Pound’s Pisan Cantos: and Kenner

There’s a pub I sometimes go to called the Yorkshire Grey, near the BBC. I read in the paper that in their stays in London Rimbaud lodged opposite and Ezra Pound lived next door and referred to it in his Pisan Cantos. That was as good a reason as any to read the PCs (at last), so on my holiday I did. I had looked cursorily at the Cantos before and, I imagine like most of us, had been put off: Chinese and Greek script, lots of stuff in other languages, unidentifiable references. So I was surprised how much I enjoyed the read.

More on what there is to enjoy in another posting. This one is about Hugh Kenner’s book on Pound, The Pound Era, Faber & Faber, 1972. The Introduction to my Pisan Cantos mentioned that he explained how one passage of Canto 81 is a resumé of English verse forms from the middle ages to the 19th century. That sounded intriguing, and, since I couldn’t see from the poem itself how it was that, I got Kenner out from Senate House Library. (Where I always enjoy going--it’s so impenetrable and impossible and reeks of another era when students read books; the annotations in the Kenner showed that some readers had indeed been studying the Canto seriously. I was able to tease apart the layers of date-stamped issue sheets and counted that the book had been out about 120 times since 1972, though only once in 2007 and once in 2008. I hope the kids are at least reading something else instead.)

Kenner does indeed describe (pp.486-93) how Pound scans the history of English metres, but I was struck by the passage immediately before that on Pound’s notoriously dodgy translations and on sound in poetry. Then, when gets on to metre and rhythm, Kenner I think is brilliant. He has the ear and can make the reader hear what he hears (which makes him the right sort of critic for English teachers, since their job too is to get their students to hear poetry.) Here’s the passage:

What do I think about that claim that in the Seafarer bard ‘the gestures of tongue and expulsions of breath… mimed… the emotions of exile’? Like so many claims in lit crit, impossible to prove; but I find the general idea plausible. Emotions, after all, are physical as well as mental states (see Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain); there’s no reason why they should not inhere in movements of tongue and breath as well as in those of face and stance. Whether that particular Old English line expressed those particular emotions (of exile) seems more doubtful: my impression is that that language was full of wu- and wa- and wor- and -ac and -ea and -ath sounds even when the meaning wasn’t being gloomy, lonely, despairing or angry; I find more desolation in the sense that the weak hold the world--not a globe, of course, for the bard but the whole earth, however he pictured it--as if this was something the whole of which could be held, with no space left for seafarers, so total and hopeless is the takeover by the weak.

I like the idea, which teachers of poetry might take to heart even if it’s wrong in this instance, that ‘To develop his sense was the least of the Seafarer-bard’s concerns; the meanings of the words fit in somehow, vessels to receive his longing, as the structure of sound is built up, prolonged, modulated.’ Then Kenner gives us Yeats struggling to do the same sort of thing.

The pages that follow the passage I've copied deal with the iambic pentameter which Pound had tried to ‘break’, believing it be ‘a thickening (based on five stresses) of the Italian hendecasyllabic (based on 11 syllables)’ (later, p.489) and alien imposition on English. Anyone who’s tried to write poetry finds themselves being inexorably pulled towards that di-da di-da di-da di-da di-da so it’s hard to believe that it isn’t natural to the language, but of course Pound and ‘Jo Bard’ (‘Josef Bard (1882-1975), Hungarian writer’, say my Notes) are quite right to say that the speech of ‘bakers and concierges’ could never get into it. English verse, in Pound’s belief (and evidently Kenner’s), has been distanced from the rhythms of speech since its colonisation by the pentameter and the decasyllabic, of which the pentameter is one variety.

In the earlier Cantos Pound had largely escaped that literary pull: his ‘first heave’ had been to ‘break the pentameter’ (and decasyllabic) so as to readmit the rhythms of speech. In the process he developed his own signature, ‘a spondee [dá dá] terminating the line’ (that’s the sort of thing I wish I were better at noticing).

Now, however, in Canto 81, in the US military prison camp at Pisa, he transacts ‘a courtship with the eponymous English decasyllabic itself, since Chaucer the language's most pervasive measure’ (488).

‘[H]e suddenly finds himself speaking words of Chaucer’s Your eyen two wold sleye me sodenly I may the beauté of hem nat susteyne ….And these pure English decasyllabics are followed by the contemporary speaking voice: And for 180 years almost nothing. Then decasyllabic reasserts itself [with a line of Dante in Italian, and then] there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent whether of spirit or hypostasis …. Then three more irregular lines; then, then, the anonymous genius of English asserts itself: Sáw but the éyes and stánce betwéen the eyes a full-blooded iambic pentameter, not simply ten syllables but five unmistakeable stresses.’
(The ‘anonymous genius of English’ thus seems to be a genius that shows itself in verse and not in speech. I confess I don’t feel I've got Kenner’s argument quite straight.)

