AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writers House where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of contemporary poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of a poem. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities. And, we hope, gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound Archive writings.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House in our third floor Garret studio by Richard Sieburth, translator, scholar, essayist, editor among whose great editions of Ezra Pound are the New Directions Pisan Cantos and the masterful Library of America Poems & Translations. Who was the leading force behind the making of PennSound’s Pound Page and author of PennSound’s listeners guide to those recordings along informative essay titled 'The Sound of Pound'. And by Kaplan Harris, who as a DC dweller, co-curated the Inner-Ear and Ruthless Grip poetry series now teaching at Saint Bonaventure University. Editor with Peter Baker and Rod Smith of The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, whose recent critical essays can be found in contemporary literature, art, voice, American literature, by Dumas and elsewhere. And by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the Brooklyn born critic and poet whose most recent installment of her long, ongoing poem, “Drafts” is Pitch: Drafts 77-95, published by Salt in 2010, whose PennSound page is a treasure trove of recordings of Drafts, as well as lots of other work, and whose Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work I highly recommend. Welcome back to Poem Talk again, Rachel once again. Hello. Thanks for coming down from North Philly or Center City or wherever you are. Prior to this. Kaplan, Richard, welcome to the Writers House and to Poem Talk for the first time.

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Thank you.

AL FILREIS:
Is it really true this is your first time to the Writers House?

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
It is. I have downloaded many things from here, but I've never been here myself.

AL FILREIS:
Now you're actually here. And Richard, thank you on this rainy day for interrupting your sabbatical to join us. Well, today we've gathered to talk about the third Canto of Ezra Pound published in, you know, between hardcovers for the first time in 1924-25 Three Mountains Press Draft of 16 Cantos and variously drafted earlier probably written around 1917. The Canto was never recorded by Pound, so far as we know, until the summer of 1967 in Italy. The voice you'll hear is quiet and frail, so we recommend listening along with the printed text. So here now is Ezra Pound reading 'Canto III' in 1967.

EZRA POUND:
I sat on the Dogana's steps
For the gondolas cost too much, that year,
And there were not “those girls”, there was one face,
And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling “Stretti”,
And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini,
And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been.
Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.
Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, mælid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,
A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,
And there are gods upon them,
And in the water of the almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,
As Poggio has remarked.
Green veins in the turquoise,
Or, gray steps lead up under the cedars. 

My Cid rode up to Burgos,
Up to the studded gate between two towers,
Beat with his lance butt and the child came out,
Una niña de nueve años,
To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers,
Reading the writ, voce tinnula:
That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz,
On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike
And both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered,
“And here Myo Cid are the seals,
The big seal and the writing.”
And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid,
With no hawks left there on their perches,
And no clothes there in the presses,
And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas,
That big box of sand, with a pawn-brokers,
To get pay for his menie;
Breaking his way to Valencia.
Ignez de Castro murdered, add a wall
Here stripped, here made to stand.
Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone,
Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall.
Silk tatters, “Nec Spe Nec Metu.”

AL FILREIS:
I'd like to do the sort of simple host like thing of just starting out by saying what the blocks or pieces are and then invite you to comment. You can go anywhere and invite you to comment on how these things are put together if they are. We have what seems to be an autobiographical fragment of Pound himself in Venice in 1908. We have the lyric passage of Tuscan prehistory, which seems to be something he sees a vision of it beyond the steps. We have the Cid arriving at Burgos and subsequently his tricking the Jewish merchants. And then the end. I'm not sure that's constitutes a separate section, a reference to the murder of Ingez de Castro and the mention of drear waste. So, I guess the first question I want to ask is how does the historical method of 'The Cantos' work here? And is it simply blocks of historical pieces that just are juxtaposed and don't get stitched together? How do these pieces get delivered? And is this typical of 'The Cantos'? A couple of big questions, Richard.

