Friday, June 30, 2006
I don’t teach that often, maybe once every five or six years, save for one-day deals here & there. Over the years I’ve turned down a couple of tenure-track positions – they always assume you’re willing to take a 50 percent (or more) cut in pay – as well as a number of adjunct and one-semester or one-year positions. So when I actually do run into a class of bright, energetic, talented individuals, especially at the graduate level (thus having thought enough about what they want to do for writing to be more than a distraction in the undergrad hookup scene), I get a great rush of enthusiasm. These folks are great and a few of them have the chops to do something serious with writing.
But they’re so unread! This was an observation I made with my first grad level class at
These folks are not dunderheads, not in the slightest, but unless you’ve had John Taggart as a teacher (one of my students has), studied at one of a handful of identifiable schools like SUNY Buffalo, Brown, Bard, Temple, Penn, Mills, Wayne State or UC San Diego, or are some kind of manic autodidact, your chances of entering a graduate school program with even a remote understanding of the history of American poetry over the past half century are pretty minimal. (High schools, where poetry is routinely taught by people who don’t even read it for pleasure, are of course a million times worse.)
Think for a moment of just what the problem is. If you read two books of poetry per week, you will fall behind in your knowledge of what exists and is out there to the tune of 3,900 books a year at minimum. Another way of putting it is that, at two books per week, you could read the poetry books published in the
This is obviously where canons, anthologies and selection comes in. You really don’t want to read all 4,000 titles that will be published this year, regardless of what your allegiance is to aesthetic camps. Indeed, you can’t possibly read just the post-avant texts that will be published this year, just because it’s probably the largest single semi-coherent grouping of those titles today. It would not shock me to discover that, of the 4,000 titles, as many as 1,500 can be identified as post-avant, either some kind of poetry that grew out of the various traditions once represented by the New American poetry or some other postmodern tendency (Stein, dada, surrealism, sound poetry & vispo, for example, were all noticeably not a part of the New American scene). Perhaps 500 books out of that pile of 4,000 can be traced likewise back to the
Now I may have my numbers wrong here – there may be as many as 2,000 post-avant books, for example – but if you want to challenge the numbers, I suggest you put up some alternative ones of your own, thank you.
The culprit here no doubt is undergraduate curricula, which sees no need to teach contemporary poetry, or does so ahistorically, without reference to the shape of the landscape. You can call that educational malpractice – and it surely is – but the real question isn’t what to call it, but rather what to do about it. I would presume, for example, that even the sleepiest of MFA programs² confront the same problem with each incoming class.
I do have a suggestion. Two actually. One for students, another for schools. For students I would seriously recommend taking a year off between your undergraduate education & any MFA program you might be thinking about. Use this year to read voluminously and historically. I would start with Donald M. Allen’s The New American Poetry. Of the 44 poets in that volume, there are least 30 whose work you should know pretty much in its entirety. You should also be able to trace at least three of the groupings – the Projectivists, the
There are more recent anthologies, of which Paul Hoover’s Norton Postmodern is almost certainly the best, that attempt to give a sense of the broader contemporary landscape. How do these poets fit into those same historic lineages? Then take an anthology devoted to new poets – such as Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics – and conduct the same exercise. If you can get through all this in one year, ask yourself why there has not been a good anthology of Objectivist poetry – the generation that comes after Pound & Williams, but before the New Americans – since 1932. Read all of them & then work your way back to the modernists.
That would be a year of excellent reading, and it would give you a foundation to build upon as a poet. The choices you made for your own poetry would be based on some perspective, not simply because you don’t know better.
For schools, my recommendation isn’t so different. Rather than simply admitting students to MFA programs if they have a remotely decent manuscript (or simply the dollars necessary to pay the tuition), grad programs should require prospective students to write a critical or historical paper. For prospective poets, that paper would take the Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, as its starting point. Students would have a large number of options including tracing on grouping in the anthology up to the present, identifying major new poets and formal evolutions along the way, analyzing the relationships between one another (and between the poetry of one another) of one or more writers from each of the different sections of the anthology, writing about the absence of people of color from the anthology and the relationship of a particular identarian poetics to the poetics of the Allen anthology as it has developed from the 1960s to the present, writing about the relative absence of women from the anthology and doing pretty much the same thing there, writing about a new trend in American poetics and how it relates to (or contests) the poetics implicit in the Allen anthology, writing about a
particular kind of poetics or poet (vispo, deep image, performance poetics, chance poetry, W.S. Merwin, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, James Wright, rap poetics etc.) that is absent from the anthology, analyzing why that is and what that means, and tracing the influence of that alternative poetics to the present. All of these essays would require prospective student finally to position themselves with regards to whatever they’re writing about, and to write about their hopes for this line of development going forward and how they fit into that.
This is not, you might have noticed, so terribly different from the questionnaire that Jack Spicer used for his own Magic Workshop back in the 1950s, where he asked prospective attendees to choose one of two models for literary inheritance (one looks like a genealogy chart, the other planets in outer space, some larger, others smaller, some central, others not) and to fill in the boxes. Spicer’s Magic Workshop was not only a seminal event in the history of
I don’t imagine that this exercise would beget a generation of students who sought to write like the next New American Poetry, only that it would help generate a cohort of MFA students who were not illiterates when it comes to American literary history. That way MFA programs would not have to spend at least half of their two-year programs on remedial education. And it just might cause a few more undergraduate programs to look at what they’re doing when they teach contemporary poetry.
¹ These numbers also suggest that the quickest way to become famous as a poet is to become a
² And wouldn’t it be fun to have contest identifying those.
Labels: Naropa, The academy
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Laird Hunt, Rebecca Brown and Thalia Field were discussing “The Poetics of Prose” on Tuesday morning, although from my bailiwick at the rear of the auditorium it felt more as if Thalia Field had decided to take on genre once & for all as having no true value beyond “getting in the way” of whatever you need to write next. She was, so to speak, taking no prisoners. It made for such a lively discussion – one student after another clung to the questioner’s microphone in the middle of the audience trying to see if Field would bend even a little – that I forgot I was supposed to step outside at 11 o’clock to take a call from Jordan Davis. My bad,
Certainly anyone who has ever written a work that gets mangled & muddled by the institutions that surround literature is going to sympathize deeply with Field’s frustration, if not necessarily the moral terms into which she was casting her jihad against genre. I won a Pushcart Prize for Fiction in 1979, although in fact I have never, to this day, written any. It was nice to receive an award & all, but I made them take the word fiction off my work in the paperback edition. The work that received this curious honor, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, one of the satellite texts of The Age of Huts, has neither character, plot nor even, for that matter, verbs. But it does appear as a single block of print that might be read as a paragraph. Which apparently is all that is required to be an award-winning author of fiction.
Then, three years later, UC San Diego offered me a visiting lectureship to come and teach fiction there. This appeared to be a result of the books Ketjak and Tjanting, works that have verbs for the most part, tho plot & character never really darken their doors unless, as Bob Perelman once theorized, the repetition of sentences in these poems is understood as plot. I insisted that UC let me teach a poetry course before I said yes. Did I feel guilty saying yes, knowing how many thousands of hardworking, dedicated, intelligent fiction writers there are who haven’t been getting such support for their work, either in the way of Pushcarts or teaching jobs? Yes, for about 30 seconds. It says something about the state of fiction – or maybe just the state of fiction in that little pocket of time 25 years ago – that someone could garner jobs & awards just by virtue of reaching the right-hand margin.
Elizabeth Willis, one of the shining presences at Naropa this week, rose up from the audience to note that genre distinctions are a necessity for institutions such as the New York Times Book Review as well as for bookstore managers. Since I’m teaching Povel this week, a book that received a poetry award that led to its publication but which has been reviewed almost exclusively as a novel, I wondered about that. It might be a bit much expecting bookstore managers to read the product before stocking their shelves, but what would the New York Times lose by the disappearance of easy categories besides the ability to know that it was dissing poetry as ever? Later, I pointed out to
The discussion also reminded me of an experiment I conducted in the mid-1970s when I was invited to give readings within a two-week period at the Maximum Security Library at Folsom State Prison¹ and at UC San Diego through the Visual Arts program where David Antin was teaching. I gave the same reading in each institution, centered around the poem “
The students at UCSD heard my writing as theory-savvy in some way – that accounted for their positive reaction there, but I suspect that on other occasions it has been every bit as much a turn-off to other student listeners. Certainly an awareness of theoretical debates later proved to be one of the great crimes that I & other langpos were charged with, mostly by professional academics, but also occasionally by some poets who had consciously rejected the academy themselves. Theory-savvy text is not (or was not then) a category among urban black felons, but they had their own set of categories & I happily came close enough to one to fit. But the white cons at Folsom had a different set altogether & there wasn’t any slot that seemed appropriate.
So in this sense I don’t think that categories or genre are a plot by Times editors, curriculum administrators or the buyers at Borders or Barnes & Noble. Rather, all of those institutions are trying to work with & shape, however ineptly (& it’s pretty profound), categories that begin with readers, as such, that come out of their own life experiences, which will differ dramatically according to their backgrounds. At some level, they’re not much more than an awareness – it can be quite vague in the absence of a specific text to identify & type – of the ensemble of cognitive frames we carry for any literary or textual phenomena. Some of it is learned, of course, but not necessarily always in school.
It’s not unlike the question of the relationship of a blog like this one to so-called serious critical writing. There no doubt are some readers who don’t trust a text that hasn’t been refereed by representatives of a critical journal. I’ve been pretty clear over the years that I tend to think of refereed journals as second-rate repositories of critical sludge and that direct discourse by poets amongst each other is really the only critical writing of lasting value. Which is to say that all the Fred Jameson texts in the world will never have the impact of a single copy of The Mayan Letters or Call Me Ishmael. Now there are some writers – Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Rachel Blau DuPless all immediately jump to mind – who successfully address both worlds at once. That’s a phenomenon worth studying on its own, but I would suggest that it’s a success that comes not through denying the differences between genres as Thalia Field seems to desire, but rather through acute sensitivity to the active dimensions (and limitations) of each.
¹ That way minimum security prisoners could attend & so could those in maximum security. Had I read in the minimum security library, the prisoners assigned to higher levels of security would not have been able to be there.
