Ezra Pound and Spatial Poetics

Ezra Pound was preoccupied with both time and space. But he developed a spatial poetics in order to transform experiences of time into intense moments of relationality and supra-historical awareness. His earlier discovery of a "method of Luminous Detail" was further confirmed by Ernest Fenollosa's theory of the ideogram. What interested Pound was the superposition of historical and cultural meanings in the present, or, more precisely, in the textual present of the Cantos. It is not that Pound wanted to suppress time; superposition is for him simply the mode of being in the present, which is compounded into the same process of transmission, mediation, translation, and rewriting. Pound's ideograms slow down the monolinear movement of narrative to allow more complex patterns of awareness and modes of interaction to emerge among the images, facts, and details of a given Cantos sequence.