So what? Wagner's project was anti-semitic to the very core. He says
so very plainly in his writing. Yet I quite like Wagner, and so do a
lot of other people. I hear that Wagner's operas were staged in
Jerusalem. Celine was an out-and-out fascist thug, yet I like his
writing. I like Jorge Luis Borges.
Sure EP doesn't measure up to his own standards ... who does? He may
not intend the work to be fragmentary ... again, so what? I intend my
work to be all kinds of things but it never is. What he says and what
he does maybe two different things. Again, so what? I like his work,
it speaks to me. I find sustenance in it when I read it. I wish I
could write a work which failed as grandly and as big-time as the
Cantos. All I ever seem to come out with is mediocre.
Roger
On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 9:15 AM, David Bircumshaw
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> My point about Arvo Part was concerning a specific work of his, not a
> generalised comment on his or others music. Its context was what can be done
> with unpromising language, indigestible prose.
>
> Pound's artistic project in The Cantos was political, it was a politics
> derived from his aesthetics and thus confused, disastrously, categories. Its
> politics were specifically totalitarian. You don't have to take my opinion
> on that - he states so himself in the 'Guide to Kulchur' which calls for 'a
> new synthesis, the totalitarian'.
> His intentions were would-be universalist, in no way are The Cantos supposed
> to fragmentary. That they are is an index of artistic failure. His method
> does not approach a fragmented world as an reality to be experienced.
> As aesthetic law-giver in this Ezra-world he decrees, in 'The ABC of
> Reading' that 'poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be
> fine language, departing in no way from speech save by heightened intensity
> (i.e.simplicity). There must be no book words, no periphrase, no
> inversions'.
>
> If ever there was a case of man hoist by his own petard. His writing is full
> of 'book-words, periphrase, inversions'. As for being as well written as
> prose ... (The image of someone blowing themselves up with their own
> primitive bomb is quite apt in his case I think)
>
>
>
>
> --
> 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
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
The Go-Betweens
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