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Yeah, well, this is the first time you have the large magic school I at the beginning of 'The Cantos'. This is only the second time that the first pronoun I occurs in the previous Canto, there's an I spoken by Achiote, who's the pilot of a ship with pirates that are spiriting Dionysus away. But this is clearly in an epic. This is a very interesting moment. And it's the moment where Pound is talking about the inception of his own career as a poet in the summer of 1908 in Venice, where he publishes 'A Lume Spento'. That first section is all in the past tense, I sat and then we cut to 'gods float in the azure air'. That's all in the present tense until the next break in the poet. So in the poem. So you move from an autobiographical memory in. And Venice you move to kind of a present tense, ecstatic eternal, which is actually Pound's of sort of impressions of Lago di Garda, which is one of his sacred places.

AL FILREIS:
So the question is then we've got those two sections. What happens, Rachel, how do we... As Richard suggests, we go from one to the other and there's a real shift. But how do we make it to that second piece and what are readers supposed to do with it?

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
Well, there are a couple of things that one could pick up from Richard said already, and one was the use of the word epic, which was very casual in your statement, and it may mean simply large when 'The Cantos' in toto are extremely large and long and will have taken when he doesn't quite finish them many many, many decades. That's so epic. I'd like to return to that but just simply we have a kind of multi temporal set of overlays happening from Greek classical mythology, from Venetian contemporary to medieval Spain to Renaissance Italy to Renaissance Portugal for that matter, because the last bit is really Portuguese. So, you know, and there may be a few more in there that but just that that gives you the idea...

AL FILREIS:
Slight reference to China as well.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure there is. So, it's as if there's a series of overlays that can be cited. They can be retellings of things that he has already spoken about in his essays. They can be autobiographical notations and these overlays you can imagine as being on transparencies, the way in the old technology typed perhaps on them or and that they they slide across each other and maybe they cross and maybe you look down through them. It's kind of a palimpsest with limpidity and condensation, these nodules of crossing are perhaps foreshadowing the enigmatic method of which is another promissory note.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Kaplan what do we do with that year following from what Rachel said, we have he's sitting on at the gondolas platform by the customs house, and the gondolas cost too much that year. And that year. And then we go to this ethereal gods floating in the azure air, which is not just that year. What do we do with this?

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Some kind of eternal thing that's being spoken of. The I is interesting because he's unable to actually participate in that autobiographical moment. He's just got to sit there and observe things. You know, he doesn't have money in his pocket. You know, there's this this weird moment where he refers to the girls and you think, OK, he's a young Ezra Pound traveling abroad. I mean, that probably was more on his mind at the time than the azure air and...

AL FILREIS:
What was on his mind?

KAPLAN HARRIS:
I think.

AL FILREIS:
Looking at the girls.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
I think looking at the girls.

AL FILREIS:
Unlike Browning, who looks at a lot of them, he only looks at one. Is that some funny thing?

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Well, it's this moment... He's like a flaneur. He can't mingle upon with these people. And he can't. It's like the Baudelaire moment where he's in the society, but outside of it, at the same time, he's the American traveler abroad. You know, there's like the overlay of the Henry James moment. You know, what does it mean to put him in this historical moment? How does he connect up with that?

AL FILREIS:
Richard, I see what I guess some people call a subject rhyme between a Pound in 1908 and Venice and the Cid returned to Burgos because in each case, they're sort of locked out of the house, as it were. You know, the great place. They're thwarted, you know, So is he, in fact, sorry to use this flat word, identifying with the city wants us to think of himself as Cid like?

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Yes. Yeah. I mean, there's a piece that I have here that he published in 1906, the summer he spent in Maine on Penn graduate fellowship.

AL FILREIS:
Not Maine, but. Spain,

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Spain, Spain.

AL FILREIS:
I think in those days, Penn sent people to Spain rather than Maine. Yeah.

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Where he actually visits Burgos and he talks a great deal about the city and he a kind of rehearses the Cid legend. And what's interesting is that, yes, he's interested in the Cid because he was banished by King Alfonso. He is therefore something of an outlaw. He's a wandering soldier of fortune. He's not allowed to come back in the city. And anybody who helps him is going to have their possessions taken and indeed their eyes turned out so, and he's fascinated with him. He kind of prefigures Malatesta as this kind of loose cannon figure of unorganized activity against sort of central authority.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Yeah, Kaplan. And I was just going to say, the first time Cid has mentioned it's not El Cid or this, but it's my Cid, which I mean looking at this retrospectively reminds me of my Emily Dickinson shoes and how, you know, locating people, historical figures that will somehow give you permission to act or give you some kind of permission for being in the modern world.

