A ZBC of Ezra Pound

by Christine Brooke-Rose

Genres: Poetry, Criticism

297 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London, she taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and lived for many years in the south of France.

She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).

She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.

NYT obituary.

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Edit: This is now available on google books.]

This book was not meant for me. Clearly, Brooke-Rose expects readers to be familiar with the entirety of the Pound corpus, including his criticism and essay writing, and with the major prior scholarship concerning his work. She opens in medias res, as if in the midst of a discussion that was already in progress, and there is annotation only for the most obscure, oblique not-translated-from-a-foreign-language-that-few-Westerners-speak references.

This book did not have the effect of making me want to read more Pound (nor was it intended to). In fact, it rather confirmed my prior sense that understanding Pound is simply more work than it's worth.

However, it did make me want to read more of Brooke-Rose's own writing. I enjoyed her prose style and her thought process very much.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Pound was proceeding by poetic intuition, and who knows, his may be the only comprehensible poetry to the twenty-first century, when a new economic order, unimaginable to us now, may have emerged from the present apparently irreconcilable dogmas; it may be, for that matter, a post McLuhan age, an age of mixed media and ideogrammic thinking in quick cuts, when we may all be speaking Chinese, with nothing of our civlization left but the fragments he has 'shelved (shored)' against our ruin (C8, a reference to Eliot's The Waste Land)."

And

"In other words, the terminology (and for Pound this includes rhythm, sonority, image, even pictogram as well as le mot juste) must mime the thing, whether that thing be an emotion, an action, an abstract idea even, a mode of perception, a saying by someone in a certain context, or 'a red glow in the carpet of pine spikes' (C. 79).

For not only are form and content indivisible (a banality by now I hope), but they are also one with the perceiver. I could adapt Buffon and say le style c'est l'homme qui voit la chose, but this hardly goes far enough. In all communication the recipient as well as the emitter is part of the message (Jacobson), but there is also a constant dissolution of subject and sign, particularly in poetic language (Kristeva) and in the language of the 'subject' or patient in psychoanalysis so brilliantly discussed by Lacan. Hence Lacan's adaptation, le style c'est l'homme qui l'on s'adresse (Ecrits, p. 9). But since the 'je' or, in this case the 'on', is constantly shifted by 'la chose' in the sense of 'la chose freudienne' (Wo es war, soll ich werden, mistranslated as 'Where the id was, there the ego shall be'), i.e., a 'truth' that 'speaks' yet is for ever fleeting and ungraspable; and since 'l'inconscient, c'est le discours de l'Autre' (Freud's 'other scene', needed by the subject to constitute itself, called also by Lacan le trésor des signifiants), it might be possible, in relation to poetic language at least, to adapt both formulae and say le style c'est l'homme a qui l'on adresse la chose. (1)"


That is what I call fun

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

...tempted to read this. [...] just the footnotes. skip the 'main' text=body. just the feet. the notes. possible novel structure? {no didn't nabi already do that?} the 'n(r)bc' of cbr?

[e · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly dedicated to an in medias res exegesis of the Cantos, with some analysis of the very early (1908-11) work, Brooke-Rose takes a by turns jesting & reverently colloquial tone in unearthing the roots, the paideuma that spread out as connective tissue across cantos. Brooke-Rose is explicit about A ZBC's prospective audience, namely relatively unseasoned students, but I found her approach as insightful & true to the form of Pound's Cantos as any critical work I've read, not just of Pound but in the field of criticism at large. It makes perfect sense that she was a (criminally underread) early po-mo fiction writer; the imaginative thrust of this exceeds most dry analysis of which the "Pound Industry" is all too guilty. The metrical analysis of "The Seafarer" & Anglo-Saxon poetry's formulaic influence on early Pound is one such delight, as is the final chapter where Brooke-Rose lets the strong loneliness of the Cantos' concluding paradiso sing itself, bringing to mind Pound's own analysis of Dante in his very early Spirit of Romance. Brooke-Rose not only brings us back to the beginning of the Cantos through repeating the "Salt Works" Canto (98) quoted at the very beginning of the volume, but brings us back to Pound's own critical beginnings through such a metatextual détournement. An all-too-rare joy in the field of Pound scholasticism.

[B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll have to come back to this one once I've read more of Pound.

Very useful book however, for the parts that I could follow. It really helped me see where Pound was coming from and what makes the Cantos so beautiful/interesting/difficult/impressive. Brook-Rose's writing style is very conversational and easy to follow when you have a bit of background knowledge. There were certainly parts that I had to give up on and save for a few years down the line.

A great introduction to Pound if you're not discouraged by feeling out of your depth.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5