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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, June 16, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><img height="294" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/f7Oz6rcBIa6vA6OxupQmcNqcsxQ4a0oflI35DuQMdyWaGQtAjnQqWGqzplNrlhLl8qKn_mDD2mhCi4Xo88XdC8YWWQ0Z34SE9k8%3Ds0-d" width="451"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Charles Olson, I noted a week ago Thursday, insists on being taken as a crank. The fourth section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>a page and a half to sum up &#8220;Theory of Society,&#8221; underscores my point. It begins with this assertion, in parentheses &amp; all in lower case:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>(we already posses a<br> 
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;</span>sufficient theory of<br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;</span>psychology)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Much of what follows can be read as <span class=GramE>an</span> assault on one of the &#8220;hip&#8221; biases of the late 1950s &amp; beyond (versions of which exist today, no doubt), that everything is interesting, at least potentially. Olson calls this &#8220;the greatest present danger / the area of pseudo-sensibility.&#8221; What follows the colon that ends that line sounds like a direct assault on, of all things, <a href="http://www.oulipo.net/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Oulipo</span></a>, or perhaps <a href="http://www.fluxus.org/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Fluxus</span></a>, movements that began coincidentally in 1960 &amp; &#8217;62 respectively, the exact period of <span class=GramE><i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception</i>.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>games<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>randomness<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>haphazard<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;        </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>         </span>(I <span class=SpellE>Ching</span>-<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;                </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>   </span>ness)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson decidedly is opposed to the idea that &#8220;anything goes or / all <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>is </i>interesting Or / nothing is.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>is the era of the </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Bay of Pigs</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; the Cuban missile crisis &#8211; the idea that such proto-hippy sentiments should constitute &#8220;the greatest present danger&#8221; is, at the very least, quaint. But this is a man who taught alongside John Cage at a college where Allan Kaprow was a student &amp; where  <span class=SpellE>Bucky</span> Fuller orchestrated an event that Kaprow, in particular, would later run with, the happening. <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 interesting also to think of what Olson means by already possessing &#8220;a / sufficient theory of / psychology.&#8221; Olson is often treated as if his <span class=GramE>interest in the evolution of psychology in the 20<sup>th</sup> century were</span> largely limited to Jung, though in fact he refers at different points to many of the major writers &amp; will, literally on the next page, present us with a garbled version of Anna Freud&#8217;s concept of the stages of psychological development. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But if you look to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus, </i>both the poem &amp; the figure &#8211; one  of two great instances of persona from the poets of the 1950s (John Berryman&#8217;s being the other) &#8211; you don&#8217;t see Olson interested in exploring the historic Maximus so much &amp; certainly not his own motivations, but rather the idea of the self looking out into the world &amp; acting thereon. &#8220;Society&#8221; here means, I think, exactly that. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So Olson is not, repeat not, interested in sitting still for 4&#8217;33&#8221; meditating on ambient noise &amp; calling it music. Olson&#8217;s piano, where he to compose for such, would certainly be over prepared. Here he offers what he sees as the alternative to the &#8220;everything is groovy, dude&#8221; worldview:<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'>instead of novelty (&#8220;God is the organ of <br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>                   </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;      </span>novelty&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This is at least the third time in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception</i> 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&#8217;t, say, the steady state that would apply if the so-called natural cycles didn&#8217;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: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>which </i>one? Which is what I take Olson to mean when he says in the next three lines that &#8220;the true cast of / the sensible / probability.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In the next stanza &#8211; Olson&#8217;s critical prose doesn&#8217;t quite get to paragraphs &#8211; Olson takes off against &#8220;kicks,&#8221; <span class=SpellE>phoney</span> (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sic</i>) disaffection &#8211; anticipating here the &#8220;turn on, tune in, drop out&#8221; 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 &#8220;the elite among / the masses accomplishing / a lateral coup d&#8217;état.&#8221; Adorno couldn&#8217;t have put it more succinctly. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson&#8217;s straw man, here, never fully figured as such, comes close to Milan <span class=SpellE>Kundera&#8217;s</span> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson then advances one of his pet theories, that people become identified with the point at which they &#8220;fall off&#8221; from keeping attuned to the new:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Some fell off at 5 etc some at<br>
17 others 40, like<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>   </span>No matter, they <br>
are bombers (carrying forces) of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>time <br>
they fell off, </i>not what <br>
they look like talk like <br>
seem etc Or are <br>
taken as<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It is this that Olson contrasts with Anna Freud&#8217;s developmental phases (infancy, libidinal, <span class=SpellE>oedipean</span>, etc.), a world that was healthier because &#8220;rites / de passage existed.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:2.5in;text-indent:1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Opinion<br>
has replaced all such<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Word writing.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> <span class=GramE>Instead of &#8216;idea-writing&#8217; (ideogram etc).</span> That would seem to be it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Thus begins &#8220;Logography,&#8221; the second essay, note or section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception. </i>In the space of one page, Olson makes a couple of basic assertions &#8211; that the phoneticization of writing systems comes about from the need to accurately represent proper names &amp; that for a long time after the arrival of phonetic writing, grammatical elements were not indicated. The implication &#8211; an important one for a poet whose later writing will often look like notes cast spatially across the page &#8211; is that phonetics precedes grammar, both historically &amp; in terms of importance. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This is also unmistakably a shot at Ezra Pound, whose &#8220;collaboration&#8221; with the late Ernest Fenollosa on ideograms was generative for Pound&#8217;s poetry, but also managed to set forth all manner of <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ezra_pound_chinese.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>linguistic myths</span></a> into the literary culture, partly because Pound was no linguist &amp; partly because Fenollosa wasn&#8217;t either.&#185; Thus Olson&#8217;s concern with &#8220;<span class=SpellE>abt</span> the earliest business we can know anything <span class=SpellE>abt</span>, some Sumerian traders in cattle&#8221; is not with the detail, the economics of the exchange, but the actual <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sequence of sounds</i> involved:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Uruk</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><a name="OLE_LINK5"><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;     </span></a><span class=SpellE><span style='mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK5'>Erech</span></span></span><span style='mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK5'></span><br>
