[I originally wrote this before Jon's most recent post, but my computer
screwed up and wouldn't send it. Hope it gets through this time. R.]
From: "Joanna Boulter" <[log in to unmask]>
<<
Good grief, Hamilton, you showing some knowledge of Bunting?
>>
Well, not really, I just happened to have a copy of his Collected to hand
(being about to exile it to the loft until I move to Darlington) and just
where the Villon echoes were coming from was beginning to irritate me. So
it was more look-up-the-context, and I wasn't struck enough by the bits of
the rest of the poem I read (well, it must have been about his earliest) to
read the whole more than to scratch an itch.
<<
(Does this mean
I may yet inveigle you into reading Briggflatts?)
>>
Having avoided this for 38 years now, I may put it off a little longer. In
favour of perusing the _Noctes Ambrosiana_, all five volumes of which
arrived at the unlikely time of 6.30 this evening, all the way from New
Zealand, while I was in the process of hanging, or assisting in the hanging
thereof, of two of my ex-wife's paintings on the walls of the sittingroom.
... with a Core Duo computer sitting unpacked in the hall ...
If it were only tomorrow, there's the makings of a snapshot there.
<<
Seriously, though, thanks for chipping in. I'd failed to find what I'd taken
to be a complete poem in my Collected Bunting, so supposed Jon must have dug
it out of some esoteric source which I wot not of. Coulda made a right neddy
of meself there!
>>
No comment. <g>
<<
I totally agree with you about Pound though. As surely Bunting himself would
have done?
>>
Yeah, that was the major effect of the whole poem, such of it as I read, on
me -- Pound jumping out and biting my nose. Not, to be fair, *just Pound,
but the poem wouldn't have existed if not for Ol' Ezra. The pre-Lustra
Pound, even, shades of Pierre Vidal Old. Anyone know of a full study of the
relation between Bunting and Pound? Presumably the influence was strongest
early on in Bunting's writing career.
[Hey, just thought, maybe there's a line through the use of deliberate
anachronism in Bunting here, and Logue later in "Gone Ladies", going back to
"Homage to Sextus Propertius"?]
Back to Edinburgh in 1822, to see what the good Doctor William Maginn, aka
O'Docherty, has to say about Sinfu' Davey.
Dem damn phrenologists, always fingering some skull or other.
R.
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