Gettin' you offn th' groun

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Steven Yao

Finally, Kevin Young, a contemporary African-American poet, explores connections between Pound in all the various phases or personae of his career and both the canonical (that is, white) figures of modernism and various African-American writers of the twentieth century. More evocative and suggestive than conventionally scholarly, Young's essay posits a conceptual relation between the Poundian adoption of personae and an African-American strategy of "counterfeiting" as a means to "forge" (in both senses of the word) "black authority in a world not necessarily of their own making" (199). Most importantly, however, Young attests to Pound's ongoing significance as a potential source of both inspiration and provocation for contemporary poets of whatever background or cultural affiliation.

Even without these substantial essays, the volume would merit attention for the primary materials it presents, such as the correspondence between Pound and Langston Hughes and the brief exchange between Pound and another of the most renowned poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen. These letters, which together span a period of 25 years, from 1931 to 1956, first arose from Pound's effort to instigate an English translation of Frobenius, the German anthropologist who not only explored African civilizations and advocated their historical importance for world culture but also supplied the poet with the term paideuma for the concept of cultural morphology. But they also underscore Pound's deep interest in African culture and his active, if spotty, engagement with African-Americans. Particularly interesting here are the brief comments that Pound offers to Hughes regarding the latter's work in Fine Clothes to the Jew, Not Without Laughter, and Simple Speaks His Mind. As a whole, this correspondence at once documents Pound's breadth of interest and validates the argument underwriting the entire volume: that we have much to gain and more to do in exploring the complex, sometimes vexed, but always interesting relationships between canonical (white) and other versions of or approaches to modernism. Finally, two useful reviews close out the volume, one by art historian Mary Ann Calo on recent studies of African-American modernist visual culture and the other by Kevin Dettmar, aimed mainly at more traditional Pound scholars, on North's The Dialect of Modernism.

Overall, building on powerful existing work and charting heretofore unexplored terrain, Ezra Pound and African-American Modernism stands as a useful model for the kind of scholarship that does for literary criticism what Pound sought to do for poetry in his day: Make it new.