I had twenty minutes between this & that so I turned on the television & was flipping through the channels when SpikeTV, which often has the worst imaginable programming on when it isn’t doing reruns of Star Trek, turned out to be showing The Godfather. It was just a brief passage – it began with Marlon Brando telling his associates that his boy Al Pacino was now in charge & continued up to the start of the baptism scene (in which the infant is played, if that is the right word, by Sofia Coppola in her film debut). My wife looked up from the other room and I told her, “It’s like Macbeth – you can pick it up anywhere and just watch for a scene or two.”

 

“I know you like it. Why don’t you own it?”

 

“Because it’s on TV so often that I don’t need to.”

 

There are poems and books of poetry like this – not just Macbeth or Lear, either. I’m not sure, for example, if I will ever read Richard Sieburth’s new edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos cover to cover because that is a text that, at this point in my life, I’m quite content to dip into not unlike watching a 20-minute snippet of the clan Corleone:

 

Out of Phlegethon!

out of Phlegethon,

     Gerhart

              art thou come forth out of Phlegethon?

with Buxtehude and Klages in your satchel, with the

Ständebuch of Sachs in yr/ luggage

                          — not of one bird but of many

 

That is, as it happens, the entire text of Canto LXXV, save for a two-page transcription of the violin part of a 16^th century piece of music “abbreviated” in the early 20^th century by Gerhart Műnch. It is Műnch, a native of Dresden, who is being addressed &, tho it is never mentioned as such, it is precisely the carpet-bombing of that city by the Allies that is being discussed.

 

Pound’s juxtaposition of high & low levels of discourse, the not-quite synonyms of satchel & luggage contrasted with the – in this order – 17^th century composer, 20^th century anthropologist & 16^th century singer, is a typical strategy for Pound. He does an effective job conveying the jumble of Dresden’s cultural treasures that its refugees presumably attempted to rescue from the onslaught of bombings.

 

Because I don’t read music I’d never really noticed that the score that follows is Műnch’s abbreviation for violin of Francesco da Milano’s 16^th century arrangement of Clément Jannequin’s Chant des Oiseaux, literally “Song of the Birds,” until I’d read Sieburth’s notes. And I certainly had not noticed that there is a tiny Chinese ideogram at the end of Olga Rudge’s transcription, tho I can see that it’s there not just in the Sieburth edition, but even in my 1956 The Cantos (1-95), the oldest of several copies I have of different portions of this work.

 

In most of The Cantos, a seven-line passage like this one would represent just a passing moment & there are plenty of other such passages in the Pisan suite as good or better. Yet picking up a book like this – and it can be almost any book that you’ve grown up with as a poet, so I would include Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, many of the New Americans & more than a few langpos as offering comparable experiences for me. Stein less so, simply because it took me longer to get into her poetry & so I come to it always already as a much more fully formed reader. Sometimes it will be just a line or two, or a couple of stanzas:

 

     Thus

Hides the

 

Parts – the prudery

Of Frigidaire, of

Soda-jerking –

 

I’m quite serious when I say that one could spend a lifetime just considering these lines. Their hesitations, their sense of enjambment & of vocabulary – that remarkable contrast of prudery with Frigidaire, the palpable physicality of Soda-jerking. Thus / Hides the / / Parts – George Oppen here in only the second section of his great first book Discrete Series announces his fundamental concern with ethics, that will focus him as poet & citizen all his days. Further, that verb phrase with its cognitive dissonance as to number, working as it does as if coming after – it calls to mind the very syllogistic machinery it violates – will always pull me in. As much as I love coming upon new poems & new poetry, books such as this are not so much ones that I will, in any strict sense, ever read again so much as pick up & read into. From the vista of those lines, the whole of Oppen is available to me, just as one can turn almost anywhere in The Godfather to find a detail (the way Troy Donahue’s foot goes through the windshield, the shattered glass spidering & rendering his death half veiled) from which the whole of the trilogy feels almost inevitable. Is there any way for an art to do more?