Perloff: "I would posit that Pound's basic strategy in the Cantos is to create a flat surface, as in a Cubist or early Dada collage, upon which verbal elements, fragmented images, and truncated bits of narrative, drawn from the most disparate contexts, are brought into collison"
a "collage poetry"
Perloff quotes David Antin on collage poetry, who notes that it "no longer yield(s) an iconic representation, even of a fractured sort, though bristling with significations"
Perloff again: "It thus occupies a middle space between the mimetic on the one hand and the non-objective or 'abstract' on the other; the referential process is not cut off but is subordinated to a concern for sequential or spatial arrangement [...] th text becomes a surface of linguistic distortions and contradictions that force the reader to participate in the poem's action [...] Pound dislocates language so as to create new verbal landscapes"
all quoted by Retallack