So basically these pirates kidnap a boy intending to sell him into slavery, but he turns out to be the god Dionysus, stops the ship, and turns them all into fish. Acoetes, the helmsman, is the only survivor. In this version he tells the story as a warning to King Pentheus; as Pentheus takes no heed and suppresses the cult of Dionysus anyway, he's driven mad by the god and is torn to pieces by the women of his own family.
...It occurs to me to wonder if the bit re: Eleanor of Acquitaine relates to that as well. Hmm. XD
I think I like Pound for completely different reasons than you. XD I thought that most of his Cantos was self-conscious anti!pop pop - pretty on the surface, with layers of meaning underneath obscuring the fact that there was nothing meaningful they were obscuring. Like I told Chrissie, I could see him smirking to himself going, "you're never going to understand this brilliance, you plebes, so don't even try," which would have been okay if I'd thought it was brilliance, but once I'd untangled what it meant I was always left with the feeling of "wait, that's it?" - that it was a clever but irrelevant puzzle. Also, from the non-poetry stuff he wrote, like his book "the ABCs of poetry" (that's what it was called, right? its been over a decade since I studied him), I thought he was somewhat insufferable the way he rejected everything that didn't meet his standards, thought it worthless, an attitude that I find worthless in itself (probably because I see it in myself so much at times XD;;). This wouldn't have mattered to my appreciation of
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Actually I agree with you on pretty much all of this. XD I mean, I read Chinese, for one, so a lot of the time I'm like, "Dude, this isn't nearly as impressive as you seem to think it is." (And he really was an insufferable person, I think, not just somewhat - wacky in his beliefs too.) But I enjoy working through the puzzle for the sake of working through the puzzle.
...Or not even; I enjoy the process of wading through the text, looking for the flashes of lyrical brilliance that make irrelevant whatever Pound was actually trying to say. Like hunting for seashells. I've come to realize that this process describes my relationship with a lot of texts, in fact - Jubilate Agno, which come to think of it was written under similar circumstances as a great deal of the later Cantos. XD; Anyway I tend to be drawn to succinct forms, so it's nice to be able to open and book and see the pages stretch on and on. And Pound never makes my eyes cross, unlike the Romantics.
And w/r/t the latter - yes, it's true, and they are very good poems as well as an appropriate close (perhaps the only appropriate close to any life's work? Other than raging against the dying of the light), but I don't think Pound's judgment of his own oeuvre matters to me per se. And sometimes... I don't know. His life brought him to that. Same goes for Wilde's De Profundis and I can barely bring myself to read it, because it seems unfair that it should ever had to have come into existence. I suppose Pound deserved most of what he got. ^^;
I mean, I read Chinese, for one, so a lot of the time I'm like, "Dude, this isn't nearly as impressive as you seem to think it is." (And he really was an insufferable person, I think, not just somewhat - wacky in his beliefs too.)
You're right - we do agree on a lot of this.
And w/r/t the latter - yes, it's true, and they are very good poems as well as an appropriate close (perhaps the only appropriate close to any life's work? Other than raging against the dying of the light), but I don't think Pound's judgment of his own oeuvre matters to me per se.It's not his judgment of his work that matters to me as much as, how to put this? I think for the most part what he wrote was artifice without meaning, deluding himself that it had profound meaning. But in the last, fragmentary and unfinished Cantos, when he gave up trying to write the most-meaningfulest and righteous poem EVAH, and just wrote what was, however broken and fragmented and inadequate, are when, imo, he managed to write something that was relevant and meaningful and truly
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I love the imagery. Also have a thing for turning non-verbs into verbs. ("The gulls broad out their wings", that was lovely.)
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...It occurs to me to wonder if the bit re: Eleanor of Acquitaine relates to that as well. Hmm. XD
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Jesus christ man I was just taking all that in as RANDOM GREEK REFERENCES. XD; Okay admittedly I am not very good at parsing poetry to begin with, so.
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Here are explanations for some of the refs, and here.
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...I'm a bit drunk. XD Anyway yeah, I just think of this as THE BISHOUNEN KIDNAPPING CANTO.
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Despite not being drunk myself I now really want to see this rewritten as AN SSBB STORY? Can Acoetes be a seme w/ sword
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...Or not even; I enjoy the process of wading through the text, looking for the flashes of lyrical brilliance that make irrelevant whatever Pound was actually trying to say. Like hunting for seashells. I've come to realize that this process describes my relationship with a lot of texts, in fact - Jubilate Agno, which come to think of it was written under similar circumstances as a great deal of the later Cantos. XD; Anyway I tend to be drawn to succinct forms, so it's nice to be able to open and book and see the pages stretch on and on. And Pound never makes my eyes cross, unlike the Romantics.
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You're right - we do agree on a lot of this.
And w/r/t the latter - yes, it's true, and they are very good poems as well as an appropriate close (perhaps the only appropriate close to any life's work? Other than raging against the dying of the light), but I don't think Pound's judgment of his own oeuvre matters to me per se.It's not his judgment of his work that matters to me as much as, how to put this? I think for the most part what he wrote was artifice without meaning, deluding himself that it had profound meaning. But in the last, fragmentary and unfinished Cantos, when he gave up trying to write the most-meaningfulest and righteous poem EVAH, and just wrote what was, however broken and fragmented and inadequate, are when, imo, he managed to write something that was relevant and meaningful and truly ( ... )
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