Size Matters

I’m still in the trenches of preparing syllabi (D-Day is tomorrow – er, later today, I guess) & therefore not at all available for extended blogging. Thank Goddess there’re so many distractions from paying work. Right now I’m finding it hard to line up dates & page numbers because the cranium’s abuzz with the idea of a longish essay/shortish monograph on part-to-whole relationships in modernist/late modernist long poems. Really a meditation on length, the length of the small things that make up the big thing. Sparked by noting how while The Cantos stretch out from 3-5 pages early on to 20 or more in the late bits, there’s a general homogeneity in duration – only rarely the blip of a canto longer or shorter than anything around it. (Relecting back on the books into which Homer & Virgil divided their epics – who’s responsible for the book divisions in Homer? are you out there, David W? – the very regular canto lengths in Dante, Milton’s decision to revise Paradise Lost from 10 to 12 by the simple expedient of chopping 2 long books in half…) Chapter & volume divisions in the Victorian novel, more often than not influenced by the exigencies of periodical publication & circulating library demands – a tradition blown to hell by the metastasizing chapters of Ulysses – which I read in turn as the key influence on Zukofsky’s decision to organize “A” as a series of heterogeneous formal experiments, rather than – as it began – a Marxist-inflected new world version of The Cantos. Then on to what – The Alphabet? Drafts? the solid text blocks of McCaffery’s Black Debt? the labyrinths of Sheppard’s Twentieth Century Blues? But for now back to the syllabi…
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Michael Bérubé has closed up shop. I’m glummish, even tho rejoycing at the 4-5 weekly hours that have been freed up…
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Hey, Bob, what if – and the syntax allows – Ron only meant Gjertrud S’s poetics were fascist, & not Geoffrey Hill’s? Just wondering…
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The night of the walking ellipses… (LZ habitually used only two dots for ellipses, one of the weirder orthographical things I’ve encountered since Ron Johnson’s habitual “Euridice.”)