AG: So you’ll find in the twentieth-century, (Ezra) Pound, (Basil) Bunting, (Louis) Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, some of (Robert) Creeley, all derive from this poem or from the practice of this poem It’s sort of like the secret inner measure of their work, the kind of attempt that Campion is getting into here or the territory he’s getting into. And that was related to the idea of William Carlos Williams of finding a measure that would be an American measure rather than just taking the hand-me-down English, taking in the English as a hand-me-down, and writing in the emotion of the…
[Dick Gallup leaves to get up and smoke a cigarette. AG: It’s alright to the smoke here. It’s alright to smoke here, Dick – DG: It’s alright AG: Ok]
The break with iambic pentameter that (Ezra) Pound talked about and the atttention to the sound of the spoken voice that Williams was preoccupied with, was also, like, a main theme in (Basil) Bunting and in (Louis) Zukofsky, and all those friends, even Marianne Moore.
So that a study of this poem will turn you on to the meters, or the sounds, or the continuity (continuity, to use your word), continuity that you hear in Pound’s Cantos (and some of his earlier poems that are similar to…
That’s why I’ve been trying, in several classes, so hung up, to decipher, or make clear, that something muscular is going on here that is different from the usual set of muscles
(tho’ I’m not very articulate about exactly what it is maybebecause I don’t really know enough, I just.. I hear it).
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-four minutes in and concluding at approximately fifty-six minutes in]