The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics

by Jeanne Heuving

Overview

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is a probing examination of how the writing of sexual love undergoes a radical revision by avant-garde poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, the exploration of love by poets—long a fixture of Western poetic tradition—is thought to be in decline, with love itself understood to be a mere ideological overlay for the more “real” entities of physical sex and desire.
 
In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Jeanne Heuving claims that a key achievement of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, and others lies significantly in their engagement with the synergistic relations between being in love and writing love. These poets, she argues, have traded the clichéd lover of yore for impersonal or posthuman poetic speakers that sustain the gloire and mystery of love poetry of prior centuries. As Robert Duncan writes, “There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call ‘falling in love.’”
 
Heuving claims that this writing of love is defining for avant-garde poetics, identifying how such important discoveries as Pound’s and H.D.’s Imagism, Pound’s Cantos, and Duncan’s “open field poetics” are derived through their changed writing of love. She draws attention to how the prevailing concept of language as material is inadequate to the ways these poets also engage language as a medium—as a conduit—enabling them to address love afresh in a time defined through preoccupations with sexuality. They engage love as immanent and change it through a writing that acts on itself.
 
The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics ascribes the waning of love poetry to its problematic form: a genre in which empowered poetic speakers constitute their speech through the objectification of comparatively disempowered subjects, or beloveds. Refusing this pervasive practice, the poets she highlights reject the delimiting, one-sided tradition of masculine lovers and passive feminine beloveds; instead, they create a more nuanced, dynamic poetics of ecstatic exploration, what Heuving calls “projective love” and “libidinized field poetics,” a formally innovative poetry, in which one perception leads directly to the next and all aspects of a poem are generative of meaning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817389093
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	05/19/2016
Series:	Modern and Contemporary Poetics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	454 KB

About the Author

Jeanne Heuving is a professor of English at the University of Washington Bothell and a graduate faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore as well as two collections of poetry.

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The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics

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By Jeanne Heuving

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8909-3

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CHAPTER 1

Projective Love and Libidinized Field Poetics

By bad verse, whether "regular" or "free," I mean verse which pretends to some emotion which did not assist at its parturition.

— Ezra Pound, "Affirmations: As for Imagisme"

Love poetry has been definitive for Western poetry and for love in Western cultures since classical times. And while this love writing has shifted through diverse historical epochs — Latin elegists, Provençal, dolce stil nuovo, and Romantic traditions, among others — it has occurred largely through lover-beloved forms that depend on an empowered poetic speaker as lover and a comparatively disempowered beloved. In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics I ask why sexual love flourishes in avant-garde poetry. I answer this question by exploring how key modern and contemporary poets change the form of love poetry to a projective love and libidinized field poetics. They engage love as immanent and transform it through a writing that acts on itself.

The poets discussed in this book have sometimes been included in poetry evaluations seeking to identify avant-garde poetry. Yet they also have been dismissed for their romanticism, traditionalism, and language use. Since I am suggesting that their avant-garde practice inheres in their transmutation of love, the rather generalized critique of their romanticism needs to be revised and, with respect to their traditionalism, their active engagement with figures and languages that derive their significance from epochs of cultural evolution needs to be addressed in ways that do not simply label their use of these as antiquated. In creating their libidinized fields from a diverse set of mythical and historical figures they do not simply insert these figures from an earlier time but reengage them. Additionally, these poets sometimes have been dismissed for what is regarded as an inconsistent attention to and understanding of the materiality of language. Indeed, while their engagement with language sometimes manifests as an attention to the material aspects of language — as a heightened and disruptive foregrounding of the aural or visual elements of language — they engage language foremost as a medium but one that possesses material properties. These poets relate to language as mediating their experiences in relation to their "real" historical time and as a potentially transforming and transformative medium. For them, language is both symbolic and material, conduit and object.

I initiate this inquiry by considering Pound's and Duncan's changed love poetry to convey the radical and far-reaching aspects of these poetics. For both Pound and Duncan, as with the other poets considered in this book, their changed love writing is important not only because it provides a different way of writing love for modern times, but because it is directly productive of their most important and inventive poetry. Canto IV, published in 1919, is Pound's first poetry in which he fully realizes a projective love and libidinized field poetics, and it led him to to a rapid revision of Three Cantos and the creation of new cantos, resulting in the publication of A Draft of XVI Cantos by 1925 (Bush 301–3). Duncan's "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," citing as its source "the First Beloved," is the initial poem in The Opening of the Field, his first volume to realize these poetics. Although in subsequent chapters I engage each of these key poems in relationship to Pound's and Duncan's overall evolving poetry, I begin with these to explore these poetics and their implications for poetry. Both poets came to reject the poetic speaker as a self-dramatizing lover and engaged a poetics described by Duncan as working "with all parts of the poem as polysemous, taking each thing of the composition as generative of meaning" (Bending the Bow ix).

