About The Cantos: Pound & Co. Reading Group

The idea is to have a read-through of Ezra Pound's magnum opus, the Cantos. This is similar to the Finnegans Wake read-through groups--though, given the outward-gazing nature of the Cantos, there will no doubt be trips afield to discuss other matters.

The Cantos were at one time considered a vital monument of 20th Century literature. As authors' popularity fades and brightens in phase with critical fads in the academies, so EP's work is not perceived as being as central and basic as it was. Perhaps this is as much because of the difficulty of the work as it is the odium of some of the views he expressed. But, as Basil Bunting said of the Cantos:

Here are the Alps, fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble.

The Cantos will reward a close reading, however, and EP is deserving of the kind of exegesis and focus that James Joyce and Proust receive in extant read-through groups. We can gather to scramble safely over the rocks of EP's recondite difficulties and past the thorns and dust-devils of his social views. This group's purpose is to try to make accessible and present a major work that warrants more and better attention.

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There is another function for such a group. Too many people want to write poetry but not to read it. There are many groups devoted to writing poetry. Let's not mince words: The best way to learn about poetry, both to be an audience to read it with insight and to write it with craft, is to read it. And the better the poetry, the more there is to learn. "The mind prepared," as the saying goes. There is a reason that T.S. Eliot dedicated The Wasteland to Ezra Pound, "il miglior fabbro". It wasn't chance or a whim--ol' Possum was no dolt when it comes to poetry. Eliot's dedication is pointed; it is an expression of gratitude to his maestro, his editor, his friend, his colleague, but it is also to put us, the reader, on notice. If you are already as good a poet as Basil Bunting or T.S. Eliot; if you have the craft and joiner's skill of Louis Zukofsky; if you hold the "American idiom" in the palm of your hand as did William Carlos Williams; if you do not, unlike William Butler Yeats, need a goose from an insightful hand to jump to your maturer and tighter style; then, by all means, drop EP from your radar and welter on. But, if like them, you love poetry and can recognize an exemplum of its very best when it is in front of you...then the Cantos are for you.