Labels: Naropa
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
When I was a student at
Similarly, this summer at Naropa, I’m teaching a course that looks at the dividing line between self & other in contemporary writing. There are, of course, a million works these days in which the poet has brought in various literary devices to ensure that everything in the work is not the “pure expression” of the poet’s ego. In class, we’ve discussed John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Oulipo, flarf, Kenny Goldsmith’s uncreative writing. At the same time we’re reading three major critical pieces by Charles Olson – “Projective Verse” and “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” two of his programmatic statements of projectivism, very much articulations of how the self might proceed in poetics, as well as “Proprioception,” Olson’s dialectics, which contains within itself a glimpse finally not just of self, but of other. Against this, what I didn’t want to do was simply pose works that offer the polar opposite practice, such as Mac Low or Goldsmith (different as they from one another), but in fact writers who don’t normally proceed as if the self/other question in the work is a major axis of their writing. The three books I chose were Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics, Christian Bök’s Eunoia, and Geraldine Kim’s Povel. Not only does each poet come to a very different conclusion in these works as to how this question plays out in their writing, each represents a different demographic approaching this issue.
Shurin, with whom I went to UC Berkeley (for all I know, he may have taken Crews’ class), is a member of my own generation, old enough now to have had a couple of different careers as a poet, emerging first as one of the gay activist poets of the post-Stonewall period, then pushing himself further toward a post-avant poetics after working with Robert Duncan at New College. Involuntary Lyrics represents a return to the line after 15 years of prose poems, but for the project he chose the end words of Shakespeare’s sonnets (not necessarily in the same order as they appear in that sonnet) for which he wrote new lines, so to speak.
The best-selling poetry book in Canadian history, Eunoia is a marvel of narrative & sonic invention, as Bök, a generation younger than Shurin &, like many Canadians, as close to the European tradition of experimental literature as he is to the
Gerald Kim’s Povel presents this issue in exactly the opposite way. One could read her new sentence structured verse novel as tho it were an autobiographical text and, tho her book received the 2005 Fence Modern Poets Series prize from Fence (Forrest Gander was the judge), at least some reviews treat the book as though it were entirely a novel. Born in 1983 – she couldn’t have been more than 21 when she wrote Povel – Kim is of a new generation entirely, as well as a Korean-American writer, a cultural take that
Labels: Naropa, The academy, Theory
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Last Sunday night at Naropa, there was a celebration of Howl, in print now continuously for the past 50 years. There were excerpts from a documentary called Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds, Steven Taylor used Allen’s old harmonium to lead everyone in a song by William Blake & Taylor, Anne Waldman, Randy Roark & others got up & said or read things (I never noticed before just how much Anne stands with one foot raised off the ground as she reads, as if ready to spring into flight or dance). But the key to the evening was everyone – maybe 300 people! an SRO crowd in what I take to be Naropa’s largest auditorium – reading Howl aloud simultaneously. You should try this sometime.
One of things that happens is that the event itself takes over – there really are only one or two ways that that many souls can sound the same text at the same time & it sounds curiously similar to the pledge of allegiance, only this time to a very different nation, the real one. But underneath this overtone – it borders on the chants of Tibetan monks after awhile – you become aware of the lines in the text that fit comfortably with such a mode, both declamatory and almost hushed, and those lines that don’t. In Howl, there are many that don’t. Consider for example this six-line passage & how radically the four-part structure of that last line slows down the incessant forward motion:
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
The key word in Howl, at least part I, is who. After the first three lines, in which the word doesn’t appear at all, it then is the first word¹ in 56 of the next 63 lines, 89 percent of the time. It occupies this position only twice in the final twelve lines², just enough to infer the cohesion of parallel syntax, even as the poem opens out to a wider range of syntactic forms as it winds to a stop.
Because Ginsberg uses anaphor and long lines, the poem encourages rapid pacing & few breaths at the end of line breaks. Yet these last lines are line brakes as well as breaks, as Ginsberg takes great care to let the text coast to a stop.
¹ There’s an argument to be made that the word in a line that receives the most emphasis is the one at the line’s end, followed by the first word, followed by the word that comes immediately before a caesura, followed in turn by the first word after that, etc.
² It is the second word in the 73rd line.
Labels: Naropa
Monday, June 26, 2006
Philosophy after
That sentence, which is true in the sense that it is possible, that we can say & think it, can hear echoes of other similar sentences within it, can substitute any discipline into that first word-slot – mathematics after Auschwitz is barbaric – can substitute any horror into the third position – mathematics after Hiroshima is barbaric – can even, if we are prepared to cross a line not everyone will be comfortable with, substitute any characterization into the last slot – mathematics after Hiroshima is transparent – bedevils me.
Poetry & philosophy are twins, each looking to the other, anxious to compare. For every Adorno or Sartre or Cavell who addresses literature as a professional philosopher, we have poets who mime, as well as mine, philosophy itself, from Ezra Pound to John Taggart to Anne Carson & Susan Stewart, from Charles Olson to Charles Bernstein to Allen Grossman to Geraldine Kim. And then there is Wittgenstein, more widely imitated by poets, yours truly included, than any other practitioner of a “non-poetic” genre, more even than Bob Dylan. Not to mention Walter Benjamin – him I see as philosophy’s Jack Spicer. Both were obsessed with the task of the translator.
Like a lot of poets, I enter into this with a history & a bias. My formal training in philosophy consists of two classes, one on set theory, the other an intro course at
I found Chomsky’s linguistic texts impenetrable. The most intelligible line I ever read there, to this day, is ”Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” though I think it’s considerably more meaningful than does he. On the other hand, Dwight Bolinger’s Meaning and Form, a basic text, and the writing on linguistics by Charles Hockett in Scientific American, had a deep and lasting impact, sending me back through the history of linguistics first to Saussure & then to Roman Jakobson. It is not an accident, I think, that when MIT math major George Lakoff wanted to take a course on poetry & got Jakobson as his teacher,
that Lakoff was destined – one might say doomed – to become a linguist. Nor is it an accident that when Claude Levi-Strauss heard Jakobson at the New School while in exile in New York during World War 2, that Levi-Strauss was similarly doomed to develop the structuralist school of cultural anthropology, which is exactly the structuralism to which all post-structuralism today imagines itself to be post-. The series Levi-Strauss attended was later published as Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Sound & meaning, not accidentally, are the critical dimensions of the poem. Jakobson’s ideas first began to percolate when he was still in
Reading Wittgenstein for me was a life-changing event, perhaps because I read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations back to back & could see there the passion of the self-tortured mind. Passion, I would argue, is precisely what separates the very best philosophers from the bulk. It’s what I love about Willard Van Orman Quine & about Sartre, with whom I never ever agree. It’s what I love about Adorno, even if his attitude toward jazz makes me want to club him with a saxophone. Philosophy is all about feelings, but that’s not all.
Poetry & philosophy are two practices that propose their texts as instances of the self-valuable word. It would be easy enough to sketch them out, one pulling on the side of connotation, the other denotation. But as twins, this pair is incestuous. One could argue that continental philosophy is on the side of connation, analytic philosophy on the side of denotation, that continental philosophy as such has been infected with the poetic.
When I was a creative writing major in the 1960s, the obsessive quest of such programs was to help young poets find their voice. It was early in that decade when Charles Olson first drafted the nines essays that make up Proprioception, the closest thing we have ever had to a dialectic of, by, and for poets. Over the decades since the obsession with voice has changed. We live now in the age of flarf – at least one definition of which is poetry created to be deliberately awful or anti-literary – as a genre and of Google-sculpting & myriad chance operations as everyday literary devices, of appropriated texts & found ones. Kenny Goldsmith, sometimes known as Kenny G, writes &teaches what he calls uncreative writing, scanning in an entire edition of The New York Times, offering us a year’s worth of weather reports. Today, younger poets find themselves in exactly the inverse position of the one I confronted 40 years ago, seeking not so much their Voice as ways out of it, seeking not their Self but their Other. But what does that mean? I think it’s at least as nebulous as the concept of voice. My own goal for this week is to explore that dividing line in as many ways as possible.
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This statement is for a panel, to include Elizabeth Willis, Anne Waldman, Chris Tysh, Donald Preziosi and me, Monday morning, June 26. The description of the panel itself is as much instruction as we were given, save to prepare a statement, seven to ten minutes in length:
What is it in philosophy that writers find so attractive? How important should philosophy be to a writer? Panelists will discuss how philosophical inquiries have informed their thinking and writing. Be it Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Jean-Luc Nancy, or some other French guy, our panelists will discuss the philosophers they have been reading. Panelists will also discuss which investigations‹whether class, gender, society, desire, philosophy of language, or other areas‹most inform their work and thinking.
Labels: Theory
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Thursday’s comments stream
proved a breaking point.
One person posted over 70 messages
& another descended
into overtly sexist name calling.
I don’t have the time to monitor & delete
over 70 messages a day
especially when I’m traveling
so the comments stream will remain turned off
for at least one month.
And I may investigate using another system
that permits me to block out abusers.
§
“If it would help stop the war
and bring down the Bush dictatorship
I'd go on tour
with Britney Spears tomorrow.”
Jello
The generational problem
in anti-war arts.
§
ReadySteadyBook
is hosting
a Gilbert Sorrentino site
§
Documents of
the International Digital Publish Forum’s
work developing standards for
e-book publications
Thursday, June 22, 2006
The ninth and final work in Proprioception is in some ways the strangest precisely because it isn’t. Composed for the most part in – for Olson – relatively straightforward prose paragraphs, Olson argues for a history of letters that, as I read him, divides roughly into three periods: from the Second Millennium BC backwards perhaps as far as the Sixth, this being the time of the gods; the two millennia after that; the two millennia that lead up to our own time. It’s not as clean as that, though, since for Olson the central figure reporting on that first period is the poet Hesiod, who lived around 700 BC. At the very least, Hesiod is nearly as far from the end of the Second Millennium as we are from, say, Anne Bradstreet. At the other extreme, Hesiod is as far from its start as we are from 700 AD, which is to say well before the English had English, let alone writing. Roughly as far as the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel in 732 turned back the Islamic army that sought to expand its European empire beyond
Olson states his motivation forthrightly:
Immediately my purpose is only to wake up the time spans and materials lying behind Hesiod, so that they can seem freer than they have; but essentially I’m sure a line drawn through Hesiod himself will already demark the difference the materials and times behind him will yield.
The Second Millennium is key, according to Olson, because the wars of the gods were all concluded & this was the time of “the general overthrow of the ancient settled world, which was neither East nor West.” Considering just how attentive Olson is to agency and case in language, his wording is almost startling: “Around about 1800 things shook up.” But the gist is unmistakable:
This [Zeus’ victory over the Titans “322 years before the siege of Troy”] then can be taken to be the line of the end of God-Father change and or transmission, as well as a good controlling date for the emergency of the Mycenean (sic) or Aegean Greek governance of the Mediterranean: 1505 BC.
Olson sees this correction as necessary, because
With that one can then begin to work Hesiod back – as well for that matter as the Iliad – and at the same time come forward toward Homer and Hesiod’s day (850-800 BC) from a ‘true’ origin of much which they include, the thousand years of writing some of which is now known which precedes them by a term of time as long as 1000 years. In other words Indo-Europeans and Semites had, for that long before Homer and Hesiod, power and governed an earlier literary and historical tradition which itself preceded them by two full millennia, the 3rd and the 4th.
The implication as I read it is that to get “from the old discourse to the new,” one must in fact identify the oldest discourse of all, the alleged “’true’ origin.”
If one were to align Olson’s nine pieces in Proprioception according to their focus on time, one would see that we are proceeding backwards. We start with the self, a present fact, before it can even identify itself & we end with the origins of writing, the founding of cities & the emergence of civilization out of Paleolithic man’s bigger “brain-case, like the present / porpoise’s” & the implications hidden in primitive art, “the so-called ‘Venuses’.”
As I read here, Olson’s desires are two: first, to understand how the new occurs; second, to carry into the present all of the knowledge of the past. In a sense, Olson is proceeding as though he thinks the first sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus cannot be true. If the world indeed is all that is the case, as Wittgenstein postulates, then it is complete. There is no way in that equation for the new to occur. Olson’s strategy here – and elsewhere in his work – is to focus on the tectonic shifts in culture & see what arose where & if possible how, an anthropological refutation of positivism. Second, Olson is trying mightily here – it is his most postmodern impulse – to break free of the myth of progress. Where a generation before people would have seen only gain in the arrival of the new – think of how Williams uses the term in Spring & All – Olson marks it always as a site of forgetting & of loss. But it’s not that he doesn’t want to engage it. Rather, he wants to understand the process & to recognize it always as two-sided.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
I remember Joe Brainard & so should you. If you’re in
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I’m toying with the idea of turning off the comments box for awhile, either while I’m in Naropa next week or in
§
High on the list of my pet peeves. People who spell Charles Olson’s last name with an “e,” Allen Ginsberg’s surname with a “u,” or Zukofsky with a “v.” Ginsberg’s first name gets misspelled a lot as well. It says something about the level of attention. How hard is this, really?
§
One technology blogroll I like a lot – because it focuses to a surprising degree on the social implications of technology – belongs to J.P. Rangaswami, whose blog is Confused in Calcutta. This is the current roster.
Adriana Cronin-Lukas and Perry Havilland et al
I always read First Monday as well.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
The single longest section in Charles Olson’s Proprioception is the seventh, “GRAMMAR – a ‘book’,” checking in at five pages, six sections. It’s the one you’ll never see printed in native HTML, at least not the first two sections – passages appear at different angles, lines go from A to B connecting different terms, at least once traveling through some other text to get there. Olson also shifts here from italics, with a notable exception, to underlining for emphasis. This is true in both the Four Seasons Foundation and UC Press editions of the text.
Olson begins with a typically curious claim:
why (“adv.”!) instrumental case of hwā, hwaet. See WHO
“WHO,” all in caps, is underlined three times, an effect I can’t duplicate here. The instrumental is a case that was already beginning to fade from existence in Old English, where, in the words of one online source of Old English cases, it was
only distinct from the dative case for a few pronouns and for strong adjectives. It is used to indicate the thing or person by means of which the action of the verb is accomplished.
A diagonal line at a 50º angle juts down from the period after hwaet to a line that reads “Goth hvas (Skt kas).” The idea that untangling the origins of a given term will tell you some essential feature thereof is the linguistic equivalent of justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito & Roberts claiming that the original intent of the writers of the Constitution is what determines a phrase’s meaning today. Yet a phrase like “all men are created equal,” was created in a time when all did not mean all, when men meant some men and no women, and when equal did not mean equal. Language itself is infinitely malleable & the social circumstances of one utterance to the next can and do change dramatically, altering content with every turn. Originationism is a vestige of 19th century historical linguistics, known then as philology, and though Olson understands that this is not the whole of language, this process is for him still a very powerful mode of proceeding. Looking up historic precedence is what Olson means by research. Yet one thing he doesn’t note, tho one might think he would had he known it, is that hwaet is itself the first word of Beowulf, & thus in some sense, the first word of English poetry as such.
The page at this point divides roughly into three columns, only the rightmost of which is printed in approximately the standard orientation to horizontal & vertical axes (approximately, but not in fact entirely!). This column traces the history of the word that, which interests Olson apparently because it serves both as a pronoun & a connective. The center passage, which starts at roughly the left margin & then moves downward in a very tight column no more than eight characters wide, appears at first to trace the relationship of the word how with who, what, & again why, then, as it moves downward seems to alternate from annotating the discussion of that to its right to ending up on who.
The left-hand column, boxed in by a border on three sides & tilted so that its bottom crowds the center of the page considers the term quantum, “neuter of quantus (cf. page 192” tho there be no closed parenthesis, nor even an allusion to suggest which book’s page 192 might be in mind. It’s the assertions that occur beneath this that, I think, pull this term into what otherwise appears to be a discussion of the syntactic potential of pronouns:
the process is not continuous
[pattern]
but takes place by steps,
each step being the emission
or absorption of an amt. of
energy called the quantum
Math. distinguished fr. a
magnitude
Phil. the char. of a thing
by virtue of which measure
or number is applicable to
it, or it can be determined
as more or less than some
other
Olson proceeds to give us similar considerations of other pronouns: like, an, another, who, while on the next page, proceeding to argue quantus as pronoun & adjective, which we are told is “Relat. correl. with tantus, / of what size, / how much.” This leads eventually to:
absence of any such a word in English,
fr tantus? Result, or confusion over
quantity? Therefore not understanding
quantus is the neuter case of pronoun,
not an adjective???
Hidden here, tho not very, is Olson’s application of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, the central tenet of any linguistic determinism, the implication that if there is not a single word in English to ask how many, how much, there is some gap in our understanding of the world.
The second section of “GRAMMAR – a ‘book’” is devoted to the middle voice – the middle, so to speak, between active and passive. This is the distinction between The fox ate the chicken, which is active, The chicken was eaten by the fox, which is passive and The chicken cooked in the oven, which is in the middle voice in that the subject of the sentence is in fact the object of the action. The second section, labeled “’Case’” – the inner quotation marks are Olson’s – is not, theoretically or linguistically, his finest critical writing, but what Olson is after is precisely that hybrid phenomenon. This is why, midway down the page, Olson will draw a line from ”future perfect” to “middle” – because it invariably combines some form of will have with a past participle. This is followed by a passage on the “indicative middle,” a phrase inserted with a ۸ between the words Middle and voice. The indicative middle, although Olson doesn’t note this, is a case one finds most often in Classic Greek or Old Iranian. Further, Olson’s notes here appear to be cribbed almost directly from William Hersey Davis’ Beginner’s Grammar of the New Greek Testament, published in 1923, an author Olson does not cite.
The third section of ”GRAMMAR” is entitled “The Indo-Europeans Anyway,” describing their migrations around 1800 BC and the impact this had on the language. Olson’s second (of two) paragraphs is almost entirely a quotation from Edward Sapir:
The first [of the three drifts of major importance at work in the language] is the familiar tendency to level the distinction between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases…. The distinction between the nominative and accusative was nibbled away by phonetic processes and morphological levelings until only certain pronouns retained distinctive subjective and objective forms. (Bracketed language, ellipsis and italics all Olson’s)
The fourth section, entitled “Syntax (‘ordering’),” is entirely a quotation of Sapir, arguing that language invariably begins as concrete – Sapir’s example is the origin of of, as it appears in the English phrase, “law of the land,” a pronoun that began as “an adverb of considerable concreteness of meaning, ‘away, moving from, ’and that the syntactic relation was originally expressed by the case form [ablative] of the second noun.” (Bracketed insert Olson’s). Thus:
An interesting thesis results: – All of the actual content of speech, its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm.
Section five, entitled “
The sixth and final section is “Number,” specifically the singular, since it can be nominative whereas plurals necessarily distribute. This passage, read in the context of the whole of Proprioception feels less like the end of book on grammar & more a staging for the next section, entitled, in all of Olson’s quirky uses of capitalization & speech:
A Plausible ‘Entry’ for, like, man
This, as it turns out, is a time line from Paleolithic man to Eric the Red, 1025 years ago. A long horizontal line divides the page in the middle, with HOMER, all in caps, above it and below the date “450, Athens” and the note “logos invented (universalism possible” tho Heraclitus had been dead for 25 years by then.
The most important date in more recent years, to Olson, would appear to be 732 AD, the “date Martel turned back Moslems at
771 Charlemagne
790 Irish monks to Iceland
823 Norse, to Dublin
862 Swedes to Novogrod
871 Alfred
981 Eric the Red, to Greenland
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Monday, June 19, 2006
Never one to leave his bibliography to the end, Charles Olson uses the fifth of his nine pieces in Proprioception to a reading list. Or, more accurately, a list of names, date March 1961 “with / acknowledgements to / Gerrit Lansing.” The title of the piece is “Bridge-Work,” the bridge being
fr the Old Discourse to the New
Italicized by Olson, immediately characterized as “men worth anyone’s study,” and (with two exceptions) the names that follow are all boys. Some of these names are well enough known – cultural geographer & longtime Berkeley professor Carl O. Sauer, mystic Aleister Crowley (of whom Olson writes, “?: particularly his / book on the Tarot”), Pound’s favorite Fenollosa, Edward Carpenter (mentioned as being “Whitman’s friend” & then as “Eileen Garrett’s / teacher,” tho it is unlikely that many now will recognize the name of this once famed medium), and early linguists – post-Saussure, pre-Chomsky – Edward Sapir & B.L. Whorf.
Some of the names are less well known today: Andrew Lang was a collector of folk tales and early anthropologist, tho like Crowley & Garrett he was also a popular author on psychic phenomena. Olson notes, next to Lang’s name, “on hypnagogic vision, / as well as trans. of / Homer.” Hypnogogy is a term for the drowsy consciousness that often precedes sleep and one finds a many references to it on sleep disorder sites, but Olson here must be alluding to its use identifying trance states.
Lang is not the only translator of Homer on this list. Victor Bérard translated Ulysses into French as well as authoring other works on a wide range of subjects. An historian of antiquity around the turn of 20th century and an authority on ancient trade routes, Lenin is known to have read his Britain and Imperialism. Fenollosa was of course a translator as is Edward Hyams, who also wrote a work called Soil and Civilization that argues – in a proto-Jared Diamond sort of way – that some civilizations have been destroyed through poor soil management practices. G.R.S. Mead translated the Gnostic text, Pistis Sophia.