<span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>   &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;             </span><span class=SpellE>Orchoe</span><br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    </span></span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>                     </span><span class=SpellE>Warka</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Try saying that fast three times. Just two firm consonants, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>r </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>k, </i>around which vowels are placed in various sequences. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The third section or note of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>is interesting on at least two dimensions. One is that as almost a footnote &#8211; its title is &#8220;Postscript to Proprioception &amp; Logography&#8221; &#8211; this piece suggests that Olson has not, at this point anyway, sketched out the larger plan of this project &amp; that the remaining six sections will be as much a surprise to him as to us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The other is the pair of terms raised up here as foundational: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Landscape </i>&#8211; Olson italicizes it &#8211; and NOUN (O. puts it all in caps), which he terms &#8220;fundamentals of any new discourse.&#8221; Beyond these words, as such, it&#8217;s worth pausing to think about why, exactly, Olson feels the need for a &#8220;new discourse,&#8221; what that phrase conveys for him. <span class=GramE>It&#8217;s</span> 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: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>make it new.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Landscape is space &#8211; a key term for Olson throughout his career &#8211; but space of a particular kind, that &#8220;which the eye / can comprehend in a single view.&#8221;<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>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, &#8220;know it / instantly.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is a spatial break midway down the page before Olson tells us:<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'>The <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>other </i>knowing is NOUN, proper (<span class=SpellE>proprius</span><span class=GramE>)</span><br> 
noun &#8211; that which belongs to the self<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Proprius</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>is a term we have already met here, rooted deep in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>proprio</i>ception. Thus Olson sets up that which is not the self, the landscape &amp; the nouns that occupy that space.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; Realistically, no one was in any meaningful sense prior to the work of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure"><span style='color:windowtext'>Saussure</span></a>, whose <a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm"><span style='color:windowtext'>course on general linguistics</span></a> was first taught in 1906, just two years before Fenollosa died, and whose ideas didn&#8217;t become widely understood until <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>after </i>the 1960-62 timeframe in which Olson composed <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception. </i>Thus <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Finnegans</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Wake</i>, to pick one lurid example, proceeds from Joyce&#8217;s understanding of 19th century philology, a fatal starting point. Saussure&#8217;s notes, cobbled together by his students after his death in 1913, spread first to the Prague School of Linguistics &amp; then more broadly into cultural theory through <span class=GramE>the<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>work</span> of Claude Levi-Strauss, who was introduced to the ideas while attending a course of Jacobson&#8217;s at the New School during World War 2, but whose own writing did not become popular in the U.S. until <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>after </i>Olson crafted <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception</i>. Olson&#8217;s own conception of anthropology, never very far from the surface of his own poetics, is very much pre-structuralist in its assumptions &amp; vocabulary. Olson must have known the work of the likes of Sherry Anderson &amp; Margaret Mead &amp; 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&#8217;s academy. The ghosts that Olson is tackling here are all gone a decade later. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, June 08, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Suzanne posted a comment to Monday&#8217;s note that&#8217;s worth repeating:<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'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception"><span  style='color:windowtext'>PROPRIOCEPTION</span></a>
<br>
is the true sixth sense<br>
not defined as Olson does it<br>
but as the perception of the body<span class=GramE>;</span><br>
of its parts in relation to its whole<br>
it is about balance <br>
or lack thereof<br>
it is how we walk <br>
without tripping or falling<br>
it is the knowledge built into the parts <br>
of the placement <br>
and location<br>
of the other parts<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In fact, the concept of kinesthesia, which the Wikipedia discussion under the link above characterizes as &#8220;another term that is often used interchangeably with proprioception,&#8221; is integral to Olson&#8217;s definition also: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>movement, at any cost, kinesthesia: beat (<span class=SpellE>nik</span>) </i>starts the second paragraph of Olson&#8217;s initial definition, the one labeled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Today. </i>Olson&#8217;s name, by the way, pops up in the external links to the Wikipedia definition, as one of the sources for Charles Wolfe&#8217;s essay by the same name. Also invoked are dance, yoga and Alexander Technique, a 19<sup>th</sup> century mode of body work. It&#8217;s not that Olson&#8217;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&#8217;t possible without a sense of your nose having a surface &amp; some general idea where that might be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But the point raises the question of the nature of knowledge &amp; its value within a poem. If I were, to use Suzanne&#8217;s example, a sufferer of peripheral neuropathy, I wouldn&#8217;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&#8217;m not at all certain that I would turn to Olson, even, if I were researching a history of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>village</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Gloucester</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, except as an example of his own role there. <span class=GramE>Or for any questions concerning <span class=SpellE>Sumeria</span>, Greek mythology, the Maya or whatever.</span> At least no more than I would turn to Ezra Pound for information on economics. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What then is the value of all this <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>research</i> that is so much a part of Olson&#8217;s poetic practice, a dimension that he directly takes from Pound in fact, the poet as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8216;<span class=SpellE>istorin</span>, </i>the ancient mariner of the archives who emerges from deep in the library&#8217;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&#8217;Hara lunch poem or Ed Sanders&#8217; investigative poetics or Michael Magee&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>My Angie Dickinson</i>?<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>While investigative poetics does seem to have a direct relationship back to Olson&#8217;s practice &#8211; substitute the poet as reporter for Maximus&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8216;<span class=SpellE>istorin</span></i> &#8211; 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&#8217;s use of an appropriated linguistic source for his project is, ultimately, no better or worse than Pound wandering through Van Buren&#8217;s written record or Jackson Mac Low&#8217;s reading through insurance texts in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stanzas for Iris <span class=SpellE>Lezak</span>, </i>or Frank O&#8217;Hara recounting what he saw as he walked into the department store to type out a poem on one of the typewriter display&#8217;s store models. It&#8217;s a source of material, which can be used inventively or not (the Van Buren <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cantos </i>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&#8217;s use of the dictionary as a source for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Maintains </i>does not depend on the reader recognizing the source, nor the source&#8217;s truth function in the world (&#8220;this definition is accurate&#8221;), nor even the metaphysics of dictionaries as such, a linguistic and social phenomenon all their own. It&#8217;s what Coolidge does with this that makes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Maintains </i>one of the great books of the 1970s.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But what then of the neighboring category, the use of terms in a poet&#8217;s critical or theoretical prose, which is where we find <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception</i>?</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> More than any other poet of his generation, Olson produced a large quantity of such texts, for which the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Prose </i>is but the tip of an iceberg. There is, for example, an as yet still unpublished <a href="http://www.charlesolson.ca/files/chronology2.htm"><span style='color:windowtext'>book on Shakespeare</span></a> written in 1954, according to the chronology of his life and work at the remarkable <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.charlesolson.ca/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Looking for Oneself: Contributions to the Study of Charles Olson</span></a> </i>website. There are, among others, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Mayan Letters </i>(a distinct publication from  the Cape/Grossman series extracted from the voluminous correspondence with Bob Creeley), <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Special View of History </i>(reconstructed notes from a class given at Black Mountain), two volumes of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Muthologos</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>which collects talks &amp; interviews, plus volumes of correspondence, and fugitive enough fare, like his <a href="http://slought.org/content/11092/"><span style='color:windowtext'>reading &amp; talk at Goddard College</span></a> in 1962, which <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Slought </i>has up on its website both as a sound file &amp; transcript. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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 &#8211; tho the fields are different, that seems to me a lot closer to the poet-physician model &#8211; nor is it <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only </i>Olson working, as did Creeley, Sorrentino, Baraka, Spicer or Duncan &#8211; as a poet discussing poetry. Although I think  it can be read as that, and may well have its greatest value there. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson <span class=GramE>wants,</span> I believe, very much to be what <a href="http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm"><span style='color:windowtext'>Antonio</span></a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramsci"><span  style='color:windowtext'>Gramsci</span></a> described as an organic intellectual. This is quite distinct from a &#8220;professional&#8221; intellectual, such as a tenured history or philosophy professor at West Chester University, but rather fits quite close to Olson&#8217;s conception of Maximus of <span class=SpellE>Tyre</span> &#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'>he mostly wandered around the Mediterranean world from the center, from the, from the old capital of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span class=SpellE><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Tyre</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>, talking about one thing &#8212; Homer&#8217;s Odyssey.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The wandering scholar fits Olson&#8217;s own critical project, although with the notable difference between &amp; his doppelganger that Olson talks about many things, depending almost on the wind &amp; the whim. He is a perfect <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>bricoleur</span></span></a>. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This lines Olson up alongside some other interesting characters: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ludwig Wittgenstein</span></a>, whose relationship to his chair at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cambridge</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> could best be described as fitful.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin"><span style='color:windowtext'>Walter Benjamin</span></a>, one part philosopher, one part literary critic, one part mystic.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdos"><span style='color:windowtext'>Paul <span class=SpellE>Erdos</span></span></a>, the homeless mathematician<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The key to Olson&#8217;s work here &#8211; and it&#8217;s not so far from Benjamin&#8217;s arcades project or Wittgenstein banning students from his classes who intended to become philosophy professors &#8211; is its commitment to amateurism. Or, to be even more clear, its adamant opposition to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>professionalism. </i><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> As an <i>ism.</i> </span>The mode of address, in the poems &amp; Olson&#8217;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.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson insists on being taken as a crank. <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>And </i>being taken seriously.</span> There is nothing in any way professional<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>driving his investigations, nor what he learns, nor what he thinks you should know. Thus a poem in the form of &#8220;Letter for Melville 1951&#8221; which carries the note betwixt title &amp; text:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>written to be read AWAY FROM the Melville Society&#8217;s &#8220;One Hundredth Birthday Party&#8221; for MOBY-DICK at </span></i><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Williams</span></i></st1:PlaceName><i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> </span></i><st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>College</span></i></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>, Labor Day Weekend, </span></i><st1:date Year="1951" Day="2" Month="9"><span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Sept</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>. 2-4,  1951</span></i></st1:date><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
 
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Because of the nature of his particular project, there is less of a gulf between Olson&#8217;s critical prose &amp; his poetry, perhaps &#8211; during the Goddard sessions, he is challenged on what makes his work poetry  &#8211; but perhaps the deeper question ought to be the other way around: what makes his critical writing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>poetry? Certainly Charles Bernstein &amp; others since 1970 have shown the ways in which both critical writing can be streaked with the poetic &amp; verse can be conversely critical. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Which means that I do take <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>completely seriously &#8211; it is not, to my mind (as one correspondent this week put it) &#8220;the <span class=SpellE>rantings</span> of a drunken seventeen-year-old Philosophy sophomore at a rave party,&#8221; but in fact, word-by-word as densely written as anything produced by Derrida. <span class=GramE>Or &#8211; to use a more direct comparison &#8211; the prose in Williams&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All</i>.</span> But when I do read it or any of Olson&#8217;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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, June 07, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>One of the interesting &#8211; problematic may be a better word &#8211; 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 &#8211; framing may be the better word &#8211; their arguments within the broader landscape of contemporary intellectual discourse. Read Ezra Pound after <span class=GramE>Marx,</span> or even after a few issues of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Monthly Review, </i>and you realize that Pound&#8217;s initial impulses weren&#8217;t so bad, but that addressing problems of justice through monetary policy requires a theoretical infrastructure so vast &#8211; precisely because you are so far from root causes &#8211; 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&#8217;s a viciousness in his radio broadcasts that registers just how maddening &#8211; I&#8217;m choosing my words carefully &#8211; it must have been to see his vision of the future coming asunder. And it&#8217;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 </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> for trial or possibly just taken out &amp; shot, Pound is stripped of all his books &amp; intellectual trappings, penning the <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pisan</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Cantos </i>literally on scraps of paper. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Similarly, I wonder how Olson&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>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 &#8220;Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)&#8221;. The question is bogus, at least partly, simply because Olson wrote <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>between 1960 &amp; &#8217;62, while Althusser first published his essay in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>La <span class=SpellE>Pensée</span> </i>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 59<sup>th</sup> birthday, dying on the tenth of January 1970 &#8211; he never lived to read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://monthlyrevieworg.nationprotect.net/miva/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&amp;Store_Code=MRS&amp;Product_Code=PB0394&amp;Category_Code="><span style='color:windowtext'>Lenin and Philosophy</span></a>, </i>really to absorb <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any</i> 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 &#8220;Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man&#8221; conference held at Johns Hopkins in October, 1966, the iconic tipping point between the structuralism of the 1950s &amp; the new world of Post-everything that this conference announced, I haven&#8217;t seen evidence.&#185; Although the conference, whose speakers included Derrida, <span class=SpellE>Lacan</span>, <span class=SpellE>Todorov</span> &amp; Roland Barthes (presenting &#8220;To Write: An Intransitive Verb?&#8221;), 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&#8217;s gothic bio of Olson, is that his drinking ramped up significantly after Betty&#8217;s death in an auto accident in 1964. Beyond sketching out &#8220;A Plan for the Curriculum of the Soul&#8221; in early 1968, Olson will make no more major theoretical statements in his life. The productive core of his life &#8211; from the first poems in the late 1940s until the work begins to trail off in the late &#8216;60s, is just twenty years. <span class=GramE>Longer perhaps than the careers of Jack Spicer or Frank O&#8217;Hara, perhaps, but not very long.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ironically, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>soul</i> is exactly the word I wish Olson had had  the opportunity to interpenetrate with <span class=SpellE>Althusser&#8217;s</span> conception of ideology. It is the third term in Olson&#8217;s dialectic, between physiology &amp; the unconscious, and it&#8217;s the focus of the second half of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception&#8217;s</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>title essay. The sidebar to the next full paragraph beyond the one I ended Monday&#8217;s note with is: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the soul is / <span class=SpellE>proprioceptive</span>. </i><span class=GramE>And is worth quoting further:</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>the &#8216;body&#8217; itself as, by movement of its own <span class=SpellE>tis</span>-<br>
