ILX Book Club - Ezra Pound: The Cantos

I wasn't able to source a copy (my library hates me! I have fines to pay!!) to decide on a split.

Be nice to read a discussion of a few sections :-)

Flipping from poem to footnotes will induce vertigo.

Tempted to sign up. I don't know these at all.

the traditional divisions are (haha as per wikipedia:)

I–XVI
XVII–XXX
XXXI–XLI (XI New Cantos)
XLII–LI (Fifth Decad, called also Leopoldine Cantos)
LII–LXI (The China Cantos)
LXII–LXXI (The Adams Cantos)
LXXII–LXXIII (The Italian Cantos)
LXXIV–LXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)
LXXXV–XCV (Section: Rock-Drill)
XCVI–CIX (Thrones)
Drafts & Fragments

People I am assuming will not have the Italian ones, there are some slightly different extant versions of drafts and fragments.

It might be worth having a slow first chunk (one through seven gives a goodish break point); whereas the adams cantos + the china cantos could be one chunk, likewise everything after the pisans. don't know, though, i have only read like 20% of all of this.

Wait, 896 pages? That's almost as long as Ada!

But on the bright side, hopefully better written and more whitespace on the page.

you guys really have to do this with somewhat shorter works imo

alright how many languages do ya'll know

2.5, but they aren't the relevant ones.

lol, I did look at wiki before I started this thread and thought the better of it :)

Wait, 896 pages? That's almost as long as Ada!

But on the bright side, hopefully better written and more whitespace on the page.

― Shakes-a-maxion (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 15 May 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's the spirit

Maybe people should read Babel No More before they tackle this

one of those things that when I was young I assumed I would someday read and now I assume I will not

i'm ready to go! got my beautiful well-worn Faber copy with the Italian cantos and all. have always wanted to make a hypertext of this but the problem you get is that google tends to turn up links to the poem rather than the info you wanna exegise

And then went down to the ship

I'm looking at Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound. He suggests moving directly to the Pisan Cantos, getting the flavour of them, and then moving back and studying the development towards them. They, apparently, close the circle begun by the initial seven. Maybe that can be optional homework...

While I'm happy we're choosing a poem instead of a novel I don't know if I can join this time. I find so much of The Cantos a trial.

I'm shy about poetry in general - it's always somewhat of a trial. I've heard it said that Pound's wish for poetry is basically, "To hell with your taste. I want to improve your perception." So I'm hoping that the difficulty of The Cantos will turn out to be educational.

Where is Aimless when we need him?

couldn't we read "The Auroras of Autumn" or something

i don't know how you bozos agreed to doing this, but since it's summer i might just get in on it.

Raring to go. In fact, I've gone. Been away in the wilderness, and started reading them a couple of weeks ago in between other things. Through the first 30 or so.

accidentally started this read, so I may as well shoot the first spurt of impressions.

So afaict we go down and meet the dead, Homer-style (beautiful), then some v lovely classical man-nature-god metamorphoses + dionysian rites (+ Circean debasement), then aestheticised medievalism shading into Italian city state politics (financialisation coming in here? mercenaries, cost of art, dead poets etc?), and there's constant to-and-fro round the crucial eras, and then it hits seven and sort of flickers into (debased?) modernity looking for the dead world, which is Canto I's going down to meet the dead again.

There are lots of lovely passages, but I just don't trust him is the problem – as i was going on sensibility seemed a combo of totally typical late-Victorian aesthetic fetishes (Hellenism, Medievalism) & cranky ancestor of internet goldbug conspiracists.

I don't really know what's going on a lot of time. I haven't really had access to reference books or guides or the internet so I've had to rely on what the previous owner (It's inscribed, so I just googled her. She's a documentary film grant writer now) wrote in my second-hand copy (she gave up after Canto VII). Light annotator. More connected now, may start looking stuff up, though maybe not. I've enjoyed reading blind. But how much more do I enjoy this if I get what's going on in these cubist or micro-sliced versions of condottierri anecdotes? This does feel way more gotta-catch-em-all re:references than Eliot. A bad thing, that.