Cyrus Gordon was a Bible scholar, the first Jewish one to get a teaching job at a
At first glance, this seems like something of a bizarre list, mixing the history of antiquity with early anthropology and linguistics and mysticism. Pointedly absent are two names one often hears in Olson scholarship: Carl Jung & Alfred North Whitehead, each of whom proved to fit more comfortably in the academic canon than many of those on this list, with the possible exceptions of Mead, Sapir & Whorf. Sapir, it is worth noting, goes first in Olson’s list, followed by Carpenter, Sauer, Lang & Mead.
What are the threads that bind this roster of 14 names – 15 if we include Homer – together? One obviously is anthropology, a second ancient history, a third linguistics, the fourth the psychic dimension. My sense is that Olson is reasonably in touch with anthropology as it stood in the early 1950s, interested in that part of linguistics that could reasonably be expected to be of interest to poets, eclectic and not necessarily orthodox in his sense of history – it seems almost hit and miss there. And for this X-files dimension? Tarot, séances, trance states – there’s more than a little Fox Muldur in Olson.
I’ve noted here before that Olson’s own death in 1970, combined with Robert Duncan’s 15-year hiatus from publishing books, a self-enforced silence that began in 1968, precipitated a major shift in American poetics, one that I think is most visible looking at some of the publications of the time, such as George Quasha’s Active Anthology, which came out in 1974 – still recent enough to have previous unpublished pieces in from both Olson & Paul Blackburn. In addition to the Olson’s own work, many of the pieces here have or touch on aspects of this same spectrum of alternative reality. Armand Schwerner dedicates his “Bacchae Sonnets” to Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche “with love.” Ted Enslin’s excerpt from Ranger touches on the teachings of Don Juan, on Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Chuck Stein offers a poem entitled “Vajra – Guru – Padma – Did – She.” Editor Quasha offers “The Sufi Singer” as well as some sections from his Somapoetics. Anselm Hollo & Jonathan Greene both have poems with the word dream in their titles. Nathaniel Tarn has his Lyrics for the Bride of God. David Meltzer has poems that he terms “amulets.” Richard Grossinger presents an excerpt from The Slag of Creation, Frank Samperi an excerpt from The Kingdom, Ed Sanders offers a “Prayer for the Unity of the Eye,” dedicated to ”my friend Horus.” Robert Hellman & Spencer Holst both offer works with the word Magician in the title. Even John Giorno chimes into the theme here with an excerpt from Suicide Sutra. Indeed, Buddhist scholar Rick Fields has a poem entitled “Realm of the Gods.” And Chögyam Trungpa himself has four poems in this one-short anthology. None of this may seem exceptional if we take each piece by itself, each contributor by him- or herself. But across a field of 65 contributors – 55 men, 10 women¹ – the impact is unmistakable. Olson was just one key part in a broader field of poetics that was deeply spiritual, but not at all within the orthodox Judeo-Christian frame.
This disappears in the 1970s almost completely. And my test of this is to look at the poetry of Robert Kelly, in particular, from the 1960s and the same poems from that era that he chooses now to include in various contemporary selected works. It’s not that he’s rejected his worldview, I think, so much as he may feel that the more secular poems travel better across time.
I’ve also written that I that what took the place of mysticism and the wisdom traditions in American poetry in the 1970s was theory, specifically continental theory of the structural & especially post-structural kind.
But Olson’s death &
This I think makes a section like “Bridge-Work” particularly difficult for a younger reader today to grasp. What may at first glance appear completely daft in Olson’s interest in séances & Tarot was by no means exceptional at the time he wrote this.
And it’s interesting to see, in the sixth section of Proprioception, the seven “hinges” Olson proposes, specifically “of civilization to be put back on the door,” where Olson addresses questions of the secular & divine fairly directly. It is precisely this balance point I see at work in these “Hinges.” The first is a reconsideration of the dating of what Olson calls “original ‘town-man,’” which Olson wants to push back; the second, Indo-European, where Olson wants to connect the Bible to Hittite, Sumerian & Canaanite texts of the period, as well as
roots: the linguistic values of Indo-
European languages, the
original minting of words
& syntax
Throughout, Olson is trying to connect these “hinges” not to our time (or at least his), but precisely in the opposite direction:
[as in other hinges of the direct line, there
is an advantage to the leaping outside as
well as connecting backward: for example
American Indian languages offer useful
freshening of syntax to go alongside
Indo-European]
This same backward motion appears again in the third Hinge: “to turn the 5th Century / BC back toward the 6th” – to the right of which runs a vertical list: “Heraclitus / Buddha / Pythagoras / Confucius.” It’s not that Olson wants us to proceed backwards through history, but rather an insistence that whatever is new not displace the old, thus (Hinge # 6):
the 17th [Century], seen as the brilliant secular it /
was, without the loss of alchemy etc
it unseated
leading finally to “the 20th, release fr / both the 18th . . . & 19th, the new progress of / Marxism,” to which Olson concludes by appending the most straightforward statement in all of Proprioception:
otherwise the present will lose what
A secularization which ... loses nothing of the divine. Not an either/or, but a both/and. This would seem to be where Olson has been aiming all along.
¹ It’s interesting to see this 6.5-to-1 ratio in 1974, a moment when langpo elsewhere already had brought the difference down to 4-to-1, a distinct – if still too short – step toward the parity we have routinely 30 years later.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Genentech is blocking access to a drug for the wet form of macular degeneration so that it can market a second drug for the condition that costs 100 times as much. Macular degeneration has robbed both my mother and my late grandmother of their vision, my mother when she was only ten or so years older than I am now. Why isn’t this a crime?
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Thanks to everyone
who offered assistance
in our search
for a place to stay in the
It appears to have worked out just fine.
§
Last Sunday’s comments stream
has taken on a life of its own.
§
Public access to federal research
is one idea whose time
is fast approaching
§
The trials of a deadline poet
Friday, June 16, 2006
Charles Olson, I noted a week ago Thursday, insists on being taken as a crank. The fourth section of Proprioception, a page and a half to sum up “Theory of Society,” underscores my point. It begins with this assertion, in parentheses & all in lower case:
(we already posses a
sufficient theory of
psychology)
Much of what follows can be read as an assault on one of the “hip” biases of the late 1950s & beyond (versions of which exist today, no doubt), that everything is interesting, at least potentially. Olson calls this “the greatest present danger / the area of pseudo-sensibility.” What follows the colon that ends that line sounds like a direct assault on, of all things, Oulipo, or perhaps Fluxus, movements that began coincidentally in 1960 & ’62 respectively, the exact period of Proprioception.
games
randomness
haphazard
(I Ching-
ness)
Olson decidedly is opposed to the idea that “anything goes or / all is interesting Or / nothing is.” Proprioception is the era of the
It’s interesting also to think of what Olson means by already possessing “a / sufficient theory of / psychology.” Olson is often treated as if his interest in the evolution of psychology in the 20th century were largely limited to Jung, though in fact he refers at different points to many of the major writers & will, literally on the next page, present us with a garbled version of Anna Freud’s concept of the stages of psychological development.
But if you look to Maximus, both the poem & the figure – one of two great instances of persona from the poets of the 1950s (John Berryman’s being the other) – you don’t see Olson interested in exploring the historic Maximus so much & certainly not his own motivations, but rather the idea of the self looking out into the world & acting thereon. “Society” here means, I think, exactly that.
So Olson is not, repeat not, interested in sitting still for 4’33” meditating on ambient noise & calling it music. Olson’s piano, where he to compose for such, would certainly be over prepared. Here he offers what he sees as the alternative to the “everything is groovy, dude” worldview:
instead of novelty (“God is the organ of
novelty”
This is at least the third time in Proprioception that Olson has pointed to the new as the pivotal question confronting not just poets, but anyone who seeks to make sense of the world. What is it about the nature of the world that the new occurs? Why isn’t, say, the steady state that would apply if the so-called natural cycles didn’t lead to some kind of perfect equation of beings all in harmony, the food chain operating as smoothly as gears? What is it about the world that, always, N = N+1? And the corollary question: which one? Which is what I take Olson to mean when he says in the next three lines that “the true cast of / the sensible / probability.”
In the next stanza – Olson’s critical prose doesn’t quite get to paragraphs – Olson takes off against “kicks,” phoney (sic) disaffection – anticipating here the “turn on, tune in, drop out” messages of Mr. Leary just a few years down the line. The one-time Democratic party activist Olson takes what is almost a Frankfort School line against such an attitude, seeing dissociation from the political as “the elite among / the masses accomplishing / a lateral coup d’état.” Adorno couldn’t have put it more succinctly.
Olson’s straw man, here, never fully figured as such, comes close to Milan Kundera’s portraits of aesthetes in Eastern Europe during the bad old days of Actually Existing Stalinism, where people turn to any kind of hedonism, from sex to art to food, so as to develop a code of civilization that will buffer them from having to confront the depredations of the real.
Olson then advances one of his pet theories, that people become identified with the point at which they “fall off” from keeping attuned to the new:
Some fell off at 5 etc some at
17 others 40, like No matter, they
are bombers (carrying forces) of the time
they fell off, not what
they look like talk like
seem etc Or are
taken as
It is this that Olson contrasts with Anna Freud’s developmental phases (infancy, libidinal, oedipean, etc.), a world that was healthier because “rites / de passage existed.”
Opinion
has replaced all such
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Thursday, June 15, 2006
A good friend is undergoing surgery today – ten hours plus – to remove a tumor that the doctors believe is cancerous from her adrenal gland. I feel completely distracted. I am completely distracted.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Donald Hall,
Poet Laureate
§
William Logan’s latest blast,
targeting Heaney, Gallagher,
Geoffrey Hill, Anne
(“the acceptable face of the avant-garde”)
Carson et al
§
Charles Olson in
this Sunday
§
§
A writers’ conference in
§
A bookstore for
§
Diary of a literary judge.
§
Kandinksy & synaesthesia:
Paint by music.
§
Bill Zavatsky
American neglectorino
§
Who owns
James Joyce
§
Who owns
John Steinbeck
§
Schjeldahl’s Picasso
Labels: links
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Word writing. Instead of ‘idea-writing’ (ideogram etc). That would seem to be it.
Thus begins “Logography,” the second essay, note or section of Proprioception. In the space of one page, Olson makes a couple of basic assertions – that the phoneticization of writing systems comes about from the need to accurately represent proper names & that for a long time after the arrival of phonetic writing, grammatical elements were not indicated. The implication – an important one for a poet whose later writing will often look like notes cast spatially across the page – is that phonetics precedes grammar, both historically & in terms of importance.
