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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, May 23, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><img height="338" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/JLT92A29vhhLyemXXEz_Lgy9SeYb7DiJx4E52Hs1Xswx8c9cKQ0-hLQX3Z483i68hUcDeeUpUlD5d33bZRgp8CAVhcJ8rBYMWmk%3Ds0-d" width="227"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is a hinge of sorts in Charles Olson&#8217;s argument in &#8220;Projective Verse,&#8221; and I&#8217;ve learned over time that one should pay close heed to these moments. When Olson, having laid out his three simplicities and his claim for the importance of breath, concludes<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>the pressures of his breath.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Olson then moves, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>instanter</i></span> as he would say, to this: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Let&#8217;s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What Olson does not say here is that breath &#8211; that which flows in vowels &amp; <span class=SpellE>abrupts</span> or grinds in every consonant &#8211; leads to, causes, or otherwise inscribes the syllable. Indeed, that isn&#8217;t where Olson is going in &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; at all. In the final phrase of that previous paragraph &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the acquisitions of his ear </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the pressures of his breath </i>&#8211; it is the ear to which Olson will pin the syllable, not the breath. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>King and pin of versification: </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>it is worth keeping in mind that Olson does not appear, here or elsewhere, to have seriously studied linguistics, for the syllable hardly is the &#8220;smallest particle of all,&#8221; but rather is a construction &#8211; one whose architecture is always evident &#8211; out of such truly smallest particles, phonemes. One-syllable words are themselves most often marvelous schemes of conjoined phonemes, so that it is rare to find one &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I, oh, </i>possibly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>you </i>&#8211; that is coterminous with a lone phoneme. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Be, </i>after all, contains two. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Olson&#8217;s perception of the syllable has a historical dimension &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>verse here and in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> dropped this secret from the late Elizabethans to Ezra Pound, lost it, in the sweetness of meter and rime, in a honey-head. (The syllable is one way to distinguish the original success of blank verse, and its falling off, with </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Milton</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8211; but it is not the historical that principally concerns Olson here, so much as the dynamics of the syllable in sounding the poem:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity of words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature,  were more allowed to lead the harmony on. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Leading the harmony on, because <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. The fineness and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This is an argument for melopoeia over logo- and <span class=SpellE>phano</span>-, Pound&#8217;s old troika, and worth considering, especially when one thinks of that branch of Olsonian post-Projectivists (Paul Metcalf, say) who envisioned The Big O as permission for a logopoetics of the archives. Again, tho, we note that return to the idea of syllable  as &#8220;the minimum&#8221; and &#8211; this is new <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>troubling &#8211; &#8220;source of speech.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But to those who would let the syllable <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>lead the harmony on, </i>Olson issues <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>this warning, to those who would try: to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless &#8211; and least logical.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The idea that the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>least careless </i>should also, at the same moment, be the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>least logical </i>is worth thinking about. Even as he clumsily wades through his homegrown linguistics, Olson here echoes Jack Spicer&#8217;s Martian radio, insisting on the importance &#8211; and formal inclusion &#8211; of some aspect of the irrational:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>After which colon, Olson inserts an unattributed quotation identifying etymological sources for common English one-syllable words that propose more weighty philosophic dimensions, such as &#8220;&#8217;Is&#8217; comes from the Aryan root, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>as, </i>to breathe.&#8221; From folk etymology, Olson moves very rapidly to folk physiology (the ellipses in what follows are Olson&#8217;s):<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind&#8217;s, that it has the mind&#8217;s speed . . . <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . .<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>it is from the union of the mind and ear that the syllable is born.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The mind chooses what the ear hears &#8211; that seems to be gist, that there should always be this privilege. But what is most fascinating here is the metaphoric family invoked by Olson in which the king is born of brother &amp; sister. Which in turn makes me very curious about that list at the end of that second paragraph: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . . </i>To my <span class=GramE>mind, that</span> is perhaps the most mysterious single sequence in all of Olson&#8217;s writing. Trying to figure out not only how ear &amp; mind are siblings &amp; equals (having thus to resist my own instinct that what Olson calls the ear is always already a part of mind, just as is recognition of shapes &amp; objects in sight &#8211; there are no innocent senses beyond the age of what? three?), but also how those three cognitive domains include one another or at least overlap.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, May 22, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.focalpointyoga.com/breath_meditation.htm"><span style='color:black'>Breathe</span></a></span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, <a href="http://hinduwebsite.com/buddhism/essays/breathmeditation.htm"><span style='color:black'>say</span></a> <a href="http://www.buddhamind.info/leftside/lifestyl/medi/breath.htm"><span style='color:black'>all</span></a> <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/breathmed.html"><span style='color:black'>manner</span></a> <a href="http://www.freemeditations.com/buddhist_breath_meditation.html"><span style='color:black'>of</span></a> <a href="http://www.anextstep.org/html/breath_meditation_.html"><span style='color:black'>meditators</span></a>. Tho he was obviously interested in the work of Carl Jung, it&#8217;s hard &#8211; impossible &#8211; to envision <a href="http://www.olsonnow.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>Charles Olson</span></a>, all chain smoking, chain drinking six-foot-nine of him, sitting <a href="http://www.mro.org/zmm/teachings/meditation.php"><span style='color:black'>Zazen</span></a>. Olson is nothing if not the antithesis of the stereotype of the mellow Zen acolyte dressed in natural fibers, nibbling tofu with chopsticks or else engulfed in the presentness of inhaling, then exhaling, with no further agenda than being here now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Yet no other poet of his generation &#8211; or any other, for that matter &#8211; has so directly connected poetry to the physiological process of breathing itself. Listen to him, in 1950, writing in his most famous essay, &#8221;Projective Verse&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and head. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>the pressures of his breath.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It&#8217;s worth keeping in mind <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>where </i>precisely this fits into the logic of Olson&#8217;s poetics. He&#8217;s concerned here with defining what he alternately calls Projective or Open verse or Composition by Field, &#8220;as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the &#8216;old&#8217; base of the non-projective.&#8221; Which is to say that Olson is very much proposing this as a poetics of all that is alternative to the School of Quietude, a claim that both empowers and limits his argument, ultimately (e.g. Olson will thus write prose poetry <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>out </i>of his picture, regardless that it is equally opposed to &#8220;inherited line, stanza, over-all form&#8221;).<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>From which foundational claim &#8211; this will account for all that is anti-SoQ &#8211; Olson then proceeds to stake out what he calls &#8220;simplicities that a man learns&#8221; &#8211; his language is hopelessly sexist &#8211; &#8220;if he works in OPEN,&#8221; this phrase never to join up with an ultimate noun. The &#8220;simplicities&#8221; are, as I read them, three underlying dynamics, true of all poetry (or so he claims), the second being the most famous, Creeley&#8217;s dictum: &#8220;FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.&#8221; But the first, what Olson calls &#8220;the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>kinetics </i>of the thing,&#8221; includes an actual definition of the poem:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself, must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy discharge. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This is one of the most overlooked claims in the recent history of poetry, given just how much attention has gone to other parts of Olson&#8217;s project, and to all the work by others (not just Creeley &amp; Duncan, say, but virtually everyone who came in contact with any of the three Projectivist musketeers). The most important single word here, I swear, is the simplest: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Okay. </i>Olson&#8217;s prose, not unlike his verse, perpetually twists &amp; turns, rushing propulsively forward, often sounding quite breathless in the process. This one word interjection is exactly not that. It&#8217;s a pause, a punctuation, an emphasis. He wants us to take that claim in: <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A poem is energy transferred</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>.