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
(CROSSTALK) It's a pun on Myo Cid, which is the (CROSSTALK) yeah. But but you're right. That kind of appropriation of...

AL FILREIS:
So, am I right about the subject rhyme, both figures are thwarted. So we're supposed to read backwards to Pound sitting on the Dogana's steps as someone who really ought to have the ride across to San Marco instead of having to walk all the way around because this is Pound he should be liberated by situation.

EZRA POUND:
I sat on the Dogana's steps for the gondolas cost too much that year, and there were not those girls. There was one face, and the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling Stretti. And the lit cross-beams that year in the Morosini and peacocks in Kores house, or there may have been gods float in the azure air. Bright gods and Tuscan back before dew was shed. Light and the first light before ever dew was fallen.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
There's really a genre circus going on here, and just as there would be in the larger Cantos. And so what you get is you do get a lyric, I really. And then you get a heroic figure with whom yes, he does presumably identify. So, you get general pieces and probably that's not the only genre. There's a kind of elegiac tone. One would be a kind of hyperspace collage, another would be encyclopedic. In other would be 'Tale of the Tribe', sacred book of the, you know, the sacred book of the odes...

AL FILREIS:
Bibliography.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
Bibliography. I mean, Pound lays down. He sort of deals out cards about what his project is a periodically throughout his career. And one of the cards that he deals is it coheres even if my notes do not cohere and this is a very late statement. It may be coterminous with the reading of the this tired, poignant reading that we've just heard. And most people focus on the word coheres, which it clearly doesn't. You know, but I would like to focus for a minute on my notes, which is a genre. And I think that one could argue that among the among 'The Cantos' genre circus, my notes is very important. And I would say that this 'Canto III' is like my notes on certain texts which he names as he often does. The footnotes are embedded, which... And then the question is what the purpose which we could talk about. I mean I could, you know, we anybody.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Yeah. I'll just argue a little bit with you here since I mean I see it as notes, but the way he's putting things next to each other strikes me as, as manipulative in a way. Like there's I have to go back to these lines about...

AL FILREIS:
The manipulative Ezra Pound. He's got this...

KAPLAN HARRIS:
The line about the kid who comes out of the... The child came out of the the two towers and then one or two lines later you've got people who are having their good sequestered eyes torn out. I mean to put a child next to, you know, these scenes of deprivation, you know, or violence.

AL FILREIS:
It could be argued that Kaplan, the Pound really is reporting what he thinks he saw, right?
(CROSSTALK) He saw a girl when he visited Burgos.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Well, no, sure that she was the same girl.

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
He's actually taking this directly from the poema. So, in fact, the other genre that you didn't mention is translation, because my Cid rode up to Burgos and this kind of introduction already in 'The Cantos' of this typically pounding use of and which is the end of historical chronicle. And it starts in the third line and were not those girls and the Buccentoro and the lit cross screams and peacocks and from the apple and there are gods and in the water and then it continues those ands continues. These are actually where this is where Hemingway found his ants. It's in reading 'The Cantos'. And those those ends which which are also related to. They're not necessarily purely narrative.

AL FILREIS:
And sometimes the opposite. They they stand in for cause and effect, right?

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
I mean they're just sort of copulative. And so but he's translating here and what's interesting is that so he knows the text. We know from this little travel account that he wrote to Burgos being Ezra Pound, when you read the poem, you go visit the place and and he goes visits the place and he actually thinks he sees the same little girl on the street who actually. So this is how something perjurer through history and...

AL FILREIS:
Who does what Richard? Who dares to read the edict so that Cid has a leg up on what's facing him?

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Who dares? Alright. She risks offering hospitality, which is one of the great themes of 'The Cantos' as it is in the odyssey to the banished to the wandering.

