"I know there is a history of reading
Pound's Cantos against his politics, but there are
also a number of other
views, Seiburth's marvelous work on the
economics/poetics of the Cantos
among them (I've presented a piece in this vein
myself, and at a Pound
Centennial). To claim that EP is "polyvocal" in the
Cantos, as Bernstein
does in his "Pounding Fascism," is to ignore the
monomaniacal nature of
those vocalisms and what they, i.e. Pound, seek to
instate.
to create."
Do you know that bit in Geoffrey Hill's amazing
Mercian Hymns where King Offa, Hill's shadowy and
omnipresent protagonist, looks tenderly at some
insects, shortly after drinking to his family's health
'because it amused him'? It's ages since I read
aboutall this,and I don't have the books here to look
it up, but one critic latched on to this passage and
cited it as proof that Hill was attacking Donald
Davie's (pioneering?) attempt to rehabilitate Pound, I
think in one of the studies for 'Poet as Sculptor'
(incase you hadn't guessed, I'm no Pound scholar!).
Apparently Davie thought that the amount of
sympathetic attention Pound gave to birds in the Pisan
Cantos indicated a return on his part to some sort of
sanity and humanity - instead of thinking about grand
myths and ancient battles and whatnot he was looking
closely at the world around him.
Hill, it was claimed, was saying: he can empathise so
with the non-human because he is NOT human.
I remember not being able to make up my mind between
Hill and Davie.
I wonder whether such a debate could even have taken
place before the 20th century, when anthropomorphism
was the party line for poets of nature.
Scott
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Just back to the list and catching the tail ends of
what I read (as I posted
to John) of an "electronic food fight." I wanted to
say Amen or some such
affirmation of the support already expressed for
John's handling of the
list, which is, after all, a shared social contract of
sorts that his
efforts created, and also to thank him not only for
the discussion space but
for the many list-related projects he has generated
and to wich he has
welcomed one an all.
Re. domfox's poetics statement: I know there is a
history of reading
Pound's Cantos against his politics, but there are
also a number of other
views, Seiburth's marvelous work on the
economics/poetics of the Cantos
among them (I've presented a piece in this vein
myself, and at a Pound
Centennial). To claim that EP is "polyvocal" in the
Cantos, as Bernstein
does in his "Pounding Fascism," is to ignore the
monomaniacal nature of
those vocalisms and what they, i.e. Pound, seek to
instate. I am, like most
contemporary poets, a son or daughter of Pound, a
grateful one, I'd say in
my case, but I wouldn't want to live in the Paradise
that the Cantos sought
to create.
Yet one more matter: I wonder if the artifice vs. the
bugaboo of presence
argument is not overstated in general, as if Plato's
scary view of the
rhapsode were now taken too literally. Representation
has its uses, even if
only as a "truth" always passing, under the burden of
experience, into untruth.
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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