I then discuss how I am drawing some of my primary concepts from Olson's "Projective Verse" while modifying them. While there is much debate regarding Olson's originality in relationship to Pound and Williams, I argue that Pound's and H.D.'s projective love writing precedes and enables Olson. In abstracting and generalizing the projective and composition by field poetics apart from Olson's specific theorizing of these concepts, I suggest a much longer and more involved development of the projective and composition by field poetics per se. I ask and answer, in part: How important is projective love to a projective poetics, or what does love have to do with projectivism? How pervasive is a more broadly understood projective and field poetics, including a libidinized field poetics, in avant-garde and innovative poetry of different types? In the afterword, I address the relationships between projective love and projective poetics more generally; here, I consider projective love and libidinized field poetics through Olson's apt terminology in "Projective Verse" and explore Olson's useful descriptions beyond his specific engagements.

I then address several theoretical considerations that The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics challenges. To understand these authors' poetics, it is most useful to understand the poet as a medium and language itself as a medium. While much description of avant-garde activity has circled around the poet as an agent acting on a material language, in this book, I stress that the poet is as much acted on by language as acting. Moreover, it is precisely in the poet's engagement with the figures and languages of the past that a shift in the entrenched languages of love can occur. While in critical discussions of several of the poets covered in this book the concept of the poet as medium or a description of the poet's orientation to language as mediumistic arises, these descriptions almost always fall outside of specific claims for avant-gardism. Both nominations are often judged as anathema to a poetry that would make itself new. For these poets it was their changed relationship to signifying systems brought on by their being in love that was critical for their transmutation of love and the innovative poetry and poetics that followed.

As early as 1911, Pound in "The Fault of It" notes that despite their compelling quality, lover-beloved poems do not sufficiently "touch us." The poetic speaker recalls writing poems:

    Saying: a lovely voice is such and such;
    Saying: that lady's eyes were sad last week,
    Wherein the world's whole joy is born and dies;

But he repudiates this form:

    Ask us no more of all the things ye heard;
    We may not speak of them, they touch us nearly. (Ezra Pound's Poetry
and Prose 1: 43)

The poetic speaker rejects poetry that he is moved by because it "touch[es] us nearly," or not enough. In titling his poem "The Fault of It," Pound draws attention to the inadequacy of love poetry for "we" of this time and suggests that this insufficiency creates a "fault," a chasm separating him from the past, to which there is no return. One of the "faults" that Pound may be intimating through his title is the hierarchical relationships in traditional love poetry in which an empowered poetic speaker constitutes his speech in relationship to a comparatively disempowered beloved.

In the decade after he wrote "The Fault of It," Pound discovered a new way to write love in his Cantos. The radical difference between his conveyance of love in the early love poetry and in The Cantos is evident. In "La Donzella Beata" from Pound's Hilda's Book, the poetic speaker celebrates the "transport" that the maid provides him, but he also uses this sublime beloved as a foil to constitute his poetic speech. Addressing his beloved as "Soul," the poetic speaker also refers to the object of this poetic quest as "thing," so beyond any set of sublime vocabularies is this divine entity, now rendered earthly:

    Soul
    Caught in the rose hued
      mesh
........
    Stooped you again to bear
    This thing for me
    And be rare light
    For me, gold white
    In the shadowy path
      I tread?

But although Pound initiates this poem by placing attention on the poetic
speaker's transporting love for his beloved, after this lover addresses her
as "Soul," he is left wondering whether she is after all the "bold" maid he
seeks:

    Surely a bolder maid art thou

    Than one in tearful
      fearful longing
    That would wait Lilycinctured
    Star-diademmed at the gate
    Of high heaven crying
      that I should come
    To thee

This poetic speaker, despite his attestation that his beloved is his "Soul," reveals the underlying rhetorical dynamics of traditional love poetry, which enable him to move without pause between adulation and condemnation. Yet, however circumscribed this poem is by its lover-beloved dynamics, it is worth noting that the transport of love to which the poem attests may well give the actual writing in this poem pitch and precision. In the last lines, beginning with "Lily-cinctured," the subtle relationships between the poem's semantics and its visual and aural relations, particularly between its consonance and assonance, presage Pound of The Cantos.

