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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, October 13, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><span style='color:black'><img height="227" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/9-XcWQMMDOu2Ye0iOWXHGqLfx2-SfVV3Kq6CS2FA0Ow-CZjaRues5brA6lVqD1gvvGBWTRxFOWJ8e1EQU3UlyFINeyAQ6bQ1dw%3Ds0-d" width="150"><img height="227" id="_x0000_i1026" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/6mSeTvoVa1Uvt4xBXTnKrAFZ-oVwvz0SehBx0qgEvHltJ7T3EGPoc69LY5NZJzu8LbsunPy9mCQMPzm29YfrrFjSJmbVAWM%3Ds0-d" width="150"><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'>If you were only going to own two books of poetry, you could do far worse than making them the two volumes of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley. </i>UC Press has finally released a paperback edition of the original <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/1627001.html"><span style='color:black'>Collected Poems, 1945-1975</span></a> </i>to coincide with (and echo in look) its new <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10161.html"><span style='color:black'>Collected Poems, 1975-2005</span></a>, </i>which is just out in hardback. The two volumes together will run you $75 and change &#8211; that may be the best deal in all of poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Creeley"><span style='color:black'>Robert Creeley</span></a> already was the dean of American poets &#8211; I can think of no better way to describe him &#8211; by the time I first wandered onto the scene in 1965. It is difficult &#8211; impossible &#8211; to imagine that at the moment he was only 39 years old.&#185; His first trade press book, the 1962 Scribners volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love, </i>gathering together material from eight earlier chapbooks, had made him the most popular &#8211; and accessible &#8211; of the non-beatniks involved in the New 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;color:black'>His was also the last generation in which every young poet of substance could expect reasonably to have a book by a major trade publisher &amp; thus in most bookstores in the country. Soon enough, the rapid increase in the number of poets &amp; the decrease in the number of bookstores willing to stock much in the way of verse beyond Blake, <span class=SpellE>Gibran</span> &amp; Rilke caused the trades to retrench into becoming essentially a small press scene of their own, albeit with distribution, ad budgets &amp; some ability to influence institutional awards. Even poets just a few years younger than Creeley, such as Ed Dorn, soon found such doors shut to them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So we turn out to be incredibly fortunate that Creeley had such distribution while still in his thirties &amp; at a moment when it still meant something in terms of reaching a broader audience. The brevity of Creeley&#8217;s poems belies the fact that he was, throughout his life, one of the most brilliant of innovators &amp; with perhaps the most subtle ear of his generation. If the arc of these two volumes differs, it is that the earlier one shows the work of a young man anxious to remake the world of verse over in his own aesthetic image. The poems are intense &amp; often need to be read with a great sense of urgency &amp; even <span class=GramE>an</span> tone of anger or despair, pausing &#8211; as he invariably did &#8211; audibly at the end of every line. By the start of the second volume, Creeley was already the most widely imitated poet in the English language &amp; was in the process of concluding his long relationship with Bobbie Louise Hawkins. In 1976, while doing a reading tour of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New Zealand</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, he met Penelope <span class=SpellE>Highton</span>, who was to become his wife &amp; companion for the last 27 years of his life. Both her spirit and the more settled domesticity of his last marriage are inseparable from the poems of the second volume. <span class=GramE>It&#8217;s</span> easier going &amp; the quest isn&#8217;t so much to change poetry &#8211; Creeley had already accomplished that &#8211; as it was to always stay attentive to the immanence of daily life. <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'>Close readers of Creeley&#8217;s verse may be surprised to discover that there are only four &#8220;uncollected&#8221; poems to the second volume, works I suppose that were written after he&#8217;d completed the manuscript for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>On Earth </i>which was in production at UC when he died. Here is the most amazing of the four, entitled &#8220;Poets&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Friend I had in college told<br>
me he had seen as kid out the<br>
window in backyard of an<br>
apartment in upscale <span class=SpellE>Phila</span>-<br>
<span class=SpellE>delphia</span> the elder Yeats walking<br>
and wondered if perhaps he<br>
was composing a poem or else<br>
in some way significantly thinking.<br>
So later he described it, then<br>
living in a pleasant yellowish<br>
house off Harvard Square,<br>
having rooms there, where,<br>
visiting I recall quick sight of<br>