I really don't trust his aesthetic/organic fetish for classical & late medieval world. Am I misreading that? I'm having trouble pulling his personal fascistness apart from the root of the poetry. I just don't know if a really well-engineered verse will be enough with this spirit behind it.

I really don't trust his aesthetic/organic fetish for classical & late medieval world. Am I misreading that?

Nah -- it's my problem with his work after "Mauberley."

This library copy has a mess of annotations of Canto I in three different hands, otherwise unmarked. Ominous.

when i tried to read this in college, drawn in by the high-modernist-difficult-monument reputation, i had a lot of trouble grabbing hold because of the endless proliferation of proper names (people, places) for which i had absolutely no referents. it was frustrating - i took to that era because of joyce-style musical/close-observational prose and wcw-style no-ideas-but-in-things poetry and pound was supposedly this great master who just seemed so self-impressed, so overtaken by whatever exactly his project was, that he could barely get out a whole poem without ruining it.

Where is Aimless when we need him?

In Brittany, carrousing with my wife, with my library 6,000 miles away and not regretting it.

Unc Ez's unsavoury but brilliant pal Wyndham Lewis's Wild Body for max Brittany/club vorticist horsepower.

easy on the cidre.

j., there's a perloff article about the weight of the proper names in the cantos. i half-trust it.

http://marjorieperloff.com/articles/pound-duchamp-nominalism/

This does feel way more gotta-catch-em-all re:references than Eliot. A bad thing, that.

...

I'm having trouble pulling his personal fascistness apart from the root of the poetry. I just don't know if a really well-engineered verse will be enough with this spirit behind it.

― woof, Tuesday, 15 May 2012 23:54 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's a commonplace i think stemming from kenner (though lol possibly just 'something i read on ile') that in eliot the better you know the references the more you realise you don't need them to follow the poetry, whereas pound is the exact opposite

it's also been a fairly common comment on pound since the 70s got hold of him that his aesthetic as a poet requires fascism to underwrite it. the strong central self that somehow undergirds the world of collage and confusion he's copy-pasted together. this obviously requires a very loose definition of 'fascism'

i read a pretty good take on pound lately about how even something so anodyne as his constant use of images of light can't ever be separated from his fascist side. how the light of technological/political progress that exists in the mid cantos should be taken as essentially what the quiet, still light stuff in the pisan cantos, and the "little light / like a rush-light / to lead back to splendour" in the fragments. it was a really good argument, i thought, put the sort of hand-waved 'fascist aesthetic' ppl of my previous para into some sort of close reading. no i can't remember who wrote it.

Kenner seems to argue that Pound's allusiveness isn't a serious obstacle:

One of the most fateful accidents in literary history was the publishers' demand for a few more pages that led to notes being appended to The Waste Land. Nothing has done more to jeopardize poet-audience relations in the present century, largely by spreading abroad the impression that the reader is either playing a hunt-the-source game or is utterly debarred from if he can't instantly detect an allusion to any book on an esoteric and polyglot reading list.

Pound is within his rights in expecting a knowledge of Homer, Dante, the mythology in Ovid. The rest, for the careful reader, is there on the page; enough, that is, to keep whole passages from going utterly blank. The encyclopedia will clear up small points; but it is much more important to sharpen one's ear for nuances of tone and implications of rhythm. The man who has been supplied with the denotations of all the words on the page before he can make a start is making no distinction between a poem and a cross-word puzzle.

When we read the lines,

in contending for certain values
(Janequin per esempio, and Orazio Vechii or Bronzino)

we can see, without knowing whether Janequin is a composer or an art-gallery, what kind of thing the second line presents.

