Anyone got a link to good notes on the 1st Pisan Canto? Decided to skip all the Chinese/Adams ones for now and I want to give this one a good go cos it looks really good but also really long and hard. Can't see anything on the cantos project website which I've even using up till now.
So far I have this summary but I need more detail:
Summary
Canto 74
As this canto begins, the speaker (again presumably
Pound) looks out his window at the American Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) in Pisa, reflecting on the death of "Ben" Mussolini and his mistress Claretta ("Clara" in the canto), who were shot and then hung by their feet from a scaffold. This had happened shortly before Pound was taken into custody. This is followed by a reference to the last line of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men": "a bang, not a whimper." After this opening, the poem shifts to
Odysseus and several images of movement—the movement of Venus (Lucifer) in the sky, meteors, and sciroccos (winds). Returning to Pound's personal situation, the speaker complains about his own situation: "without free radio speech is as zero" and references Wanjina, an Australian god whose father closed his mouth so he could not create things by speaking their names. Pound also describes visits from several goddesses, including Aphrodite. A reference to Sigismundo
Malatesta and passages about financial practices and anti-Semitism bring back themes found in earlier sections of the canto. This is one of the longest cantos.