Kenner goes on -- well, read the scanned text as the layout and stress marks may not be preserved if I type them:
A lively feature of these Cantos is the constant irruption of ‘ordinary speech’ in amongst the obviously poetic (the ghosts are of the poets Pound has been echoing):

I find it a pleasure following a reader like Kenner. Next time I'll address Pound.

Pavements in Plogoff

Here’s a large village in Brittany with, running through it, the main road (not very busy) to the Land’s End of Finistère, Pointe du Raz. The commune was working on the layout of roadway, pavement, kerb, crossings, gutter, parking, and I liked what they were doing. In fact, most of it was finished and the masons were building the short, low, free-standing walls I've mentioned before (post of 28.7.08) that provide a support and anchor for flowering plants, prevent parking, separate pedestrians from traffic and look nice. (Click to enlarge.)

To the right of the wall at the front you see the new strip which will be the edge of the pavement. It’s very slightly raised above the level of the roadway but is distinguished from it by its different colour and texture, which makes the street seem wider.

That’s how crossings are done too:

Notice none of the garish yellow lines, or white equivalents, let alone the double ones, that disfigure English towns and villages as if it goes without saying that the aesthetics of the place can be casually sacrificed to the control of parking.

On country roads most you get an unobtrusive broken white line: you don’t park on the roadway side of the line, though you can on the other side if there’s room. This is on the road into Plogoff:

If they want to prevent parking on the pavement, they use walls if there is room or a blue metal barrier or blue posts:

In fact I never discovered the rules for parking. I got the impression that not much enforcement is needed, or they don’t fuss too much about it: those cars on the road on the right may be out of order. It seems the French, at least in these parts, aren’t prepared to ruin the place with lines and signs: the markings were understated and people were expected to be sensible and responsible. Which mostly they were.

I even liked the gutters. (The opposite pavement clearly hasn’t been redone.)

Harold Rosen: hero of English

Harold Rosen has just died aged 89. He was my PGCE tutor at the London Institute of Education and the best teacher I ever had in higher education, including four years at Oxford, and the first to show me that university work could be about ideas. (Admittedly, the subjects I'd studied -- classics and English -- were not at Oxford noted for intellectually lively content.) He was probably also the first really intelligent and forceful person of the left to whom I had any real exposure.

He was right about English teaching in so many ways -- and had been right, I now discover, as head of English in 1956-58 at Walworth School (an LCC ‘experimental’ comprehensive, founded in 1946 and with a predominantly secondary modern intake).

Thanks to Simon Clements, who also taught at the school and has had the foresight to keep key documents, I've just yesterday seen the syllabus Harold wrote for the department in early 1958, a neat 50 years ago. It warrants a longer post but a couple of points, remarkable for the age in which they were written, immediately struck me.

First, he notes the huge gap between the home language of Walworth’s working-class pupils (the community revolved around the docks) and the language they need if they’re to participate in communications beyond the locality. He stresses the tact that teachers need to exercise by starting by welcoming anything the pupils want to say, whatever the language they can use most easily, when it’s spoken (or written, always after the chance to talk) out of an honest desire to express experience or share views. Starting from that acceptance and respect, you then only gradually work to extend the scope of their language -- but he’s quite clear that is your aim, and he’s very specific about the teaching of spelling, punctuation etc, the value of comprehension work (always done orally first), and above all the need for lots of reading, including works normally considered ‘demanding’.

Second, in 1958 he’s recommending reading Lord of the Flies and Salinger with the fourth year (now known as Year 10)! I'm surprised to learn that Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 -- I've just looked it up.)

The top pic comes from an interesting site about residents of Muswell Hill, London. The one below, rather different, comes from an equally interesting piece in Socialist Worker Online.

Slow posting

I'm intending to up the frequency of my blogging. As it is, I'm back from a long spell in Brittany to lots of more urgent stuff, the most important being my first visit to new grandson, Johnny.


I know I indicated that I might do a post on road surfaces, pavements, crossings etc in Plogoff and that the world is still waiting.


Well, not much longer, I hope.

Windmills in Brittany

My inner jury’s out on the aesthetics of windmills in landscapes. France is the place to see them, where they’re called Eoliennes, after Aeolus, the God of the Winds.

I suspect their impact depends more on the state of the sky than that of the land.

If the scene is a bit boring and not pretty, windmills are a definite enhancement.

Up closer, I love their size. Aptly, a friend commented that they recall Triffids -- but he may have meant those other tripod-like creatures in some other John Christopher novel.

