Tender and Bloody was He

After finishing writing the last post about logopoia I realized I had limited “context” to common ways of speaking, while not taking into account other possibilities as, for example, the syntactic order.

Sadly in this example we meet the curse of Babel but I think people who don’t read Spanish can overcome the difficulties with a bit of effort. The following verses are taken from Amor América in the Canto General of Pablo Neruda

Man was dust, earthen vase, an eyelid

of tremulous loam, the shape of clay –

he was Carib jug, Chibcha stone,

imperial cup or Araucarian silica.

Tender and bloody was he, but on the grip

of his weapon of moist flint,

the initials of the earth were

written

I had not thought death had undone so many…

As last post was about phanopoeia I thought it might be nice to keep reflecting on Pound’s ways of charging words. So I started digging in my memory in order to try to come up with a good example of logopoeia. But first, lets go back to Pound in  ”How to Read” to see his definition:

Logopoeia, “the dance of the intellect among words,” that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play.

That means words can be charged not only by their own meaning but also making use of the context we usually find them in. Words are not isolated species, they live in a context, they are used in certain ways and by changing their natural context we can highlight them and, as a consequence, enhance and expand their meaning. The effect is similar to having an eskimo walking on a caribbean beach… it raises amazement, like “what is he doing there”?