John Berryman who had been<br>
his teacher and was just leaving<br>
as I&#8217;d come in, on a landing of<br>
the stairs I&#8217;d just come up, the<br>
only time and place I ever did.<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'>If you&#8217;re still an undergraduate or <span class=SpellE>elsewise</span> challenged economically &amp; your parents or spouse or whomever ask you what you want for this year&#8217;s forthcoming holidays, print out the online ads under the links to these two volumes above, and tell them to get you these. They&#8217;re a present you&#8217;ll keep &#8211; and use &#8211; for the rest of your life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; This made him the same age as my mother, which I, in my teenage wisdom, was certain was a very old age. My own father died that same summer at the age of 38. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, August 10, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="306" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/rTZBOqBqOaxp5B84NXY95DWi9YicGDb1y2orm9XuEKKy7mnNfQM8F-r4-e-Mdx0Z4Z5q1caxNt9E4nmwe7tmT-bIHli9YQSa%3Ds0-d" width="200"><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'>Of all the poets included in the watershed 1960 anthology <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry, </i>edited by Don Allen, perhaps only Bruce Boyd is less widely known than the late <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirby_Doyle"><span style='color:black'>Kirby</span></a> <a href="http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/doyle.html"><span style='color:black'>Doyle</span></a>. He has just one poem in the book, in its &#8220;San Francisco Renaissance&#8221; section &#8211; a grouping that I&#8217;ve argued before was largely a fiction created by Allen&#8217;s need to organize his materials &#8211; sandwiched betwixt Boyd &amp; the not-a-whole-lot more famous Ebbe Borregaard. A brief one-paragraph bio note indicated that he had been a grad student at SF State, but was then in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, working on his poetry &amp; a novel &#8220;under the dubious security of unemployment checks.&#8221; When Doyle died in 2003, the poem in the Allen anthology was his one poem still in print.  <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The book I came across the other day in Oakland, Doyle&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poems, </i>was published in 1983, his fourth volume to appear, one of which was a novel, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Happiness Bastard, </i>composed entirely on a single roll of newsprint a la Kerouac. There were four more books after the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected, </i>all in the 1980s. If I read his entry in Wikipedia right, there remain unpublished at the least one epic poem, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pre American Ode, </i>and another novel. There is an excerpt in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected, </i>which it describes as &#8220;End Section of Book Five (Glacial Nocturne)&#8221;:<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;color:black'>In my forty-ninth year<br>
with a few dollars<br>
&amp; many poems<br>
I salute you, <span class=SpellE>Tomales</span> &#8211;<br>
O fecund &amp; friendly coast<br>
of my native land<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
deeper than genius<br>
(or as deep).<br>
This hand salutes<br>
thee<br>
&amp; not <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; death threats<br>
of a non-existent god<br>
marrying children to murder<br>
<br>
Poorer than a priest<br>
&amp; certainly healthier<br>
nature loves &amp; is <span class=SpellE>profound&#8217;d</span><br>
by me &#8211;<br>
Sappho calls to me<br>
beyond &amp; prior to<br>
the&#8217; ill-<span class=SpellE>focus&#8217;d</span> folds<br>
of <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; priestly &amp; alien calendar.<br>
I would die before<br>
I (intentionally) <span class=SpellE>call&#8217;d</span><br>
this earth a planet &#8211;<br>
would perish myself <span class=SpellE>a&#8217;fore</span><br>
I would deliver earth to <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; universe<br>
Fields love me in fields<br>
I do not count.<br>
I am welcome in earth &#8211;<br>
there is no death for me.<br>
I am no ace of space<br>
but a walking land.<br>
If there is an </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>,</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br> if there is a west<br>
I am that </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
&amp; that west.<br>
I too have <span class=SpellE>lean&#8217;d</span> w/mean<br>
estates<br>
&amp; have <span class=SpellE>straighted</span> from them &#8211;<br>
O they are worthless in their<br>
viewings &amp; importance<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
&amp; O I have happy &#8211; pointless.<br>
O Spirit be not spirit<span class=GramE>;</span><br>
God be not god.<br>
<br>
A hundred lines before breakfast<br>
&amp; O I am living!<br>
a hundred lines after<br>
&amp; life is original again &#8211;<br>
<br>
kiss&#8217;s from everywhere &#8211;<br>
flowers tuba bass notes<br>
of welcome.<br>
<br>
Simpler than schemes o&#8217; killers<br>
I give no false directions.<br>
<br>
