Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Pound suggests should be founded on the demilitarized banks of the

Rhine—a city “sans armée, sans aucune importance militaire, sans

aucune gouvernement sauf pour balayer les rues.”^22

A note in Pound’s margin, Sieburth points out, relates Kongo Roux to
“la nouvelle Athènes” and thus indirectly to Pound’s ideal city, Dioce. Such
idealization, we might note, is hardly Dadaesque; neither, as Sieburth himself
notes, is the poem’s explicitly political tone and Blast-like diatribe against
the conspiracy of ¤nanciers and usurers. But more important: here, quite
atypically for Picabia or Tristan Tzara or Hugo Ball, is a panoply of histori-
cal references—for example, “Souvenir / Dernier auto-da-fé, / Espagne a.d.
1759,” “Inquisition retablie Portugal a.d. 1824,” and “Piazza dei Signori”;
or again, the iniquities of “des contrats / Injuste d’usure 1320–1921,” “Jules
unanime et Laforgue,” to “Goncourt (qui n’aimait pas Mme Récamier),” and
even the note “ ‘Jesus-Christ était nègre’ (Voir les écrits / de Marcus Garvey,
/ un noir” (Clear¤eld, “Pound, Paris, and Dada” 135).
From Marinetti to Tzara’s M. Antipyrine, avant-gardists scorned such
musty dates and references to historical persons and places as hopelessly
retro. But Duchamp, who remained aloof from Paris Dada as from all the
contemporary movements that tried to absorb him (his readymades, for that
matter, well preceded Dada),^23 would have understood, although his own
names like the Tzanck Check, drawn on “The Teeth’s Loan & Trust Company
Consolidated” and made out to Duchamp’s dentist, Dr. Daniel Tzanck (see
¤gure 3), are, of course, more fanciful, punning, and less directly referential
than Pound’s. But such punning names as “Jules unanime,” which substi-
tutes the movement Jules Romains founded for his last name and then lines
him up, inappropriately, with the poet Jules Laforgue, could be understood
as infrathin variations on such titles as L. H. O. O. Q. for the moustached
Mona Lisa. “Ate” is not “eat,” “tables” not “table.”
The Kongo Roux technique, in any case, is perfected in The Cantos, espe-
cially in the Pisan sequence, in which Pound relies so heavily on memory
to provide him with narrative and image. Here is a typical passage from
Canto 78:

Be welcome, O cricket my grillo, but you must not

sing after taps.

Guard’s cap quattrocento

o-hon dit que’ke fois au vi’age

5 qu’une casque ne sert pour rien

‘hien de tout

Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 49