My daughter - the teenage one, not the six-month-old - came into the room while I was slowly incanting one of the Cantos in this thread to myself, mock-Pound style, and I had to explain to her what I was doing. Something about the way it's written makes you read it slowly, sonorously. You could try rapping it I suppose, but it seems to have its own internal drag. It wants to pull you into its own sound-world.
I like this reading luka posted in another thread:
https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=34&poem=1731
Canto CXVI
Came Neptunus
his mind leaping
like dolphins
These concepts the human mind has attained.
To make Cosmos ---
To achieve the possible ---
Muss., wrecked for an error,
But the record
the palimpsest ---
a little light
in great darkness ---
cuniculi ---
An old “crank” dead in Virginia.
Unprepared young burdened with records,
The vision of the Madonna
above the cigar butts
and over the portal.
“Have made a mass of laws”
(mucchio di leggi)
Litterae nihil sanantes
Justinian’s,
a tangle of works unfinished.
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
If love be not in the house there is nothing.
The voice of famine unheard.
How came beauty against this blackness,
Twice beauty under the elms ---
To be saved by squirrels and bluejays?
“plus j’aime le chien”
Ariadne.
Disney against the metaphysicals,
and Laforgue more than they thought in him,
Spire thanked me in proposito
And I have learned more from Jules
(Jules Laforgue) since then
deeps in him,
And Linnaeus.
chi crescerà i nostri ---
but about that terzo
third heaven,
that Venere,
again is all “paradiso”
a nice quiet paradise
over the shambles,
and some climbing
before the take-off,
to “see again,”
the verb is “see,” not ‘walk on”
i.e. it coheres all right
even if my notes do not cohere.
Many errors,
a little rightness,
to excuse his hell
and my paradiso.
And as to why they go wrong,
thinking of rightness
And as to who will copy this palimpsest?
al poco giorno
ed al gran cerchio d’ombra
But to affirm the gold thread in the pattern
(Torcello)
al Vicolo d’oro
(Tigullio).
To confess wrong without losing rightness:
Charity I have had sometimes,
I cannot make it flow thru.
A little light, like a rushlight
to lead back to splendour.