Warren Wilson MFA program
Swannanoa, NC
07/03/10
begins by reading Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”
then the first 85 lines of Pisan Canto #74 (the first)
Pound is about excess
- dismisses generalities without particulars
- writes from the wind’s view in periplum (as seen from a boat)
- paradise exists in fragments
- anti-hierarchical world view
- meticulously rendered particulars
#74 is 842 lines long
#75 is 9 lines followed by monophonic bird song
Pound’s discomfort with parameters of lyric
his anxiety of imagination to own it all, to refuse the values order enforces
poems want to exceed the restraints without which they could not exist
the Pisan Cantos’s excess is driven by Pound’s wish not to die (in a cage)
what matters most in the Pisan Cantos is tone
the reader looks for patterns amidst the cacophony Pound creates
is gratified when the poem repeats itself, when tone repeats itself
- elegaic
- colloquial
- haranguing
- reverent
a structural pattern that repeats
the poem is organized by the interweaving of the tones
by its unrelenting particularity & disjunctions
a mind desperate to compose itself out of nothing
the illusion of human interiority
the poem idealizes the “stagger” of the poem
the metaphor: the knowledge that he will be silenced, yet he must be heard
Keats’s “this living hand”: the wish to exceed the boundaries of human
Pound’s irremedially roiling texture gives way here & there to pure lyricism
Pound found “pull down” from Speare’s Pocket Book of Verse
the book found in the “jo-house” (latrine)
a volume issued to every American soldier in WWII
green casque = nature
lyric song becomes a swollen magpie
the Pisan Cantos more rigorous in procedures than in meaning or conclusions
Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is also a reprieve from finitude & death
the nightingale eludes & embodies at the same time
the language so tonally rich overwhelms equivocation
lyric vs sense
inadequacy of its own conclusions
any answer is incapable of solving or being enough for the equivocation
Keats: “poetry should surprise by a fine (limited) excess (limited-less)
words on the page are the linguistic medium
to exceed is to cease to exist, to meticulously make
Dickinson: “enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs — only pathetic counterfeits”
poems are not content with their own finitude
they ask us to change
