Monday, January 21, 2008

This blog and you are our trans-Atlantic communication network

I'm just a bit too tired, taking the night off from music. By "night off" I mean that I already practiced piano (Beethoven's first sonata and the beginning of the "Appassionata") for two hours or so, read scores while listening to recordings for about a half hour, and composed for another hour and a half. Basically, I've done nothing but music all night.

I decided to pick back up the barely thumbed-through book of Ezra Pound poems that I bought for class long ago. Once again, they don't make sense unless you read them aloud. It's like sitting there staring at music without trying to at least hum it, much less play it. So, mumbling under my breath late at night while exhausted from a weekend of working nearly 20 hours, also exhausted from the hot whiskey (hey, it helps stave off the cold), I found a new appreciation for Ezra Pound. Not really any poem in particular so far, but just lines like

Your mind and you are our Sargasso sea;
London has swept about you this score years
and bright ships left you this or that in fee:

that just make utterly no sense on a literal level, but when you say it aloud, sure, maybe it makes sense. But, continue reading the poem; she--the poem is "Portrait D'unne Femme"--is a shell of a woman, embodying multiplicity, a pretty face. That deliberately ambiguous phrase "Your mind and you are our Sargasso sea" is itself a portrait of her.

And this is why I now love Ezra Pound.

Anyway, I also have something saved up comparing Beethoven to Beckett (again). But that's for another day.

No comments: