34:2 Spring 1984

JIM POWELL

Cleopatra

The “Poetry and Politics” issue also included poems by Turner Cassity and Jim Powell. The poem selected here is a translation of Horace’s Odes 1.37. It was subsequently included in It Was Fever That Made The World (University of Chicago, 1989).

 In 1990, Powell contributed an essay on Basil Bunting and Mina Loy to an issue of CR devoted to “Neglected Poets” (see Ronald Johnson’s “Six Alas”). In that piece he describes Bunting’s debt to Horace:

Bunting was Pound's protege during the 20s and early 30s and certainly Pound fostered, if he did not prompt, Bunting's experiments with classical measures. But Bunting also brought to this process his own abiding love of the Latin lyric genius Horace (a poet Pound learned to appreciate only late in life), and the effects of the Roman poet's formal balance are part of what distinguishes Bunting's sense of rhythmic poise and focus from Pound's Greek profusion and variety.

And he keenly articulates the relationship between sound and sense in the tradition Bunting—and Powell—are writing in:

It was Bunting who discovered in a German-Italian dictionary the translation Pound made into a slogan, "dichten = condensare"—‘to compose poetry is to condense.' This desiderates compression of sense, economy of means, the quest for le mot juste, for the one right word that supplants a half dozen blurry approximations, the fusion of phrase and perception that subverts habits of thought and speech to embody insight and survive, weathering the erosion of dailiness and the passing of fashionable ideas, rewarding repetition. But in poetry sound and sense are consubstantial, and compression of sense requires corporeal embodiment in the simultaneous melic condensation of verse. Memorability, durability in the mind, has always been recognized as one of the primal functions of poetic form (incantation, hypnosis, is another), and memory is a hedonist. She lives in the mind, which is a carnal thing, and wants corporeal nurture, wants in verse the carnality of a substantial music--impedance, weight, solidity, resistance: impedance like a burr to snag in recollection, resistance to outlast the corrosive blizzard of oblivion, solidity that like Yeats' "stone in the midst of all" troubles the recourses of memory and reflection, a weight of phrase that sinks beyond the currents of ephemerality into the deeper reaches of our lives.

[ES, 2006]

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