The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach

Author:James Longenbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press

Any reader might be forgiven for giving up at this point, since almost every line of Canto 74 demands a meticulous attention, diverting its readers from the increasingly unmanageable task of seeing the poem whole.

But if we turn to Canto 75, the second and shortest of The Pisan Cantos, we find something different. Following the 842 lines of Canto 74, this canto contains just 7 lines of verse followed by 124 measures of a musical score, written out by hand. The score is a twentieth-century transcription for violin of Francesco da Milano’s sixteenth-century transcription for lute of Clement Janequin’s “Song of the Birds,” a polyphonic motet for four voices. The score reduces the multiple voices of polyphony to a single voice, replacing sung syllables with pure sound, while simultaneously offering a visual equivalent of an experience that (as we find out later in The Pisan Cantos) Pound had every day he was incarcerated.

8th day of September

f f

d

g

write the birds on their treble scale

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