But why are prime words—words divisible only by themselves—so desirable?
Here we might come back for a moment to the lines from Pound’s “River-
Merchant’s Wife,” “And I shall come out to meet you / As far as Cho-fu-
sa.” Why, to repeat my earlier question, is this designation preferable to the
“Warm Wind Sands” of Yip and Cooper? Perhaps because the signi¤er Cho-
fu-sa, real place though it is, gives us so little information to go on. For the
Anglophone reader—and that, of course, is the reader for whom Pound is
writing—Cho-fu-sa is suggestively exotic but withholds any further mean-
ing. How far is Cho-fu-sa? How long would it take to get there? We cannot
tell any more than we can recognize, earlier in this same poem, the location
of Ku-to-yen, a Poundian neologism based on the amalgam of two words:
Kuto (the locality) and Enyotai, designated by Fenollosa as the huge rock in
the river at the entrance of the narrows at Kuto (see Kodama, “Cathay and
Fenollosa’s Notebooks” 223).
Names li ke Cho-fu-sa and the ¤ctional Ku-to-yen draw the reader into the
poet’s con¤dence: of course you know, the poet seems to be telling us, what
it is I’m talking about. You too have been there. The speci¤c name, in other
words, takes on an aura despite the emptiness of the signi¤ers in question,
their lack of semantic density. In The Cantos such naming becomes much
more elaborate: names are often piled on unrelated names in various meto-
nymic con¤gurations. Given that Pound was, after all, wedded to the notion
that “Dichten = condensare” (ABC of Reading 36), that “It is better to present
one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works” (Literary Essays
4), why the Gargantuan excess, the immoderate roll call of names?
Before we turn to The Cantos themselves, it is interesting to note that even
in his brief Paris phase (1920–1923), when he ®irted with Dada, Pound pro-
duced texts quite unlike, say, Tristan Tzara’s in their inclusion of documen-
tation. Consider, in this regard, his little-known poem called Kongo Roux,
written for Picabia’s special issue of 391 called by the nonsense name Le Pil-
haou thibaou (10 July 1921). Kongo Roux, printed on the verso of Picabia’s let-
ter to “Mon cher Confucious” [sic] is reproduced by Andrew Clear¤eld in an
essay for Paideuma,^21 which describes the piece as a “typical Dada jeu d’esprit
(120, see ¤gure 2). Richard Sieburth, who discusses it more fully in his essay
“Dada Pound,” calls it “as close to the real Dada thing as [Pound] would ever
get,” observing:
[T]he piece is a deliberately incoherent farrago of slogans and ram-
blings whose zany truculence and typographical hijinks combine Vor-
ticist polemic with Picabian put-on. The title pun (Kangaroo/Red
Congo) refers to the name of a Utopian “denationalist” city whichPound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 47