RonPrice
September 28th 2004, 06:05 AM
OPENING UP QUESTIONS
Pound...presents us with a paradigm of the relation of poetic form to ideology and of modern poetry’s relation to history. -Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p.227.
Seventy years of writing The Cantos
and 800 pages later he has produced
this paradigm of paradigms.
Personally, I find Toynbee’s poetic form
more fertile as a way of stating my relation
to poetry and history
within some paradigmatic setting.
The notion of oneness in its central place,
the single motif threading its way through
the wondrous, mysterious movement of history
as: vision, principle, dogma, emotionally potent
concept whose time has come
in an infinitely complex and intangible process,
meticulously plotted, perplexing, a posteriori,
a priori, evocatively worded, technically superb
in a magnum opus too big for most:
painting the whole canvas of history...
a huge theological poem in prose,
a director setting all of history in motion
with its appearances, masks, observations, images,
immensity and wonder where historical certainty
is found within an endlessly deferred
and supremely complex matrix
whose end hath no end:
sceptical, scholarly, imaginative, sympathetic,
opening up questions not closing them down:
always there are questions, endless questions,
always there are words, endless words,
God could not have made it more complex--
and yet simple, so simple and simpler--
whom the gods would destory they first make
simpler and simpler and simpler.
Ron Price
21 October 1995:blush:
Pound...presents us with a paradigm of the relation of poetic form to ideology and of modern poetry’s relation to history. -Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p.227.
Seventy years of writing The Cantos
and 800 pages later he has produced
this paradigm of paradigms.
Personally, I find Toynbee’s poetic form
more fertile as a way of stating my relation
to poetry and history
within some paradigmatic setting.
The notion of oneness in its central place,
the single motif threading its way through
the wondrous, mysterious movement of history
as: vision, principle, dogma, emotionally potent
concept whose time has come
in an infinitely complex and intangible process,
meticulously plotted, perplexing, a posteriori,
a priori, evocatively worded, technically superb
in a magnum opus too big for most:
painting the whole canvas of history...
a huge theological poem in prose,
a director setting all of history in motion
with its appearances, masks, observations, images,
immensity and wonder where historical certainty
is found within an endlessly deferred
and supremely complex matrix
whose end hath no end:
sceptical, scholarly, imaginative, sympathetic,
opening up questions not closing them down:
always there are questions, endless questions,
always there are words, endless words,
God could not have made it more complex--
and yet simple, so simple and simpler--
whom the gods would destory they first make
simpler and simpler and simpler.
Ron Price
21 October 1995:blush: