Which huge american poem should I read?

Didn't see this was a poll--I was going to suggest "Desolation Row."

The only section I'd read of Sandover is "Divine Comedies," the culmination of Merrill's work and maybe the American formalist tradition: grand, funny, and camp all at once.

That's more or less the first third or so, the Book of Ephraim right? I read that and thought it was absolutely stunning, really brilliant, like the last major stand of that kind of voice - capacious, precise, flexible, funny. Then i got into the mystic peacock cosmology and fell off.

Ammons' Garbage has entertaining bits. Paterson after the first book is dull.

Where's Edward Arlington Robinson's Merlin?

Zukofsky is the one I most want to read, so I'm voting for that.

Robinson won three Pulitzers, one for a booklength poem that no one at my university library has checked out since 1981.

woof, "capacious" is a perfect word to describe TBOE.

it's a tone I like a lot - I associate it with mid-period Auden, that knack for engaging (or seductive) civilised address that carries you along chattily then accelerates into something else - serious argument, or lyric, or close natural observation.

From a quick scan I do not like the look of that Merlin.

Is it heretical to call Merrill a better poet than Auden? I'll say it anyway. He surpasses Auden in wit, energy, and invention. With Auden always the great poems read like scripts for the public personality.

Xp

I mean obvs its natural to associate Auden with the tone of the Book of Ephraim because he dictates parts of it from beyond the grave.

I don't think it's heretical - I don't feel like Auden's much of an orthodoxy nowadays. (Suspect MacNeice would edge ahead of him if you asked a lot of poetry heads to pick one of MacSpaunday now). But I dunno, I'm Auden forever, love him beyond reason - I could maybe see the case for Merrill if it was Auden after 19fortysomething, and certainly if it was long poems only, but for wit, invention, perception, tone, I will always take Auden, tho' I don't know Merrill that well.

Can't say more. Time to leave work.

tho' I don't know Merrill that well

to clarify – first third of Sandover & been through the old-ish selected once.

Read all of those listed, start w Paterson, then go off-list to Ginsberg's "Kaddish," about his mother and her mental problems--not a downer, at least to me. Read it on my first and best acid trip (the whole little book, Kaddish and Other Poems, I think)

It's not that huge, but vivid, detailed, w momentum, one of his best probably.

cantos gets pretty lame eventually, no need to read the whole thing unless you really want to hear outdated social / political rantings

i voted for merrill btw

Harry Antrim (Donald's dad), one of my grad professors and a huge Eliot stan, used to grumble that the Cantos were "literally – I mean this – literally unreadable."

Voted "You missed The Dreams Songs (Berryman) and An Explanation of America (Pinsky)" and otherwise would say Paterson.

no 'john brown's body'?

there is a pretty good part toward the end of the cantos where he insults my religion

these are not really poetry but i always loved these

http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com/isbn.asp?isbn=1574231898

yeah I've never really got enough out of Pound to make me commit to tunnelling through the Cantos, or to finding a way around all the batshit bad shit – like his cauldron of race/economy/politics arguments looks like the ne plus ultra of modernist psychopathologies, but idk I've never seen much more to lure me in than raving horror at the evils of industrial democratic europe + a very good ear.

I thought about adding The Dream Songs, but I feel I'm ok with them for the time being. Will look at Explanation of America, and Kaddish, maybe time to get over Ginsberg allergy.

a huge Eliot stan

dying breed.

I read a couple of the Pisan Cantos and was taken with a couple of perfectly chiseled verses. Pound's about verses not whole poems imo (with exceptions).

i was going to read the cantos this holiday, that didn't happen

well, i have four days left i guess

you can do it, ~204pp (faber ed.) or 29 cantos / day.

I wonder of Pound's greatest contribution to literature is helping Eliot w The Waste Land, re Alfred "perfectly chiseled verses"

I think Pound's greatest talents were as a critic, gadfly, pot-stirrer and man with his fingers in everyone's pie. He was a damn fine poet, too. His ear for language was similar to perfect pitch in a musician. But he needed someone he respected more than himself to tell him the Cantos were becoming a literary white elephant and he was riding a fast horse to nowhere, and sadly Pound never had a Pound to guide him.

That last phrase is exactly right.

Pound's Cathay lyrics are some of the most haunting translations I've ever read, but their masterly channeling of 10th (8th?) century voice attuned to a twentieth century ear made The Cantos redundant.

lol no

i don't know, i think (and tbf i have read ~30% of the total words in them maybe) the cantos are far more interesting standing there as they are than they would be had they 'succeeded'

'cathay' only works if you remember 'the seafarer' is meant to be running through the middle of it. -- & there are solid reasons to prefer his endless agonizing about what voices he can channel, and under what conditions, to his presumption in giving you the chinese. i don't know, i may change my mind on that tomorrow.

oh, have you seen the version of 'song of the bowmen of shu' he did in later life when he was translating the classic anthology? it's a hoot

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pG1UEqZDiG0/S0SfXWS5MVI/AAAAAAAAAbo/ta9DjsfsB8M/s400/stanford-+battlefield+++cover-final-recreation.jpg

song of the bowmen of shu is fantastic and i love love love that anthology

You can skip the Adams block of The Cantos and not miss anything. But 47 and 49 floor me every time.

Pound was crazy and TC was a huge failure, but there are those passages that no one else could write.

I wonder of Pound's greatest contribution to literature is helping Eliot w The Waste Land, re Alfred "perfectly chiseled verses"

Eliot had the material and Pound didn't. Pound had the control and Eliot didn't. After the composition power shifted from one to the other. John Harwood is good on this.

From looking at the galleys it's astonishing -- and a relief for us readers -- how correct Pound's editing was.

Somebody give me $200, I need the complete edition of Ronald Johnson's Ark. After I read it, let me tell you about it.

check your PayPal brah

Thanks, you're a prince

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Fine -- read The Cantos. But you'll put it down to read Sandover.

yes let us know how far you can make it

Somebody give me $200, I need the complete edition of Ronald Johnson's Ark. After I read it, let me tell you about it.

Ark rocks. Get it from a university library if you can.

Paterson by William Carlos Williams 1

u should count this as 2

I would've voted WCW as well so there's 3.

I haven't read a few of these at all but it goes without saying that all boast unreadable sections.

does it?

Sandover, Paterson, Cantos, Gunslinger -- they've got deep sloughs

because I think it goes without saying that most contemporary readers need to be hand-held and hand-jobbed and whimsyed a bit too much by Eggers-ys writers to get through these great poems.

okay--maybe some slow spots, but "deep sloughs"? No.

We'll disagree on the last point; by the way, that these poems have sloughs shouldn't dissuade readers. The sloughs in the Merrill and Williams poems deserve study (no exceptions for the parts of The Cantos I've read; those are motley junk).

oh fck.

well, I shouldn't have put it in if I wasn't willing to read it.

if I look in my heart i think i wanted merrill or olson to win. I enjoy what I've read of both of them. But I'm sure The Cantos will be good for me.

I've still got about a month of Browning to read though. Guess I'll be spending a lot of time in imagined Italys of the 19th & 20th Cs, I'm ok with that.

Italies. Italys.

i did and will always vote Cantos. Pound's politics are often despicable and more often misguided but the poem's failure to cohere is more of a virtue than a failure and the universe it creates is beautiful despite the dumb cruelty of his racism. it's the most glorious failure-as-success and i go back and back to it in a way i never do with pre-Quartets Eliot.

and imo the concentration and comprehension that you afford the earlier Cantos are just best left behind when it gets fragmentary and ideogrammatic and opaque - just drift thru that fog and admire the beautiful icebergs that poke thru it right down to the end

Browning is appropriate prep for the Cantos anyway.

x-men it is then. I have read bits of the Cantos and also enjoyed bits of the Cantos. That's probably how it's going to stay for a while tho. Good thread, now want to read Merrill.

ty NV, that is inspiring - it's mostly the earlier cantos that I've read - always been put off by feeling like I've lost all reference points, like I have no idea what he's recounting, who he's discussing, etc etc. (Is it Kenner who says that if you simply know the references, Pound's actually fairly straightforward, whereas Eliot becomes more complex – or confused – the more you know?) And that particular Modernist music has never completely worked for me (you like Bunting more than me too iirc?) - whereas I do like Eliot up to The Waste Land a lot.

Also like hugh selwyn mauberley and sextus propertius.

Good. Now totally convinced myself this is right result.

I wonder of Pound's greatest contribution to literature is helping Eliot w The Waste Land, re Alfred "perfectly chiseled verses"

Doesn't he also push Yeats towards his middle Responsibilities style?

I've got a gorgeous unread Penguin edition of The Ring and the Book I bought as a college freshman in '93 that's mocked me for twenty years.

"Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is terrific, no question.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

xxp

now there's a poem with sloughs. Finally read it as part of this Browning commitment; great, really great, and just stupidly full and inventive and energetic, but there are weak books as it goes on.

admittedly my copy of Cantos is covered in pencil notes explaining references, from trawling thru the various keys and exegeses, but it's a poem and like any of the other big referential Modernist works i feel it ought to work on some level without having the author's brain/library. i kinda regret reading too much about Ulysses at the same time as i first read it, the stuff i read cold was purer and more fun in some way. with the Cantos i read a lot of it cold without going near a concordance, it was love for the poem that made me want to explore it later, but i think the explication and the experience are usually best managed at some kind of arm's length.

not dissing Eliot btw, just feel like i exhausted my urge to read him because he let me in too much, Pound's mad cold shoulder is more my personal ideal of art now. other people's mileages will definitely vary.

I'm much more comfortable nowadays going in cold and letting stuff slip by, not feeling like I have to get to position of authority or certainty or correctness on a book.

Also planning to read that David Graeber book, Debt, should be another interesting companion to bits of The Cantos.

btw a 2003 paperback edition of The Pisan Cantos was published; you can just read that, woof.

Nah, better go all in.

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

you know i almost sat down and read thro the x-men run when i was at my parents last wkd. it's pretty good.

when do you envisage starting on this? i just have the moody bio to finish and i'll join you

Browning for a bit, then I'm away for a bit, so somewhere around May 20.

TRATB?

Finished that, reading The Inn Album now. Once I'm through that, I think it'll be the early plays - Strafford, Druses, blot in the Scutcheon – or more likely some of those late volumes I barely know – Fifine at the Fair maybe. It's not programmatic, just an experiment really - what happens if I focus properly and just read this one author – who I like a great deal, but have no academic ties to and am no expert on – for a month or two. Sporadically dumping random thoughts here: browningversions.tumblr.com

Also planning to read that David Graeber book, Debt, should be another interesting companion to bits of The Cantos.

Must say that Pound's ranting against bank conspiracies sounds less crazy these days.

"Maximum Poems" is the only one of these I own - I've probably only read 1/4 of it though.

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?

wait a second, isn't this bunting?!?

i was going to mention briggflatts but IIRC correctly it's only like 700 stanzas or something so def not HUEG (though it is quite epic in more than one sense) and also he's from the UK

<3 <3 <3 basil bunting btw, would recommend to anybody, but esp people who dig getting-medieval-on-yo-ass poetry like "the seafarer" and "song of the bowmen of shu"

Must say that Pound's ranting against bank conspiracies sounds less crazy these days.

what about his admiration for Martin Van Buren?

xp

yes, Bunting! I've always liked that.

yeah that is probably my all-time favorite poem about poetry

what about his admiration for Martin Van Buren?

Beats Mussolini.

the crazy guy who Pound picked up his anti-banking economics from was on point about a lot of what's wrong with capitalism but then went all Ron Paul meets Hitler when it came to how to put it right

always liked the image of Pound when first in London. Running round dynamically ORGANISING things for Lewis, Eliot, Gaudia-Brzeska, wearing silk ties "hand-painted by a Japanese", with his plumed head of hair, being configured as some sort of Vorticist or modernist totem.

that description by ford is kinda golden

it took kind of a long while for him to grow into the non-absurd aspects of the image, i think. moody is quite good on his years as poetaster.

'poetaster' is unfair - his commitment to poetry was absolute, but his means seem questionable to people who didn't have to spend umpteen years throwing off the shackles of the victorian etc. -- also he's v lena dunham about it, lots of how-dare-you-suspect-i'm-wasting-my-time letters to homer. & a rather horrible remark to dorothy about the ideal function of a poet's wife.

i mean, he was basically a hipster; it's just that in literary london of the era he was necessarily the only one. great war nothing, pound just got v frustrated because his social category didn't manifest properly for another 80-90 years. hence fascism.

Fascism had lots of modernist appeal. It took care to project itself as sleek, shiny and up-to-date.

I think some care has to be taken with that - there were all sorts of sects of eugenicists and Christian progressives and mysticists, as well as 'I rather like this funny little man they've got in Germany' civil service/city types who found Hitler's germany appealing. The specific association of modernism with Fascism and anti-semitism, while it certainly holds water, is not an exclusive thing, in fact the fascistic traits it displays are rather more notable for being very commonplace than specific to modernist aesthetic movements as such.

I don't think what you say is wrong by any means, but more often than seems entirely right, modernism and modernist artists seem sometimes to be exclusively associated with fascism and the rise of nazi germany, producing a distorted picture of a shared cultural appeal

Fascism was itself terrified of artistic decadence and its regimentation was not of the same aesthetic as modernism I think. Probably.