It happens that Pound attaches particular importance to Janequin's bird-chorale (reproduced in Canto LXXXV), an archetype of indestructible form the birdsongs in which have survived successive arrangements for chorus, lute, piano, and violin. To know this sharpens the relevance of the line, and no encyclopaedia would lay the stress thus. But (a) the point occurs several times in Pound's prose; (b) without knowing it we can in any case read on without utter bewilderment. (pp. 216-217)

Of Eliot, on the other hand, he says,

Contrast: Mr. Eliot's habit of engaging in his poems so much of the conceptual corpus of allusions that the reader who doesn't know the sources is, while not bewildered, innocent of whole dimensions of the poem. (p. 216)

As I understand this: while Pound does use lots of esoteric proper names from history and mythology, the reader isn't required to invest these names with any more depth or meaning than what the poem itself gives them. If we see how these names are operating in the poem, in terms of their relations with other elements, we have the important facts.

Which all sounds rather convenient for the reader.

ha, so i had it the wrong way round? never mind. i hate that book anyway.

The man who has been supplied with the denotations of all the words on the page before he can make a start is making no distinction between a poem and a cross-word puzzle.

well kind of yes, but kind of bollocks to yr Leavis-y "textual unity" shtick and get with the programme, Modernist texts can be poems and crosswords and esoteric encyclopedias all at once, son

Yeah, and I think he's simply recommending that we weight these differently in the cases of Eliot and Pound - Eliot is more likely to engage his sources on their terms whereas Pound is more likely to engage his sources on his own terms, as part of his own idiosyncratic conceptual corpus. Thus, gaps in the crossword puzzle are less disastrous for a reader of Pound than for a reader of Eliot.

it's also been a fairly common comment on pound since the 70s got hold of him that his aesthetic as a poet requires fascism to underwrite it. the strong central self that somehow undergirds the world of collage and confusion he's copy-pasted together. this obviously requires a very loose definition of 'fascism'

The 'strong self' I wouldn't be so persuaded by from what I've read thus far – he doesn't seem to push himself to the front & the effortful trust in something central, a rock in the middle of the ruins or a strong system, is that not just this strain of Modernism? I don't think that's necc. fascistic – like I don't think it would be fair to call Eliot's aesthetic a fascist one, for all its plentiful unpleasantness & for all it shares with Pound. Or David Jones's, similarly. But the connection to fascism doesn't have to be that loose when some part of his response to chaos is fetishisation of a mystified archaic greece, classical Rome and late-feudal courtly europe. isn't that sort of call to an organic, man-nature-ritual eurociv golden age a part of lots of fascist aesthetics? (Yeats a nearer parallel, maybe.)

I like Kenner, but I remember finding The Pound Era quite off - slippery & tenuous arguments, lots of assumptions and assertions.

Thinking more, I'm not really sure where I stand on references in Pound v Eliot. I'm not sure there's as much in it as Kenner makes out - Eliot up to The Waste Land is an extraordinary phrasemaker - Prufrock, even just as surface glitter, is beautiful. I'm not convinced one's 'innocent of whole dimensions of the poem' if you don't get allusions in Eliot, or those dimensions don't matter as much as srious critics of the last century thought - maybe there's that stern Eliotic anglicanism that goes missing? but Pound's allusiveness locks you out of the page in a way that Eliot's doesn't. It's not just the fragments of greek or italian (and the chinese characters, not that I've hit those yet), it is the names – like who the fuck is cabestan and why is his heart in a dish?

but then I'm sure that goes against Eliot too - I'm just much more used to his allusion range. So I don't know where I stand.

don't worry i've found out who cabestan is now.

after 1915 Pound didn't digest his allusions.

didn't you say cathay was the high point?

