Series: Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Ezra Poundings – The Reboot

gordsellar6 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Years ago — seven years ago this fall — I started a study group, with whom I started working my way through Ezra Pound’s classic poem, The Cantos. When I say “classic poem” it probably makes you think of a single page of sparse text, which is understandable if you haven’t read the Cantos. So think more like a late James Joyce novel, but in poetical form. Think about a bunch of different languages, including not only various forms of English, but also old Occitan, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese ideograms. Think references to obscure historical and literary …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto I

gordsellar2 Comments
This entry is part 2 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Where to begin? I could go back and read Personae …

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The Traneumentary, Shooting for Trane, and Pound/Trane in Comparison

gordsellar2 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

First of all: if you’re interested in John Coltrane, there’s a wonderful podcast series (titled The Traneumentary) which has now concluded, but which is worth working your way through — the segments are brief but contain interviews with all kinds of jazz musicians, producers, and other folks, as well as discussions of specific tracks in voiceover on the tracks themselves.  For more on the origins of the project, see here. It’s wonderful, and full of bite-sized chunks, and very professional — and for those Trane fanatics out there whose significant others or friends ask, “So, why Trane?” I think it …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto II

gordsellar16 Comments
This entry is part 4 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing Canto …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto III

gordsellar8 Comments
This entry is part 5 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing …

Continue Reading