An over-abundance of myself<br>
weathers all genius, all originality &#8211;<br>
weathers time, weathers sleep<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<span class=SpellE>unempires</span> forests, makes <span class=SpellE>unstrange</span><br>
of friends.<br>
Gardens celebrate themselves<br>
by my wealth.<br>
Voices cease<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
&amp; stillness enters all places,<br>
all persons, all causes &amp; deeds.<br>
<span class=SpellE>Th</span>&#8217; hills are still &#8211;<br>
O <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; hills are living still!<br>
<br>
(Priceless drafts of rough poems<br>
<span class=SpellE>stain&#8217;d</span> &amp; wealthy &#8211;)<br>
<br>
<span class=SpellE>Th</span>&#8217; freedom o&#8217; Adam<br>
far from <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; craze of killers<br>
straining for bondage<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
alive &amp; nonchalant<br>
is my companion &#8211;<br>
O happy <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; furls of smoke,<br>
my companion tobacco &#8211;<br>
O profound cigarette,<br>
profounder than bells.<br>
<br>
&#8217;Ways of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>life</i>&#8217; only live &#8211;<br>
ambition prays itself.<br>
<br>
I am yet born<br>
O the&#8217; angels o&#8217; Blake<br>
are too precious &#8211;<br>
I have no angels<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
just ageless seed companions<br>
of <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; endless forests of earth.<br>
Now half-a-century <span class=GramE>long</span><br>
now my birth &#8211;<br>
I am earth.<br>
Conquerors who could not (would not<span class=GramE>)</span><br>
conquer themselves<br>
have come upon me<br>
asleep in my time<br>
and <span class=SpellE>perish&#8217;d</span> &#8211;<br>
<span class=SpellE>fear&#8217;d</span> &amp; cunning hags<br>
worthless in antiquity<br>
&amp; too stupid in <span class=SpellE>incessance</span><br>
of old &amp; <span class=SpellE>unwant&#8217;d</span> sex<br>
have <span class=SpellE>shriek&#8217;d</span> &amp; faded.<br>
<br>
<span class=SpellE>Th</span>&#8217; ego of independence<br>
is a priority of my rights &#8211;<br>
I accept only <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; teaching<br>
of the poem.<br>
<span class=SpellE>Th</span>&#8217; ambitious ordinances of God(s<span class=GramE>)</span><br>
cannot force my love.<br>
<br>
Friend, I tell you I am asleep<br>
&amp; am sleeping in my own time &#8211;<br>
that the succulent living growth<br>
of all fruits &amp; food<br>
is a product of my sleep.<br>
Too many claims, old gods<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
I shall not awake unto you.<br>
<br>
Ride not, ye priests<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
upon <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; sleep of a babe &#8211;<br>
you are sleepless, &amp; without time<br>
No fruits of life have ever <span class=SpellE>claim&#8217;d</span><br>
you &#8211;<br>
death is <span class=SpellE>y&#8217;r</span> dear toy.<br>
<br>
Over exposed, mad ambitious<br>
religion &#8211;<br>
thou are over exposed.<br>
<br>
Without a word doth life <span class=SpellE>occure</span> &#8211;<br>
without a word.<br>
Hug thy tricks to coin, prayerful &#8211;<br>
thou hast stolen from babes.<br>
No easy theft, mark you &#8211;<br>
<span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; cries of innocence<br>
dismember universe(s).<br>
Check <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; lust of thy attention<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
Holy &#8211;<br>
<span class=SpellE>suffer&#8217;t</span> <span class=SpellE>y&#8217;rself</span>.<br>
<br>
Goodly companion Tobacco &#8211;<br>
most medicinal witness<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
thou art nation.<br>
<br>
O contending suitors of Belief &#8211;<br>
So what thy over-praised <span class=SpellE>Zions</span><br>
hate us that we would not chase,<br>
would not praise &#8211;<br>
What care we, <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; people,<br>
I, this hand, <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; earth &#8211;?<br>
<span class=GramE>(art <span class=SpellE>thous</span> not praised well enough<br>
slave by thy slaves<br>
in <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; far fear?)</span><br>
<span class=SpellE>Th</span>&#8217; field is not a mouth<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
nor a house made of mouth.<br>
By (<span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217;) field this poem life<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
this hand.<br>
When <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; &#8216;eternal&#8217; of history(s<span class=GramE>)</span><br>
has completed<br>
<span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; field lives yet.<br>
<span class=GramE>I am <span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; field, not God.</span><br>
I am asleep, not awake.<br>
I am time before count, my own.<br>
My only sky<br>
<span class=SpellE>th</span>&#8217; ever still hills &#8211;<br>
flowers my only stars.<br>
<span class=SpellE>Th</span>&#8217; shadows of my <span class=GramE>seasons</span><br>
strata within me<br>