This is also unmistakably a shot at Ezra Pound, whose “collaboration” with the late Ernest Fenollosa on ideograms was generative for Pound’s poetry, but also managed to set forth all manner of linguistic myths into the literary culture, partly because Pound was no linguist & partly because Fenollosa wasn’t either.¹ Thus Olson’s concern with “abt the earliest business we can know anything abt, some Sumerian traders in cattle” is not with the detail, the economics of the exchange, but the actual sequence of sounds involved:
Try saying that fast three times. Just two firm consonants, r and k, around which vowels are placed in various sequences.
The third section or note of Proprioception is interesting on at least two dimensions. One is that as almost a footnote – its title is “Postscript to Proprioception & Logography” – this piece suggests that Olson has not, at this point anyway, sketched out the larger plan of this project & that the remaining six sections will be as much a surprise to him as to us.
The other is the pair of terms raised up here as foundational: Landscape – Olson italicizes it – and NOUN (O. puts it all in caps), which he terms “fundamentals of any new discourse.” Beyond these words, as such, it’s worth pausing to think about why, exactly, Olson feels the need for a “new discourse,” what that phrase conveys for him. It’s one thing, at the outset of his project in 1950, to be seeking a new discourse, but to be doing so 12 years later positions it differently, as more of a permanent desire, that discourse itself be subject to the old modernist dictum: make it new.
Landscape is space – a key term for Olson throughout his career – but space of a particular kind, that “which the eye / can comprehend in a single view.” In a sense, landscape would appear to be to space what proprioception would be to the self or soul, that which we can grasp intuitively, or as Olson phrases it, “know it / instantly.”
There is a spatial break midway down the page before Olson tells us:
The other knowing is NOUN, proper (proprius)
noun – that which belongs to the self
Proprius is a term we have already met here, rooted deep in proprioception. Thus Olson sets up that which is not the self, the landscape & the nouns that occupy that space.
¹ Realistically, no one was in any meaningful sense prior to the work of Saussure, whose course on general linguistics was first taught in 1906, just two years before Fenollosa died, and whose ideas didn’t become widely understood until after the 1960-62 timeframe in which Olson composed Proprioception. Thus Finnegans Wake, to pick one lurid example, proceeds from Joyce’s understanding of 19th century philology, a fatal starting point. Saussure’s notes, cobbled together by his students after his death in 1913, spread first to the Prague School of Linguistics & then more broadly into cultural theory through the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who was introduced to the ideas while attending a course of Jacobson’s at the New School during World War 2, but whose own writing did not become popular in the U.S. until after Olson crafted Proprioception. Olson’s own conception of anthropology, never very far from the surface of his own poetics, is very much pre-structuralist in its assumptions & vocabulary. Olson must have known the work of the likes of Sherry Anderson & Margaret Mead & all the gentlemen Egyptologists who were plundering the pyramids, but hardly any of the authors who would make anthropology one of the great pop successes of the 1960’s academy. The ghosts that Olson is tackling here are all gone a decade later.
Labels: Charles Olson
Monday, June 12, 2006
Sometime toward the end of the previous millennium, back when Google sculpting was but a rumor & flarf but a glimmer in Mr. Sullivan’s eye, Mark Peters used the venerable “do no evil”¹ search engine to look up the word men, from which he crafted a long, booklength work, a dark, brooding, obsessive thing as I recall, tho only portions of the larger project ever snuck into print (see here & here & here) before a chapbook that was a too-modest slice appeared.
The shadow of that project hovers, never very far off & yet never exactly directly overhead, just offshore from Lisa Robertson’s new & wonderful The Men, from out from BookThug in Toronto. Contra Peters, The Men is subtitled A Lyric Book, which is absolutely accurate. It’s one of those texts where you know, within its very first lines, that you have come upon something very special indeed:
Men deft men mental men of loving men all men
Vile men virtuous men same men from which men
Sweet and men of mercy men such making men said
Has each man that sees it
Cray as men to the men sensate
And their poverty speaking to the men
Is about timeliness men is about
Previous palpability from which
The problematic politics adorable
And humble especially
Young men of sheepish privilege becoming
Sweet new style
These are lines that call up, instantly, everything from Paul Celan’s “Todesfugue” to Lorca’s “Verde que te quiero verde. / Verde viento. Verdes ramas.” It’s built around the ear – I have a correspondent who is going to positively flip at the alliteration of p sounds in the eighth & ninth lines (but will he notice that the run begins, in fact, in line six?) – but not solely the ear. Here is the first stanza on the second page – consider the use of rhyme that is so central to the eighth & ninth lines of this 17th-line structure:
Each man – I could write
His poem. He needs no voice.
But what would I take from it. Our facades are so
Minor. What would I begin to say
If his words were
My poem. I am preoccupied with grace
And have started to speak expensively – as in
Have joys
Which look like choice
Ill-matched to its consequence
As laughter to a fall – bad memory
Poorly researched life
The men’s
Cocks
And their faces
As we do so
Fall upwards.
As joys / choice still echo, the final sound of the next line – quence – calls our attention to the fact that the s sounds above are, in fact, different. But what really echoes – the key to this sequence sonically – is the rhyme back with voice from line two. It is precisely the chance of sound to thread themes that raises the issue right as Robertson herself suggests the opposite of necessity – He needs no voice.
This is the second, social dimension of Robertson’s lyric – to make use of men the way poets have, for centuries, displayed & deployed women. Men are reducible to faces & penises. There are other texts resonating here – Kenneth Koch’s “Sleeping with Women” certainly, but I hear also the more fugitive voice of Lenore Kandel & The Love Book, that 1960’s icon to female lust.
Robertson is gathering & gathering here, for as it turns out The Men may be A Lyric Book, but that does not necessarily make it a book of lyrics, as such. Rather it is an investigation of lyric as that crux where self & voice & song cohabitate & pretend just for a moment to be one. Rather The Men is a booklength investigation, a serial poem longer & more complex than anything Spicer ever wrote, save possibly for Language, as political as it is personal – and personable as well. The Men is a thoroughly likeable book, even when, in the final section, Robertson investigates the differences between men & that other mass category, people.
It’s a complicated project & almost impossible to convey here second hand, the ways it invokes men as desire and as violence. She says, in fact, very little about the latter, letting it seep up instead through the text. Whereas Mark Peters sort of rubs our noses in just what violent clods men as a category can be, Robertson comes through much more powerfully by hinting around the edges, letting our knowledge of the categories do the heavy lifting.
I’ve said before that Lisa Robertson has emerged as one of the master poets of the new century & everything she’s writing these days has all the features to make it an instant classic. The Men is a great book as well as a haunting one.
¹ Offer void in
Sunday, June 11, 2006
If you post your poems, songs
or work of any sort
to MySpace,
the copyright to your work
now belongs to Rupert Murdoch.
So sayeth Billy Bragg.
Robert Pinsky asks
”What is bad poetry?”
§
Counting book sales
§
The artistic hub
that is
Tijuana
§
The second greatest
living British writer
is Terry Pratchett…?
§
Walter de la Mare
has been dead for 50 years
& his Collected Poems
out of print for 20
Saturday, June 10, 2006
§
§
Lewis MacAdams
on
Timothy Leary
§
Studs Terkel
on
Pete Segeer
§
Gyordy Faludy:
”Literature will not survive
the 21st Century”
§
Another
books are doomed
piece
Friday, June 09, 2006
Is it possible to produce a quality anthology of poetry on a single theme? More dreadful collections of poetry have been organized around the idea of the thematic than anything else, it would seem. Weddings, cancer, jazz, baseball, relationships with our mothers, relationships with our daughters, cats – a quick search on Amazon turns up six different anthologies of poems for or about cats, tho none that I could see by them. If it’s a noun, chances are it has an anthology of poems dedicated to it. Don’t even get me started on anthologies about Iraq, migration, nuclear disarmament or African debt – any anthology of the thematic is really a book about cats.
Mark Lamoureux knows this & has decided to up the ante some by requiring his new collection fit into the space of a chapbook, one generously filled with illustrations at that. And the noun he has chosen is decidedly at an angle also, as the title underscores in its wording: My Spaceship. The illustrations come from a black-and-white coloring book Lamoureux had as a kid – apparently he never colored it in!
My Spaceship is both a thematic anthology, as a result, and a send-up of the form. Precisely because Lamoureux isn’t the sort of guy to do anthologies on Corgies or faeries or childhood illnesses, the work herein is, shall we say, different:
When Mars Was A Candy Bar
I saw Captain Video
Scale the heights of Pluto,
But it was Al Hodge
Crawling across the studio floor.
Tree people, ray guns, machines
Arriving on God’s celestial shores.
I saw Flash Gordon,
The swimmer Buster Crabbe,
Battle Ming the Merciless
Space ships the size of light bulbs
Filmed in shoeboxes.
Sputnik soared over the Danbury Fair
I met Gus Grissom’s girlfriend
My name rhymes with orbit
I write in the name of my brother
Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.
Thus Bill Corbett. There are some really great works throughout this tiny collection: Jill Magi, Eileen Tabios, Catherine Meng, Noah Falck & Jon Leon all have terrific pieces here. I’d never heard of Magi or Falck before, so that is real plus. And if I don’t quite hear Christopher Rizzo’s piece, if Maureen Thorson’s couplets go limp after the third one (with 11 more yet to go!) or Scott Glassman only proves that what Bruce Andrews does is really much harder than it looks, that’s just the price you pay for organizing around a theme, even here.
My real quibbles – and I have some – have to do with design. The header typeface is Imazeng & mostly demonstrates why you should not buy your fonts from somebody who calls himself Pizza Dude – it is semi-legible at best & only the “cheat” of a table of contents in Zia Gera permits me to know that Steven Roberts really has work in this issue. That is, however, more than I can say about Nathan Pritts, whose name is left off the table of contents altogether.
So this pamphlet isn’t a home run, but it does make for a tasty palette cleanser (yeah, yeah, mixed metaphors, tsk) after all the dense Olson I’ve been wading through of late & I’m totally happy to have it in hand. Think of it as a paper airplane.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Suzanne posted a comment to Monday’s note that’s worth repeating:
PROPRIOCEPTION
is the true sixth sense
not defined as Olson does it
but as the perception of the body;
of its parts in relation to its whole
it is about balance
or lack thereof
it is how we walk
without tripping or falling
it is the knowledge built into the parts
of the placement
and location
of the other parts
In fact, the concept of kinesthesia, which the Wikipedia discussion under the link above characterizes as “another term that is often used interchangeably with proprioception,” is integral to Olson’s definition also: movement, at any cost, kinesthesia: beat (nik) starts the second paragraph of Olson’s initial definition, the one labeled Today. Olson’s name, by the way, pops up in the external links to the Wikipedia definition, as one of the sources for Charles Wolfe’s essay by the same name. Also invoked are dance, yoga and Alexander Technique, a 19th century mode of body work. It’s not that Olson’s conception of proprioception is wrong per se, but rather that he is using a broader term to try to focus in on a particular subset of the experience, that sense of absence, of between-ness, that exists inside our own bodies, a sense specifically of the body as manifesting many surfaces, interior as well as exterior. The iconic gesture of proprioception, touching your nose with your eyes closed, isn’t possible without a sense of your nose having a surface & some general idea where that might be.
