In a message dated 1/5/03 10:27:03 AM Pacific Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< Well-said, but I don't think it holds water.  I am one of those awful
 people who find gems scattered through the Cantos unequaled elsewhere in
 the canon of poetics, and who feel that large parts of the Cantos are in
 fact unintellegible rubbish.  I would really like to see through to "the
 essential challenge of the piece as a whole" which is one reason I hang
 out here, but so far haven't.  In part because I'm baffled at the
 thousands of lines of obscurantist-take-on-forgettable-bits-of-US-history
that seem so poetically vacuous - it would be nice if there were a framework
on which
 they were mounted that better exposed their virtues if any.  Please
 enlighten us. -Tim

  >>

It would also be useful if you would point to those areas of the Cantos which
you consider 'unintelligible rubbish' -- and I do not take this designation
as pejorative as such.  Then, perhaps, we could actually discuss these areas
without having the usual resort of broad generalizations.  I wonder at times
if we don't try too hard to 'understand' the literal aspects of the poem,
much as we would understand a prosaic explication, instead of remembering
that it is in the main art, with all of the affect and residual effect that
art transmits.  My own experience with the Cantos is that I was not the same
person after I read it as I was before doing so.

joe brennan