POUNDIAN POETRIES
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AGNES LEHOCZKY
What are the Poundian principles of a poem for me? In other words what are the Poundian poem composites? One, perhaps, most crucial, is that the poem’s parameters embrace an entire cultural odyssey, the discourse on history, the dialectic of cultural thought. The other is that the poem therefore, and so consequently, is always a katabasis: into the subconscious of private and public, singular or collective selves? And thirdly, because of all principle 1 and 2: the language of the poem is always heteroglossic.
“Poems in Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters” (first published by Boiler House, 2018, then in Swimming Pool, Shearsman, 2018) are polyphonic texts posing a movement of thought through the exploration of art, history and culture, following a dialectic of feeling and thinking in the form of dialogic letters, essay poems, to-and-froing between author and reader, lover and loather, critic and posthumous poet in a retrospective motion yet in the texts’ contra movement/resistance/always already being at present/motioning towards its own desired posthumous-ness; some kind of canto-esque katabasis into a critical discourse on artworks which, in various ways, explore the phenomenology of “pool”: The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Bosch, Helen Chadwick’s The Oval Court (1984-86) and Karine Laval’s Poolscapes and The Pool (2009-2010); also her State of Flux (2013-2014) with minor references to La Piscine. Each art work in a sense portrays “pool” as a place as metaphor, of inevitable polarity paralleling the nature of the phenomenological place of the poem fused into absence or erasure, axioms or premises/promises inseparable from doubt, both poem and pool as pars pro toto, these premises always as palimpsestic, almost always layered into a bricolage and storage of risk, danger and peril: place, pool and poem as multifunctional and as transformation trope always in motion and/or metamorphing, and/or dialectic of feeling, memory, hermeneutics and human error.
[Pool Epitaph i; letter I:13] ‘…And so on a hot August day’
…And so on a hot August day, on a feeling,
thinking day, on a sublime swimming day, on
the chance day, the brave day, when the swimmer
knows that on such a day anything could
happen, after much anxious anticipation we
arrived at the swimming pool and saw that it
wasn’t there. More precisely we did not see that it
was there. In other words, the local pool in the
heart of the XI district normally perched on one
of the gentle slopes of the Buda Hills was gone,
the pool was misplaced. The sign, hardly
comprehensible, said: pool isn’t here– yet, my
sympathetic swimmer, how can a swimmer
swim sans swimming pool? O poolpresent, pool
past. And misplaced too searching for our
missing pool, my patient concierge and I drifted
into the middle of Hieronymus’ garden of
earthly disgust and delights. Imagine this
pathological pool within that pathologicalpool.
Pathological because right beneath our living
swimmer a drowned swimmer is swimming too.
So let’s take a risk and imagine this image
without doubt. It’s our local swimming pool at
dusk. The pool, this pool, another pool, the
same pool. The playful pool. The absent pool
present for now. The pondering pool, the pond
full of various magic and mirage. And we
entered with a body we both loathed and loved
while we were alive. We entered with a body
that both loathed and loved us before it
drowned. Then in the blue tiled dressing room
we undressed quietly. And leaving the body
behind us we dived into Jerome’s triptych. Both
present and absent, as apparition there and
elsewhere, we disappeared in dusk and appeared
in the middle of another pool, at its focal point
the musical fountain of your childhood on
Margaret Island in Budapest with your small
sun-tanned body wandering in water with other
tiny swimmers drifting through a cryptic century
at a time when time was not yet timed. The
century was empty as a tomb. And we were
there at the edge of the pool and we saw that
the page in front of us was always already the
only page, the same page, the same composite of
blue sky and pool. And this was the heroic
Hieronymus moment when one’s phantom foot
slips on the tiles and our silhouettes took off…
[PE ii; letter II:13] ‘… Dear silent swimmer sans silhouette’
…Dear silent swimmer sans silhouette, sans
soul, bon courage. These are letters from a
pool long morphed into a landscape
somewhere else. Let us move in the triptych
playfully in order. Contours of the poem inside
and outside concealed in dusk. Next to the
pool the largest zoo in the world, as large as
the world; in the large zoo the saddest animals,
as sad as sky. The sky, blue tiled, as rectangular
as a regular swimming pool. In this ordinary
pool the drawings of exotic animals, some
somewhat irregular, carefully copied from mid-
15th century humanist scholar Cyriac of
Ancona’s travelogues. And we were there at
the edge of the pool and we saw that the page
in front of us was always already the only page,
the same page, the same composite of blue sky
and pool. On the surface of the water floating
artlessly on its back, the Dodo read a book.