The 'strong self' I wouldn't be so persuaded by from what I've read thus far – he doesn't seem to push himself to the front & the effortful trust in something central, a rock in the middle of the ruins or a strong system, is that not just this strain of Modernism? I don't think that's necc. fascistic – like I don't think it would be fair to call Eliot's aesthetic a fascist one, for all its plentiful unpleasantness & for all it shares with Pound. Or David Jones's, similarly. But the connection to fascism doesn't have to be that loose when some part of his response to chaos is fetishisation of a mystified archaic greece, classical Rome and late-feudal courtly europe. isn't that sort of call to an organic, man-nature-ritual eurociv golden age a part of lots of fascist aesthetics? (Yeats a nearer parallel, maybe.)

but pound by the 30s (with inklings of it earlier) literally believed that his particular conjunction of looking at things the right way would guarantee a return to the society he wanted. butttt this is more pronounced in the cantos a little later when it's all founding fathers and economics and chinese names -- an any rate, if eliot displays an 'effortful trust' in something it's certainly not his own aesthetic praxis.

also, i am choosing to believe i remembered kenner the wrong way round because my way round it works.

also who is cabestan.

who literally believes that.

Went to a bricks and mortar today and splurged on a new paperback copy. Just skipping around now to see how I am going to get a handle on it. Trying not to read the long posts upthread yet.

Just off the top of my head and no wikipedia, Cabestan refers to an incident of kinship cannibalism in the Middle Ages that for Pound "rhymed" with the same story in House of Atreus Greek mythology.

I really want to take part but the time is not right.

That's basically it, tho unlike the Tereus Itys Procne Philomela saga, it's not kin-eating, just feeding a troubador to an his lover.
I did wiki:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillem_de_Cabestany.
Don't know if that'll come out right, first go at linking from phone.

my old copy is in storage, so i got a new one today. john crowe ransom's back-cover blurb still cracks me up:

'pound's cantos is a modern classic that everybody has to know.'

"...and not read."

I am potentially game for this—been reading some Pound lately, though I'm less interested right now in the Cantos than in what preceded them

OK, randomly dipping into this and it seems to be one of those books you have to force yourself through once without really understanding it much at all to then later reread with reference books at hand. Which I used to be able to do and might once again be able to, but not sure how this works in the context of crash course reading group. Still, dipping into it I see individual lines that I like and faux-Homeric constructions that I enjoy. Also see lots of foreign language stuff that, even if I am familiar with the language in question I assume to be literary references that I am not familiar with, which is OK, I guess.

KEEP THE PEACE, BORSO!

so i read the first XXX cantos the other day.

i was surprised to find certain early bits much more lucid than they were in the past - i think because i've become a more sophisticated reader, and also just because i know some more bits of semi-knowledge that helped me stay clued in.

but i am surprised to find HOW MUCH crap about the italians fills up these cantos. i like the idea of prosy things being made subjects of poetry, and the idea of poetry being more or less prose-with-condensation, but i found it hard to see the ahem 'literary' value or point of big chunks there. i can see that i might have to read much more carefully so that i can appreciate some ironies that play out on the dramatic/narrative/sequential level, but at the moment that seems like a requirement that i read even more closely something that does not promise to repay my reading in 'poetic' payoff.

wondering what sort of a schedule people are thinking of?

I've got no idea - feel like this is almost uncoordinateable.

I've read about 50 of them now, but I'm getting busy again now so will slow down. I'm not very good at schedules – I'll just get through them when I can, then go back through if/when we talk about something.

If this is going to work – and tbh i'm still sceptical of this as a book-club project - maybe we should read away, chop them as thomp suggests above, & maybe pick one canto per chunk for a close look? It is a bit uncontrollable as it stands.

It's inscribed, so I just googled her. She's a documentary film grant writer now

There's a narrative poem in those words alone

Let's chop them like Ezra chopped through world literature.