sues, giving the data of, depth. Here, then <span class=SpellE>wld</span> be<br>
what is left out? Or what is physiologically even<br>
the &#8216;hard&#8217; (solid, palpable), that one&#8217;s life is<br>
informed from and by one&#8217;s own literal body &#8211; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What obsesses Olson here, the point if you will, of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>is that<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>which is what gets &#8216;buried,&#8217; like, the<br> 
flesh? bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., what one<br>
uses, literally, to get about etc<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:.85in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>that this is &#8216;central,&#8217; that is &#8211; in <br> 
this &#189; of the picture &#8211; what they call the SOUL,<br>
the intermediary, the intervening thing, the inter-<br>
<span class=SpellE>ruptor</span>, the resistor. <span class=GramE>The self.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This key passage of Olson&#8217;s sounds like nothing so much to me as 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'>ideology &#8220;acts&#8221; or &#8220;functions&#8221; in such a way that it recruits subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or it &#8216;transforms&#8217; the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>interpellation </i>or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: &#8220;Hey, you there!&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Which is the key paragraph in <span class=SpellE>Althusser&#8217;s</span> essay.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This does <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>mean that I think what Olson is describing here necessarily is ideology, whether in the broad <span class=SpellE>Althusserian</span> sense (ideology is that which defines us) or the more narrow daily meaning (ideology as a political label). For one thing <span class=SpellE>Althusser&#8217;s</span> ideas themselves &#8211; like those of any of the major structuralist theorists of the past half century &#8211; 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<span class=GramE>,</span> if we could read these twin conceptions &#8211; ideology/Soul &#8211; as partaking of one another, seeing what each might then tell us further about the other.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It is clear, to my eye at least, that Olson&#8217;s goal in identifying the Soul is construct <span class=GramE>a dialectic</span>, as he literally says in the next paragraph, that the &#8220;gain&#8221; is <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>to have a third term, so that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>movement </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>action</i><br>
is &#8216;home.&#8217; Neither the Unconscious nor <span class=GramE>Projection</span><br>
(here used to remove the false opposition of <br>
&#8216;Conscious&#8217;; &#8216;consciousness&#8217; is self) have a home<br>
unless the DEPTH implicit in physical being &#8211; <br>
built-in space-time specifics, and moving (by<br>
movement of &#8216;its own&#8217;)<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;   </span>&#8211; is asserted, or found-<br>
out as such. <span class=GramE>Thus, the advantage of the value<br>
&#8217;proprioception.&#8221;</span> <span class=GramE>As such.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Althusser himself has gotten to his essay on ideology immediately after one on dialectics in Lenin, quoting Lenin on Hegel as follows:<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'>Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract . . .<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>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 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>all </i>scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>completely. </i>From living perception to abstract <span class=GramE>thought,</span> and from this to practice &#8211; such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson rejects the <span class=SpellE>unbodied</span> presence of categories &#8211; 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:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>the three terms <span class=SpellE>wld</span> be<span class=GramE>:</span><br>
surface (senses) projection<br>
cavity (organs &#8211; here read &#8216;archetypes&#8217;)<br>
unconscious the body itself &#8211; consciousness:<br>
implicit accuracy, from its own energy as a state of<br>
implicit motion<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Identity,<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>  &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;    </span>therefore (the universe is one) is supplied; and the<br> abstract-primitive character of the real (asserted<span class=GramE>)</span><br> is &#8216;placed&#8217;: projection is discrimination (of the<br> 
object from the subject) and the unconscious is the<br>
universe flowing-in, inside.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>At one level, one could read Olson here as being part of a long chain &#8211; stretching out beyond Althusser or Henri Lefebvre &amp; Lenin or Hegel, all the way back to Socratic method.&#178; Yet these are largely disconnected discourses &#8211; 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 &amp; 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 &amp; 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But if the <span class=SpellE>banalization</span> &amp; 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 &amp; have personal lives of their own, Olson&#8217;s own Curriculum of the Soul was never aimed in the same direction. He&#8217;d already lived the experience of </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Black</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Mountain</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>College</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, which was &#8211; at once, as it only could have been &#8211; it proved both the most successful educational experiment in the history of the arts in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and  </i>a complete &amp; utter disaster administratively &amp; financially. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What would a Curriculum of the Soul for a post-theoretical age look like?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; The one poet I know who did attend the Johns Hopkins event was Bruce Andrews, still a teenager at the time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#178; 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, June 06, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I was asked to come &amp; teach this summer at Naropa, specifically to talk about &#8220;dialectical materialism&#8221; as part of a weeklong unit on philosophy &amp; poetry, an interesting proposition, and this is what took me back to Charles Olson. Years before, at a time when I&#8217;d been part of a study group in San Francisco on the general topic of Marxism &amp; modernism, I had been reading Henri Lefebvre&#8217;s great <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dialectical Materialism, </i>a work written right on the cusp of the Second World War &#8211; the first publication was by Presses <span class=SpellE>Universitaires</span> de France in 1940 &#8211; and, quite by chance, happened to be reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>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 &#8211; I&#8217;m there the last week of this month &amp; first couple of days of July &#8211; my immediate instinct was to turn back to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>&amp; see how it stood up now, roughly two decades after I&#8217;d had that initial reaction. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The relationship of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>&#8211; and Olson&#8217;s project on an even broader scale &#8211; 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&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Call Me Ishmael </i>&amp; the initial release of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Mayan Letters. </i>Indeed, it&#8217;s worth noting that the first four volumes in that series overall were Claude Lévi-Strauss&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Scope of Anthropology, Call Me Ishmael, </i>and two volumes by Roland Barthes, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Writing Degree Zero </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Elements of Semiology, </i>followed immediately with volumes by William Carlos Williams, Václav Havel &amp; <span class=SpellE>Nazim</span> <span class=SpellE>Hikmet</span> (at a time when the latter two were almost entirely unknown in the West). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The Cape/Grossman series itself was as erratic as it was inventive &#8211; as I understand it, Cape Editions published in the U.K. volumes chosen by Tarn &amp; those that were not already being marketed in the U.S. (like the Barthes&#8217; volumes) got the &#8220;/Grossman&#8221; 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&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>22-23). <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dialectical Materialism, </i>no. 27 in the series, comes roughly midway between <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mayan Letters </i>(no. 17) and Pablo <span class=SpellE>Neruda&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Twenty Love Poems </i>(no. 38). Some of the other volumes that occurred during that particular stretch included Julian Huxley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe </i>&amp; Eldridge Cleaver&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Soul on Ice, </i>Francis <span class=SpellE>Ponge&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Soap </i>&amp; Fidel Castro&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>History Will Absolve Me, </i>plus volumes by Alfred <span class=SpellE>Jarry</span>, <span class=SpellE>Nicanor</span> <span class=SpellE>Parra</span>, Louis Zukofsky, André Breton, Yves <span class=SpellE>Bonnefoy</span>, <span class=SpellE>Georg</span> <span class=SpellE>Trakl</span>, a volume by Lucien <span class=SpellE>Goldmann</span>, another volume by Lévi-Strauss, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Critique of Pure Tolerance </i>by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore <span class=SpellE>Jr</span> &amp; 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&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All, </i>the book was designed to mimic the pocket-sized </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cape</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> volumes. More important that who or what got published in the series is the degree to which it reflects one of the most important features of the decade, which is the miscegenation of ideas from different &#8211; often conflicting &#8211; discursive &amp; professional fields. Just as both Marxism &amp; Freudian analysis proved far more pervasive throughout a wide range of disciplines because neither had a &#8220;home church&#8221; in any given college department &#8211; Freudian analysis evaded the psych department by training its practitioners outside of the university system altogether &#8211; the range of possible codes that could be brought to bear on any given subject seemed at least potentially limitless. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gladiator, </i>the historic Maximus of <span class=SpellE>Tyre</span> was, to use Olson&#8217;s own term for it, &#8220;a 2<sup>nd</sup> Century dialectician.&#8221; In a talk that <a href="http://slought.org/content/11091/"><span style='color:windowtext'>he gave at Goddard College</span></a> right at the end-point of composing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>Olson describes Maximus this way:<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'>I mean this creature Maximus addresses himself to, to a city, which in the instance is, is </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Gloucester</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>, which, then in turn, happens to be </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Massachusetts</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>. That is </span><st1:place><st1:City><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Gloucester</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>, </span><st1:State><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Massachusetts</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>. I&#8217;m not at all under the impression that it is necessarily more to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in any more meaningful sense than the creature is, either me, or whom he originally was intended as, which was a, was Maximus of <span class=SpellE>Tyre</span>, a 2<sup>nd</sup> Century, uh, dialectician. At least on the record, what he wrote, was <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dialethae</i></span> which I guess we have in the word &#8220;dialectic&#8221; meaning intellectual essence, or essays on an intellectual subject, and uh, he mostly wandered around the Mediterranean world from the center, from the, from the old capital of <span class=SpellE>Tyre</span>, talking about one thing &#8212; Homer&#8217;s Odyssey. I don&#8217;t have much more of an impression of him than that. I&#8217;ve tried to read his, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>dialethae</i></span> and found them not as interesting as I expected. But he represents to me some sort of a figure, that centers, much more than, much more than the 2nd Century A.D. In fact, as far as I feel it like, he&#8217;s like the neighbor of the world, and uh, in saying that I&#8217;m not being poetic or loose, uh. We come from a whole line of life which makes </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Delphi</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> that center. I guess, I guess I, can say that amongst you and still be heard. And this I think must be the kind of a theory that can at least be disturbed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So Maximus means &#8211; or at least conveys at some level &#8211; dialectics, although as one wades through <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>it is worth keeping in mind Olson&#8217;s other, rather off-the-cuff definition of dialectics: </span><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>intellectual essence, or essays on an intellectual subject.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>I&#8217;m not at all sure just how he might have dealt with the vagaries &amp; limitations of HTML, but I am certain of this. Olson himself would have been a great blogger. </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, June 05, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In his <a href="http://olsonnow.blogspot.com/2006/05/benjamin-friedlandercharles-olson-now.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>address</span></a> to the May 20 <span class=SpellE>OlsonNow</span> event at MIT, Ben Friedlander <span class=GramE>proposes<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>that</span> &#8220;Olson&#8217;s ideas were not static, but always in flux.&#8221; There is an important truth here, but. <span class=GramE>But.</span> But it is worth noting that Olson begins his other great manifesto project, &#8221;Proprioception,&#8221; in the exact same place he did &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; some 12 years earlier, with the body. <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>His </i>body.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.25in;text-indent:-1.05in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Physiology: <span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;   </span>the surface (senses &#8211; the &#8216;skin&#8217;: of &#8216;Human<br>
Universe&#8217;) the body itself &#8211; proper &#8211; one&#8217;s own<br>
&#8217;corpus&#8217;: PROPRIOCEPTION the cavity of the body<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
in which the organs are slung: the viscera, or<br>
<span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>interoceptive</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>the old &#8216;psychology&#8217; of feeling,<br>
the heart; of desire, the liver; of sympathy, the <br>
&#8217;bowels&#8217;: of courage &#8211; the kidney etc &#8211; gall.<br>
(Stasis &#8211; or as in Chaucer only, spoofed)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.3in;text-indent:-1.25in;margin-bottom:0.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    </span>Today:<span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;   </span>movement, at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (<span class=SpellE>nik</span>)<br>
the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles,<br>
tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily<br>
tensions (&#8211; or relations of same). Violence<span class=GramE>:</span><br>
knives/anything, to get the body in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-left:1.3in;margin-bottom:0.0in;text-indent:-1.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>To which<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-left:1.3in;margin-bottom:0.0in;text-indent:-1.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>PROPIOCEPTION: the data of depth sensibility/the &#8216;body&#8217; of us as<br>
object which spontaneously or of its own order<br>
produces experience of, &#8216;depth&#8217; Viz<br>
SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.3in;text-indent:-1.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;   </span>BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>That passage is worth quoting at some length just because it does so position Olson: <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>meat before mind</i></b>. Olson starts from a phenomenological premise &#8211; that we can only know what our senses tell us (even as, in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus, </i>what they so often tell us is about the historical record, the merest suggestion of connections). The animal &#8211; not yet even &#8220;I&#8221; &#8211; sees, hears, feels, smells, is aware but not yet conscious. If this wasn&#8217;t already apparent, Olson lays it out next, adding.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.45in;margin-bottom:0.0in;text-indent:-1.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;&nbsp;   </span>&#8216;Psychology': <span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp; </span>the surface: consciousness as ego and thus no flow<br>
because the &#8216;senses&#8217; of same are all that <span class=SpellE>sd</span> contact<br>