my true clouds.<br>
My total knowing is only life.<br>
Death knows only dead.<br>
I am not ye.<br>
</span><st1:City><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Temple</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> not upon me.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
<br>
<span class=GramE>Unnamed nature my only name.</span><br>
I am without a game.<br>
Verse is my signature.<br>
I know nothing of space.<br>
I am earth uncreated.<br>
There is nothing of God about me.<br>
<br>
I am a hand that<br>
holds a cigarette, writes.<br>
<br>
Good darkness, pre darkness &#8211;<br>
I salute myself.<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'>I&#8217;m not going to argue that this is great or, for that matter, even good verse, tho there are examples of such in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected, </i>as in:<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;color:black'>Leave us Presume<br>
thy eye&#8217;s the </span><st1:time Minute="0" Hour="12"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>noon</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> &#8211;<br>
thy mouth&#8217;s the moon &#8211;<br>
Thy Death&#8217;s disbanded calliope&#8217;s in society<br>
too soon &#8211; my room<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
my mind&#8217;s the loom. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The underlying influence of Blake in both pieces is palpable (plus Whitman, Ginsberg, McClure &amp; <span class=SpellE>Bremser</span> in the first poem), but Doyle is hardly alone in heeding Blake in his generation, from Roethke to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> to Ginsberg. Where Doyle&#8217;s at his best &#8211; say, at the start of the passage from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pre American Ode </i>&amp; <span class=GramE>all of the</span> untitled piece &#8211; eye &amp; ear are both at work &amp; there&#8217;s a level of specificity to the writing. But towards the end of this excerpt of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pre American Ode, </i>a poem he continued to work on, so far as I can tell, the rest of his life, tho there were apparently long bouts of not writing as well, his attention flags. The poem lapses into predictability. <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'>There are, of course, always people on the fringe of any literary scene who get caught up in the energy of a collective activity &#8211; the excitement is contagious &amp; to some degree so is the writing (this is one of the great secrets of literary groups &amp; movements &#8211; that the process itself makes all of its members better writers, at least for a time) &#8211; and one way to read Doyle is as an instance of this phenomenon. As a part of the Beat scene, the writing makes a kind of sense that it will later lack once that scene has moved on. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pre American Ode </i>has never been published in book form, but one wonders if the context for it as a book exists in 2006. Or even if the manuscript survives: Doyle died in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>San  Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s Laguna Honda Hospital &#8211; essentially the City&#8217;s charity facility &#8211; after &#8220;a long illness.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is a lot of discussion, in his <a href="http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/14/BA310444.DTL"><span style='color:black'>obit</span></a> in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>San Francisco Chronicle </i>&amp; in the memorial site on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/doyle.html"><span style='color:black'>Empty Mirror</span></a>, </i>of the impact that drugs &amp; alcohol played in Doyle&#8217;s later life. One comment on the latter site that has the ring of authority is T. Walden&#8217;s &#8220;Doyle's drug use was clearly an attempt to &#8216;self-medicate&#8217; a severe mental illness.&#8221; This would hardly be a first. Indeed, poetry is one field &#8211; from John Clare to John Wieners to Jimmy Schuyler to Hannah Weiner to Robert Lowell &#8211; in which a person with a serious psychiatric condition is not necessarily at a disadvantage. There is, in fact, a history yet to be written about this genre&#8217;s role in the history of disability in general &#8211; think, for example, of Larry Eigner with his profound physical challenges. <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 Doyle here deserves the last word. <a href="http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/images/poets/doyle/angelfaint.wma"><span style='color:black'>Here</span></a> is a link to a 15 minute reading of his (in WMA format) from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Howls, Raps &amp; Roars: Recordings from the </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>San   Francisco</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Poetry Renaissance</span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Berkeley</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span   class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>CA</span></span></st1:State></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> :</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Fantasy Records, 1993.