Spring Day

In March 1912, six months before her first book of poems was published, Amy Lowell met Ada Dwyer Russell, a formerly prominent stage actress who was separated from her husband. During the next two years, the pair became intimate companions, and they lived together at Sevenels, the Lowell family mansion in Brookline, Massachusetts, for the rest of Lowell’s life. “Ada took on the household of Sevenels,” summarizes Honor Moore, “releasing Amy further to her poetry. . . . To Amy’s friends and correspondents, Ada was affectionately ‘Mrs. Russell’—to Amy, she was ‘Peter,’ becoming so integral to the life of her writing that Amy imagined for the Sevenels driveway a sign saying ‘Lowell and Russell, Makers of Fine Poems.’”

Russell also coached and managed Lowell’s public readings. “The term readings, however, does not adequately describe the way she presented her poems: these were theatrical events,” explains literary scholar Melissa Bradshaw. In one of his own poems John Brooks Wheelwright called Lowell “the Biggest Traveling One-Man Show since Buffalo Bill caught the Midnight Flyer to Contact Mark Twain.” When she finished a poem, the audience often didn’t know what to do, and she would just as often demand, “Well?—Clap or hiss, I don't care which; but for Christ’s sake do something.”

http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2016/05/spring-day.html

The Jewel Stair's Grievance

The jeweled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

Note.—Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of the weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but soaks her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

Pound’s poem  based on Li Bai’s “Yujie yuan 玉階怨 [Jade Staircase Lament], 1705.

Li Bai and Ezra Pound's "Jewel Stair's Grievance"'

In 1913, Ezra Pound began working on a new series of poems based on Ernest Fenollosa’s unpublished notes on classical Chinese poetry. 1 These poems would become the core of Cathay, published in 1915. A volume of translations of classical Chinese poems by 李白 Li Bai (sometimes romanized in older literature as Li Po, 701 – 762), and others, Cathay represented a watershed moment in English Modernist poetry.Pound’s use of Li Bai’s Japanese sobriquet, “Rihaku,” points to his double alienation from his source materials. 

He could not access the Chinese-language originals, nor could he understand the Japanese source materials that formed the foundation of Ernest Fenollosa’s (1853-1908) manuscripts. Fenollosa’s translations were created, according to Eric Hayot, “with the help of a Professor Mori and a Mr. Ariga.” Steven Yao offers a slightly different account of how Pound became interested in classical Chinese poetry:

As the story goes, shortly after their initial meeting in London during the early autumn of 1913, Pound received from Mary McNeil Fenollosa a set of manuscripts produced by her late husband,

Ernest, who had died suddenly of a heart attack in 1908 after a distinguished, if not entirely unblemished, trans-Pacific career as a philosopher, cultural reformer, and historian and advocate of “Oriental” art in Japan and the United States. These manuscripts, which have come to be referred to collectively as “the Fenollosa notebooks,” record the efforts Ernest Fenollosa made studying various East Asian literary traditions, including both classical Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh drama, with distinguished Japanese scholars during one of his final visits to Japan in 1898 5

https://hananomono.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/li-bai-and-ezra-pounds-jewel-stairs-grievance/ 

Text by Cynthia Houng