The texts of the cantos and theories of literature

The textual history of Pound’s Cantos is among the most complex of any work commonly (or indeed uncommonly) associated with Anglo-American modernism. Notwithstanding the intricate problems facing any scholar keen on tracing the development of Pound’s poem through its stages of composition and revision, the record of published texts alone presents serious obstacles. As Lawrence Rainey notes, written over a period of almost fifty years, published discretely in more than twenty-five magazines and at least as many different collected volumes across seven countries, ‘no reader other than Pound could ever have traced all the parts of The Cantos’, nor even does any library in world contain copies of every published version. For numerous reasons owing both to the poet’s personal temperament and to the social nature of literary production, non-identical changes were made to different in-print versions

The language of inquiry

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address. Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings

We Might Say Poetry

This presentation was given on November 5, 2011 in Lawrence, Kansas at the Eberhardt Colloquium in honor of the writing of Kenneth Irby, sponsored by the Department of English,The Hall Center for the Humanities, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the Spencer Museum of Art

In Demonstration

In Ghostly Matters, the sociologist Avery F. Gordon suggests that we “ponder the paradox of providing a hospitable memory for ghosts out of a concern for justice.”1 The phrase she italicizes is from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, as is the concept, though, in Derrida’s original, the paradox is so elaborately convoluted as to seem unable to extricate itself from the idea at hand. In the event, he opts to glimpse no more than a glimpse.2 Fair enough. Very early on, Derrida says his text will proceed “like an essay in the night.”3 Mine, however, like its subject, will proceed in bright daylight. This essay is about a protest march that took place on a beautiful spring day, from noon to five, though it was part of something that had already taken place, and would take place again, and, perhaps, was never not taking place, namely protestation..