This morning I put “read cantos” on my to do list. I try to limit to three things, really I should have 1 thing, and sometimes it balloons to 7 things – and I don’t always do things on my to do list. My practice is not to have self judgement about this failing but compassion – it is a self-compassion practice.

So imagine my surprise when looking for an old human design reading I saw the cantos and remembered my todo list and began reading Canto 8.

The words that I saw first were “Slut” Bitch” its like one of those new age tests where the word you see in a jumble of letters is the thing you are going to manifest.

But I also saw truth. And shelves and shores. Shelves are not shores Ezra! But they sound like they are. That is false speech – not true.

The feeling of this canto is different – granted it has been a month since I read canto 7 but this feels more personal – an epistle. Peace is being discussed – a public matter – a political matter – but in the language. of privacy and family. I am adopting family/political as a binary – oikos/polos – home/city. There is somethig. of the cloud atlas to this canto, of the virtuosity of a mimic. It makes sense – what a disappointment.

Latter/matter/maestro/mortar

dry/away/ready

It also feels ike an inventory poem- perhaps like a todo list

But the canto devolves into the old canto format starting with Lyra. It is a magic work and induction to a mystical past away from the political/family mundane business – from the material world to the enchanted world.

and we vacilate between worlds for a bit. And the politics become poeticized. What does that mean? To poeticize – they become open to many meanings / they open to the reader/ to collaborate.

What are the poetics here – what is the structure of this many meaningness / of the opening. The container. is the poem, the entrance is the poetics.

I don’t know I am only at canto 8. The war is negotiated between to men via letters and then narrated via flowery “poetic” verse – the different aspects of the same event have different languages and they look different too.

How to they echo history or pull in the future? Pound pulls in the greek emperor in Florence, the gods (Poseidon/Dionysius). At one aspect history happens all at once, myth exists, and we look for language to express that paradox.

We move to city states and nations – to people ventians, Milanese, Naples to seasons, This poem is so hard to read.

And he was twelve at the ome, Sigismundo,

And no dues had been paId for three years,

And hIS elder brother gone PIOUS,

And that year they fought m the streets,

And that year he got out to Cesena

And brought back the leVIes, And that year he crossed by night over Fogha, and

the end of canto 8