Pound is starting to hit his stride here, with the archaic and arcane mixtures one expects: Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt mixed with Italy and even a little bit of medieval England. But we don’t yet see those stanzas or turns of phrase that simply blow your mind yet.
I did, though, appreciate the lines:
Is smothered beneath a mule,
a poet’s ending.
The Fourth Canto begins to truly look like what one expects of the Cantos. Though the lines often seem to refer to some sort of narrative, they rarely refer to the same narrative.
This is where we see Pound’s obsession with words as individual objects and his use of words for their qualities, in and of themselves, rather than, necessarily, in relation to each other (as in coherent sentences, stanzas, or paragraphs).
He also starts digging deeper into his bag or erudition. For example, referring to the church at “Poictiers” – “Poictiers” being an old English way of spelling the French town of Poitiers.
And, for the first time, he starts mixing Chinese names and influences from Pound’s own studies and translations of Chinese poetry.
The Third Canto consists of the first person musings about the fall of “Myo Cid” (or “Mio Cid” – literally, My Lord; refers to the great Spanish hero of the Reconquista, El Cid).
Though writing about a Spaniard, the person musing is clearly in Italy. To me, this Canto reads as if it has moved away from the distancing mythologizing of the first two. I was struck by the strong impression that the “I” was truly Ezra Pound himself and that Myo Cid was a personal metaphor for some hero of his that suffered an undeserved fall from grace.
Much like the First Canto, the Second Canto reads like an section of a narrative poem (though, as befitting the Second Canto, it reads as if a little further along into the story than the First). But it does not necessarily read as a continuation of the “narrative” implied in the First Canto.
The Second is also, dare I say, more character driven. It is also more explicitly about a journey of some sort. To my eyes, it reads more like an Odyssean tale – someone returning after years away from home, both older and wiser than when he left.
Formally, Pound has yet to do anything particularly innovative or experimental and his references are primarily to that birthplace of Western culture, Ancient Greece. Challenging to read? Yes. But not yet beyond the pale.
You would hardly expect what will follow based on reading the First Canto. Drawing on Greek mythology (including the two-sexed Tiresias who so prominently featured in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland). Based on the First Canto, you would think that the Cantos were an epic, mythologized narrative. Specifically, the story of a journey, such as those taken by Odysseus, Jason, Aeneas, and Orpheus. But the Cantos, as you probably know, are anything but a narrative.
After going I can’t remember how long without reviewing a single book poetry, the New York Times Sunday Book Review finally made some small amends with a review of a new translation of the nineteenth century Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi. They gave a positive, dare I say, glowing review of Jonathan Galassi’s translation of the Canti.
Of course, it would be nice if they did this every Sunday. It would also be nice if they drew some attention a poet who wasn’t already dead. But I guess I’ll take what I can get.
The True Keeps Calms Biding Its Story is Rusty Morrison’s second book of poetry – also a book length conceit wherein every line ends with either “please,” “stop,” or “please advise.” Each “poem” consists of a trio of three line stanzas justified at the right (rather than the usual left) margins.
Normally, I would say that I am wary of book length conceits and themed books – though one of my favorite books is Charles Simic’s 1990 Pulitzer winning collection of dark prose poems, The World Doesn’t End and my favorite contemporary poet is Anne Carson, whose most famous collections – including Autobiography of Red and her most recent, Nox – are both thematic meditations governed by an overriding literary conceit.
So, my concerns are not borne out by my actual preferences.
Perhaps I am just mistrustful of a writer’s ability to maintain both that kind of abstract formal limitation and consistently high quality. Of course, could not the same question be asked of, say, rhyming poetry? And I do not often question Byron’s Childe Harold!
But to return to The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story…
I enjoy poetry that consistently challenges the flow of my reading – that pulls me up short. Certainly, it can go too far and prevent me from truly enveloping myself in the reading process (I won’t name names here today – I come here to praise poets, not to bury them). Adrienne Rich’s habit of inserting extended gaps within lines is something I enjoy (and a tool I copied in much of my own poetry – with mixed success – in the early and mid nineties).
I would say that the way Morrison’s formal limitations break up the flow and interfere with the normal process of reading and interpretation lend added strength to the plaintive tone of the collection.
And plaintive is an appropriate tone – for the collection addresses the death of his father. Furthermore, the arrangement of the lines and stanzas self-consciously reflects telegraphs. By referencing obsolete technology, it reflects the passage of time and extinction implied in a father’s death. It also reflects that these are messages sent off into an unhearing void – there is no telegraph machine operating that can pick up the signal.
Perhaps because I was, like many sensitive, awkward adolescents, deeply occupied in my early years by Edgar Allan Poe, I feel a keen affinity toward poetry that reflects on death (though Poe’s own writings were, of course, far more lush, romantic and gothic than either Morrison’s or my own).
Incidentally, The True Calms Keeps Biding Its Story was the 2008 James Laughlin Award winner, handed out yearly to a poet’s second published book. Among the judges that year was the current poet of the hour (at least since Versedcame out), Rae Armantrout.
The True Calm Keeps Biding Its Story was published by Ahsahta Press, the university press of Boise State in Idaho. They are a small press that consistently publishes some of the best and most interesting poetry in America today.
the coffee philosopher 