It could be that my definition of logopoeia is mine alone. I don't think the concept is clear at all in Pound--

Logopoeia, 'the dance of the intellect among words,' that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes into 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. It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation...

It is not abstract ideas or intellectual content, because it cannot easily be translated. It is the poetic effect gotten from using a word in a particular way in relation to that word's normal or expected usage.

Think of the word "wastrel." Now think of its context, where you would be likely to find it. A Victorian novel? What other words would you be likely to find in its vicinity? (urchin, workhouse) Is it ambiguous? (Yes, it means either an abandoned child or a goodfornothing bum.) Other associations? (waste, waist?). What is the word's register? (archaic, literary, relatively unusual but not unheard of either). Now imagine it where it doesn't belong, its anti-context. Using it there would produce a logopoetic effect because it would clash with its surroundings, it would be used "in a particular way in relation to that word's normal or expected usage."

We can see that this effect is distinct from the visual image of a "wastrel," a word which for me frankly calls up no picture at all. (Ok, I'm lying: my visual analogue to this word is in fact a particular kind of drawing by Edward Gorey.) I can smell the word more than I can see it. It's also goes beyond the sound of the word, because it you didn't have those purely verbal associations this odor would not be produced. It's not a primarily melopoeic effect, then, but a mostly verbal one.

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Also, by extension, other verbal figures of rhetoric that aren't particularly focussed on the "image" belong to logopoeia. Hyperbaton for example.

I think Creeley is strong in logopoeia. Hart Crane. Stein. Lowell. Donne and Stevens. Guillermo Carnero. Ashbery. I know it when I see it. Pound found it in Laforgue.

It is conspicuous in its absence in the mature poetry of Wright. (His earlier poetry, influenced by New Criticism, has more of it.) It is absent from many translations, and in fact its absence makes discourse sound "translated."

James Wright is a totally original poet. (A separate question from being a good poet or bad.) He doesn't resemble any precursors within American poetry (Roethke?). He certainly bears little resemblance to any European or Latin American sources that I know of (Neruda? I don't think so). His poetry would seem unoriginal if you didn't know that he was the first one to write like that. So whenever I start to write a poem entitled "Reading James Wright's Poem about Reading a Bad Book of Poetry and Wondering What Book it Was, and Whether it Was Really Bad, Then Closing my Eyes and Smelling the Rotten Wood," I have to stop myself.

This tests my limits of badness in another way--



This time, I have left my body behind me, crying

In its dark thorns.

Still,

There are good things in this world.

It is dusk.

It is the good darkness

Of women's hands that touch loaves.

The spirit of a tree begins to move.

I touch leaves.

I close my eyes and think of water.

--James Wright, "Trying to Pray"

This kind of poem was such a stylistic influence on so many people when I myself first began writing, the decade of the 70s. This epoch was also the heyday of kahlil Gibran, and some of the language comes uncomfortably close to that. The particular kind of speaker of this poem is found in many others of the period, by everyone from Simic to Orr and Kuzma. There's something oddly unidiomatic, "translated," in the tone, as if the speaker were not native speaker of English. Nobody talks like that: "I touch leaves." "It is the good darkness."

So there are aspects of the poem that come up against my own ideas of "acceptability." Its sententiousness and simplified language, for example. This badness is potentially interesting, but only if I conclude that it's not wholly on the side of badness. Otherwise there would be no limit testing at all. It's a very beatiful poem in some ways. You can see why this particular mode became influential, and remains so to this day.