That said, Eliot's anti-semitism is not a phantom, Lewis' fascism, tho recanted comparatively early to some others let more easily off the hook, is still what it looks like, and Pound's usury/anti-semitism is credulously naive at best. And certainly the cult of the machine as developed by Marinetti, with its mechanised belligerence, was unpleasantly inhuman, but it's worth remembering i think that it was the first world war, and not the second, that killed off a lot of the most extreme aesthetics of anti-human modernism.

Difficult area.

what is that one law about the internet

regression to the mean?

well put fizzles

Started reading The Book of Ephraim and am totally bowled over. First stage, loved the easy conversational almost Byronic swing to the opening (well, Don Juan Byronic), itself discussing the choice of mode. Second stage: the seance set-up amidst the American setting. Third: Ephraim's tone and utterances themselves - perfectly pitched between fragmented and lyrical, so they feel authentically delphic, plus the cosmic structure that Ephraim describes is appealingly metaphysically batshit. Love the introduction of the various historic characters. Feels fun, relaxed (useful for a v long poem) and ringing full of great lines. Appreciate the way he uses the Pope heroic couplet as a periodic punctuation on the poetic phrasing, helps split it up a bit - tempo generally is perfect.

Really excited.

sold my copy of Changing Light a few weeks ago for gas money; I have some regrets, but agree w/ everyone else that it goes downhill fast after BoE. I'd be open to reading more Merrill somewhere down the line, though.

weird not to see The Bridge as an option on this pole... not long enough for ya? :D

That's more or less the first third or so, the Book of Ephraim right? I read that and thought it was absolutely stunning, really brilliant, like the last major stand of that kind of voice - capacious, precise, flexible, funny. Then i got into the mystic peacock cosmology and fell off.

ok this exactly so far. If I can defeat The Mystic Peacock, possibly wearing the magic cloak of +5 stamina when fighting hardcore mystic cosmology class creatures, I'll report back. I'm quite up for some systematised mystic bullshit so I fancy my chances.

Beware! If the Mystic Peacock is in the habit of emitting ugly, ear-splitting screams at random intervals, as its non-mystic brethren do, then you may be in for a hard slog.

my new apartment is right next to william carlos william's old home/doctor's office, maybe now's the time to finally read paterson.

you should, it's good (what I've read of it, anyway) — like a less half-baked Cantos, or a hypertrophied Spoon River Anthology

weird not to see The Bridge as an option on this pole... not long enough for ya? :D

partly that, but I read it a while back so it def doesn't qualify.

Good luck with that Peacock Fizzles. I can't see myself getting past it soon.

still got 2/3 of the Cantos to go. I WILL FINISH.

After a slightly heavy going section of recondite domestic reference, the small section that starts

Powers of lightness, darkness, powers that be

is wonderful. As usual, the poet and his partner are interrogating dead soul Ephraim across the Ouija board about metaphysical mechanics:

Power, then, kicks upstairs those who posess it,
The good and bad alike? EXCEPT FOR MOZART
Whom love of Earth, command of whose own powers
So innocent as to amount to scorn
HAVE CAUSED REPEATEDLY TO BE REBORN
Skipping all the Stages? HE PREFERS
LIVE MUSIC TO A PATRONS HUMDRUM SPHERES
Is this permitted? WHEN U ARE MOZART YES
He's living now? As what? A BLACK ROCK STAR
WHATEVER THAT IS LET US NOT DIGRESS
OURS IS A GREAT WHITE WAY OF NAMES IN LIGHTS
BYRON PAVLOVA BILLY SUNDAY JOB
OTTO & GENGHIZ KHAN MME CURIE
Hitler too? YES Power's worst abusers
Are held, though, stricly INCOMMUNICADO
CYSTS IN THE TISSUE OF ETERNITY
SO MY POOR RUINED LOVE CALIGULA
SO HITLER Here on Earth, we rather feel,
Such wise arrangements fail. The drug-addicted
Farms. Welkin the strangler. Plutonium waste
Eking out in drowned steel rooms a half
Life of how many million years? Enough
To set the doomsday clock - its hands our own:
The same rose ruts, the red-as-thorn crosshatchings-
Minutes nearer midnight. On which stroke
Powers at the heart of the matter, powers
We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake,
Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath
And speak new formulae of megadeath.
NO SOULS CAME FROM HIROSHIMA U KNOW
EARTH WORE A STRANGE NEW ZONE OF ENERGY
Caused by? SMASHED ATOMS OF THE DEAD MY DEARS
New that brought into play our sharpest fears.

Cross-posting with the current what are you reading thread, where Aimless is further on than me.

NB: Words in ALL CAPS are presumed to be transcribed from the Ouija board and are the contributions of the dead soul, Ephraim, in response to the poet.