Here's a quote from an Alfred Kazin essay published in 1959:

Ezra Pound could be a beautiful poet, in dribs and drabs of isolated lyric pieces. His real gift is for pastiche. He has imitated the Greeks, the Chinese, and finally his own youth. But has always been obsessed; for a number of years he was clearly insane, and what makes him puzzling -- if you really look at him -- is his manic oscillation between savagery and tenderness, between insight and phony scholarship. Any man of good will MUST be divided about Pound. For myself, surrounded as I am by inexpungible memories of the millions of dead, I cannot think of the purely literary case made out for Pound without horror.

i've just been ordered to have a draft of my thesis done by friday. so i will not be joining you on this just yet.

and i'm still reading the moody bio

but you'll have plenty of time to read pound on saturday, hey?

ok so i seem to have just read quite a lot of Chinese history in verse. I didn't really enjoy it much.

on reflection, the 'one canto per chunk for a close look' plan seems worth a try. I am going dump my observations here early next week – and I am thinking Canto VII to start, then maybe XV the week after that.

btw if anyone wants in (& is ok with unOCRed pdfs and piracy) there's a text of the cantos & the 2-vol companion to the cantos at aaaaarg.

& I hope the thesis draft went well thomp.

Thanks woof, I'm gonna order a copy from the library tomorrow.

Would a 2nd thread be useful? Canto x for week y, etc.

'Canto chunk'.

naw, why bother, just chunk it here

agree, let's just stick in here till we hit 3k posts.

So, thank you very much guides and such, I think I'm basically on top of the references here, as bare references: Helen = Eleanor of Aquitane, then Homer, Ovid's advice on picking up girls in the amphitheatre, medieval battlefield, Dante's log that shoots up sparks, fragment of Flaubert, a meeting with Henry James (who's painted in phrases from Dante), then a section where he, Pound/The poet revisits old Parisian haunts. That takes us a little under halfway.

We're still somewhere fairly recognisable in this opening chunk of the Cantos – it's modernist collage, and there's a known idea of fine verse in 'we also made ghostly visits' section. It's not quite the collage or blurt(*) that hits us as we move into the Chinese history or Adams correspondence.

But - I don't think it's that great as fine verse fwiw. Unmemorable. That 'we also made ghostly visits' section is quite clumsy and vague - it sort of create an impression, but is a bit lame, like the epithets are lazy - 'sun-tanned, gracious and well-formed fingers' - the 'sun-tanned' seems to be trying to make the two slack adjectives concrete, but it doesn't come off imo. There's something he's not really getting - misses the surprising word, is either syllable counting or working to form and against speech - shld be 'the gouty-footed (one!)'.

Right, so, it's springs out from a 'dear dead women' backbone in the first half - helen, eleanor, his Ione – into a more general play of now/then, dead/alive, motion/life contrasts in the middle/end sections of the poem - like the dead more alive than the living, mere moving husks not being alive, a room in different states (fake-Egyptian room hosting Jazz in teens/20s vs what it was before, 'the no-colour plaster') being remembered, superimposed. It's lyric and non-rational, or not an argument, but it recaps lots of where we've been in this opening chunk of the Cantos - down among the dead in I, time jumps between Italy, Provence, Archaic Greece – and pulls it into a now. This ply-upon-ply of time art is the best of him for me - slippage, I like the feeling of not knowing where I am quite.

The men as locust-shells, talk=husks stuff – I'm just taking this as Modernist misanthropy, and I find it harder to stomach as I get older. But I guess if I do spend an hour on XIV/XV next week, that would prob be the place to poke those ideas a bit. I might be misreading that though.

(*) As Alfred says upthread, Pound doesn't digest his allusions (**) after 1915/a certain point. But yes, I can go along with this as a way thru' the fussinesses of organic poem - the digested-allusion texture of eg Eliot is maybe less useful than this direct quotation quilt/see-what-fits poem-page - Pound's undigestion is nearest neighbour of that Marianne Moore clipping-file style? (which I love better than almost anything. What does Moore say about Pound? I will find out later).

