Ostentatious

Critical Introduction

"Ostentatious", published posthumously in transition in the June 1929 issue was the last poem by the Baroness published in a little magazine in the modernist era. Eugene Jolas’s piece “Logos” begins on the page after the Baroness’s poem. He begins the piece: “Poetry is at the cross-roads today,” and he goes on to define this crossroads as one between a “positivist” and “sterile” poetry that gives a “monotonous description” of a “mediocre universe” and experimental poetry that seeks to revise “traditional” values and is “in open revolt against naturalistic concepts” (25). These are concepts already expressed in magazines such as The Little Review and others, but like the editors of Dial and Poetry, Jolas inscribes a transcendental and otherworldly element to the poet by denigrating “verbal freaks and literary acrobatics” and postulating that the “orphic poet” has a vision that is “direct and pure.” This orphic poet, he contends, has to do with the world, but his poetry does not: “Poetry, using the word as mechanics, may [. . .] produce a metaphoric universe with is a sublimation of the physical world” (26). The piece serves as a warning to the dead author of the posthumously published poem that precedes it: poetry should have little to do with your life. Clearly, it seems that the experimental nature of the poem was what attracted Jolas to it. Thus, in the context of the published poem, the ttitle "Ostentatious" has less to do with the Baroness's well-known street performances and more to do with the more oymoronic because more subtle ostentatious element of the sky and the word in play.

“Ostentatious; Westward:; Eastward:; Agog.” (transition June 1929, 24) relies on strictures of reading order and space to make meaning. In this compilation poem, the Baroness includes four separate poems. The first and topmost stanza, titled “Ostentatious” discusses “Vivid fall’s/Bugle sky;” the second to the right is titled “WESTWARD:”, while the next, lower to the left is titled “EASTWARD:”; the last stanza, at the bottom of the space, is titled “Agog” and discusses “Ultramarine/Avenues.” While the placement of the sky at the top and the water at the bottom provokes little thought, the displacement of East and West—in terms of mapping standards—is more curious. That these stanzas actually include the adverbial form “Eastward” and “Westward” indicates a missing verb and therefore a missing subject. This occlusion emphasizes the perspective of that missing subject. The “Eastward” stanza in the traditionally “West” (because on the far left) position is about what one views from the West looking Eastward: a rising moon in the East. Likewise, the “Westward” stanza in the traditionally “East” position is about the setting sun. The day is bright as a bugle at the highest point of the sky (at the top of the page). The sun begins to set in the “westward” looking perspective where the tones of the poem deepen (the golden saxophone). As the day wanes or as the reader moves down the page in traditional reading order, however, the moon rises towards the East, and it seems that travesty prevails: from the centered perspective of the sea, the sun and the moon are both risen; resembling two eyes widened in shock, these eyes are “Agog” at the world. The tone and meaning of each word is dependent on the reader’s movement through the graphical interface or the space on the page. Space is an essential element within the poem with which the Baroness was working. Indeed, in the first of the four manuscript versions of “Ostentatious,” the words of the text change little while their movement in the space on the page changes dramatically, emphasizing the fact that the Baroness anticipates the reader’s ordered movement through space as a signifying element in the poem.