AL FILREIS:
And he sees he. Fixes on her big black eyes, which gets reproduced in the poem. So back to Kaplan about manipulative. I mean, certainly he saw the girl. He thinks she's the same one. And now we get to the poem. You want to say what it is that is it that irks you or it's not irks you, emotionally involved.

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Yeah. No, no, no, no.

AL FILREIS:
Just killing girls. I just... Maybe she was the one girl instead of...

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
But it is directly from that. It is directly, you know, a kind of a translation of an episode in the Cid.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
But I would question directness in terms of translation, just because there's always going to be choice involved. And we've already got this strong 'I' that fronts the poem so the translator is not transparent. And, and there are still choices in that end.

EZRA POUND:
My Cid rode up to Burgos, up to the studded gate between two towers beat with his lance butt and the child came out una nina de nueve anos to the little gallery over the gate between the towers, reading the writ voce tinnula. That no man speak to feed help Ruy Diaz. On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike. And both his eyes torn out and all his goods sequestered. And here Myo Cid are the seals. The big seal and the writing.

AL FILREIS:
The recording we have.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Yeah let's talk about that.

AL FILREIS:
He's now you know it's almost 60 years later and of the few poems he chose to read in this recording, which was at Spoleto, I believe he chooses to read this one. Could should we read something into that? I'm moved by the voice of this recording. Would you Kaplan like to say anything about that?

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Yeah. I think there's a couple of ways to consider it. I mean, you could think about him as physiologically old. It's tough maybe for him to sustain a 2.5 minute reading, but...

AL FILREIS:
How old was he?

KAPLAN HARRIS:
81, 81.

AL FILREIS:
81 So he sounds a little frailer than a lot of 81 year olds, I know. But I assume that was part of the performance. But...

KAPLAN HARRIS:
I don't want to discount the idea that there's still a performative aspect to it as he's reading it. And one thing that's missing is some of the way he would have a kind of singsong voice in his early Cantos. If you listen to other recordings on PennSound, that way of reading, that's just one step away from humming or incantation that seems to be missing in this version. And my question would be how much he might be looking at the fact that, OK, you know, William Carlos Williams, the vernacular has one. It's the 1960s. It's after Olson, it's after Creeley. Maybe we need to change our reading style if we're going to be a poem that stays present and relevant into the future. You know, you've got to trade in your old reading style for something a little more modern. I mean, contemporary. I'm wondering.

AL FILREIS:
So he's being strategic in the reading, do you think?

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Maybe. Because, you know, anybody listening to the old kind of and down they went, you know, kind of reading, you know, which, you know, would hear somebody who's truly dated, who is truly back in 1915 and 1970, not a poem that's going to last a thousand years.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
But I think this reading is truly dated. He really sounds Victorian. He sounds like Yeats actually.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, he does sound like Yeats.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
A kind of cross between the incantatory Yeats and the incantatory Eliot the poetry voice, a loathsome poetry voice that people use when they read poetry.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Yeah. It's still there. I would say a little bit, but it's a lot less than those older recordings.

AL FILREIS:
Look, we could talk about this Canto or any Canto forever. What I want to do is invite you each to say one last thing as we go around, just to have at least the pretense of wrapping up this already very good reading of the poem. Kaplan do you want to start, what's a last thought?

KAPLAN HARRIS:
A last thought, yeah. I listened to the poem a couple of times and and and I agree with everything that's been said. You can still hear the incantatory voice, but I do think there's some places where he doesn't quite articulate every single word. And it's a little difficult or maybe it's just difficult to hear on the recording. But certain words I want to say do stand out. Like when he says pawnbrokers, that one, you almost feel like he speeds up a little bit and he says, Oh, wait a minute, there's a real argument in this poem. I need to make sure that it gets across."

AL FILREIS:
You mean passing over it.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
No, no. I think there's a slight stress on some words and...

AL FILREIS:
He's remembering the anti-Semitism of the moment maybe.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
Maybe, maybe.

AL FILREIS:
OK. Alright. Thank you, Rachel.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
It's really hard for me to say one thing, except that perhaps going back to the genre question and the question of who is the hero? It seems to me 'The Cantos' are really the invention of a new cultural institution, which is somewhere between a lot of things, between criticism and poetry, between documentary and fact, which differ in Pound's case, quite drastically and between a lot of things. It's really a major collage poem of which one part is never the only thing that can be found there.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you, Richard.

