Tim,

After your lucid comment on dramatic structure in an epic like the Cantos, I must
say you've lost me here. So I'll simply make some random observations.

[Wait let me get more coffee.]

My use of the notion of "arcane" was meant to be in contra-distinction to yours.
The usual meaning especially as regards literature implies a non-utile dimension,
that is that the public for example can ignore the arcana if it chooses becuase it
little impacts on their daily existence.

However, now with the rise of hundreds of scientific and technical specialties not
to mention specialties outside of these two general disciplines we have "arcana",
if you will, which profoundly effect the utility of our everyday lives. In large
part Pound sought, mistakenly, a return to a culture not as reliant on
'specialties.'

Thus, Pound's arcana are generally speaking comfortably non-utile. Hence, he
clearly has not written the "anthem to Fascism" because any political/military
movement that does not ground itself in modern science and technology will be
ground under as recently witnessed. Pound never included a paean to Fascism's
reliance and development of modern weapons of war such as the V-1, V-2 rocket.

I, for one, seeing this as a serious epistemological lacuna in the Cantos decades
ago sought to put myself in the center of the concern for the everyday arcana that
is science and technology. Your email seems to suggest that to engage this arcana
in its original forms violates some sort of communication with the poetry reader.
Let's leave aside the obligation of the reader because, generally, this is one
'obligation' the reader has no intention of meeting.

There are all important ontological and epistemological dimensions to scientific
and technological arcana. To simplify, this provides a philosophical and
"expository" bridge from the dominant epistemologies of the sciences to "epic"
poetry as you've described it. This, for me, is also the field of poetic engagement
because this is the field of dialectic. On one side lies the sciences in all of
their mathematical/formal immunity. On the other, the public in all of its naive
acceptance. (Exceptions would appear to be the environment, nuclear power and
biogenetics though challenges here are not at the epistemological level. In fact,
their criticisms lose much of their force because they do not attach an
epistemological dimension to the moral and ethical arguments that they proffer.)

When you write:
<Within those narrative limitations, the modern epic poet might well be able to
create a dramatic narrative that showed how statistical probabilities have come to
affect the
quality of life as lived by the man in the street.>
you are addressing a poet who has done exactly that for years and within more
scientific taxonomies than just Game Theory. As far as Game Theory, I just appear
particularly prescient again which is not surprising because it is the type of
study I am involved in all the time. As far as the man in the street; he needs to
get wacked upside the head with something heavier than a manuscript.

My urging is simply that more poets engage underlying epistemologies of their time
and not abandon the lessons of the high modernist model whether it be through the
cipher of Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Olson, Zukofsky, Tolson, Duncan, Jones (yes, Jones)
et al. It seems to me that if you are not aware of these underlying forces and
their infuence, the poetry generated is going to be derivative of this influence
without having any understanding with which to form a dialectic. I don't begin Tale
of the Tribe with Hegel out of Kant just to be beating my gums. Its the limitations
of the scientific epistemology of perception and the grounds upon which those
limitations and their consequences effect everyday existence.

I would contend that contemproary poet's are largely 'consumers' of an epistemology
that they don't understand much less have the ability to critique. As for readers:
as far as overall numbers are concerned my percentile is not much lower than
Pound's or Olson's. To the naked eye the needle seems to be resting at the bottom.
Carlo Parcelli

P.S. I apologize in advance for any grammatical or spelling errors in my email.


Tim Romano wrote:

> Epic demands that exposition be subordinated to dramatic human action. The
> epic poet can make extensive use of speeches and narrative, killing the
> birds of exposition and character revelation with one stone. In offering
> the poet the freedom to put words into the mouths of characters and into
> the mouth of an omniscient narrator, the genre gives the poet the tools
> necessary to expound a theme and to create a drama.  Within those narrative
> limitations, the modern epic poet might well be able to create a dramatic
> narrative that showed how statistical probabilities have come to affect the
> quality of life as lived by the man in the street. But the audience ought
> not be expected to have --or be willing to acquire-- an actuary's knowledge
> in order to understand that theme. There is rarely if ever a need for any
> abstruse technicality, raw and undigested, itself to become the subject
> matter of the poem; when that happens, the artist is not making a poem but
> passing an owl-pellet.
> Tim Romano
>
> Carlo Parcelli wrote:
>
> >[...]
> >Nash's work is tremendously influential and has broad application. Nash's work
> >along with Heisenberg's, Bohr's, Pitts' (another good melodrama) and
> >McCulloch's, Watson's and Crick's, von Neumann's, Turing's, Weiner's,
> >Shannon's
> >and dozens of others forms the theoretical and practical bedrock of our daily
> >lives. Can the consumer of 'epics' only explore this as melodrama, ghosted
> >forces that make self-interest possible, or in simple allegories of good and
> >evil? If not through the Cantos, Maximus, "A" etc., how else would such an
> >ambitious and risky poetics proceed? Carlo Parcelli