We've discussed Pound's narrative style in terms of film montage as developed by Eisenstein. I'd like to add now that for someone learning to read the Cantos for the first time, it would be an excellent idea to see the new film THE LIMEY by Steven Soderbergh (SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE and OUT OF SIGHT). In fact, seeing it more than once would probably be very useful. In my opinion, the editing in this film is more like Pound's technique in the Cantos than anything else I have ever seen or read. Unfortunately, the syntax and rhetoric of cinematic images has not yet been developed to the point where we can talk about the prosody of a film, but I do think it's clear that Soderbergh has nothing even close to Pound's ability to construct beautiful lines. But the way in which he puts images together is very similar. As we know, when Pound was first starting on the Cantos and trying to figure out what he was doing, he once told Wm Butler Yeats that the Cantos were intended to be like a Bach fugue. Later he changed his mind, but there certainly is a fugue-like element in the way that themes, images, and phrases in the Cantos keep recurring. (The phrase "ply over ply," for instance, occurs in several different Cantos.) This fugue-like structure is another way in which Soderbergh's film ressembles Pound's work. There's no shortage of academics who have studied the Cantos exhaustively, have written books on them, and can explain in detail all the things Pound refers to. But the true test of one's understanding, in my opinion, would be to reach the point where one has absorbed the work and understood Pound's thinking so thoroughly that one can use his innovations as the basis for creating new work. It seems in some respects rather discouraging that the first person to succeed in this task has been a filmmaker rather than a writer. (Hey, my field is neither literature nor cinema. If I'm mistaken about this, let me know how I'm wrong.) --Lee Lady <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>