----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2000 9:46
PM
Subject: Cantos' influence on living
poetry?
At 02:23 PM 1/17/00 -0500, Burt Hatlen wrote:
>Has anyone
other than Pound written a good poem in a manner shaped
by
>the
Hmm, anyone who attempts a book-length poem can hardly be
unaware of
the Cantos looming over their shoulder. In the last decade
I've read
two book-length poems that I consider to be very good: Vikram
Seth's
"Golden Gate" and Derek Walcott's "Omeros". Both are
influenced only
very little in *form* by the Cantos; they are mostly
monoglot and mostly
adhere to formal structures in their verse. I
think the influence shows
heavily in the
occasionally-enjoyably-out-of-control discursions in both
poems; Seth
invests pages in the mechanics of plucking olives and
distilling oil, and
in antinuke rallies; Walcott takes us far afield from
the poem's home in
the Caribbean to episodes in New England, Mid-America,
and other more
exotic locales. In neither case is the material really
integral to
the, er, dramatic unities of the underlying work; in
both cases (Seth more
than Walcott) it's hard to imagine the work
really working with the
discursions excised.
Of course in the Cantos, if you excised the
discursions, what would
you have left? Snicker.
-T.