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><img height="416" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/DbkFzAAfvI33z1SbnMvLsG6fWylUSQC2i9hYEdKdscMC5yiqO7nb4VGJeML5HJk4963sL47RHfVIrdjRuga1ygKC1DSr89vu%3Ds0-d" width="300"><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'>Here, in its entirety, is the history of Jack Kerouac&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Sketches </i>as given in that book itself:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>In 1951, it was suggested to Jack Kerouac by his friend Ed White that he &#8220;<span class=GramE>sketch</span> in the streets like a painter but with words.&#8221; In August of the following year, Kerouac began writing down prose poem &#8220;sketches&#8221; in small notebooks that he kept in the breast pockets of his shirts. For two years he recorded travels, observations, and meditations on art and life as he moved across </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> and down to </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Mexico</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> and back. In 1957, Kerouac sat down with the fifteen handwritten sketch notebooks he had accumulated and typed them into a manuscript called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Sketches</i>; he included a handful of new sketches he had written that year.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This information comes not from an editor&#8217;s forward, but rather on the front jacket flap. If there is an editor here, he or she has gone the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee"><span style='color:black'>Alan <span class=SpellE>Smithee</span></span></a> route and chosen to remain anonymous. What introductory essay there is here is by painter and onetime William Burroughs collaborator <a href="http://www.artseensoho.com/Art/HEARN/burcon98/burcon.html"><span style='color:black'>George Condo</span></a>. Here is Condo at his most analytic:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Read this <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Sketches </i>and you&#8217;ll be amazed at what a genius Jack Kerouac was.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s a good thing, given that Kerouac&#8217;s work appears to be in the hands of what could be charitably described as people unfamiliar with handling substantial literary archives. There are a million questions here, many of which have to do with the relationship between the 15 small notebooks, the eventual typescript and what appears here on the page, short stanzas of print that don&#8217;t look much like prose at all, tho they read Kerouac&#8217;s version thereof:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Saturday afternoon in Rocky<br>
Mt. woods &#8211; in a <span class=SpellE>tankling</span><br>
gray coupe the young father<br>
crosses the crossroads with<br>
his 4 dotters piled on the<br>
seat beside him all eyes<br>
&#8211; The drowsy store the<br>
great watermelons sit <span class=SpellE>dis</span>-<br>
posed in the sun, on the<br>
concrete, by the fish box,<br>
like so many fruit in<br>
an artist&#8217;s bowl &#8211;<br>
watermelon&#8217;s plain green<br>
&amp; the watermelon with<br>
the snaky rills all<br>
tropical &amp; fat to burst<br>
on the ground &#8211; came<br>
from <span class=SpellE>viney</span> bottoms of<br>
all this green fertility &#8211; <br>
Behind Fats&#8217; little shack,<br>
under waving tendrils<br>
of a pretty tree, the<br>
smalltime Crapshooters<br>
with <span class=SpellE>strawhats</span> &amp; overalls<br>
are shooting for 10&#162;<br>
stakes &#8211; as peaceful &amp;<br>
<span class=SpellE>regardant</span> as deer in<br>
the morning, or New<br>
England boys sitting in<br>
the high grass waiting for<br>
the afternoon to pass.<br>
Paul Blake ambles over<br>
across the road to watch<br>
the game, stands<br>
back, arm on three<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
watching smiling silence.<br>
Cars pull up, men<br>
squat &#8211; there goes Jack<br>
to join them, everywhere<br>
you look in the enormity<br>
of this peaceful scene<br>
you see him walking, on<br>
soft white shoes, bemused<br>
-- Last night a few<br>
hotshots &amp; local sailors<br>
on leave grabbed those<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'>There is a line break right here, tho the sentence itself continues onward, a typical detail that makes you wonder if this reflects the typescript, the notebook, both, neither, or what precisely. There is no way here to tell. <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'>In his introduction, Condo writes &#8220;These poems just breathe and flow&#8230;&#8221; tho the book itself carries (in what I take to be Kerouac&#8217;s own hand) a frontispiece that reads parenthetically &#8220;(Proving that sketches <span class=SpellE>aint</span> verse).&#8221; The only other clue comes from a half-title page that reads:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Printed Exactly As They Were Written<br>
On the Little Pages in the Notebooks<br>
I Carried in My Breast Pocket 1952<br>
Summer to 1954 December &#8230;&#8230;&#8230;<br>