But the point raises the question of the nature of knowledge & its value within a poem. If I were, to use Suzanne’s example, a sufferer of peripheral neuropathy, I wouldn’t be turning to the poems of Charles Olson for medical help. Nor even those of William Carlos Williams, Gael Turnbull or C. Dale Young, poet-physicians at least insofar as each practices (or practiced) both professions. I’m not at all certain that I would turn to Olson, even, if I were researching a history of the
What then is the value of all this research that is so much a part of Olson’s poetic practice, a dimension that he directly takes from Pound in fact, the poet as ‘istorin, the ancient mariner of the archives who emerges from deep in the library’s stacks to address his city? How is this information the same or different from, say, the data you pick up in a Frank O’Hara lunch poem or Ed Sanders’ investigative poetics or Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson?
While investigative poetics does seem to have a direct relationship back to Olson’s practice – substitute the poet as reporter for Maximus’ ‘istorin – all poems use data from the external world simply by employing language, a medium that exists (unlike paint or sound) only in pre-existing social tokens called words. Michael Magee’s use of an appropriated linguistic source for his project is, ultimately, no better or worse than Pound wandering through Van Buren’s written record or Jackson Mac Low’s reading through insurance texts in Stanzas for Iris Lezak, or Frank O’Hara recounting what he saw as he walked into the department store to type out a poem on one of the typewriter display’s store models. It’s a source of material, which can be used inventively or not (the Van Buren Cantos would actually represent the lower end of creativity here), to the uses of the poem, which really are what the poem does with whatever it has at hand. Clark Coolidge’s use of the dictionary as a source for The Maintains does not depend on the reader recognizing the source, nor the source’s truth function in the world (“this definition is accurate”), nor even the metaphysics of dictionaries as such, a linguistic and social phenomenon all their own. It’s what Coolidge does with this that makes The Maintains one of the great books of the 1970s.
But what then of the neighboring category, the use of terms in a poet’s critical or theoretical prose, which is where we find Proprioception? More than any other poet of his generation, Olson produced a large quantity of such texts, for which the Collected Prose is but the tip of an iceberg. There is, for example, an as yet still unpublished book on Shakespeare written in 1954, according to the chronology of his life and work at the remarkable Looking for Oneself: Contributions to the Study of Charles Olson website. There are, among others, The Mayan Letters (a distinct publication from the Cape/Grossman series extracted from the voluminous correspondence with Bob Creeley), The Special View of History (reconstructed notes from a class given at Black Mountain), two volumes of Muthologos, which collects talks & interviews, plus volumes of correspondence, and fugitive enough fare, like his reading & talk at Goddard College in 1962, which Slought has up on its website both as a sound file & transcript.
This is not, I think, the same level of work as a New York School poet, whether of the New American generation or thereafter, who does double duty as an art critic – tho the fields are different, that seems to me a lot closer to the poet-physician model – nor is it only Olson working, as did Creeley, Sorrentino, Baraka, Spicer or Duncan – as a poet discussing poetry. Although I think it can be read as that, and may well have its greatest value there.
Olson wants, I believe, very much to be what Antonio Gramsci described as an organic intellectual. This is quite distinct from a “professional” intellectual, such as a tenured history or philosophy professor at West Chester University, but rather fits quite close to Olson’s conception of Maximus of Tyre –
he mostly wandered around the Mediterranean world from the center, from the, from the old capital of
The wandering scholar fits Olson’s own critical project, although with the notable difference between & his doppelganger that Olson talks about many things, depending almost on the wind & the whim. He is a perfect bricoleur.
This lines Olson up alongside some other interesting characters:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose relationship to his chair at
Walter Benjamin, one part philosopher, one part literary critic, one part mystic.
Paul Erdos, the homeless mathematician
The key to Olson’s work here – and it’s not so far from Benjamin’s arcades project or Wittgenstein banning students from his classes who intended to become philosophy professors – is its commitment to amateurism. Or, to be even more clear, its adamant opposition to professionalism. As an ism. The mode of address, in the poems & Olson’s critical prose as well, is almost invariably that of the letter to the editor, not the report of the hired consultant brought (and bought) in by the authorities.
Olson insists on being taken as a crank. And being taken seriously. There is nothing in any way professional driving his investigations, nor what he learns, nor what he thinks you should know. Thus a poem in the form of “Letter for Melville 1951” which carries the note betwixt title & text:
written to be read AWAY FROM the Melville Society’s “One Hundredth Birthday Party” for MOBY-DICK at
Because of the nature of his particular project, there is less of a gulf between Olson’s critical prose & his poetry, perhaps – during the Goddard sessions, he is challenged on what makes his work poetry – but perhaps the deeper question ought to be the other way around: what makes his critical writing not poetry? Certainly Charles Bernstein & others since 1970 have shown the ways in which both critical writing can be streaked with the poetic & verse can be conversely critical.
Which means that I do take Proprioception completely seriously – it is not, to my mind (as one correspondent this week put it) “the rantings of a drunken seventeen-year-old Philosophy sophomore at a rave party,” but in fact, word-by-word as densely written as anything produced by Derrida. Or – to use a more direct comparison – the prose in Williams’ Spring & All. But when I do read it or any of Olson’s prose, my concern is not whether his definition of a given term will get you through a med school exam, but rather to examine the play of the mind as covers issues of interest, I should think, to many a poet.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
One of the interesting – problematic may be a better word – aspects of reading not just Charles Olson, but any poet of the last century on subjects that move even a little away from the realm of the close inspection of poetic texts, as such, is positioning – framing may be the better word – their arguments within the broader landscape of contemporary intellectual discourse. Read Ezra Pound after Marx, or even after a few issues of the Monthly Review, and you realize that Pound’s initial impulses weren’t so bad, but that addressing problems of justice through monetary policy requires a theoretical infrastructure so vast – precisely because you are so far from root causes – that the opportunity to go astray is huge. And Pound is sort of the test case to demonstrate just how far astray one might wander. There’s a viciousness in his radio broadcasts that registers just how maddening – I’m choosing my words carefully – it must have been to see his vision of the future coming asunder. And it’s no accident that his very best writing occurs next, at the moment when, living in a wire cage in a prisoner of war camp, waiting to be sent back to the
Similarly, I wonder how Olson’s Proprioception, specifically the title essay, three page outline that it is, might have proceeded had Olson ever read Althusser. Or, at the least, extracted from Althusser the concept of ideology as it is expressed in the essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”. The question is bogus, at least partly, simply because Olson wrote Proprioception between 1960 & ’62, while Althusser first published his essay in La Pensée in 1970, very much as a reformulation of theory in the wake of the failed French revolution of 1968. Olson lived just two weeks beyond his 59th birthday, dying on the tenth of January 1970 – he never lived to read Lenin and Philosophy, really to absorb any of the material that would begin to flow forth in great quantity in the U.S. after the height of the anti-Vietnam war movement peaked in 1970 with the murder of students at Kent and Jackson State Universities. Olson may have, almost inadvertently, been among the first to coin the phrase post-modern to characterize the epoch then coming into existence, but if, for example, he knew of the “Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” conference held at Johns Hopkins in October, 1966, the iconic tipping point between the structuralism of the 1950s & the new world of Post-everything that this conference announced, I haven’t seen evidence.¹ Although the conference, whose speakers included Derrida, Lacan, Todorov & Roland Barthes (presenting “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?”), occurred just 16 months after the Berkeley Poetry Conference in which Olson gave his infamous lights-out marathon talk, by 1966 his critical writing is already largely behind him. My own impression, based I must say largely on my reading of Tom Clark’s gothic bio of Olson, is that his drinking ramped up significantly after Betty’s death in an auto accident in 1964. Beyond sketching out “A Plan for the Curriculum of the Soul” in early 1968, Olson will make no more major theoretical statements in his life. The productive core of his life – from the first poems in the late 1940s until the work begins to trail off in the late ‘60s, is just twenty years. Longer perhaps than the careers of Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara, perhaps, but not very long.
Ironically, soul is exactly the word I wish Olson had had the opportunity to interpenetrate with Althusser’s conception of ideology. It is the third term in Olson’s dialectic, between physiology & the unconscious, and it’s the focus of the second half of Proprioception’s title essay. The sidebar to the next full paragraph beyond the one I ended Monday’s note with is: the soul is / proprioceptive. And is worth quoting further:
the ‘body’ itself as, by movement of its own tis-
sues, giving the data of, depth. Here, then wld be
what is left out? Or what is physiologically even
the ‘hard’ (solid, palpable), that one’s life is
informed from and by one’s own literal body –
What obsesses Olson here, the point if you will, of Proprioception, is that
which is what gets ‘buried,’ like, the
flesh? bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., what one
uses, literally, to get about etc
that this is ‘central,’ that is – in
this ½ of the picture – what they call the SOUL,
the intermediary, the intervening thing, the inter-
ruptor, the resistor. The self.
This key passage of Olson’s sounds like nothing so much to me as this:
ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it recruits subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or it ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”
Which is the key paragraph in Althusser’s essay. In each instance, the intervening/interrupting thing at home in our identity is being defined as X, whether X is ideology or X is Soul.
This does not mean that I think what Olson is describing here necessarily is ideology, whether in the broad Althusserian sense (ideology is that which defines us) or the more narrow daily meaning (ideology as a political label). For one thing Althusser’s ideas themselves – like those of any of the major structuralist theorists of the past half century – are themselves deeply problematic, flamboyantly so in the instance of the French philosopher who later murdered his own wife and was at least as psychiatrically challenged as Pound, let alone Olson. But it would be of extraordinary use, I think, if we could read these twin conceptions – ideology/Soul – as partaking of one another, seeing what each might then tell us further about the other.
It is clear, to my eye at least, that Olson’s goal in identifying the Soul is construct a dialectic, as he literally says in the next paragraph, that the “gain” is
to have a third term, so that movement or action
is ‘home.’ Neither the Unconscious nor Projection
(here used to remove the false opposition of
‘Conscious’; ‘consciousness’ is self) have a home
unless the DEPTH implicit in physical being –
built-in space-time specifics, and moving (by
movement of ‘its own’) – is asserted, or found-
out as such. Thus, the advantage of the value
’proprioception.” As such.