In The Cantos, erotic transport is not engaged through a poetic speaker as lover, but rather is presented directly, through an expanded set of references. This writing does not depict the drama of the poetic lover seeking a beloved, but rather conveys a moving speech. In Canto IV, an unidentified poetic speaker rallies multiple associations that impart the state of being in love:

    Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil
    That liquid and rushing crystal
      beneath the knees of the gods.
    Ply over ply, thin glitter of water;
    Brook film bearing white petals.
    The pine at Takasago
      grows with the pine of Isé!
    The water whirls up the bright pale sand in the spring's mouth
    "Behold the Tree of the Visages!"
    Forked branch-tips, flaming as if with lotus.
      Ply over ply
    The shallow eddying fluid,
      beneath the knees of the gods. (The Cantos 15)

By foregoing a poetic speaker as an egoistic lover, Pound extends his libidinal energies to a much wider range of references. Pound portrays eros as light turning into crystal, a trope drawn from multiple sources and likely connected to Pound's insistence on actual perceptions. Stephen Hinds notes that in Latin elegiac poetry the presence of the beloved is conveyed through liquid light and crystallized vision (Hinds 125). Kevin Oderman comments on Pound's transitioning light in relationship to erotic depictions throughout The Cantos: "The liquidity of light which the lover sees around or before the body of the beloved is figured in many ways, perhaps principally in the verbs — it flows, falls, and pours. And just as [a figure] seems capable of metamorphosing into aura, and flame into light, the liquid light seems to become — again by implicit progression — 'crystal'" (120–21). Crystallization is also Stendhal's preferred metaphor for evoking the transformative effects of being in love.

In this passage, as throughout Pound's Cantos, the semantics and materialities of language are brought into interactive relationships in ways too multiple and subliminal, finally, to delineate fully. Throughout the passage there is a play between long and short i's, suggestive perhaps of alternating states of desire and satisfaction. "Takasago" and "Isé" are references to pine trees in a Noh drama that symbolize a couple growing old together, demarcated not by a lessening of desire, but by a doubled "pine." "Beneath the knees of the gods" suggests a bodily vulnerability and therefore also tenderness. The phrase "ply over ply" calls up the multiple pleats of a folding skirt or fan, or the qualities of water creasing on itself. The phrase "e lo soleills plovil," taken from the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel and translated earlier by Pound as "the rain falls from the sun," given its multiple l's, creates a visual sense of rain or of a downward striking motion (Terrell 33).

In his early love poems, Robert Duncan manifests a suffering caused not only by frustrated desire but also arguably by the form of love poetry itself. In engaging a love poetry that had been developed primarily through heterosexual relations, his poetic speaker frequently experiences himself as isolated and his same-sex beloved as both overly present and absent. In the following, Duncan's poetic speaker pronounces on his own "monotone":

    O with what pain I watch in my vision
    my proud and reluctant animal self
    where he sings in his lonely monotone; (Collected Early 92)

Within this economy the beloved is both a "hoax" and a "drowning place":

    Your image is the daylight hoax
    on which my soul & body wrecks.
    The absence of your body is
    the drowning place, the deep abyss. (55)

Indeed, the possibilities for relationship are everywhere and nowhere:

    Any stranger is dangerous, holding perhaps
    the locks of self, who may release a flood. (32)

While at that time Duncan inscribes this wrenching pain as if it were entirely self-originated, he was writing through poetic traditions that do not adequately speak him as a lover seeking a same-sex beloved. The failure of love here, while depicted as created by the self's own needs and dramas, was also constituted by the inadequacy of the form of traditional love poetry itself: its patriarchal and heterosexual stances and rhetorics could not provide Duncan a precise or enriched way of speaking a same-sex love.

