This paper examines Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) through the lens of affective geography. It argues that Vuong reimagines modernist ideas of space through emotion and the body. He adopts techniques like fragmentation, montage, and disjunction but redirects them toward relation rather than separation. His poems use the bodily acts of breath and touch to connect moments and histories that could otherwise remain apart. The paper employs close readings of "Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds" and "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" in two separate sections in order to demonstrate how Vuong turns themes of displacement into possibilities of intimacy. The notions of space in his work cannot be fixed or measured in the physical sense. Space instead is experienced through movement, sensation, and the body's awareness. The body becomes both map and memory, carrying history and rewriting it through tenderness. Vuong thus turns modernist geography inward, grounding it in queer and diasporic life. His poetry builds an emotional landscape where vulnerability fosters relation and belonging can exist even within fracture.

Exile and displacement have always been at the heart of Chinese literature, capturing the personal and political struggles of their time. From Qu Yuan's Li Sao to Bei Dao's Sidetracks, these themes offer a lens into the complexities of identity in times of upheaval. This paper explores how Bei Dao engages in a profound dialogue with the past, reimagining the motifs of loyalty, loss, and selfhood central to Li Sao. While Qu Yuan's work traces an allegorical journey of lament and steadfastness, Bei Dao's Sidetracks presents a fragmented, restless vision of exile, marked by abrupt transitions, sharp contrasts, and unresolved meanings. In doing so, he reshapes the classical tradition for a modern age, creating a bridge between ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry.This paper addresses a critical gap in the literature, providing new insights into the evolving narrative of exile in Chinese poetry and expanding our understanding of Bei Dao's contributions to world literature.

Ezra Pound's The Cantos is a truly transnational feat, transcending different periods and geographical locations. The epic, 'a poem including history', expands the parameters of modernism in space and time, representing a diversity of culture and era through several languages, including Greek, Chinese, Italian, German, and French. The legacy of The Cantos then articulates the formation of a global poetics that has inspired writers, poets, and artists from Russia, Japan to South America. This article attempts to examine the extent to which Pound's Cantos influenced a contemporary Chinese poet named Yang Lian (1955-). Between 1994 and 1997, Yang Lian, in his own words, attempted to 'produce a Chinese version of the Cantos' in his Concentric Circles. Yang Lian, exiled from China on the eve of 1989, adopts an Odysseus-like nomadic life that seeks to take on his own version of periplum. In Concentric Circles, Yang Lian adopts the form of an ideogrammic vortex where images move dynamically, intersecting, relating to one another to catalyse, convey and render emotion organically. This paper attempts to address the transmigration of Poundian influences on Yang Lian's Chinese epic that exemplifies fragmented pattern, linguistic collage, structural discordance and avant-garde experimentation.

This article explores the interplay of qing (emotion) and jing (landscape) in Ezra Pound’s rendition of “Taking Leave of a Friend” from his collection Cathay. Building on the legacy of Ernest Fenollosa’s translations and notes, Pound transcends traditional linguistic translation to reiterate the aesthetic simplicity and emotional depth of classical Chinese poetry. Through an in-depth analysis of Pound’s innovative translation techniques and his creative interpretation of Li Bai’s original poem, this article posits that Pound not only respected but re-envisioned the source material for a Western audience, crafting a novel poetic expression. This research enhances our understanding of Cathay as both a continuation and a transformation of Chinese poetic traditions, affirming Pound’s role as a transformative figure in early 20th-century English poetry.

