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4 or 5 kilometres north of Pisa, surrounded by dry
fields and olive groves, sits the unremarkable commuter town of Metato.
Unlike the nearby cities, there has been little attempt made here to cater
for tourism. Rather than the dusty reds and dark greens that characterise the
Tuscan cliche, here all is functional suburbia: detached housing, saloon
cars, swimming pools and empty streets - nothing to attract a curious
traveller. And yet a 10 minute walk south, with the mid-morning sun as your
remote, notional destination, brings you to something quite different. The
town quickly disperses behind you, the clean pavements become grass verges
on roads that cross and re-cross with scant thought to route, and abandoned
farm
buildings replace the municipal services. Here, in this desolate, flat
landscape, there is a view which to a few means something more than the
distant haze would seem to warrant. In a few places, easily missed if not
watched for, a gap opens between the telegraph poles and cypress trees and
the unmistakable shape of the leaning tower appears, and next to it the Duomo
and Basilica, less familiar but no less impressive.
This is by no means the best view of Pisa's Romanesque architecture, it
certainly wouldn't warrant a mention in any conventional guidebook, but it
was the view that for six months, from May to November 1945, the
American-born poet Ezra Pound faced from his imprisonment, first in an open
steel cage, then in a medical tent. He had been arrested for treasonable
offences, by Italian partisans, following his broadcasts in support of
Mussolini on Radio Rome. It seemed likely that he would face the death
penalty.
The inventory of Pound's possessions during his time at the Disciplinary
Training Centre has passed into legend: A Chinese
text of Confucius, James Legge's translation of the same, a Chinese
dictionary, and a eucalyptus pip. These, at least, were his material
possessions. What proved of incalcuable importance to Pound during this
period, exposed to the brutal elements of cold nights and baking days, were
his memories. 'What thou lovest well, remains' as he wrote in the seventh of
ten Cantos produced during his time at the DTC. Entitled The Pisan Cantos
they are the high-point of the incomplete epic which occupied Pound for more
than 40 years, beginning in 1915.
This section of the Cantos is a unique collage of Pound's immense learning,
his life in London and Paris, and the fragmented images and voices that broke
in from the present. The architecture of Pisa appears in several of the ten
Cantos, most explicitly in the opening of the sixth: 'Moon, cloud, tower, a patch of
the battistero / all of a whiteness, dirt pile as
per the Del Cossa inset'. The mountains to the north-east also occur,
the most prominent of them becoming for Pound ÔTaishan', a sacred Chinese
peak: 'Zeus lies in Ceres' bosom / Taishan is attended of loves / under
Cythera, before sunrise'.
Ezra Pound was a writer of immense energy and imaginative sensitivity; his
writing, particularly his early writing, suggests someone who lived without
skin, his nerves sparking poetry at the slightest impact. The nature of his
imprisonment seems to offer a fitting metaphor for this poet: an open cage in
which he was exposed to the world 24 hours a day, total vision in contrast to
the small, high window we normally associate with incarceration. To stand in
this place and try to reconcile the reality of the scenery with those moments
of beautiful calm that punctuate the sprawling and often impenetrable Cantos,
one comes face to face with the fact of creative genius: there is nothing
here to warrant the work that it produced. As with all sources of inspiration
there is nothing intrinsic in the material which leads to art; it is not the
ingredients that are important, but the crucible in which they are mixed. One
is reminded of the line by a quite different poet, Simon Armitage, 'it ain't
what you do, it's what it does to you.'
© Ben Parker 2011
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