New Model Criticism

Critical approaches that treat literature as documents (of a historical context or ideological interest) are insufficient. I liked Colin Burrow’s critique of recent historicist studies of, accompanying new canon of, 17th century literature. He calls this approach New Model Criticism, after the New Model Army, and claims that the new canon eexcludes anything, like Paradise Lost or Marvell's ‘The Garden’, that doesn't reward analysis as 'acts or events, or testaments to political self-positioning' and that 'treats context as a matter of the events of a particular month or week' -- thus excluding poems that 'might be about emotions, retreats, imaginings, ethics, domesticity or what it is to be a poem', while including 'newsbooks, speeches, Instruments of Government'.

The New Model Criticism, while claiming to be an all-embracing, dehierarchised method that opens up whole new worlds of discourse to critical attention… in fact radically closes down the possible range of works that could encourage critical attention. With works like Paradise Lost, which adopt as part of their rhetoric a gaze extending beyond the present moment, and imagine their readers abroad, in the future, in lands or times unknown, this kind of criticism can break down, or be reduced to seeking sedimentary layers of topicality in their composition, each of which must address and can only address its own time – which again should ideally mean a week or a month.'

Burrow, C. (2008). New Model Criticism. London Review of Books, 30(12), 24-25.

In France’s Cornwall

I've been on holiday for a whole month in a single place, a rented house in Finistère, Brittany, in a region actually called Cornouaille.

For part of the time I was on my own, for part people came and stayed and it worked well. I took my laptop and a writing task, on the principle that it’s no good going somewhere just to visit; you need to be there with something engrossing to do, and get to know the place just incidentally, by virtue of being there, when not working. Next year I'll take that principle more seriously: I'll really tell myself I'm working away from home, with the delights of the place there as a refreshing change for in between times.

A month somewhere is long enough to begin to feel you’re living there. It was long enough to watch an improvement job on the village street almost from start to finish, including the commune masons building low dry-stone walls for utility (to deny parking) and aesthetics (some retained flower beds; all would eventually have flowers like fuschias climbing over them; and they were beautiful things in themselves).

(I might do a separate blog on how they do pavements.)

I started to recognise the same cheese stall on markets in different towns, to meet the man with the dog on the green at the top of the hill several times

to get to talk (as my feeble French allowed) to the man who’d built his house in the next hamlet and was busy making a wall (the local speciality) for his garden. It turned out he was the same age as me, though his life had been rather different: born in the tiny house next door, he’d worn clogs and his grandmother had talked to him in Breton; then he’d been in the navy till he retired. He showed me round. There was one spacious downstairs room with a kitchen separated by a bar where he could sit ‘pour regarder ma femme pendant qu’elle fait la vaiselle’.

Finistère seems as if it’s largely gone back to nature: bracken, gorse, thorn-bushes, broom, ivy, honeysuckle, willow; rabbits, deer. Much of it may always have been that way. They call the terrain les landes which is translated ‘moors’; but moors for me are upland stretches, which these weren’t; coastal, rather, and not a particular higher type of zone but the whole cape.
There’s a coastal path (sentier côtiale) very like Pembrokeshire’s but less frequented and more colourful (heather, broom and lots more) with bird life that wasn’t familiar to me: yellowhammers and choughs, I thought I saw. Ten minutes drive away was a handsome estuary town, Audierne, still a serious fishing port, with old 3-4-storey houses along the quayside.

Ten minutes walk away was Plogoff, a large village that is the centre of the commune; and everywhere, where most of the population must once have lived from the land and fishing, there were hamlets connected by footpaths that were almost roads, wide enough to admit mowers and hedge-trimmers and clearly maintained by the assiduous Plogoff commune (which also provides summer jobs, e.g. as car park attendants, for all young people of 15 and over who want them in the school holiday). These paths provided endless scope for wandering, and each hamlet arrived at offered a fresh combination of stone buildings, blue shutters and a profusion of flowers. Viewed from a distance from high points, the houses were so loosely clustered into settlements than they looked more like scattered crofts in the Hebrides than organised hamlets.

Wandering up every day to the disused sailors’ chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Voyage, whose 19-year-old summer warden, Gleran (a Breton name, like that of his brother, Gwen) again on a commune work scheme, told me about getting the results of his bac and how les jeunes know at any time where all four of the cape’s gendarmes are; and then along the path through the bracken and gorse down to to join the coast path along the top of the cliffs was a restful daily routine. I found myself paying more attention to rocks, plants and birds and also to the music on my iPod, and in the third week when I drove to the département capital of Quimper the art I saw there--the cathedral and its glass, the Pont Aven School and other Breton paintings, had a more than usual impact on me, as if I'd built up a thirst.

I wish I'd taken more photographs. I was put off by looking at my early ones on the laptop, which gave me the impression they were no good. Now I look at them on my 21” monitor back home some don’t look so bad.

I'd like to have been on the internet, not for email--no way--but for looking things up (e.g. birdsong) and for the British news. And next time I'll take a radio that can get Radio 4 long wave. (I did not develop a taste for French broadcasting, even when I could understand it; or for their pop music.)