Unicorns grew fins. Small fish emerged from
the depth with wings. Pre-semantic girlboy pre-
thinking, pre-feeling always already outside the
sentence, picked at a giant strawberry. A
porcupine, looking lost, rushed across the
page. A tiny black reptile, unborn at this stage,
will have gone missing on the next. Bosch’s
triptych, the art historian claims, is meant to be
deciphered chronologically, linearly, from left
to right. From dawn to dusk. From delight to
disgust. By the time we left the pool it was
winter outside. The speaking fountain within
the fountain from childhood snowed-up. On
the ice rink there was a gull skating and carving
hieroglyphs the fish underneath could not
read. Then our quiet concierge shut the
altarpiece’s shutters and the book became a
crystal ball orbiting around itself in amniotic
fluid. A baby seal crawled out on the margin.
This water universe with the baby seal much
later in 1986 turned into an installation artist’s
Oval Court composed in a Victorian terraced
house on Beck Road in Hackney, with the
baby seal morphing into the artist’s manifold
bodies whose original was lost among the
replicas; around the photocopied self-portraits
swimming up and down in an imaginary blue
universe corroding fish, dead embryos
preserved inside glass bottles, decomposing
vegetables were floating in some repulsive jelly
stuff. When you zoom in on the artist’s crying
faces you can see her many bodies, twisting,
twitching, are in pain too. But don’t you think,
my scribbling, drooling navigator, that reading
must take place simultaneously from left to
right and right to back. Bosch’s triptych pool is
one and only pool, from pool the ephemeral
past to pool a retro-future, from pool fearful
logos to pool frightful lexis, from pool Eros to
pool Thanatos, pool psychophobia, poolsans
sense, sansphilia to pool emptiful.
[PE xii; letter XII:13] ‘…Last Sunday you sent me’
…Last Sunday you sent me a segment of your
essay you were in the middle of writing. In the
passage you explain that in a letter to his friend
John Reynolds of the 3rdof May 1818, the
poet-physicist, our composer of fear, fearer of
decomposition, pre mortem, writes that he hopes
that post mortem, like the gull, or a good-sized
fish, he may dip crosswise across the page,
and, post scriptum, he will not vanish out of sight
– (Letters 1: 280). O private alphas and public
omegas. O Lethe. Personally, posthumously,
from where I stand, instead of falling across
the page, I’ll prefer to make my way towards
the margin. O the pondering childhood parks,
evaporating, in them the private dancing, the
speaking fountains. In them the small amphora
body which we loved and loathed while we
were alive, now, look, a solid metaphora. But
dear decipherer of composition. Thisbook is
now semi-lit, semi-closed. From where I stand
the conclusion won’t make any difference. The
debate, as to which direction the body falls
finally, from where you stand will always be
indifferent. O apathetic lover sanssoul, sans
silhouette, sanspassion. The swimming pool is
semi-lit, semi-light. Odi et amo [quare id faciam?].
Salute and farewell. And so, look, stoic other,
the posthumous poet continues in her
notebook found in her Buda apartment,
today’s swimming day is the last day, the
appearing day, the becoming day, the
composing, to do it sensibly on the page. To
navigate the body home through language with
compassion as if our (eternal) life were not
ours but belonged to someone else. The
expiring day, the disappearing, when
swimming pool forgives swimmer and
swimmer adapts to pool. You might call it the
swimmer’s transubstantiation. The swimmer
who exits the pool is the same swimmer who
entered pre mortem, even if, post-swimming,
no outward changes are apparent to the eye.
The body look, unchanged, unaltered, wears
the same pre-swimming face. And yet the
manner in which the change occurs is a
mystery. When we use the wordchange, we by
no means think it explains the mode by which
the body of the swimmer is converted into the
ideal body of the post-swimming swimmer the
swimmer has been searching for all her life, for
this is altogether incomprehensible. But we
mean this change not figuratively,
metaphorically or symbolically, nor by any
extraordinary grace attached to it and yet we
mean that the body during its regular and
everyday swim, becomes verily and indeed
essentially the very true and same body it
appeared before it disappeared. And so in the
half-lit, half-illuminated neon-light we enter
the local pool and we undress quietly. And
leaving the body behind us we dive into the
pool, the familiar pool, the same pool, the only
pool. Nothing much has changed since we
were gone. Objects are in their right place, in
their right time; simple, safe paraphernalia. On
the surface of the water, look, the book bores
Dodo still floating artlessly on its back. Small
fish clipped of wings vanishes underwater.
Girlboy diseased from strawberry in dark
corner. At the edge of the pool lion in neon
light (with small black reptile caught in its
jaws), elephant and giraffe stare away.
Porcupine, somewhat panicking, rushes off the
page.