Hi Doug
(this is becoming something of drag!) But, yup, I know Bunting's poem, and
have read most of The Cantos. (I have The Pisan Cantos, A Draft of XXX
Cantos and the Faber Selected Cantos.) I've been interested in Pound since
my teens. I have tried reading The Cantos entire, in library copies, but
really found them taken as a whole too aesthetically tedious to endure.
There is a failure of artistic selection in the methods of prose
incorporation which Pound employs and Perloff praises. As poetry, sections
like 'A draft of Cantos XXXI - XLI - Jefferson, Nuevo Mundo' or 'The fifth
decad of Cantos: Siena, The Leopoldine Reforms' simply do not work.
The Estonian composer Arvo Part has a piece called 'Which was the son of
...' which consists simply of a New Testament genealogy of Christ set to
music. It succeeds because Part varies rhythm, tempo, intonation etc to make
even such an unpromising wodge of material interesting, funny even. And you
certainly do not have to subscribe to Part's Orthodox Christian beliefs to
enjoy it. It conveys a sense of generations extending back and forwards
through time.
Pound likes parataxis in The Cantos. Repeatedly passages hang upon repeated
'And' 's.
The effect is numbing, desensitising. Pound is a pedagogue of a dictatorial
style, he is laying his fist on the table over and over again. It is like
being cornered by that man in the bar, you know the one, we've nearly all
met him, the one who will tell you and tell you : 'AND I know that' 'AND
what's more'. Like Pound, the man in the bar will have his facts wrong, and
will insist on telling you them in greater intensity and insistence the more
that they are wrong.
Pound had an interesting imagistic and rhythmic technique. But it was too
shaky a foundation for his grandiose project in The Cantos. Politically, his
confusion of aesthetics with ethics led him to admire what he thought of as
strong violent leaders who would be patrons of the arts, like Malatesta
equals like Mussolini, and Ezra's ideas of a just society was one which
would be based on giving comfortable lives to a select band of approved
artists (such as Ezra) and enforcing strict (but paternal) discipline on the
inferior masses. He used to boast that he'd never done a day's paid work in
his life (it wasn't quite true, he did work as a teacher for brief period in
the States) but thought of himself as an expert on economics. When he
returned to Italy from incarceration in the US his first act on setting foot
on shore was to give a fascist salute.
It's perhaps worth writing down the opening of The Pisan Cantos. Canto
LXXIV begins:
"The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's
bent shoulders.
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
by the heels at Milano
That maggots shd/ eat the dead bullock
DIGONOS, Digonos, but the twice crucified
where else in history will you find it?
yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper,
with a bang not a whimper,
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of
stars."
The layout I reproduce as printed: I don't know whether the first and
penultimate lines break where they do because of page limitations or not.
The second use of Diogonos is in Greek letters in the original and 'a
Milano' in italics.
When I first read this, aged 18, I didn't immediately realise who Ben and
Clara were. They are, of course, Mussolini and his mistress, hung after
death upside down by the partisans in a square in Milan.
Manes, as far as I understand, means the souls of deceased loved ones, which
were represented in Roman funerary customs and games. So, ok, Pound means
Benito and Clara as deceased loved ones. But Pound seem to write as if Manes
was an individual.
The maggots that follow I presume are the people who have got rid of Il
Duce.
'Digonos' has a complicated background. I quote:
"Diogenes, Laertiade, polumechan' Odusseu
(it is Calypso's phrase in Od. V, 203) happens to be used twice (Od. XI, 60
and 92) in the Nekuia episode which Pound translates in what becomes his
first Canto--not translating directly from the Greek original, but using a
Latin translation from the 16th Century, in a Latinized Odyssey he found by
chance in a bouquiniste of the Paris quays. The repetition is often thought
to be an interpolation, and does not appear in Berard's translation for
instance. However, Andreas Divus keeps it, perhaps because the Greek text he
had to work from said: "digonos" (twice-born, double) instead of "diogenes"
(issuing from Zeus, therefore noble)."
