Garrick Davis,

I very much enjoyed your piece in CPR where you skewered Casillo et al. But I
can't tell whether your broad query is tongue in cheek; whether you are simply
playing the devil's advocate or...

I just came back from having dinner with the Modernist critique, Brad Haas.
During the course of the meal I related your email concerning the lack of
self-sufficiency in much of Pound; in essence that the Cantos do not achieve
aesthetic homeostasis. Of course, questions of self-sufficiency depend more on
the reader/critic/scholar than on the writer. A poet may write to generate
response, but that response is only sustained if there is something there to
sustain it. However, this is a too large and amorphous subject for an email.

After I related your email, Brad's response was that it was astonishing that you
would use the internet for such a comment. To his mind internet technology had
simply caught up with Modernism where the luminous detail could be traced for its
resonance and edification. He said he flashed on the idea (which is not knew)
when I described for him the effect of Modernist poetry on search engines. Our
magazine, FlashPoint, has received an enormous number of hits lately, as many as
a thousand a day. For a while we just scatched our heads. But one evening while I
was preparing an article on the large number of Iran-contra figures who are now
nuzzling up to the Caspian Sea Trough, I discoverd that my parody of The Divine
Comedy was repeatedly referenced and high up in the listings. If you typed in
Frank Carlucci and Caspian Sea a section of the parody came up because of the
action in the poem. The protagonist with his guides is rapelling down a cliff
face and lands on the inverted and exposed ass of Herman Kahn of On Thermonuclear
War fame. Then Kahn's ass erupts and a gusher (shit=oil) containing the
'memorabilia' of U.S. Foreign policy since World War II shoots like a geyser
passed the protagonist's eyes. The section even ends with a parody of Pound at
his most self-sufficient: "Polyps in a wet black bowel." The shit smeared
remnants of U.S. Foreign policy plops down all over the net. And my FBI file gets
a little thicker.

Modernism is ideally suited for the net whereas less obscure poetics with a more
ubiquitous vocabulary illuminate the reader in a different way; a way that
perhaps helps explain the growing hunger for Pound scholarship and high modernist
voices. Carlo Parcelli, Alphaville Books

[log in to unmask] wrote:

> Dear Pound Listmembers,
>
> I would like to hear some discussion on the lasting importance of the Cantos.
> Is it the great epic poem of the 20th century or a complete mess?
>
> It seems to me that, in the end, it is the great garbage heap of Modernism--a
> vast accumulation of (now annotated) passages from which the reader (or, more
> probably, the scholar) picks at random. It has a vast reputation among
> scholars and poets--and yet it is formless and incoherent by any standard.
> Its reputation (and example) has been pernicious. The Cantos is "responsible"
> for the other unreadable long poems of the Modernist era--like Olson's
> Maximus or Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover.
>
> It is, in short, the perfect example of the excesses of Modernism and the
> taste in poetry that it championed: nasty, obscure, fragmentary, and long.
>
> If I may be permitted to quote myself:
> "Considered as an epic poem, as a unified work of art, the Cantos is a
> failure according to any critical measure we wish to use. It is so obscure
> that a small army of scholars has gained tenure by annotating its lines, and
> that enterprise has taken fifty years. It is so fragmentary that, even with
> their notes, most of it seems willfully private in the worst way: like the
> diary of an encryptionist, written for an audience of one. Without such
> notes, of course, the poem is merely a terrifying, polylingual puzzle. It, in
> fact, depends upon the glosses of scholars to render it readable; it is
> inscrutable without exegesis.  The Cantos is simply not a self-sufficient
> work of art."
>
> This question seems to be exemplified in the whole problem of addressing the
> Cantos in the singular or plural form. The Cantos is or the Cantos are? Is it
> one thing or a miscellany?
>
> Regards,
> Garrick Davis
> editor,
> CPR (www.cprw.com)