While in Duncan's early poetry he came up against the limitations of a self and a way of writing that isolated him, in his groundbreaking The Opening of the Field he discovered rather different economies. Although in his early poems, his poetic speakers are locked into egoistic stances, now the "I" is one entity of several and falls through his poetry. In the first poem of The Opening of the Field, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," the poetic speaker finds transport through a "First Beloved" accompanied by a "Lady":

    Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
    I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
    whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

    She it is Queen Under The Hill
    whose hosts are disturbances of words within words
    that is a field folded. (7)

In contrast to Duncan's early poetic speaker, who is all too cognizant of singing in "lonely monotone," this poetic speaker shifts between a double "I am / I say" — an entity falling through the poem's "made place" that "is mine" and "not mine" (7). This relationship is enacted through the poem's inverted syntax in which the "I" is as much predicate as subject: from "the First Beloved" "fall all architectures I am." Duncan's First Beloved is source and object, and as such recalls the First Beloved in Diotima's speech in Plato's Symposium, who serves as the origin of all "beautiful" practices. Proprioceptive relations are engaged, as capable as the "hosts" of the "Queen Under The Hill" of moving and disturbing words. While just how the "it ... Queen" relates to the First Beloved is unclear, they are connected by flowers turning into flames. On the one hand, the "it ... Queen" may allude to a love writing in which female muses figure as first beloveds; on the other hand, this figure may be calling up a queer queen, with Duncan engaging both possibilities to at once link this figure with homosexuality and keep at bay any easy sense of the fey. "She it" is nameable finally only as a kind of stutter and points to the gender and sexual aporias through which Duncan composes this changed love poetry. For Duncan, as Kathleen Fraser describes, the page itself is a "graphically energetic site in which to manifest one's physical alignment with the arrival of language in the mind" (Translating 186).

While in Canto IV Pound avoids the first person altogether, Duncan in "Often I Am Permitted" engages it. However, for neither poet is the poetic speaker an egoistic, self-dramatizing lover but rather a conveyor of love. Most useful to my analysis from Olson's "Projective Verse" is his emphasis on the dispensation of the poet as one in which he or she attempts to get "rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego" and on his discussion of a writing practice in which "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION" (Selected Writings 24, 17). This then puts the poet, in Olson's words, "in the open" and within a writing practice in which they can "go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for itself." This engagement involves the poet in "the kinetics of the thing": "the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense ... must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality" (16, 20). In such a practice the poet is not only the agent of the poem but also is its medium, and language is both material and medium.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part I - Love Poetics 1. Projective Love and Libidinized Field Poetics 2. Being in Love and Writing Love 3. Imagism as Projective Love Part II - Love Poesis 4. “Circe’s This Craft”: Ezra Pound’s Beginnings 5. “Love Is Writing”: The Advent of H.D. 6. “The First Beloved”: Robert Duncan’s Open Field 7. Kathleen Fraser and “Falling into the Page” 8. Nathaniel Mackey and “Black Sounds” Afterword Notes Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

Heuving has made us a valuable gift by opening a frank discourse about love-writing’s critical, subjectively transmutative powers. It is up to us to continue her investigations, to discover what lessons they also suggest about love’s and lyric’s world-transformative possibilities.”
—Modern Language Quarterly

"{ . . .} Heuving offers a model for attending to the affirmative, affecting, and sensuous elements of poetic writing that confirms the rich interpretive possibilities available beyond the suspiciousness that often suffuses critical reading."
—College Literature

“Jeanne Heuving has written an ardent study of the metamorphosis of Western love and its classic poetic tropes involving desire and the poetic objects of longing, by proposing an altered configuration of eros in modern and contemporary poetry. Resisting the attack on or the reduction of love as only a literary or social convention, and acknowledging changed relations of gender and altered knowledge of sexualities in modernity, Heuving treats the poetic practices of Pound, H.D., Duncan, Fraser and Mackey and offers serious theorizing on the poetics of Amor. This vibrant contribution to poetic criticism makes claims for love as ecstatic perception, the I as "othered" in love, and the affects and effects of this eros, all going beyond the poetry of the yearning gaze and the static beloved into a wider libidinal field. In fascinating readings and deft theoretical insights, she tracks the implications of this re-articulation of eros for poetic languages, formal innovations, textual subjectivities, and poetics.”
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry


“The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics proposes that the engagement of sexual love and its energies is the source of the creative power in some of the most interesting poetry written in the past one hundred years. Asserting the value of a ‘projective love and libidinized field poetics,’ Jeanne Heuving astutely draws our attention to the erotic transformations that animate the poetry of Pound, H. D., Duncan, Mackey, and Fraser, assessing changes through the psychodynamic propositions of Plato, Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva. The result is a truly enlightening insistence on the connections between these poets’ formal innovations and the topic of sexual love, whose permissions Heuving ingeniously finds submerged as a slowed down, introjective set of relations in Olson’s ‘Projective Verse,’ a discovery I find revelatory. The whole book, sharply written and superbly argued, should alter the way American avant-garde poetry is read.”
—Peter O’Leary, author of Phosphorescence of Thought and Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness

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