So twice-born, repeated, followed by 'twice-crucified'. To which my honest
response is : so what?
There then follows a variation on the ending of The Hollow Men which echoes
Goebbel's desire to slam the doors of history shut behind us.
The last line, like the first, is 'poetic' in tone. Both have an impressive
rhythmic sweep. But, in the case of the first, it's not clear why the
peasant is present nor what the tragedy of the dream in his shoulders is
while the second case there is no clear sense of what the city of Dioce is
meant to be ( my guess is that it's shorthand for the creation of the ideal
Fascist-Social Credit-Ezra-is-God State)
The 'colour of stars' is a poeticism, nothing more: what colour: blue, red,
white, yellow?
There's more one can ask about this passage: why to some lines begin with
capitals and others not without any seeming reason, why the abbreviation shd
/?
And at this point I have to ask myself is this writing worth the effort of
attention it requires? Do I as a reader derive pleasure from it? - No. Do I
find instruction or illumination? - Definitely not. Is it pleasing on the
ear? - In places, yes, but definitely not in all. Is it visually striking?
- No.
Would I want to stand up in public and read this out as an example of good
poetry to other people?
- You must be joking, mate!
All the Best Doug (I'm worn out with this now)
On 31/03/2008, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I'm not even sure if Pound was doing 'prose poetry,' even as I agree
> more or less with what you're saying here, Roger. It was his desire,
> not always well fulfilled, to bring some of the topics given over to
> 'the novel' back to poetry that I was pointing to, actually.
>
> But the thing of it is, Pound was a master craftsperson; so that,
> reading his work, early & into the Cantos, I learned a lot about how
> to write a poem. Not that that means I forgive him his human failings,
> or even evils if you want it that way, but the poetry, as such, just
> exists as centrally important to many practitioners, such as me.
>
> I'm always reminded of Bunting's poem about the Cantos, along the
> lines of
> 'These are the alps...'.
>
> You don't have to climb them, but you can't pretend they arent there....
>
> Doug
>
> On 31-Mar-08, at 9:20 AM, Roger Day wrote:
>
> > Pound was a anti-semitic pain-in-the-ass, and probably a fascist. You
> > could have mentioned his truly mad belief in some forgotten nutter of
> > an economist which led him to his theories of usury. Eliot never
> > re-canted his anti-semitism. Maybe Auden's recanting of his younger
> > days makes him a better poet? So as to justifying your attack on a
> > poet via his or hers character, I'd say, meh. So what. Poets are not
> > nice, ordinary people, they are usually verbose, highly articulate, at
> > odds with the world. Poets more often than not think that the world
> > owes them a living all because they can string a few words together.
> > Poets write and say inconvenient things, believe odd things. In short,
> > they're hard to get on with. I include myself in these category: I've
> > unfairly lambasted would-be friends because of some imagined point of
> > contention over my poetry. I'd point at your own erratic presence on
> > this and other lists which must testify to something going on.
> >
> > When does "fact-checking" come into prose or poetry? How does that
> > undermine *anything*? A problem with the facts? Isn't that called the
> > human condition? I myself am notorious for conflating three sets of
> > facts together and coming out with Sunday ... the prosaic isn't
> > necessarily the "right" facts. So, no, I do not accept any of your
> > assertions.
> >
> > I suppose it comes to this, so soon. You don't like prose poetry. It's
> > as simple as that. You've invested your time and energy in a certain
> > sort of poetry, and you declaim against the other sorts you don't
> > like. That is your right, and I would not have it otherwise. I happen
> > to think other sorts of poetry are equally important and worthy of
> > attention. Meh, this leads nowhere. But I would rather have said this
> > than not.
> >
> > Regards
> > Roger
>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
>
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> to rid me of
> the ugh in
> thought
> i spell anew
> weave the world
> out of the or
> binary
>
> bpNichol
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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