Finally, I have finished ‘Genius’, my socialist riposte/rewriting of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. I’ve blogged previously about my reasoning for taking this (See Tony Trehy: Identity and Genius (Writing 2023)). I’ve kept to the constraints of Pound’s form and inflection points, changing languages when he does (though not the same ones), referencing people, artists and writers when he does, dates, betrayals, and deaths, when he does.
Canto LXXIV (The Axiom of Separation)
The Axiom of Separation states that all sets corresponding to formulas – all multiples which correspond to the limits of language – presume the prior existence of an undefined set – a multiple in excess of language. So, in applying this principle, the opening Canto sets out to frame for the whole poem. It maps the context of the contemporary moment: the Ukraine, Iran, Yemen wars, Zionist genocide, – precursors to WW3, – multi-polarity, and the bankruptcy of contemporary art, the irrelevance of poetry itself, and what Mark Fisher called “the delusion of progressivism.” These themes contrapuntally weave through the material and ideas in the rest of ‘Genius’.
Canto LXXV (Space)
This Canto opens with my memory of an artistic epiphany I experienced in front of Michelangelo's Dying Slave in the Louvre back in 1982. I was struck by the thought: Was that the first time I had that experience, that transcendent moment when a human creation moves your consciousness, the ontological shiver confronted with a great work of art (Can you remember yours?). I realised that for me, the first such moment wasn’t an artwork at all but rather Soviet Chess Grandmaster Mikhail Tal’s sublime demolition of Dieter Keller in the 1959 Zurich tournament. So the rest of this Canto ruminates on Tal’s genius in dialogue with Duchamp and Beckett’s (and my) passion for conceptual space of Chess.
Canto LXXVI (Interiority)
The long standing shibboleth rejection of the personal voice in alternative poetry creates the formal challenge of how to represent personal history or experience. This Canto investigates the possibilities offered by the concept of interiority as articulated in the writings of Sylvain Lazarus and Alain Badiou, applied to my past life in art and poetry, and to where I am now.
Canto LXXVII (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
This canto takes the dialectic theme of William Blake’s ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.”
Canto LXXVIII (In Spring and Autumn)
“Yellow flowers on the battlefield are especially fragrant” from Cultural Revolution Songbook taken from a poem by Mao called ‘The Double Ninth’. The Canto continues the dialectic from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell stopping off via Kneecap, Rosa Luxemburg, Ibrahim Traore, Aaron Bushnell, Badiou, Helmut Lemke, closing with Mao’s observation from “On Practice and Contradiction”:
all
progressive
wars
are
just.
Canto LXXIX (Toussaint Rouge)
‘Red All Saints' Day’, also known as ‘Bloody All-Saints' Day’, was a series of 70 attacks committed by militant members of the Algerian National Liberation Front that took place on 1 November 1954. This Canto is the most overt celebration of revolution, primarily through the examples of revolutionary women either from history or whom I have known over the years.
Canto LXXX (The Clowde of Knowyng)
This Epistemological Canto uses ‘The Cloude of Unknowyng’, an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century, as a foundational vinculum interlacing the questions of “how is this not WW3?”, what is truth, what is knowability.
Canto LXXXI (Urim Thummim)
Here I address the darkest issue of our time: Israel. Specifically, the foundational myth that God allocated the Holy Land to the Jews. My question about this has always been: How exactly did God communicate this? If you consult the Hebrew Bible you find something called the Urim ("lights") and the Thummim ("perfection") carried in a breastplate worn by the High Priest (Aaron). The Urim are used frequently in the Old Testament in Exodus, Leviticus, Judges, Samuel, and Ezra. It’s pretty much academically settled that Urim and Thummim was divination by casting lots. So Israel’s claim to Palestine derives from Moses tossing a coin in the desert. Starting from this point, and Trump’s comment “Only the weak will fail”, the Canto interweaves aleatory logic of Urim, juxtaposing the language of Exodus with Palestinian testimony from the Genocide.
The final section of this Canto is the only place where I drop out of Pound’s form. In 1967, in an interview with Pound, Pier Paolo Pasolini read the end of Canto 81, which is transcribed in the Pasolini anthology, ‘In Danger’, without the line breaks. While adopting that layout for the equivalent lines, my content is a series of contrapuntal variations on Paul Klee’s phrase in ‘The Pedagogical Sketchbook’ “To Stand Despite All Possibilities To Fall.”
Canto LXXXII (Sociedade do cansaço)
Referencing Byung-Chul Han’s ‘The Society of Tiredness’ and Mark Fisher’s work on the politics of mental health, the psychological damage that capitalism does to you. This Canto reflects on struggles with depression, oppression and manufactured hopelessness.
Canto LXXXIII (Incoherence)
I’ve written previously about the concept of poetry as thoughtcrime, this Canto exemplifies the theory of Incoherist writing as a viable strategy for thought to survive through the collapse of liberalism to authoritarianism and AI assimilation. John Cage famously said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry.” Now we can say, “I am not allowed to say anything and I am saying it, and that is poetry.”
Canto LXXXIV (Toward Interregnum Closure)
Life is an infinitesimal interregnum between not existing and no longer existing. Pound’s Canto 84 starts with news of a death, so does mine, then proceeds to contemplate the nature of life and loss, and dying.
In terms of my own stylistic researches I continue to experiment with what Robert Grenier labelled my “quasicrystalline ‘new sentence’.” (https://sibila.com.br/english/robert-grenier-3/3883 ) Readers so far have reacted very positively, so the next thing will be getting it published somewhere. Failing that I’m reminded of Lawrence Weiner’s comments about a film that he had made:
“IF AND WHEN THE SCREENING SITUATION CANNOT ACCOMMODATE BY VIRTUE OF SELF-PROTECTION (CONFLICT OF BASIC IDEOLOGIES) A FILM, IT (THE FILM) THEN MUST ERECT A STRUCTURE CAPABLE OF SUPPORTING ITSELF (THE FILM)” (Notes for an Essay on Cinema 1975)