<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What does he mean? Why must the poem, at all points, be <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>an energy discharge</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>? </i>This is a far cry, actually, from Pound&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>dichtung = condensare</i>. Until you consider that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>condensare</i> just might be a necessary compacting process required to amp up the voltage so that energy is maximized through pressure. Olson very carefully declines to define this energy &#8211; we know only that it will have <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>some several causations </i>&#8211; nor to tell us, here at least, how this pseudo-electrical current gets from writer to reader. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Then, after Creeley&#8217;s dictum, comes the third &#8220;simplicity,&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This, it is important to note, is antithetical to the traditional rules of exposition. Olson is not only arguing for a particular mode of writing, but against another, in this instance the sort of thing that could be crafted into an outline, converted into a series of topic sentences, then laid out in an orderly, but definitely hierarchical structure. Olson&#8217;s argument is the absolute opposite of such hierarchy. The only moment to consider is neither the proposition at the start of the argument, nor the conclusion at its end, but rather <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>now</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>In this way, Olson again anticipates the present-centered strategy of a whole host of Eastern practices, even tho, the advice he then gives, as consequence &amp; example, sound about as unholistic as one might get:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split-second acts, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That sense of constant &amp; frenetic motion is a characteristic of Olson&#8217;s writing, even as, with that articulation of the third simplicity, the adverbial phrase <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY </i>keep Olson&#8217;s key verb phrase from immediately &amp; directly completing itself. One might think of this, as <a href="http://www.hubcapart.com/h-ngm-n/429.htm"><span style='color:black'>David Saffo suggests</span></a> in the latest issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H_NGM_N,</i> as a rhetoric for phenomenologists.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is impossible, to my ear at least, to see that term, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>simplicities, </i>without hearing Olson&#8217;s words elsewhere, in &#8220;Maximus, to himself&#8221;: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I have had to learn the simplest things<br>
last. Which made for difficulties. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Olson actually calls his &#8220;simplicities,&#8221; &#8220;the dogma.&#8221; This is the set up for the first of his claims &#8220;inside the machinery, now, 1950, of how projective verse is made,&#8221; which leads us directly to Olson&#8217;s claim for breath.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, May 31, 2005</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>All weekend I&#8217;ve been thinking that there&#8217;s an absent third missing between <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/05/grave-of-william-carlos-williams.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Collecteds</span></span><span style='color:black'> &amp; &#8220;Books as They Happen&#8221;</span></a> &#8211; it&#8217;s the case of the Selected. Sometimes even that literary act of category miscegenation, the &#8220;New &amp; Selected&#8221; (<span class=SpellE>a.k.a</span> &#8220;Didn&#8217;t write enough new poems for a full book, but wanted/needed to publish one anyway&#8221;). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Selecteds</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> are notoriously problematic &amp; there are the horror stories about different ones, such Bob Grenier&#8217;s editing of a Creeley Selected that proved too radical for its publisher &amp; was scrapped for something that the publisher thought more of as a Greatest Hits volume. You can find Grenier&#8217;s original table of contents in the 1978 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Boundary2 </i>issue devoted to Creeley &#8211; it would have been a great book. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So I was trying to think about how you might do that. How would one approach the question of thinking it through? I&#8217;ve always thought, for example, that my own work wouldn&#8217;t lend itself to that form, that you couldn&#8217;t intelligibly &#8220;excerpt&#8221; from these booklength poems that are themselves parts of larger projects. But I wanted to think it through without that double-sided investment of editor/author, so thought about who hasn&#8217;t ever had a Selected, and how would I approach their work. <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>Louis Zukofsky</b>. How would I think to edit a Selected works of his poetry?<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Even as I&#8217;m resistant to the idea that one could/should excerpt from my own poems, I don&#8217;t sense that same taboo with his. Is that because it&#8217;s not my own work, or because there&#8217;s something fundamentally different between his poetry &amp; my own (well, there is, obviously, but besides all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>those </i>reasons)? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So what would I pick from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A,&#8221; </i>for example? I tend to read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>not as a continuous whole, but <span class=GramE>as a series movements</span>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc> 