(**) I mean what do we get out of allusion anyway? We don't now have an immediate response to seeing a Sicheus namecheck; we have to look it up, and maybe there's some stockholm syndorme thing where the poet is our captor & the more we work the more we believe in him,so the more we look stuff up… but I don't feel like there's a deep intuitive vibrancy in any of this stuff that £ keeps going on about. I don't trust him! Like why in God's name does he spend a couple of lines lifting from the Lusiads?

but maybe I find it sympathetic, or useful, to see £ as a bullshitter (as Mark Ford suggests/mentions in the newish LRB); we mostly aren't hard classicists now - if we want to make use of Homer/Ovid etc, then grab and blag, force some painterly colour out of them, is the way to do it. But… I don't really trust Pound to be taking me somewhere intersting. I think he's trying to bully me with some of the allusions; Eliot knows what he's doing. I'm not sure Pound does. But again, maybe that improv/sketchiness opens up useful space for the make-it-new tradition.

woof out. for tonight.

I'm now out for the foreseeable. I was hoping to post a dense telegraphese confused reading of Canto XV, but I've got to do some semi-pro reading over the coming weeks & there's no space for Ez.

kill the canto club, do lionel asbo i say.

hey just when I got myself a copy - will plough on, expect it'll jsut pass me by but I'll look at the posts here now and again.

right where were we?

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/ScreenShot2012-09-23at124546_zps6bca26e8.png

so I leave him alone for 8 months and he's still talking about Chinese history.

i think about Foucault and Borges describing China as a land made of text and imagination and it seems fitting that Pound fixates - feel like for him China is reducible to an Ideogram, and history is reducible to a set of scrolls

I can see that I guess. Feel like it comes up short on the imagination side, like there's no attachment to the world, just these bare narratives punctuated by anecdote, schematically shouting down taoists and buddhists, upping Confucianism - like the imagination informing this whole reading of Chinese history is always turning back to Pound's lectures on how the state should be run. Love bare + disruptive anti-aesthetics, but when they're used for an end that makes my rational-critical head kick in it can't really come off.

But yes maybe the panorama is working… war, collapse, small victories, misgovernment, war, collapse… I'm carrying on. At least the Jesuits have turned up now. Always interested in Jesuits in China.

wait till you get to the panegyric to Mattie Van Buren.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xiWjpjRl1Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player

So, yeah, I'm through China for the time being, and then the Adams Cantos just flew by.

Before going in, if you'd said "There's going to be a lot on the intersection of political theory and transatlantic mercantile history in the later 18th century for the next hundred, hundred and fifty pages", I would have said "sold" and yet I found it a little bit dull. Better than anecdotes from China, but really, there's that sense that I'm having a Prison Planet reading of history pushed on me w/o any aesthetic compensation or connection to experience - I mean I am for poetry as the all-encompassing, compendious, cyclopedic, able to absorb polemic, fragment, stray text, scraps of news, etc etc but this doesn't seem to reconnect, complete a circuit for me psychologically or touch/record the world.

But it's the Pisan Cantos next. I am looking forward to them.

The Pisan Cantos are elegant and elegaic, and constitute something of a throwback to his earlier manner, but with most of the didactic bullying removed.

I read a lot of this last year.

I mean, this book, not this thread.

hi pinefox. good to see you around.

Thanks Fizzles, that's generous!

Islamic banking (IB) in Russia is a great idea, sovereign and multipolar, highly patriotic. Usury is an absolute evil.

The American poet Ezra Pound, who dedicated his magnum opus Cantos to the destruction of interest capital as an idea, reasoned as follows: God is eternity and… pic.twitter.com/b1LElv5sg0

— Alexander Dugin (@Agdchan) July 4, 2023

avoiding the major issue with most critiques of "usury" there (nb usury is bad but that specific word is too fraught with antisemitism to be anything but a gigantic red flag imo)

It's a fucked tweet, it's just weird how the Cantos is checked out on it.

old EP did bang on about usury tbf, i hear his voice when i see the word too