, ‘Charles Henri Ford: Catalyst Among Poets’.
53 Charles Henri Ford to James Laughlin, 14 October 1951, series 2, box 7, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
54 Charles Henri Ford to Paul Bowles, 18 March 1964, series 2, box 12, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
55 Charles Henri Ford to Charles Boultenhouse, 6 March 1978, series 1, box 4, folder 10, Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, NYPL Archives & Manuscripts, New York Public Library.
56 Michael Andre, e-mail to the author, 5 February 2011.
57 An editorial announcement in Unmuzzled OX 22 (Winter 1981) makes passing reference to the fact that Ford had already collected a significant number of manuscripts for a possible tenth Blues as early as 1981.
58 Late in life, Ford was prone to self-depreciation, referring to himself as the ‘Hermit of the Dakota’ (his New York home of many years). See Valery Oişteanu, ‘Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002)’, NY Arts: December 2002 (Online Edition): http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/?p=2002 (accessed 10 June 2016).
59 Michael Andre, ‘Ezra’s Last Words’, Unmuzzled OX: 26Blues: 10 (1989), 78. Hereafter all quotations from the tenth issue of Ford’s magazine are abbreviated and appeared in the main body of text.
60 Sarah Barnett, ‘Galway Kinnell and Sarah Barnett Three Weeks After Chernobyl’, Unmuzzled OX: 25 (1988), 120.
61 Barnett, ‘Galway Kinnell’, 120.
62 Tyrus Miller, Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 66.
63 Miller, Singular Examples, 70.
64 Jackson Mac Low, ‘CXXIV’, Unmuzzled OX: 23 (1988), 14.
65 Pound believed great literature ‘is news that STAYS news’. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1987), 29.
66 Cohen is, of course, alluding to Edward B. Germain’s account of Ford.
67 Pound, Literary Essays, 16.
68 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1964), 13.
69 Shari Benstock and Bernard Benstock, ‘The Role of Little Magazines in the Emergence of Modernism’, The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 20, no. 4 (1991): 87.
70 Pound’s exact words to Donald Hall: ‘Okay. I am stuck. The question is, am I dead, as Messrs. A. B. C. might wish?’ Donald Hall, Reminiscences and Opinions (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 240.