Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto I

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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Ezra Poundings – The Reboot

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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