area is valuable for, to report in to central. In<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-left:1.45in;margin-bottom:0.0in;text-indent:-1.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>THE WORKING<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;     </span><span class=SpellE>spection</span>, followed hard on heels by, judgment <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-left:1.45in;margin-bottom:0.0in;text-indent:-1.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp;&nbsp;  </span>&#8216;OUT&#8217; OF<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>          </span> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;(<span class=SpellE>judicium</span>, <span class=SpellE>dotha</span>: cry, if you must/all feeling may<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-left:1.45in;text-indent:-1.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>&#8216;PROJECTION&#8217;<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    </span><span class=GramE>flow,</span> is all which can count, at <span class=SpellE>sd</span> point. Direction<br>
<span class=SpellE>outword</span> is sorrow, or joy. Or participation: active<br>
social life, like, for no other reason than that &#8211; <br>
social life<span class=GramE>,.</span> <span class=GramE>In the present.</span> Wash the ego out, in its<br>
own &#8216;bath&#8217; (<span class=SpellE>os</span>).<br style='mso-special-character:line-break'> <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style='mso-special-character:line-break'> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>That physiology and psychology both begin for Olson at the same place &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the surface &#8211; </i>can be no accident. Yes, it&#8217;s intimate division between self &amp; other, here &amp; there, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>fort </i>&amp; <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>da</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>but it is also, or so Olson appears to be suggesting, something prior even to that. <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'>Proprioception </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>differs from &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; in that it&#8217;s not an essay in any usual sense, but a book of notes &#8211; the sections quoted above are as normal as the prose writing gets here &amp; several sections are simply beyond my ken with HTML to reproduce. Specifically, it&#8217;s a series of nine notes &#8211; what I&#8217;ve quoted thus far amounts to the first third of the initial one &#8211; all published in various journals (<span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kulchur</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, <span class=SpellE>Yugen</span>, Floating Bear</i>)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>edited by the then-LeRoi Jones before being issued as a book in &#8217;65 by Donald Allen&#8217;s Four Seasons Foundation. In the ten years that separate out &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>many things have happened to Olson: meeting Creeley (which he does right at the moment when he&#8217;s writing &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221;), the start of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus, </i>his <span class=SpellE>rectorship</span> at Black Mountain College, the rise of New American Poetry generally, the dissolution of his marriage &amp; subsequent partnership with Betty Kaiser, the publication of his first important books of poetry, the reissue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Call Me Ishmael </i>(with an audience now assured for it), and the publication of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry </i>in May, 1960, where Olson&#8217;s position as the very first author seems absolutely intended as a signal that it is he, not Ginsberg, not O&#8217;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 &#8220;Projective Verse,&#8221; having at that point published just one book of poems, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>X &amp; Y, </i>and having just written a handful of the pre-Max poems (such as &#8220;The Kingfishers&#8221; and &#8220;The Praises&#8221;) after that. In 1960, Olson is unquestionably a central figure in American poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson&#8217;s writing is different in 1960 as well. The propulsive, rapidly shifting movements that characterize both the early prose &amp; early verse are in fact more calculated now. He still believes, as he writes, in &#8220;movement, at any cost,&#8221; but the writing is far less mimetic about it. If anything, that sentence fragment -- <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>movement, at any cost</i> &#8211; is a strikingly static way to put this. Or perhaps it is less anxious.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The other thing that immediately strikes me, reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>up against &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>with some 40 years&#8217; hindsight, is just how much more ambitious it is, as a program, than even that of its audacious forerunner. &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; really had two primary moves, one to set out grounds for poetic practice, the second to frame that practice within the world. That <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>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 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>between </i>organs:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.2in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The &#8216;cavity&#8217;/cave: probably the &#8216;Unconscious&#8217;? That<br>
is, the interior empty place filled with &#8216;organs&#8217;? <span class=GramE>for <br>
&#8216;functions&#8217;?</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This paragraph is atypical for Olson, precisely because it is so halting &amp; open about its own uncertainty. He uses question <span class=GramE>marks,</span> he cushions his claim with &#8220;probably.&#8221; Then, in the next paragraph &#8211; this on carries the sidebar title of &#8220;THE &#8216;PLACE&#8217; / OF THE / &#8216;UNCONSCIOUS&#8217;&#8221; &#8211; Olson explains:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.2in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The advantage is to &#8216;place&#8217; the thing, instead of<br> 
it wallowing around sort of outside, in the<br>
universe, like, when the experience of it is <span class=SpellE>intero</span>-<br>
<span class=SpellE>ceptive</span>: it is inside us/&amp; at the same time does<br>
not literally feel identical with our own physical or<br>
mortal self (the part that can die). In this sense<br>
likewise the heart, etc, the small intestine, etc, are<br>
or can be felt as &#8211; and literally they can be &#8211; <br>
transferred. <span class=GramE>Or substituted for.</span> Etc. <span class=GramE>The organs.</span> &#8211;<br>
Probably also why the old psychology was chiefly<br>
visceral: neither dream, nor the unconscious, was<br>
then known as such. Or allowably inside, like.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is, I think, something very human &#8211; appealing to me in any event &#8211; in Olson&#8217;s desire to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8216;place&#8217; the thing, </i>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 &amp; repeatedly telegraphs cautions, that one not read this as too literal or fully baked &#8211; the use of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>etc, </i>the reiterated <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Probably </i>&#8211; and that almost Valley Girl final qualification, ending this assertion with the qualification <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>like. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, June 02, 2006</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"><img height="220" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/V5iPVM7hslw9MUmlngcfVy8IEmunOaMSSHHS9818rEnU_fsquxs23_Sh357PsNvHcizlYVgBpxKM9yo6dA%3Ds0-d" width="146"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">When I read the sexist language in Olson&#8217;s &#8220;Projective Verse,&#8221; my instinct is to see Olson as a not-too-atypical male of his generation, chronologically positioned midway between my grandfather&#8217;s generation born in the late 1890s &amp; my father who was born in 1927. He sounds like a case of testosterone poisoning &amp; is no doubt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the </i>person intended by the rubric given to the macho side of the New American Poetics as the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Wounded</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Buffalo</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">. <span class="GramE">Yet dismissing that language as a sign of generational ignorance &#8211; Zukofsky &amp; Pound &amp; Eliot all had their visibly patriarchal sides &#8211; and keeping in mind that the Allen anthology has just four women among its 44 contributors &#8211; is not too unlike dismissing the equally unmistakable anti-Semitism in Pound, Cummings, Stevens or Eliot.</span> You do it at some risk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">You could also take exactly the other tack, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis did about ten years back in an issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diacritics, </i>in an essay called &#8220;Manifests&#8221; that likewise close reads &#8220;Projective Verse,&#8221; but as a sexual text rather than merely one on poetics whose arteries are clogged with the prejudices of the time. It&#8217;s a fascinating alternate path into the work, informed externally by the discovery of Tom Clark&#8217;s &#8211; the real literary coup of his Olson bio &#8211; that Olson&#8217;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 <span class="SpellE">Motz</span> Boldereff, with whom he had an intense &amp; 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 <a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6363-3.