<li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;   tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>1 through 6, the opening sequence written very much under the influence of <i      style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos<o:p></o:p></i></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>7 through 11, the poems in which LZ first reaches his mature works<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>12 all by itself, the great WW2 poem, heavily influenced by </span><st1:City><st1:place><i        style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Paterson</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><span       style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></li> <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>13 also by itself, &#8220;partita,&#8221; one of <span class=SpellE>LZ&#8217;s</span> finest works, as finely tuned a modernist work as exists<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>14-20, not &#8220;formally&#8221; the whole of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>An </i>(that      poem-within-the-poem that is a major sequence unto itself), but its gut&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></li> 
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>21, &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Rudens</span>,&#8221; a text I never understood until I saw it performed last year at the Centennial Conference at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span        style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Columbia</span></st1:place></st1:City><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, <span class=SpellE>LZ&#8217;s</span> lust for Shakespeare&#8217;s late fantasies, the weakest section in the entire     work&#185;<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>22-23, which I think of as &#8220;the twins,&#8221; the finest writing LZ would ever do<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>24, Celia&#8217;s gift to LZ proved to be closure, or perhaps cloture<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of these, I would include the following:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>1 through 3, a brilliant opening, it shows his roots, his indebtedness to Pound &amp; the role of music as a template<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>6, because it is where LZ really is thinking through the problem of the form of the long poem <o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>7, because it&#8217;s a great poem &amp; where LZ really takes leave of his    predecessors<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I love <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 8, but realistically, it's too long for a Selected &amp; its involvement with issues of labor, Marx, the question of social movements are all handled more compactly &#8211; and more profoundly from a poetic perspective &#8211; by the great double-canzone of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 9. <i      style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i><span      style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>&#8211; 9 is a must<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;A&#8221; </span></i><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8211; 10 is the first WW2 poem &amp; not nearly so long as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 14, but in the compact environs of a Selected, I&#8217;m caught by the easy, careless (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and never redacted</i>) racism of lines like &#8220;No slant-eyed devil on stilts,&#8221; so I wouldn&#8217;t include it, even tho the evocation of a lost Paris is one of the most powerful images of the war from an American poet<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;A&#8221; &#8211;</span></i><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> 11, a love poem to his wife &amp; son, one of the clearest statements of his theme of family love, one of his finest poems<o:p></o:p></span></li> 
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;A&#8221; </span></i><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8211; 12 is both long &amp; problematic from my perspective </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>&#8211; this is the only number I would pull excerpts from: the first nine-plus pages up through the stanza on &#8220;How does the Czar sleep Nights?&#8221; &#8211; the section beginning with (big cap) &#8220;</span><b      style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>B</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>lest&#8221; and continuing through the passage that starts (also big cap) &#8220;</span><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>A</span></b><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>rdent&#8221; &#8211; the final 11 pages or so, beginning with &#8220;These are some things I wanted / to get into a poem&#8221; &#8211; </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>T</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>hus after the first 261 pages of the volume, I&#8217;ve selected just 70, and if I had to cut back, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:black'>&#8220;A&#8221; </span></i>&#8211;<span style='color:black'> 12 would be the first to get cut. The second &#8220;half,&#8221; by which I mean <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A<span class=GramE>&#8221; <span style='font-style:normal'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>-</span></span></i> 13-23, is not a whole lot longer, 302 pages, but I would include considerably more from this second half of the volume, which LZ did not begin until nine years after completing 12. The second half where Zukofsky&#8217;s greatest <span class=GramE>work</span> lies. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I would include all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A<span class=GramE>&#8221; <span style='font-style:normal'><span      style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>-</span></span></i> 13 through 16, an      uninterrupted swath of 114 pages. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I love <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i><span      style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>- 17, the coronal for Floss &amp; elegy for her husband William Carlos Williams, but it&#8217;s not Zukofsky&#8217;s best work, in spite of its embodiment of poetry as community (&amp;, as such, one of the first truly post-avant works) &#8211; likewise, I wouldn&#8217;t think to include <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 18<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I would include <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 19, formally the strongest of the later portions of the 1960s work, a period when, from my reading, <span class=SpellE>LZ&#8217;s</span> work was again starting to level off &#8211; Zukofsky had a pattern of making enormous strides in his work, followed by longer fallow periods. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>For those reasons, I wouldn&#8217;t include either <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 20 or 21, but I would include all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 22 &amp; 23, written in the early &#8216;70s after the gift of Celia&#8217;s musical montage of 24. These two pieces are Zukofsky&#8217;s very best work. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That&#8217;s a total of 265 pages taken out of a work that contains over 800 once you fold Celia&#8217;s piece in. It would of course be the core of any Selected. But would these excerpts &#8220;represent&#8221; or at the least not entirely gut <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A<span class=GramE>&#8221; <span style='font-style:normal'>?</span></span></i> My sense is that it <span class=GramE>wouldn&#8217;t,</span> tho I think you could argue for including others, especially 8, 10 &amp; 17 (another 85 pages). That&#8217;s where I&#8217;d have to start thinking about just how large my Selected would be, and just how adequately I thought to represent the shorter poems. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; This is where it becomes clear that Olson&#8217;s uses of Shakespeare completely trumps Zukofsky&#8217;s.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, March 04, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Rob Stanton
has some follow-up questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Dear
Ron,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Huge
thanks for your thorough and thoughtful <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2389637288">blog-response</a>
to my query about Engines. I think I was hoping that you might say something
more about collaboration in general, just as you did - the proliferation of
poet/poet and poet/artist collaborations in the current poetic climate is
something I find particularly fascinating (just thinking about examples you
mention, I recently read - and loved - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.mercuryhouse.org/leningrad.html">Leningrad</a></i>, and the
idea behind <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Grand Piano</i> seems
both interesting in itself and strangely inevitable). I was intrigued that you
picked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i>-24 as a possible
precedent - I too feel distinctly ambivalent about whether it really does 'cap'
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i> (and whether that sort
of 'terminal' idea was tenable in the first place). In a sort of sentimental
way, I think it does - making semi-actual the scene envisioned in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i>-11: music, words and
performance. Apart from that, the nature of the collaboration in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i>-24 seems particularly
complicated: firstly, there is Celia Zukofsky's work in setting Zukofsky's
words to music, then there is the actual presence of Handel's music (suggesting
a Handel/Zukofsky interaction, mediated by Celia), and then there's the
question of whether the four 'voices' of Zukofsky presented actual represent a
unified 'whole' (one of the joys of that <a href="http://factoryschool.org/content/sounds/poetry/frontenac.html">Factory
School</a> site is the recording of the 'live' version organised by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana;">*).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Given
your point about how collaboration provides an opportunity to sidestep and/or interrogate
the 'raging control freak' aspect inherent in an individual 'style', I was also
interested in your mention of 'the metabolism of one's own processes'. I'm not
sure to what degree you intended the biological inference, but this immediately
put me in mind of Olson's repeated emphasis on the physicality of the poet/m.
I've always felt that his talk about the individual 'breath' of the poet was
strangely close to mainstream <span class="SpellE">whitterings</span> about the
necessity of 'individual voice' etc., despite the very different poetic 'ends'
advocated. Is 'self' inevitable in poetry? Does the inevitable communality of
collaboration offer a real alternative, or does it simply place the problem at
one remove (I hate to admit it, but despite the efforts toward some kind of
group expression in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leningrad</i> , I
found it hard not to 'see' differing styles in the separate passages)? Or, to
put it another way, if the problem with most mainstream poetry is the
foregrounding of 'unified self' as end rather than mean, is all poetry simply
somewhere along a sliding style of degrees-of-leaning-on-personal-experience?
