At 11:46 AM 6/1/00 -0400, Tim Romano wrote:
>Listen, Morse. Perhaps one should recognize one's limitations --when one has
>a mind that lacks antennae for nuance and irony and yet a tongue with a
>propensity for innuendo and slander-- and consider the possibility that
>another's posting meant more than it said.

"Listen, Morse"? You left out "you dirty rat" and "top of the woild, Ma!"
But if I may try to be constructive:

We're discussing Pound via e-mail. That is, we're using a new medium to
discuss the work of a master of an old medium. The idea that a verbal
communication can mean more than it says has always struck me as strange
(if it doesn't mean with its words, what does it mean with?), but I can
understand the sense of the idiom. I take it that it refers to things like
body language and connotation and auditors' memories of prior
communications. That is, an utterance can mean more than it says because
its context carries some of the burden of meaning. Hence (for instance) the
idea of fighting words: words that have become inflammatory per se,
regardless of their dictionary definition, because they are implicated in a
fighting history.

Obviously, this kind of communication is one of the things poetry is for.
But in e-mail?

I should think there may be differences -- differences that are just now
beginning to make themselves apparent. I wonder what Pound would have made
of e-mail. More to the point: I wonder if it would be worth our while to
think systematically about what it does to Pound's words when they're
committed to the datastream.

Jonathan Morse