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">Boldereff correspondence</span></a>, now quite thoroughly in print, reminds one of nothing so much as Olson&#8217;s own way of reading Shakespeare into Melville, the informing thesis of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Call Me Ishmael. </i>The cover of the Wesleyan University Press edition shows photos of Olson &amp; Boldereff from the 1940s &#8211; his (from the same shoot as the <a href="http://www.charlesolson.ca/gifs/familyalbumgifs/13.gif"><span style="color: windowtext;">photo</span></a> I used on May 23, wearing dark shirt &amp; tie) above the title, hers below. So far as I know, no photo of the two together was ever taken. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">In that wonderful way she has in her poetry as well as her criticism of looking at an issue from all perspectives, DuPlessis doesn&#8217;t just dismiss the <span class="GramE">replete</span> sexism with a sigh, nor throw Olson overboard for it, but uses it to interrogate Allen Grossman&#8217;s critical work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/0801842433?&amp;PID=30048"><span style="color: windowtext;">Summa <span class="SpellE">Lyrica</span></span></a>, </i>which, in DuPlessis&#8217; words &#8220;announces the force of poetics as ideology.&#8221; Nor does she stop there, but rather proceeds to read the text through the works of other recent theorists, including <span class="SpellE">Deleuze</span> and <span class="SpellE">Guattari</span> (there is that question of incest to deal with, after all, and, following Grossman, the whole oedipal ball o&#8217; wax), Julia <span class="SpellE">Kristeva</span>, Hélène <span class="SpellE">Cixous</span>. But then DuPlessis does this both ways, reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">them</i> through Olson &amp; Grossman. It&#8217;s a process that eventually will lead you to understand what DuPlessis means when she claims that &#8220;I don&#8217;t write &#8216;poetry,&#8217;&#8221; a tricky position to hold if you&#8217;re one of the best poets going, which she  is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">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&#8217;t simple, and they may not even be answers, certainly not in the &#8220;settled argument&#8221; sense of that term. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">You can get <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/diacritics/v026/26.3-4duplessis.html"><span style="color: windowtext;">DuPlessis&#8217; essay</span></a> from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diacritics </i>if your library belongs to the appropriately named (for this discussion at least) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Project Muse, </i>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 (<a href="http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/01/edge"><span style="color: windowtext;">or more</span></a>) system of authorities by which the tenured speak only to the tenured &amp; tenured-to-be (they hope). Or you can wait until <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/NewSearch4.cfm?id=133172"><span style="color: windowtext;">Blue Studios</span></a> </i>comes forth as a book, which I am told it shall, very soon, from the </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">University</span></st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Alabama</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, June 01, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="214" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/YHh6g3vNahCsHHRgvRrAe-fNDzD1eY6FhXopGwKAHgb5RPtznWmEEZf9LBk9Z6cirWzRhtc9FgXd6T3xRt6CWnC8OUo56-Z_sg%3Ds0-d" width="240"><br> <span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>Charles Olson between<br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>Robert Duncan &amp; </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ruth</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Witt</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span class=SpellE><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Diamant</span></span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'><br>
 </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San   Francisco</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>State</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, 1958<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Of the slightly more than 4,500 words that make up &#8220;<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/jarnot/olson.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Projective Verse</span></a>,&#8221; 1,198 &#8211; just over one-quarter &#8211; appear in part II. Whereas the first part was devoted, both strategically &amp; tactically, to poetics, II is concerned with the status of the poem in the world, as object &amp; as knowledge:<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'>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 Seami&#185; as distinct from that which I might call the more &#8220;literary&#8221; masters. From the moment the projective purpose of the act of verse is recognized, the content does &#8212; it will &#8212; 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&#8217;s use. <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'>I myself would pose the difference by physical image.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It sounds as if Olson is about to head into Williams&#8217; machine-made-of-words territory, but, even tho what he will say eventually leads to the idea, first voiced in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All, </i>that poems are objects as additions to nature, this isn&#8217;t the path Olson will take to get there. Instead, Olson makes what is decidedly the oddest detour in this essay, distinguishing &#8211; or trying to &#8211; what he&#8217;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 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry. </i>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 &#8211; with the notable exception of Basil Bunting (a notable exception on many counts, working as a British spy in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Persia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>) &#8211; quite apart from the expat culture of the high modernists in </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. During the 1940s, virtually all had stopped publishing. Some had stopped writing. In an age where books were far harder to come by than they are today, when the idea of <span class=SpellE>Googling</span> a source wasn&#8217;t even fathomable, Olson&#8217;s characterization of Objectivism as opposed to a simplistic School of Quietude confessionalism that had, in his terms, &#8220;excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying,&#8221; is understandable, tho hardly accurate &amp; more interesting for what it projects onto Zukofsky et al than as an analysis of that poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>After the better part of two paragraphs on the topic, Olson finally turns toward his point:<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'>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 <span class=SpellE>humilitas</span> 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<span class=GramE>,</span> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It isn&#8217;t the poem as object that Olson here is after, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>but the poet. </i>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 &amp; artifacts, each of which has, as Pound might have put it, its <i 
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>virtue. </i>There is more to this than just the idea that your dust bunnies are keeping secrets from you, or that animations like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Toy Story </i>are right, at least in spirit. And this is where he begins to sound very much like the William Carlos Williams of 1923:<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'>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&#8217;s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man&#8217;s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, <span class=GramE>a seriousness</span> sufficient to cause  the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>To <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>give his work &#8230; <span class=GramE>a seriousness</span> sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>This is almost <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All </i>verbatim. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But Olson&#8217;s ultimate goal &#8211; and this is worth thinking about in a man who stood at 6&#8217;9&#8221; &amp; must have weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds &#8211; is size:<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'>But breath is man&#8217;s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. <span class=GramE>And when a poet rests in these as they are in his proudest acts.</span> 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.<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'>It is projective size that the play, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Trojan Women</i>, possesses,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson reiterates, ticking off his three examples &#8211; the other two are Homer &amp; <span class=SpellE>Zeimi&#8217;s</span> <span class=SpellE>N&#333;h</span> play, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hagoromo</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>all of which bear the notable stamp of Ezra Pound. <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'>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<span class=GramE>,</span> verse again can carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus, </i>a project that Olson began this same year, or what Duncan might do a 15 years or so hence with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Passages. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But Olson cannot stop here &#8211; 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. <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'>Eliot is, in fact, a proof of a present danger, of &#8220;too easy&#8221; a going on in the practice of verse as it has been, rather than as it must be, practiced.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Olson concedes that he likes Eliot&#8217;s line,  especially in early works <span class=GramE>like &#8221;</span><span class=SpellE>Prufrock</span>.&#8221; But, <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'>it could be argued that it is because Eliot has stayed inside the non-projective that he fails as a dramatist &#8212; that his root is mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that (no high <span class=SpellE>intelletto</span> despite his apparent clarities) &#8212; and that, in his <span class=SpellE>listenings</span> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>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&#8217;s a slide that has been almost entirely uninterrupted now for more than a half century. Far from being the central figure <span class=GramE>whom</span> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It is too soon to consider, in 1950, what the New Americans might produce. For all purposes, they hadn&#8217;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, &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; might well have had a much more interesting end. Admittedly, Olson&#8217;s disinterest in Zukofsky, even 15 to 20 years later, appears to have been match only by Zukofsky&#8217;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 &amp; the other his absolute polar opposite. For, tho Zukofsky does not rely on Olson&#8217;s folk physiology, what work at mid-century better poses itself as the test case of Olson&#8217;s thesis than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:black'>&#8220;A&#8221;?  </span><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; Olson is referring to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeami"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Zeami</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> <span class=SpellE>Motokiyo</span></span></a>, 14<sup>th</sup> &amp; 15<sup>th</sup> century N&#333;h master, one of whose works, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hagoromo</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Robe of Feathers, </i>was translated by <a href="http://www.musicalobservations.com/recordings/cp2_117_pound.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ezra Pound &amp; Ernest <span class=SpellE>Fenellosa</span></span></a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Kondo"><span style='color:windowtext'>Jo Kondo&#8217;s</span></a> recent opera for which was recorded in 2002 by the London <span class=SpellE>Sinfonietta</span>, Paul Zukofsky conducting. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="322" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/By3NPNfRFJuV7YEdge6hVrl8BkIqK3jooKCbEwPK55bGApcRYY7oqnlSWUl6-k4wEMWuHNHXmjW9lTnO7MXM7dnY5x15RMeD%3Ds0-d" width="328"><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;color:black'>But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>the line, they make a poem, they make that thing the &#8211; what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the &#8220;Single Intelligence.&#8221; And  the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending &#8211; where its breathing, shall come to, termination.<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'>Last Tuesday I noted that whenever I sense a hinge in Charles Olson&#8217;s critical writing, I pay close heed. Just as, in &#8220;<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/jarnot/olson.html"><span style='color:black'>Projective Verse</span></a>,&#8221; Olson&#8217;s discussion of breath takes him to the syllable, a unit of language that he then describes as coming not from the breath, the play of air in vowels or the stops &amp; slides of consonants, but to the ear &amp; explicitly the ear&#8217;s proximity to the human brain: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous&#8230; it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born. </i>The paragraph cited above is what comes immediately next. Here we have a second definition of poetry, to go with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A poem is energy transferred. </i>Now we find <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the syllable </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the line, they make a poem</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 I find most interesting here is Olson&#8217;s lack of bona fides for his claim that <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the line comes (I swear it) from the breath</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>Of all the literary devices that will become associated with Olson over the next 20 years, none will have the power of his equation of the line with breath &#8211; it dictates not only much that will go in projectivist poetics, but even the likes of Allen Ginsberg &amp; Frank O&#8217;Hara were known to at least nod in its direction when discussing their own use of the line. By the time I was in college, in the latter half of the 1960s, having an identifiable line was tantamount to finding your voice, that elusive creative writing program quest. Your line was your brand. So it is fascinating here to think that Olson&#8217;s first argument for this equation comes down to a parenthetical <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I swear it. </i>Talk about taking someone at his word! <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'>And what is it that is so privileged here? That <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only he, the man who writes, can declare&#8230;where its breathing, shall come to, termination. </i>The line is defined not by what goes on, but by how it ends. <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 preaches &amp; what Olson practices, even here, maybe especially here, in a prose note he was intending to send off to a journal that had no particular reason to favor his stylistic quirks, is quite different. The use of &#8220;ungrammatical&#8221; commas in <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>where its breathing, shall come to, termination</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>can be accommodated only as pauses within the prose line, a mode of internal organization that any Olson reader will recognize as characteristic, at least up until the final notational poems with which <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus </i>concludes. <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'>At this moment Olson is able to articulate his double-sided aesthetics, in which one (the syllable) represents freedom, the other (the line) responsibility:<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;color:black'>The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say, Chaucer&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Troilus</i> or S&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lear</i>, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE<o:p></o:p></span></p> 
 
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE<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;color:black'>And the joker? that it is in the 1st half of the proposition that, in composing, one lets-it-rip; and that it is in the 2nd half, surprise, it is the LINE that&#8217;s the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going.<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'>Thus it is breath, the heart, that must be the responsible half, not at all the Freudian model of ego, id, superego here. <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'>&#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; has a two-part structure, first part poetics, second part philosophy, yet it is here, just halfway through the piece&#8217;s two numbered sections, that Olson has already fully articulated his poetics, as such. One might say that what has preceded up to this point has been strategic &#8211; the remainder of part I starts off as if tactical. For example:<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;color:black'>The descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second, in projective verse, because of their easiness, and thus their drain on the energy which composition by field allows into 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'>But this is more than just a warning that story as such too easily turns into vulgar narrative. The problem ultimately is ontological. Consider the broader picture:<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;color:black'>Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand at the moment, under the reader&#8217;s eye, in his moment. Observation of any kind is, like argument in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content toward its form.<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'>Form may never be more than an extension of content. But the two have very different relations to the poem itself. One <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>is </i>the poem. The other mostly threatens to get in the way. It is, Olson writes,<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'>a matter, finally, of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used&#8230;. The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>hold</i>, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>For someone who never showed much, if any, interest in the Objectivists (he will prove this at the start of part II), Olson certainly sounds like an Objectivist here. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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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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