(I've been reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/145/wordchrono.html">The Prelude</a> </i>recently
and have been intrigued by the incredibly arbitrary and piecemeal nature of the
<span class="SpellE">Wordsworthian</span> 'epiphany' on a larger canvas.) You've
written of <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2383955338">'the
abstract lyric</a>' before in your blog in relation to the work of Barbara
Guest, but <span class="GramE">is</span> such a thing 100% possible?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Anyway,
this has been a horribly rambling email. Apologies in advance, and thanks
again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">All
the best,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Rob
Stanton<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
question of the person, in Olson or in collaboration, is invariably a difficult
topic, precisely because works are written by individuals, either singly or in
groups, &amp; yet we know that &#8220;the individual&#8221; itself is a complex &amp;
internally contradictory construction. If we follow the cognitive scientists
and neurobiologists, one of the first things we will discover is that, even
within the human being, there is no &#8220;monad,&#8221; no single site of thought or
language. Rather, different portions of the brain work in conjunction to
apprehend our world &amp; build responses to it &#8211; many of these occur below the
level of consciousness &amp; outside of our waking life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">When Olson
first began to produce the poems for which we remember him today in the late
1940s, he actually appears to have been almost the only poet in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;"> to demonstrate any awareness &#8211; more
anticipation than knowledge, really &#8211; of these issues. In his &#8220;Bibliography on </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;"> for Ed Dorn,&#8221; first written in
1955, one year ahead of Ginsberg&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Howl,</i>
Olson notes that &#8220;millennia . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>&amp;
. . . person&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">are</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> not the same as either<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">time</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> as history or as the<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">individual</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> as single<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">The first
three pages of &#8220;Proprioception,&#8221; written six years later &amp; easily Olson&#8217;s
most ambitious &amp; successful critical project, show O working through this
problem, this question, at great length. He is so concerned with place that he
is driven to find such, somewhere. Proprioception itself, kinesthesia, one&#8217;s
awareness of the actual physical rubbing together of one&#8217;s inner organs, the
growl of the stomach &amp; peristaltic pulse of the bowels, is for Olson a key,
an awareness that precedes any other mode of knowing &#8211; &#8220;I am I because my
little gut knows me.&#8221; The body for Olson is the place of the unconscious. The
&#8220;soul,&#8221; an entity with which Olson was much obsessed, proved to be profoundly
physical. Projection &#8211; the meat of his practice as a writer, a (literally)
Projectivist poet &#8211; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.5in; margin-right: 1.5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">is</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
discrimination (of the object from the subject) and the unconscious is the
universe flowing-in, inside. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Maximus,
this great comic persona that both is &amp; is not Olson &#8211; and most certainly is
not Russell Crowe &#8211; represents O&#8217;s attempt to have it all ways. And while Olson
is most certainly not the only poet among the New Americans to push the person
beyond its traditional boundaries &amp; unveil the constructedness of such
&#8220;natural&#8221; categories &#8211; think of Kerouac&#8217;s &#8220;Imitation of the Tape&#8221; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody</i>, Burroughs&#8217; use of
cut-ups in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Naked Lunch</i> &amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ticket that Exploded, </i>Spicer&#8217;s
theory of Martian radio &#8211; Olson appears to have been the only one to have had a
critical understanding of the question, as such. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">So, sure,
there is a fair amount of persona floating about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maximus</i> that is not so terribly different in its own way from the
imaginary blue-collar worker Phil Levine posits in his &#8220;I.&#8221; The self in such
poetry is largely a type, &amp; I always think of the stereotypical signals
thereof worn by the &#8216;70s rock group The Village People: you can tell which one
Levine would have been, though I fear that may be Olson under the feathered
headdress. <span class="SpellE">Bly&#8217;s</span> serape, </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Blackburn</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">&#8217;s cowboy hat &amp; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">&#8217;s purple cape were hardly more
subtle. Yet it&#8217;s Olson, among all of these, who understands not only that it&#8217;s
funny, but that there are issues here, &amp; as such worth exploring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">That &#8220;worth
exploring&#8221; is, I think, the answer to the question of whether or not &#8220;self&#8221; is
finally inescapable. It will always be, like &#8220;the social,&#8221; one possible horizon
among several, regardless of how nuanced our understanding of its composition
might become. After all, how far have we advanced in this regard from
Shakespeare&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/lear/full.html">Lear</a></i>,
responding with a quartet of words that operate like a series of concentric
circles, moving from the outer inward: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edgar
I nothing <span class="GramE">am</span></i>?<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
</i>The same response &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">worth exploring </i>&#8211;
is, I suspect, also the underlying principle beneath the continued attraction
of the abstract lyric, even if I personally find the issue less compelling. The
answer to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Stanton</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">&#8217;s <span class="GramE">question&#8217;s</span> isn&#8217;t ultimately so