Althusser himself has gotten to his essay on ideology immediately after one on dialectics in Lenin, quoting Lenin on Hegel as follows:
Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract . . . does not get way from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice – such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.
Olson rejects the unbodied presence of categories – his fascination with the details of historical record is just the surface of a deeply anti-Platonic nature, although it is interesting to see where in his system he puts this:
the three terms wld be:
surface (senses) projection
cavity (organs – here read ‘archetypes’)
unconscious the body itself – consciousness:
implicit accuracy, from its own energy as a state of
implicit motion
Identity, therefore (the universe is one) is supplied; and the
abstract-primitive character of the real (asserted)
is ‘placed’: projection is discrimination (of the
object from the subject) and the unconscious is the
universe flowing-in, inside.
At one level, one could read Olson here as being part of a long chain – stretching out beyond Althusser or Henri Lefebvre & Lenin or Hegel, all the way back to Socratic method.² Yet these are largely disconnected discourses – even more so now than in 1970 in fact. If the rise of theory, specifically the rise of the continental tradition of the human sciences, so called, in the wake of the collapse of the left in the west after 1970, was part of a flow back into the academy of a generation of intellectuals who now used this thinking not just to try & understand what had so profoundly not worked in the late 1960s, but eventually also as an emerging professional language, focused not on understanding the world & changing it so much as on the more pedestrian goals of academic professional life, the long-term transformative potential of theory in the west was doomed from the start.
But if the banalization & bureaucratization of theory was in the cards as soon as the activists of 1968 began to realize that they needed tenure if they were going to raise families & have personal lives of their own, Olson’s own Curriculum of the Soul was never aimed in the same direction. He’d already lived the experience of
What would a Curriculum of the Soul for a post-theoretical age look like?
¹ The one poet I know who did attend the Johns Hopkins event was Bruce Andrews, still a teenager at the time.
² It is, after all, Engels who first discusses dialectics in terms of its (partial) roots in Buddhist practice, where it was a already a descendant of earlier Vedic thinking.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
I was asked to come & teach this summer at Naropa, specifically to talk about “dialectical materialism” as part of a weeklong unit on philosophy & poetry, an interesting proposition, and this is what took me back to Charles Olson. Years before, at a time when I’d been part of a study group in San Francisco on the general topic of Marxism & modernism, I had been reading Henri Lefebvre’s great Dialectical Materialism, a work written right on the cusp of the Second World War – the first publication was by Presses Universitaires de France in 1940 – and, quite by chance, happened to be reading Proprioception at the same time. At some point during those readings, it occurred to me that I was not reading two books nearly so much as I reading two instances of the same argument. "Proprioception," the title piece, is (or at least can be read as) dialectics for poetry. So when I got the invitation to go to Naropa this year – I’m there the last week of this month & first couple of days of July – my immediate instinct was to turn back to Proprioception & see how it stood up now, roughly two decades after I’d had that initial reaction.
The relationship of Proprioception – and Olson’s project on an even broader scale – to the question of dialectics makes an intuitive sense. First, the Lefebvre volume, written decades before the French philosopher became the critic of everyday life who inspired the students on the barricades of 1968, was published in English translation by Cape/Grossman in the very same series edited by Nathaniel Tarn that included the republication of Olson’s Call Me Ishmael & the initial release of The Mayan Letters. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the first four volumes in that series overall were Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Scope of Anthropology, Call Me Ishmael, and two volumes by Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, followed immediately with volumes by William Carlos Williams, Václav Havel & Nazim Hikmet (at a time when the latter two were almost entirely unknown in the West).
The Cape/Grossman series itself was as erratic as it was inventive – as I understand it, Cape Editions published in the U.K. volumes chosen by Tarn & those that were not already being marketed in the U.S. (like the Barthes’ volumes) got the “/Grossman” slip jacket added for import here, at least until, at some point after 1970, Viking Compass took over that side of the operation (which is how Viking came to publish Zukofsky’s “A” 22-23). Dialectical Materialism, no. 27 in the series, comes roughly midway between Mayan Letters (no. 17) and Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems (no. 38). Some of the other volumes that occurred during that particular stretch included Julian Huxley’s The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe & Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Francis Ponge’s Soap & Fidel Castro’s History Will Absolve Me, plus volumes by Alfred Jarry, Nicanor Parra, Louis Zukofsky, André Breton, Yves Bonnefoy, Georg Trakl, a volume by Lucien Goldmann, another volume by Lévi-Strauss, A Critique of Pure Tolerance by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr & Herbert Marcuse, and a second volume by Václav Havel. Nor was it any accident that when Harvey Brown published the Frontier Press edition of Williams’ Spring & All, the book was designed to mimic the pocket-sized
One can hear the degree to which Olson himself internalizes this in how he describes the nominal subject of his epic poem. Far from being Russell Crowe in Gladiator, the historic Maximus of Tyre was, to use Olson’s own term for it, “a 2nd Century dialectician.” In a talk that he gave at Goddard College right at the end-point of composing Proprioception, Olson describes Maximus this way:
I mean this creature Maximus addresses himself to, to a city, which in the instance is, is
So Maximus means – or at least conveys at some level – dialectics, although as one wades through Proprioception, it is worth keeping in mind Olson’s other, rather off-the-cuff definition of dialectics: intellectual essence, or essays on an intellectual subject.
I’m not at all sure just how he might have dealt with the vagaries & limitations of HTML, but I am certain of this. Olson himself would have been a great blogger.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Monday, June 05, 2006
In his address to the May 20 OlsonNow event at MIT, Ben Friedlander proposes that “Olson’s ideas were not static, but always in flux.” There is an important truth here, but. But. But it is worth noting that Olson begins his other great manifesto project, ”Proprioception,” in the exact same place he did “Projective Verse” some 12 years earlier, with the body. His body.
Physiology: the surface (senses – the ‘skin’: of ‘Human
Universe’) the body itself – proper – one’s own
’corpus’: PROPRIOCEPTION the cavity of the body,
in which the organs are slung: the viscera, or
interoceptive, the old ‘psychology’ of feeling,
the heart; of desire, the liver; of sympathy, the
’bowels’: of courage – the kidney etc – gall.
(Stasis – or as in Chaucer only, spoofed)
Today: movement, at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (nik)
the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles,
tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily
tensions (– or relations of same). Violence:
knives/anything, to get the body in.
To which
PROPIOCEPTION: the data of depth sensibility/the ‘body’ of us as
object which spontaneously or of its own order
produces experience of, ‘depth’ Viz
SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM
BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES
That passage is worth quoting at some length just because it does so position Olson: meat before mind. Olson starts from a phenomenological premise – that we can only know what our senses tell us (even as, in Maximus, what they so often tell us is about the historical record, the merest suggestion of connections). The animal – not yet even “I” – sees, hears, feels, smells, is aware but not yet conscious. If this wasn’t already apparent, Olson lays it out next, adding.
‘Psychology': the surface: consciousness as ego and thus no flow
because the ‘senses’ of same are all that sd contact
area is valuable for, to report in to central. In
THE WORKING spection, followed hard on heels by, judgment
‘OUT’ OF (judicium, dotha: cry, if you must/all feeling may
‘PROJECTION’ flow, is all which can count, at sd point. Direction
outword is sorrow, or joy. Or participation: active
social life, like, for no other reason than that –
social life,. In the present. Wash the ego out, in its
own ‘bath’ (os).
That physiology and psychology both begin for Olson at the same place – the surface – can be no accident. Yes, it’s intimate division between self & other, here & there, fort & da, but it is also, or so Olson appears to be suggesting, something prior even to that.
Proprioception differs from “Projective Verse” in that it’s not an essay in any usual sense, but a book of notes – the sections quoted above are as normal as the prose writing gets here & several sections are simply beyond my ken with HTML to reproduce. Specifically, it’s a series of nine notes – what I’ve quoted thus far amounts to the first third of the initial one – all published in various journals (Kulchur, Yugen, Floating Bear) edited by the then-LeRoi Jones before being issued as a book in ’65 by Donald Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation. In the ten years that separate out “Projective Verse” from Proprioception, many things have happened to Olson: meeting Creeley (which he does right at the moment when he’s writing “Projective Verse”), the start of Maximus, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, the rise of New American Poetry generally, the dissolution of his marriage & subsequent partnership with Betty Kaiser, the publication of his first important books of poetry, the reissue of Call Me Ishmael (with an audience now assured for it), and the publication of The New American Poetry in May, 1960, where Olson’s position as the very first author seems absolutely intended as a signal that it is he, not Ginsberg, not O’Hara, not Duncan, not Creeley, but Olson who is the driving force behind the broad new aesthetics then rising up everywhere in American verse. It can be daunting to imagine the chutzpah of Olson writing “Projective Verse,” having at that point published just one book of poems, X & Y, and having just written a handful of the pre-Max poems (such as “The Kingfishers” and “The Praises”) after that. In 1960, Olson is unquestionably a central figure in American poetry.
Olson’s writing is different in 1960 as well. The propulsive, rapidly shifting movements that characterize both the early prose & early verse are in fact more calculated now. He still believes, as he writes, in “movement, at any cost,” but the writing is far less mimetic about it. If anything, that sentence fragment -- movement, at any cost – is a strikingly static way to put this. Or perhaps it is less anxious.
The other thing that immediately strikes me, reading Proprioception up against “Projective Verse” with some 40 years’ hindsight, is just how much more ambitious it is, as a program, than even that of its audacious forerunner. “Projective Verse” really had two primary moves, one to set out grounds for poetic practice, the second to frame that practice within the world. That Proprioception will go further is signaled here by an attempt, in the next small paragraph, to identify actively as a thing that which exists materially only as context, that space within our bodies between organs:
The ‘cavity’/cave: probably the ‘Unconscious’? That
is, the interior empty place filled with ‘organs’? for
‘functions’?
This paragraph is atypical for Olson, precisely because it is so halting & open about its own uncertainty. He uses question marks, he cushions his claim with “probably.” Then, in the next paragraph – this on carries the sidebar title of “THE ‘PLACE’ / OF THE / ‘UNCONSCIOUS’” – Olson explains:
The advantage is to ‘place’ the thing, instead of
it wallowing around sort of outside, in the
universe, like, when the experience of it is intero-
ceptive: it is inside us/& at the same time does
not literally feel identical with our own physical or
mortal self (the part that can die). In this sense
likewise the heart, etc, the small intestine, etc, are
or can be felt as – and literally they can be –
transferred. Or substituted for. Etc. The organs. –
Probably also why the old psychology was chiefly
visceral: neither dream, nor the unconscious, was
then known as such. Or allowably inside, like.