Reviewed by: Breaking Boundaries and "Making It New": Oriental Elements in Western Modernism by Zhaoming Qian Kent Su ZHAOMING QIAN Breaking Boundaries and "Making It New": Oriental Elements in Western Modernism Beijing. Peking University Press. 2023. 334 pages. TO REMIND HIMSELF of the paramount importance of the philosophical tradition of Confucianism, the ancient Chinese Shang Dynasty's emperor, Cheng Tang, inscribed on a washbasin the Confucian motto, "If you can one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation." Over time, this core value underwent a process of cultural transmission and eventually found its way into the hands of the American poet Ezra Pound, who reinvented it as a modernist injunction that would become a guiding principle for the avant-garde. Pound's version of the motto, which he referred to as "make it new," encapsulated the spirit of [End Page 74] experimentation and innovation that defined the modernist movement. Breaking Boundaries and "Making It New": Oriental Elements in Western Modernism adapts its title from the ideas of novelty and innovation found in the Poundian clarion call to explore uncharted territories of literature. These sentiments of rupture and revolution were echoed by many other artists and writers who sought to challenge themselves and their audiences to find new ways of expressing themselves and the world around them. Zhaoming Qian, chancellor's professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, has researched widely in areas of American modernism, interarts relations, East–West comparative poetics, and Asian American literature. This monograph aims to investigate how the influence of Eastern culture on Western art and literature can be seen through the works of eleven writers in the interdisciplinary fields of poetry, theater, film, art, and architecture. It seeks to explore how these eleven creators engaged in an unprecedented level of cultural exchange. The resultant cross-fertilization of ideas and styles had a significant impact on the world of art and literature, transforming the literary landscapes of the twentieth century. One of the book's most significant aspects is its discussion of the interlocutor theory. The interlocutor, as a potential mediator, is instrumental in bridging the gap between two different cultures and in facilitating understanding and communication between people from different backgrounds. Qian points out how the interlocutor in the works allows these themes of cultural diversity and differences to be respected. This monograph is the first to identify that some poets, such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, or Marianne Moore, had the assistance of interlocutors who could help clarify misunderstandings, translate between languages, and provide information about cultural norms, values, and beliefs. For example, Pao Hsien Fang, a member of the local Naxi minority, contributed to Pound's comprehension of Lijiang, a paradise on earth situated in the Yunnan Province. The impact of Fang's language lessons on Pound is evident in Drafts and Fragments, where Pound reproduced two Naxi Dongba pictographs—the winnowing tray and the moon (Canto 112/785). These pictographs are a part of the Naxi tribe's ancient script, which showcases a deep connection with nature. Fang's letters to Pound reveal that Lijiang had a profound impact on the poet's final works. Fang expressed his wish for Pound to write more cantos about Lijiang, immortalizing the city in Pound's lyricism. By incorporating non-Han cultures into his work, Pound seems to be departing from Confucianism and undergoing a significant shift in tone. Notably, the ancient Chinese philosophy that Pound constantly advocated does not appear in the final sequence of The Cantos. Instead, Pound's references to the Naxi tribe reflect the possibility of a paradiso terrestre, a paradise on earth that exists in the farthest reaches of the world. Pound, in turn, informed Pao about the inclusion of Naxi culture in his modernist epic, The Cantos. This example highlights how cross-cultural collaboration can foster cultural understanding. According to Qian, while some artists had the assistance of interlocutors, others, like Wallace Stevens and Gary Snyder, drew inspiration from primary sources in East Asia. Stevens and Snyder were deeply attracted to the abstract philosophical and metaphysical concepts found in East Asian landscape paintings. Stevens was influenced...

Reviewed by: Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück Kent Su Louise Glück Winter Recipes from the Collective New York. Farrar Straus and Giroux. 2021. 64 pages. LOUISE GLÜCK HAS been the recipient of nearly every award recognizing a poet's craft. In November 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In her acceptance speech, Glück expressed the desire to continue to "honor the intimate, private voice." Her fourteenth, latest work, Winter Recipes from the Collective, vividly resonates with this theme and embodies a transformative quality of life that is also entwined with the concept of stillness. The collection's understated and sparse cover resembles such stillness and deserves some explanation. It exhibits a group of paintings known as the "Album of Pheasants" by the enigmatic seventeenth-century poet-artist Bada Shanren, whose own work contains similarly nuanced threads of restraint and allusiveness. After the fall of the Ming Dynasty, Bada Shanren retreated [End Page 56] to a reclusive life in a Daoist monastery. His cryptic inscription appearing on the cover of Glück's new collection, written when he was in his old age, suggests the emptiness of political rhetoric. It concludes with a seal that indicates how one can only gain true spiritual immortality and enlightenment by withdrawing oneself from worldly possessions. This philosophical connotation finds its parallel in the glowering, humanlike expression of the chick in ink, which appears in monochrome and which, while deceptively abbreviated and ingenious, is imbued with a sense of stillness and quietude. Glück's cover sets the tone for the entire collection of fifteen exquisitely written poems, all of which display not only placidity and minimalism but also psychological depth. Reflecting the subtleties and intricacies of human relations, the poems converse with one another in dialogic and narrative forms. The first poem in the collection, simply titled "Poem," opens with the surreal image of a couple watching a boy and girl eating wild berries from a dish "painted with pictures of birds" and then flying away. The couple desires the same kind of flight but can only descend in "downward" motions. They eventually accept that this world is more "beautiful than the last." This opening poem echoes the sentiment of the cover's chick that quietly comes to accept one's own ability in life. The rest of the collection's poems also center on transient, elegiac interactions. These occur between, as examples, two sisters; parents and children; teacher and student; concierge and client. Readers witness how the events unfold in these disparate exchanges and imagistic snippets between individuals about such haunting topics as death, loss, and regret, each of which conveys the difficulties of life. Every relationship oscillates between the dualistic tensions of assertion and ambiguity. However, toward the end of nearly every work, the narratives are abruptly suspended, unfinished, and are seemingly replaced with a recurrent ambience of ascetic emptiness in which beginnings and endings cross each other. This notion of circularity complements the ancient Chinese wisdom that appears at the end of a few poems in this collection. For instance, in "The Denial of Death," the speaker alludes to the philosophical adage of Daoism: "all things flow, like the empty cup in the Daodejing – / Everything is change, he said and everything is connected. / Also everything returns." These phrases underline how the natural order manifests the unceasing returning of all things back to their beginning. In Glück's poems, the individual is to conform to the natural rhythm of the cosmos by "going with the flow." Glück seems to suggest that one can achieve inner peace and stillness by embracing life's transformations. The poem entitled "Winter Recipes from the Collective" is a four-part parable that further encapsulates such transformative qualities of circularity in human labor. It begins with an elderly couple undertaking "a time-consuming project" that involves gathering and fermenting mosses as the snow falls. These untidy mosses are then transformed into bonsai. Such a transformation is a miniature representation of natural inharmony and simplicity. The final part seems to invoke how the bonsai unassumingly blossoms into part of the arboretum in December, "the month of darkness...

