A month ago Michael Scott wrote:
> 
>[clip]> 
> however one thing did emerge out of all this opacity that i really did
> enjoy - his favourites his repetitions - the phrases that peppered his
> brain - mud the fifth element springs to mind - but i'd have to dig
> back into the text to list more examples
> 
> i got the impression that as he progressed with his great work he
> became the prisoner of form - in the end he should have gleaned from
> it his favourite phases and thrown the original away
> 
> shall we try it

I have only read and reread the Cantos over some 50 years, not studied
them or read very much critical commentary on them. I have, therefore,
never really grasped any 'form' in detail, I HAVE felt andpartly grasped
several forms which hold the poem together and which give it 'thrust' as
it were, a thrust which at the end Pound, looking back on, is not quite
satisfied with: (quoted from memory): "It coheres alright / But I cannot
make it  cohere." And the finallines, written much earlier, dedicating
it to Olga in a way only repeat the thrust of those poems entitled
"Lustra" in the Collected Poems. (I have never checked to see how
closely they correspond to the volume _Lustra_ published some years
earlier). Thos poems trace a certain hunt, amdidst barriers and
distraction, for a Lady, a source of beauty and form, which in that
movment is summed up in Bertran de Born's "made lady."

So there is not a form one can easily  explicate, but so what. And it is
the form that onecan vaguely intuit that makes those expressions Michael
wants to collect worth collecting. That form or thrust created/
discovered/ sorted out the expressions. And the _collecting_ of those
expressions, a collection that grows with the years, is the form of the
poem as 'embodied' in the process of reading, in the reader's voyage of
discovery as he/she follows the scriptor cantilenae from that dinghy
astern there. The readerr' search is, in some sense, the form of the
poem

And getting back to Michael'sproposal. Without accepting his argument on
form, it would be fun and perhaps worthwhile to take up his suggestion
and follow it on list.

Carrol