much <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why </i>as it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why not?<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>* For some reason, the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Factory</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> site fails to credit </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Bob Perelman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
though my understanding is that it was Bob who initiated this collective
process in the first place as well as substituting his piano for Handel&#8217;s
harpsichord. In my video copy of the November 15, 1978 San Francisco State
performance, it is Perelman whom Poetry Center director </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Tom Mandel</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> has introduce the event in addition to his
performance therein.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, September 16, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Where
is the center of human<br />
suffering? <span class="GramE">A tight pit at<br />
the pit of the city with the brighter<br />
flesh radiating outward.</span> Or inside<br />
out, the dark rings around the city moving<br />
in and in? <span class="GramE">At St. Denis?</span> A man<br />
by the freeway picks black-<br />
berries, and no wood-<br />
<br />
lot loomed without song.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Fields
of wild mustard outside the sub-<br />
division mushroom, each<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![if !supportLineBreakNewLine]&gt;<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![endif]&gt;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">one</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> a Flower Beneath the Foot / </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Sudan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> / cut off the hands<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">of</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> my
dream when waiting for such things as &#8220;Good<br />
night&#8221; at the end of the beginning of sleep. Pledge<br />
<br />
allegiance, he said, or the pain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">starts</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> again. I lived by my book but they asked me to move
my body<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">through</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> a series of movements called &#8220;work&#8221;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>What is the name<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">that</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is the game, of the essences of objects of pain? I
is another<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">name</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> of
the labels<br />
<br />
of laughable<br />
[detours], contents, i.e.,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Night
Road Work<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">These lines are among the
most thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">heard</i> (&amp;, not coincidentally, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">felt</i>) since Charles Olson was a young man. The comparison is apt if
only because the writer, Eleni Sikelianos, uses many, if not all, of the
devices in Olson&#8217;s tool kit as she works through this passage, the first third
or so of a poem called &#8220;The Brighter Flesh,&#8221; from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blue Guide</i>, the first of the two books that make up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Earliest Words</i> (Coffee House Press,
2001). This formal vocabulary, I would argue, is carried further than Olson
himself could have done &#8211; follow the &#8220;<span class="SpellE">i</span>&#8221; and &#8220;t&#8221;
sounds through that first stanza, initially separated in &#8220;is&#8221; and &#8220;center&#8221;
(that sibilant <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">s</i> sound hissing their
se</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">greg</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ation), joined in the second line, playing off the
contrast between long &amp; short vowel in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>&#8220;tight pit,&#8221; then again in the third line &#8211; &#8220;pit,&#8221; &#8220;city,&#8221; &#8220;brighter&#8221; &#8211;
only to foliate in the fourth within &#8220;radiating&#8221; (Sikelianos gets more emphasis
out of that intervening long &#8220;a&#8221; than any poet I can recall), only to turn them
around &amp; around again through the end of this sentence nearly two lines
later. As an instance of pure technical brilliance, the passage is
breathtaking, but where it is propelling us as readers turns out to be even
more so: to the violence of Sharia, the rule of law imposed by Islamic
fundamentalists. Enjambment here governs the prosody of nightmare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Earliest Words </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">(and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blue Guide </i>in particular)
is filled with such mouth-dropping moments, many of which have relatively
little to share with Olson or the Pound/Williams tradition in general (there
are, for example, some great prose poems here). But reading this passage &amp;
others like it for the first time this past spring made me realize just how
long it had been since I had seen anybody do something profoundly useful with
this set of discursive tools. You have to go back to the books of the Acoma
Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz from the late 1970s to see poetry achieve anything
genuinely new in this vein.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">An interesting poet to
contrast with Sikelianos might be Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drafts</i> also sometimes carry the surface
characteristics of the Pound/Olson tradition of the long poem. If you read
DuPlessis chronologically, however, I think you see a rather different
developmental journey from her early post-Objectivist impulses toward a work
with extraordinary scope and complexity. In short, she has arrived at this
outer appearance to her texts quite independently and, if you look at the
individual sections closely, they don&#8217;t function anything like logical
extensions of Pound&#8217;s or Olson&#8217;s uses of history and reference. Where &#8220;the
guys&#8221; expound, argue and hector in their poetry, DuPlessis <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thinks.</i> Not surprisingly, it is DuPlessis you meet in the text of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drafts</i>, while Pound &amp; Olson both
used the written as though it were a wall they were building between themselves
and the reader (Pound&#8217;s &#8220;great acorn of light&#8221; is, in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>fact, intended to blind). The result has a
radically different affect. It is this point at which DuPlessis&#8217; poetry and
that of Sikelianos meet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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