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
My little punctum is the Ignez de Castro, who comes in very at the end, very, very surprisingly. And just very quickly, this is the story Montherlant did his La Reine morte about this this very famous story of Pedro's wife who was murdered by King Alfonso IV. And when Pedro succeeds at power, he sets up his dead queen and all the courtiers are are forced to come and kiss her hand and kiss the hand of this corpse. This is the absolute sort of fetishization of female beauty and an extraordinary moment. It comes back at the end of Canto XXX: “After Ignez was murdered came the Lords in Lisboa. A day, and a day in homage. Seated there dead eyes, dead hair under the crown, The still the king still young there beside her.” And actually it's at the very end of the Usura Canto bringing corpses to banquet. This seems to me sort of the real danger if this is a poem about the past, the danger of absolutely fetishizing your object of desire into this corpse you talked about. And that's where the last line 'Nec Spe Nec Metu' which means with neither hope nor fear which is this motto in the rooms of Isabella d'Este in the Ducal Palace of Mantua, with neither hope nor fear. That motto means act without hope, nor fear. The the poem actually ends with the rejection of the ultimate example of the fetishized past, which is putting up corpses and adoring absolutely dead things.

AL FILREIS:
Well, my... I'm sorry. Go ahead Rachel.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
What about the dead body of Mussolini and the piece in Cantos?

RICHARD SIEBURTH:
Well, that's... But the point is that's already that's a big problem throughout the Cantos that it's already. You're absolutely right.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
He doesn't solve it.

AL FILREIS:
Another genre circus here because the Cantos is also a series of murder stories. Canto XXX and then he's in Cantos my final word very simple and it having not nearly the sophisticated reading of that family motto that ends this poem at all. When I went back to this, I rediscovered, as we sometimes do in our old copies of Pound's poems. The first time we tried to grapple with this, I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and I found neither hope nor fear written in bold letters in my copy of the New Directions, Cantos and I used it as a motto to get me through the Cantos. So I'm not sure what that says about me or my teachers at Virginia. Well, we like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of Gathering Paradise, which is a chance for several of us to spread wide, our narrow hands together a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world. Rachel, what do you recommend these days?

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS:
Oh, well, these days I'm still very saturated in the long poem because of a course that I'm co-teaching with somebody at Penn, Bob Perelman. So, I would highly recommend Langston Hughes’ ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred,’ H.D.’s ‘Trilogy’ and Williams’ ‘Paterson,’ not so much as antidotes to Pound, but as juxtapositions with them. So I feel that I haven't read anything current except maybe Jonathan Franzen, the novel, the new novel. So I would in the poetry world, that's what I'm going to rest on.

AL FILREIS:
It sounds great. It sounds like Paradise, actually. And also taking a course with you and Bob together sounds like Paradise too. Kaplan Harris, gather some Paradise.

KAPLAN HARRIS:
OK, I'm going to mention Karen Mac Cormack’s new book, TALE LIGHT New & Selected Poems 1984-2009, published by Book*hug and West House Books. It's a selection of her work that's I'm quite enjoyed reading. It's investigations of language place bodies, and I'll just read one line from it, which is from one of the prefaces. It says, "An interesting, if frightening fact is that there are fewer typos in vogue than in most scholarly books published in North America."

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. And my Paradise is I'm holding it in my hand. It's a brand new shiny New Directions paperback Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems & Translations edited by Richard Siebert. It's just out and it is priced at under $16, so everybody needs to get a copy of that. Well, that's all the expensive gondolas we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org. Thanks to my guests Richard Sieburth, Kaplan Harris and Rachel Blau DuPlessis and to Poem Talk’s engineer today, Steve McLaughlin and to our editor as always, the self-same Steve McLaughlin. Next time on Poem Talk, Burt Kimmelman, Marcella Durand and Erin Gautsche convened to talk about the eco poetics of Nathaniel Tarn. This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us for that or another Poem Talk.