The Cantos
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- a leaf in the current condom full of black beetles hate is not born in the trenches i cannot make it cohere i have tried to write paradise indulge the banter pound for pound pull down thy vanity she is an octopus the great ball of crystal the hells move in cycles the temple is holy because it is not for sale the vines burst from my fingers thought is a labyrinth unexpected excellent sausage
Corpsey.
Well-known member
Whats immediate about this one is the the latter two reference heavy long stanzas can still be understood in light of the more immediate first three. Without looking into anything its still clear how economics and writing fit into the musings on the forces that punctuate experience in the first half
luka
Well-known member
It's adding another layer to the Chaucer Eliot palimpsest April/roots. It it's not so much talking poorly about Spring exactly is it. It's talking about how pity chokes and perverts the natural course of Spring and renewel. Let Artemis kill clean and not have rot and decay and bad smells.
william kent
Well-known member
2. The Cantos, by Ezra Pound. And that means getting to the last page. You may give up on some pages, and say, “I’ll never figure this stuff out!” But keep going until you get to the last page. Pound offers something no other writer except Dante has ever attempted – and Dante does it in a medieval way that doesn’t mean much to modern people. Pound offers a hierarchy of values. We’ve heard so many voices from the East telling us “All is One,” and we’ve got so many puritanical duelists of all sorts telling us, “No; there’s good and bad.” And they all define those terms in their own way: the Christian “good and evil” duality; the ecologist’s “nature good; man bad” duality; the feminist’s “woman good; man bad” duality, and so on. Against this monism and dualism Pound offers a hierarchy of values, in which he gives you a panoramic picture of human history, very much like Griffith’s Intolerance, only in it, Pound shows levels of awareness, levels of civilization, levels of ethics and levels of lack of all these things. And you realize that you have a hierarchy of values too, but you’ve never perfectly articulated it. Every writer gives you a hierarchy of values. But by making this the central theme, Pound makes you face the question, “Will I accept this as the best hierarchy of values?” I can’t, because the guy had a screw loose. Great poet, but a little bit funny in the head at times, trying to synthesize Jefferson, Confucius, Picasso and Mussolini. So what you’ve got to do is struggle with Pound, and create your own hierarchy of values to convince yourself that you grok more than he did. And he combined genius and looniness. It’s an invigorating book to get you out of dualism, which is the Western trap, and monism, which is the Eastern trap, to attain realism: a hierarchy of values.
-- RAW.
Brings Spare to mind, writing around the same time as both Joyce and Pound. Also fixated on dissolving the binary. And also created his own personal hierarchy.
He could have been picked up by Pound, it could have all been different for him.
Reading 'Retreat' got me thinking about this a bit, with the self/ego binary, which Matthew suggests is false cos ofc self also contains ego.
Venn diagrams and overlap rather than strict divisions.
But would have to be a 3D Venn diagram, in motion, like Indras net, to capture it all.
He could have been picked up by Pound, it could have all been different for him.
Reading 'Retreat' got me thinking about this a bit, with the self/ego binary, which Matthew suggests is false cos ofc self also contains ego.
Venn diagrams and overlap rather than strict divisions.
But would have to be a 3D Venn diagram, in motion, like Indras net, to capture it all.
Corpsey.
Well-known member
The spring time killing sentiment and the merchant vignette in the 4th stanza relates to what I've read about primitive feasts. that outside whatever cultural/religious/social function the feasts had, they also did the work of preventing a surplus of goods becoming capital, which would corrupt the direct nature of power dynamics in the village. China followed the same logic more knowingly when they would close down mines before letting them produce a surplus in the 13th century.
Corpsey.
Well-known member
and, still refusing to look up any references, you could see how the 5th stanza's focus on writing could fit in there: that a sign could take on a surplus of association -the 'Dead hair under the crown'- that would exclude it from play and expression and keep it bound to representation. And the words are carved into metal, literally becoming rigid and solidified.
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Corpsey.
Well-known member
Reading the cantos had me thinking that heavy references might be most fitting for poetry, as much as codifying any medium/form isnt a complete waste of time. If a poem is typically less concerned about narrative and rather offering a up its own thought system, internal references are direction to take said system- here, now that youve got this tool go try it out over there. Luka wont like this though because its a robotic take.
woops
is not like other people
i've written a bit on here about reading canto I without references. doing that is worthwhile but you will only get the aesthetic effect and not the underlying history, or whatever you like to call it. maybe better to say things should be readable without references, not necessarily read that way.
luka
Well-known member
This is just an arbitrary prejudice and doesn't work for modernist literature which designed to be plugged in to larger bodies of knowledge and tradition.