In a letter to his publisher, John Quinn, dated January 1917, Ezra Pound expressed his belief that ‘China is fundamental, Japan is not.’ Japan was ‘a special interest, like Provence, or 12th–13th century Italy (apart from Dante),’ but China was ‘solid’. This letter has led many critics to dismiss the influence of Japan on Pound’s poetics. For example, Hugh Kenner’s canonical The Pound Era (1971) dedicates only two pages to Pound’s translations of the Japanese nō plays. Subsequent critics, such as Donald Davie, John Tytell and Ming Xie, perpetuated this claim, arguing that Japan was merely a marginal, simple curiosity for Pound. In light of such views, Ezra Pound’s Japan by Andrew Howen is a much-needed critical intervention into the realm of a historically under-theorized aspect of Pound’s creative praxis which has the potential to revise longstanding critical assumptions about Pound’s contributions to twentieth-century poetics. Howen begins by tracing the cultural complexity of hokku, which eventually served as an important model for Pound’s Imagist and Vorticist aesthetic. To achieve this, he takes readers back to Japan’s Meiji period (1868–1912), a time when many cultural traditions were declining in popularity because of a burgeoning interest in Western modernity. During this era, Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), a student at the Preparatory School of the Imperial University, encountered the suggestive indirectness of the ‘minor image’ in Herbert Spencer’s The Philosophy of Style, which promotes concretion, concision and juxtaposition. Shiki considered hokku, originally the ‘starting verse’ of a longer sequence, to be foundational to Spencer’s stylistic principles. However, he believed that hokku should not commence a longer collection but should rather be an independent verse form. Shiki later began using the term haiku to signal a sense of one-ness in images as exemplified in Bashō’s ‘old pond’ haiku. Shiki’s haiku reforms influenced various French and English translators, such as Lafcadio Hearn, Paul-Louis Couchoud, Basil Chamberlain, F. V. Dickins and F. S. Flint. The form eventually flourished in the hands of Pound, whose Imagist tenets were manifested in the directness and concision of Shiki’s principles and best encapsulated in the famous ‘In a Station of the Metro’.

In this (virtual) interview, Massimo Bacigalupo, Emeritus Professor in the University of Genoa, Italy, begins by sharing personal anecdotes of his encounters with numerous literary figures who shaped his own experience of becoming an artist and scholar. Among these, the most influential for his future activities was the American poet, Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Massimo Bacigalupo's interdisciplinary approach, combining literature with other disciplines, finds parallels in the poetic method of Ezra Pound, whose magnum opus, The Cantos, embraces a wide variety of interests, ranging from humanities to science. Bacigalupo attempts to create his own Poundian "periplum," "not as land looks on a map / But as sea bord seen by men sailing" (Canto LIX). In so doing, he navigates the seas of his life experiences using a variety of media and approaches. In the course of the interview, Bacigalupo further provides readers, who are tasked with mentally immersing themselves in Pound's creations, with advice on, and suggestions for, approaching the intricacies and allusiveness of the American poet's multi-lingual work. He discusses the "vogue for writing about Fascism in Pound and others" in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship, which is occasionally marred by an insufficient knowledge of history and politics, and may lead scholars to see Fascist implications where none exist, or vice versa, to miss larger patterns of Pound's response to Italian politics of the 1930s. Bacigalupo notes Pound's frequent exclusion from current curricula, as against his popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was seen as a scapegoat rather than as an espouser of discredited and offensive ideas, and accordingly doubly difficult to present in class. Ezra Pound's ultimate purpose was to offer an account of the world as he perceived it and to suggest a way out from war and debt, in the interest of a more just and satisfactory public and private life. While the ongoing digital Cantos Project helps us to identify sources and processes of composition, and is thus invaluable, readers must decide for themselves that Pound is worth reading as a poet and recounter of stories old and new.

