At 01:35 PM 20/12/01 -0500, [log in to unmask] wrote:

>What is most interesting is not that the members of this List have difficulty
>admitting that the Cantos are "nasty, obscure, fragmentary, and long" (this

I have trouble with "nasty".

>is a self-evident fact) but that justification of " the poetics" of the
>Cantos should finally, and fatally, involve embracing the virtues of (to
>paraphrase Alex Davis' response): disjunction, disunity, lack of closure, and
>lack of totality. Aren't these qualities the very hallmarks of the failed
>work of art?

No.  Lots of great works are messy.  Tidiness is a virtue of financial
statements and dresser-drawers.

It does seem that *large* works - Proust, Pynchon, Walcott's "Omeros",
Mahler's 9th, and Quadrophenia come to mind - are inherently more prone
to messiness.  Some of us like it in big chunks anyhow.

>If we (as Tim Bray has) entertain the idea that the Cantos are a miscellany,
>and not "a unified work of art"

Well, I granted that as a basis of a thought-experiment.  While
no easy theme-soundbite manifests itself, I certainly find that
the Cantos read well from end-to-end, unlike most collections
of poetry where one wanders and grazes.  I take this as empirical
evidence that there is a unity operating at some level here.
This need not imply that EP had it all worked out going in.

> These values have--need it be said?--polluted
>Modernist and post-Modernist poetry to its great detriment and left the
>reader with more unreadable poetry (Olson, Duncan, et al. than any one
>century ought to produce.

I think you're falling into a common fallacy here.  95% of all
contemporary art, in any form, is crap.  The part that isn't
survives the test of time.  Examples abound in every historical
period of the critical authorities lamenting the decadence of
current output compared to the Golden Age.  Each poetic period
has produced lots of unreadable poetry.  Deal with it.

> And stopped
>talking of "disjunction, disunity, lack of coherence and totality" as
>literary qualities to be championed (alas, because we wished to defend the
>Cantos) rather than the very absence of those qualities which characterize
>the superior work of art?

I observe that *life* suffers severely from disjunction, disunity,
lack of coherence and totality.  Why should art differ?  -Tim