“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

argument through the speech he now gives to others… Pound’s authorial ‘voice,’ I think, is
often implicitly and theoretically definable as that unspoken ‘marginal presence’ which
silently articulates (makes sense out of) the gaps in a printed text, a voice we only really
discover in the process of ‘speaking it’ ourselves.” 19 I agree that the voice narrating the poem
is not a “single sensibility,” but I would emphasize that Pound identifies his voice with the
“community’s heritage.” A poem featuring the many voices of the tribe is thus always
implicated in the possibilities for his own voice. His definition of an epic as a “poem
including history” should always be quoted alongside an equally revealing statement that he
made to Williams, “Most great poetry is written in the first person…” 20 Howe is
distinguished from Pound and Olson in that whereas they write historical epics, she writes a
historical lyric. Her poems are short, composed to the page, and speak from the private
rather than the public. But unlike a traditional lyric, she does not take the presence of a lyric
speaker for granted. In what is probably her most famous poetics statement, Howe writes,
“If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are
where you find yourself” (BM, 158). Her voice comes out in a quest for its historical
formation, a quest that is challenged by the fact that women’s voices have always been
mediated by patriarchal control over writing.
Even when commentators address the personal dimensions of historical poetry, the
focus still tends to minimize autobiography. This is nowhere more apparent than in an
ongoing tension between Black Mountain and Language Poets. Charles Bernstein, a leading
poet and theorist of the Language Poets, calls for a poetics based on “the actual experience
of words,” and this leads him to criticize Olson’s “excessive” allusions to historical and
19 Bernstein. Ibid., 170.
20 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters: 1907-1941 (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 8.
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