The paper seeks to discuss the Taoist elements in the evocation of Chinese landscapes in Pound’s Cantos 4 and 49. Canto 4’s Peach Blossom Poetics is believed to be the first under the Tianyuan of Chinese landscape poetry initiated by Tao Yuanming (365–427). This type of poetry shows the pastoral, tranquil life of natural beauty. The settings are domestic and localized, most being backyards, small rivers, huts or countryside. The images in Tianyuan poetry are serene and peaceful with no impositions of the human. They tend to explicitly focus on the scene itself rather than on the viewers or any human elements. On the other hand, Canto 49’s Seven Lakes represents the Shanshui poetry that originated from the works of Xie Linyun(385–433). This type of work displays adventurous treks through beautiful and untamed mountainous regions. In spite of their seemingly different settings, the essence of the two styles is the same. The two cantos elucidate the Taoist philosophy of “non-action,” which follows the effortless and spontaneous movement of nature. These two landscapes represent the glimpses of the tranquil, temporary paradiso that Pound has been attempting to reach throughout his poetic career.

Kent Su looks into The Cantos to examine how Pound’s reading of contemporary accounts of Chinese history from a Confucian perspective helped to shape his method for Cantos 52–61, the sequence known as the Chinese Cantos or China Cantos. Following his own dictum in ABC of Reading, “DICHTEN = CONDENSARE” (which Su describes as a “principle of lean philosophical economy”), Pound in the 1930s used the approach of “condensing some historical facts” to capture the pith and gist of ancient Chinese history, an approach Pound also attributes to Mussolini. Readers know that for these Cantos Pound drew from the French text of Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s 11-volume Histoire générale de la Chine, but Su demonstrates how Pound also made significant use of the two Chinese texts that served as the basis for de Mailla’s Histoire, namely, Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian and Zhu Xi’s Tongjian Gangmu, the latter a condensation of Guang’s 20-volume history. Su further contrasts the influences of Greek philosophy and Confucianism on Pound, as he offers analyses the complex cross-cultural sources of the China Cantos.

‘Confucius at the “Apricot Altar”’ in Ezra Pound’s Canto XIII Kent Su Kent Su Shanghai International Studies University E-mail: yi-kuan.su.13@alumni.ucl.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 67, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 137–138, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjz202 Published: 18 January 2020

‘耀’ (yào) or ‘sparkling lustre’, the ideogram on the cover of Cathay, has an exotic allure and creates the illusion that readers are entering the ancient world of China, which is displayed in the frontispiece: The story of Pound’s serendipitous acquisition of these Chinese materials deserves recounting. In 1908 Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), an American scholar at Tokyo Imperial University, unexpectedly passed away. His widow, Mary McNeill Fenollosa (1865–1954), sought a literary executor for his estate. Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu, recommended the young, ambitious Ezra Pound. Mrs Fenollosa and Pound met four times, and their topics of discussion focused on East Asian art and literature. In their final meeting, she emphasised the importance of her husband’s legacy. She entrusted Pound with her husband’s work and then departed for the United States. They never met again.

Confined to a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage, Ezra Pound saw a series of mountain hills from a few miles to the east of Pisa. The poet compared one of these small 800-metre hills to the sacred Chinese Mt. Tai, which becomes the most common geographical name in The Pisan Cantos. Pound’s poetic summoning of this particular mountain is related to the fact that Mt. Tai is historically and culturally connected to the philosophy of Confucius, who personally ascended the mountain several times. Pound, as a devout Confucian disciple, closely follows the philosophical doctrines and attempts to mentally trace the footsteps of Confucius. This paper will argue how Pound’s poetic evocation of the mountain shares a striking similarity to an eighth-century Chinese poem called “Gazing at Mt. Tai,” which was written by the famous literatus - Du Fu 杜甫(712 – 770 ). In spite of living in two completely different eras and countries, Pound’s and Du Fu’s reference to Mt. Tai demonstrates the confluence of their poetic spirits. Neither of them ascended mountain personally. They instead made use of their poetic imagination to follow the paths of Confucius and perceived the mountain as an earthly paradise, one which represents tranquillity and serenity away from the moral and physical corruption of the external world.