HOW DUKE VALENTINE CONTRIVED

(the murder of Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Mr Pagolo and the Duke of Gravina Orsini) according to Macchiavelli :

in the version published by Basil Bunting.

And how the mention of Mister Anthony of Venafro (representing Pandolfo Petruccio, boss of Siena) set me off…

I went to Santa Maria Novella railway station in Florence and asked for a ticket to Venafro. 'Where ?' Venafro. Never heard of it. Checks screen, checks dog-eared almanack. Oh, right. Rome, then local train south, three hours, two changes. That's right. Siena is easy enough, but your Florentine railway clerk can't place Venafrum, as Horace called it in his odes. Did Messer Antonio di Venafro know his Horace ? Because centuries after Macchiavelli they were still using handsome Roman stones as doorposts -you have to read them sideways. It had been a place the patricians patronised. It is now an overgrown village with overgrown villas jostling out the light on what was once a fertile plain. No sign of Horace. Did Basil Bunting know? during the war, when it was a beautiful little village, with a big hole knocked in it by Flying Fortresses that had been trying to hit Monte Cassino 20 miles away ? They were so high up it's a wonder the bombs landed at all.
My question is obvious : what do we have to know ? Sometimes it's clear as day. There is or was a regular contributor to PN Review - to take an example that's caught in my teeth - a medical man of letters, who berated what's his name, the Elvis of deconstruction (it'll come to me) for referring to Hitler's destruction of the European Jews as a 'gesture'. What the essayist had to know and didn't was that 'geste' means act, not gesture, as in 'geste médical'. We have to know, in other words, when we don't know ; because then we can do something about it, such as keep quiet, or find out.
Take the first poem in Muldoon's 'Hay'. I'd told a friend it was worth a read, though there was some principle of organisation behind it that the poet dangles in front of the reader's nose too close to focus. Some kind of sestina, maybe. The friend phoned up, all pleased, saying he'd especially liked the poem about the Morbier cheese. Well, I didn't recall that one. He explained, though, that the whole caper with goats, the Jura mountains and the cinder path that runs through the poem, even the Zephyr hubcaps (q.v.) is from the shape of the Morbier cheese, a round thing that gets cut in half so they can put a layer of ash in it, god knows why. He's right. It does leaves the puzzle of those odd pairs of words from adjacent spots in the dictionary, but the man deserves a cash prize nevertheless. Perhaps provision is made on the Paul Muldoon website. My friend said that when he saw in the same poem reference to 'the worst excesses of Conlon Nancarrow' he felt immensely pleased to be part of the miniscule élite that could pick up both references. He and Paul, I reckon. And now us too, gentle reader. And did we need to know ? No. But we weren't to know that.
Now take the train from Florence to Sienna. There is no train, so take the bus. The city has put up plaques here and there, very discretely, quotations from Dante that I was able to check up in the bookshops :
'… mi fè, disfecemi Maremma' on a thirteenth century palace in the middle of town, the words of a young woman who speaks to Dante in paradise. It sounds like an epitaph, like
'Norfolk sprung thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,
Clare of the county of Claremont, though hight'…
and of course it reads like an epitaph, set in stone there.
Then at the bottom of the hill there's an old covered reservoir - very old, because it's mentioned in the Inferno - 'Per fonte Branda non darei la vista' : some who's landed in hell partly because he was doublecrossed ; he's tortured by thirst, but, he says, if I could see down here the two who got me into this place, I wouldn't swap that satisfaction for Fonte Branda !
Of course Dante uses bits of this world to make his own : when he describes bits of hell as being like the river Adige at Trento it's earth, not heaven, that is real. But he does it so coherently that, when you're sitting by a pond where three big whiskered carp are enjoying the shade on a July afternoon, you might feel for a moment that you've crossed into the metaphoric level of Dante's real eternity. Everything you learn about Dante'' words gets you closer to his purpose.

Back to 1999 : what does the page of Chinese in Prynne's selected poems mean ? That depends on how many sinologists read Prynne. To the rest, it means I the poet understand this and you the reader don't. It looks nice. It attracts and repels like the ultimate Morbier cheese. The Morbiest cheese.
I'm not preparing for a PoMo analysis. Both Prynne and Muldoon are repeating Rimbaud's 'J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage' (Parade, from Illuminations) and Rimbaud was PreMo.
My language teacher asks a question. I don't know how to reply. He says, just give me an answer : it doesn't have to be true, it just has to make sense. Frank Kermode once described poetry as a higher level grammar. In some ways it's an antigrammar : it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be true. And the truth is difficult because it is banal. So Bunting hedges it round with reconditry, the worst excesses of which he then has to mend in those hilariously prim footnotes (Attis : 'Parodies of Lucretius and Cino da Pistoia can do no damage and intend no disrespect').
So what's the answer from Macchiavelli, Bunting and Abu'abdulla Ja'far bin Mahmud Rudaki of Samarakand ? For he puts himself there among them, their languages and worldly ways.

'Ille mi par esse deo videtur

O, it is godlike to sit selfpossessed
When her chin rises and she turns to smile ;
But my tongue thickens, my ears ring,
What I see is hazy.'
- Odes II, 7.

Knowing Latin is not much consolation.