There is, I think, something very human – appealing to me in any event – in Olson’s desire to ‘place’ the thing, to render the Unconscious as an object, as such, that he might query it, study it as if it were yet another organ, rather than, in this folk physiology, the absence of organs as such. Again, Olson seems quite aware of just how much he is taking on here & repeatedly telegraphs cautions, that one not read this as too literal or fully baked – the use of etc, the reiterated Probably – and that almost Valley Girl final qualification, ending this assertion with the qualification like.
Labels: Charles Olson
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Today this weblog will register its 750,000th visit. The readership here has been stable for roughly a year now, suggesting that it will reach the one million mark next February. I had not anticipated this when I started this venture, but I’ve been pleased at the result. Even more so by the quality of discourse about poetry and poetics that is taking place throughout the blogosphere on any given day. Poets using all of their critical faculties as well as all of their other senses position themselves to do their very best work, and it’s especially fortuitous when those same critical faculties don’t get sidetracked into the administrivia of university life. The great majority of poets don’t teach & aren’t students, although it’s a phase we almost all seem to go through, and one with major advantages for a time if only we don’t confuse it with the bigger picture. I know that I do my best work – writing and thinking – when challenged to do more, whatever that more might be. And I know that this weblog – raucous comments stream & all – has challenged me in ways I had not imagined when first I started it. Thank you for that.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Zoe Strauss: Detail I-95 (
You only have until June 11
to catch the work of Zoe Strauss,
Philly’s hottest artist
in this year’s Whitney Biennale
in NYC,
But you can hear her on Sunday
discuss her work at
the Institute for Contemporary Art
in
at
Though you’ve already missed
her annual one-woman show
held each year under the I-95 Freeway
at Front & Mifflin Streets.
She has a blog too
& received
a Pew Fellowship last year.
Zoe Strauss gives art a good name.
§
The 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize
has been awarded to
Sylvia Legris
for Nerve Squall
§
Pinoy penman visits Oz
This article deserves an award
for how well it contextualizes
two languages at once.
§
Carl Rakosi’s oral history
(PDF format)
is 244 pages long!
§
The new online issue of Action Yes
has an “Idaho Special” feature
well worth reading,
especially Catherine Wagner
§
See also Barbara Jane Reyes
in that same issue
& I love the way you can toggle
between translation & original
in Jen Hofer’s
rendering of Dolores Dorantes.
§
Or go to VH-1
where you can watch all four of
Jim Berhle’s episodes
from the TV series
Can’t Get a Date.
§
Robin Kemp
tries to get my goat.
Bah
§
I have some new work
in the latest issue
of mark(s)
which goes live
today.
Friday, June 02, 2006
When I read the sexist language in Olson’s “Projective Verse,” my instinct is to see Olson as a not-too-atypical male of his generation, chronologically positioned midway between my grandfather’s generation born in the late 1890s & my father who was born in 1927. He sounds like a case of testosterone poisoning & is no doubt the person intended by the rubric given to the macho side of the New American Poetics as the
You could also take exactly the other tack, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis did about ten years back in an issue of Diacritics, in an essay called “Manifests” that likewise close reads “Projective Verse,” but as a sexual text rather than merely one on poetics whose arteries are clogged with the prejudices of the time. It’s a fascinating alternate path into the work, informed externally by the discovery of Tom Clark’s – the real literary coup of his Olson bio – that Olson’s primary mentor in the post-War years before he met up with the chicken farmer from New Hampshire named Creeley was a book designer, Frances Motz Boldereff, with whom he had an intense & informing affair that he subsequently kept secret from very nearly everyone, so that it came as news two decades after his death. Reading Olson through the Boldereff correspondence, now quite thoroughly in print, reminds one of nothing so much as Olson’s own way of reading Shakespeare into Melville, the informing thesis of Call Me Ishmael. The cover of the Wesleyan University Press edition shows photos of Olson & Boldereff from the 1940s – his (from the same shoot as the photo I used on May 23, wearing dark shirt & tie) above the title, hers below. So far as I know, no photo of the two together was ever taken.
In that wonderful way she has in her poetry as well as her criticism of looking at an issue from all perspectives, DuPlessis doesn’t just dismiss the replete sexism with a sigh, nor throw Olson overboard for it, but uses it to interrogate Allen Grossman’s critical work, Summa Lyrica, which, in DuPlessis’ words “announces the force of poetics as ideology.” Nor does she stop there, but rather proceeds to read the text through the works of other recent theorists, including Deleuze and Guattari (there is that question of incest to deal with, after all, and, following Grossman, the whole oedipal ball o’ wax), Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous. But then DuPlessis does this both ways, reading them through Olson & Grossman. It’s a process that eventually will lead you to understand what DuPlessis means when she claims that “I don’t write ‘poetry,’” a tricky position to hold if you’re one of the best poets going, which she is.
Nor does DuPlessis let Boldereff off the hook. What does it mean for a woman to be a muse, to choose that role rather than put her own work forward for what it is? The answers aren’t simple, and they may not even be answers, certainly not in the “settled argument” sense of that term.
You can get DuPlessis’ essay from Diacritics if your library belongs to the appropriately named (for this discussion at least) Project Muse, a service whose sole function is to keep critical writing out of the hands of independent scholars and general readers, so as to maintain the two-tier (or more) system of authorities by which the tenured speak only to the tenured & tenured-to-be (they hope). Or you can wait until Blue Studios comes forth as a book, which I am told it shall, very soon, from the
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Charles Olson between
Robert Duncan &
Of the slightly more than 4,500 words that make up “Projective Verse,” 1,198 – just over one-quarter – appear in part II. Whereas the first part was devoted, both strategically & tactically, to poetics, II is concerned with the status of the poem in the world, as object & as knowledge:
Which gets us to what I promised, the degree to which the projective involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance toward reality of a poem itself. It is a matter of content, the content of Homer or of Euripides or of Seami¹ as distinct from that which I might call the more “literary” masters. From the moment the projective purpose of the act of verse is recognized, the content does — it will — change. If the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. It has to. It starts with the composer. The dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter’s use.
I myself would pose the difference by physical image.
It sounds as if Olson is about to head into Williams’ machine-made-of-words territory, but, even tho what he will say eventually leads to the idea, first voiced in Spring & All, that poems are objects as additions to nature, this isn’t the path Olson will take to get there. Instead, Olson makes what is decidedly the oddest detour in this essay, distinguishing – or trying to – what he’s after from an Objectivism that he patently seems not to understand or know. 1950, it is worth remembering, is the absolute nadir of Objectivism, 19 years after Louis Zukofsky coined the term to justify his gathering of the younger poets of the Pound-Williams tradition into Poetry. Late modernists who were, for the most part, Marxists or fellow travelers, the Objectivists were at odds with the vulgar poetics of the so-called New York Intellectuals (who would, in fact, be morphing soon enough from their lightly held Trotskyism into becoming the base for the first wave of the neoconservative political movement). And the Objectivists were – with the notable exception of Basil Bunting (a notable exception on many counts, working as a British spy in
After the better part of two paragraphs on the topic, Olson finally turns toward his point:
For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.
It isn’t the poem as object that Olson here is after, but the poet. Olson is very much proposing an ecological vision of human activity, just one species among many. And his argument is not that it will be good for the planet, but rather good for the poems, because the poet will be closer to a world of species & artifacts, each of which has, as Pound might have put it, its virtue. There is more to this than just the idea that your dust bunnies are keeping secrets from you, or that animations like Toy Story are right, at least in spirit. And this is where he begins to sound very much like the William Carlos Williams of 1923:
And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature.
To give his work … a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is almost Spring & All verbatim.
But Olson’s ultimate goal – and this is worth thinking about in a man who stood at 6’9” & must have weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds – is size:
But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size.
It is projective size that the play, The Trojan Women, possesses,
Olson reiterates, ticking off his three examples – the other two are Homer & Zeimi’s Nōh play, Hagoromo, all of which bear the notable stamp of Ezra Pound.
Nor do I think it accident that, at this end point of the argument, I should use, for examples, two dramatists and an epic poet. For I would hazard to guess that, if projective verse is practiced long enough, is driven ahead hard enough along the course I think it dictates, verse again can carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans.
This is a man who has, in 1950, not yet come to know the work of Robert Creeley, who would seem to me absolute proof that scale is not the issue, regardless of what Olson would do with Maximus, a project that Olson began this same year, or what Duncan might do a 15 years or so hence with Passages.
But Olson cannot stop here – he has to turn in yet another direction to pick a last fight, with the plays specifically of the poet then known best for writing works of drama: T.S. Eliot.
Eliot is, in fact, a proof of a present danger, of “too easy” a going on in the practice of verse as it has been, rather than as it must be, practiced.
Olson concedes that he likes Eliot’s line, especially in early works like ”Prufrock.” But,
it could be argued that it is because Eliot has stayed inside the non-projective that he fails as a dramatist — that his root is mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that (no high intelletto despite his apparent clarities) — and that, in his listenings he has stayed there where the ear and the mind are, has only gone from his fine ear outward rather than, as I say a projective poet will, down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has come from, where, the coincidence is, all act springs.
That is, I think, an interesting, even curious, place to end such a piece as this manifesto. It shows Olson the neurotic as well as Olson the theorist. Had he in fact had more the courage of his convictions, he might instead have turned his attention elsewhere, skating, as Wayne Gretzky puts it, to where the puck will be, rather than where it seemed at rest mid-century. As powerful as Eliot was as an organizing figure, especially for the School of Quietude in this country, in 1950, his reputation had virtually nowhere to go but down, and that’s a slide that has been almost entirely uninterrupted now for more than a half century. Far from being the central figure whom one has to position in order to have a theory that proposes to accommodate the whole landscape, he now is a footnote, someone who produced some raw footage that Pound edited down into something akin to a fine flarf fugue.
It is too soon to consider, in 1950, what the New Americans might produce. For all purposes, they hadn’t at that point. But if only Olson had known the Objectivists, had thought more historically about their absence at that moment in history, and actually read the work, “Projective Verse” might well have had a much more interesting end. Admittedly, Olson’s disinterest in Zukofsky, even 15 to 20 years later, appears to have been match only by Zukofsky’s disinterest in Olson. But there has to be more to it than the fact that one was the most anal retentive poet in existence & the other his absolute polar opposite. For, tho Zukofsky does not rely on Olson’s folk physiology, what work at mid-century better poses itself as the test case of Olson’s thesis than “A”?
¹ Olson is referring to Zeami Motokiyo, 14th & 15th century Nōh master, one of whose works, Hagoromo, or Robe of Feathers, was translated by Ezra Pound & Ernest Fenellosa, Jo Kondo’s recent opera for which was recorded in 2002 by the London Sinfonietta, Paul Zukofsky conducting.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