<br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>        </span>(Not Necessarily Chronological)<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'>You can see Kerouac&#8217;s bulging breast pocket in the infamous <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kerouac wore khakis </i>ad &amp; as someone who periodically writes on the street, in public transportation, even in office meetings, I&#8217;m completely sympathetic with Kerouac&#8217;s occasional comments about what a weirdo this makes him seem at times to others. When I worked in the Tenderloin in the late 1970s, where I would occasionally find myself writing away in a notebook in a residential hotel that served as a shooting gallery while a septuagenarian drug dealer was going around the lobby with a literal TV tray full of offerings &#8211; as if it were dim sum or the dessert tray at a restaurant &#8211; the only way I could get away with writing was because everybody there already knew me &amp; understood that I wasn&#8217;t a <span class=SpellE>narc</span>, even if I wasn&#8217;t a buyer either. No one has captured this aspect of writing so well as Kerouac &#8211; in some <span class=GramE>ways,</span> I&#8217;ve never tried simply because he ensured that I didn&#8217;t need to do so.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Sketches </i>proves to be, like so many recent additions to the published Kerouac oeuvre, half a loaf. On the one hand &#8211; and this is the most critical point &#8211; it is great to have this in print, it&#8217;s a fabulous read, a chance to watch Kerouac actively thinking about honing specific details of his obsessive, but quite freehand craft. On the other hand, it&#8217;s a poorly done version that stands as a placeholder for a properly edited and contextualized publication that won&#8217;t appear for decades, if at all. <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'>Kerouac noted to his friends that by the time <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>On the Road </i>made him famous overnight in 1957, he had already written a lifetime of work over the previous decade, much of it in the compacted 1950-57 timeframe, between the good critical reviews and total lack of sales of his first (and most conventional) novel, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Town and the City, </i>and the actually over-edited Legend of Duluoz books that were issued in the wake of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Road&#185;. </i>Watching Kerouac invent fiction, invent prose, completely rethink the task of the writer from the ground up is the real story here, much more so than the romantic tale of the questing Beat guru whose beatific surface barely covers over the thick sludge of sentimental (or worse) stereotypes that represent the worst of Catholic working class culture in the Northeast. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Sketches </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>partakes of both sides of Kerouac &#8211; there are passages here that could easily convince a woman never to read him again, a man who could have taken sensitivity training from Archie Bunker &#8211; and there is the careful, utterly honest crafter of observations trying to fathom how best to put down everything (note that depiction of watermelon or the comparison of craps players with deer &amp; especially Kerouac&#8217;s use of the French form <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>regardant</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>there), with just an occasional hint of the alcoholism that would overwhelm Kerouac in just a few short years, robbing him of his ability to think &amp; see well before it killed him. Unlike Jack Spicer, who was killed by booze even more quickly than Kerouac, but who wrote his very best work at the end, Kerouac was a writer who dwindled throughout his final decade, becoming more &amp; more pathetic in stages.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sketches </i>is still Kerouac on the ascent &amp;, as such, represents a major publication of one of the towering talents of the past 50 years. But as a publication, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sketches </i>also  reminds the careful reader of all that can go wrong with the works of a major author. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; An unexpurgated version of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>On the Road </i>is due to be released next year, on the 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the first publication. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, July 31, 2006</span></h2>

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<span style="color: black;"><img height="360" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/PSkKRcyHiTXfL6qcbHMNAI8pKZXKp09aivq7ir29005447-Hz6WrfF72cBON3W76N1u0ohCnkEQYGgP-vgobUkui2plzsMzk%3Ds0-d" width="264"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/coolidge/"><span style="color: black;">Clark Coolidge</span></a> gets credit for a lot of things, virtually all of it deserved, but generally I don&#8217;t think there has been enough recognition of his stellar work as a literary critic, as such. Over my trip west, I read the Kerouac sections &#8211; roughly 80 pages from a 140-page book &#8211; in his 1999 Living Batch collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=0945953097"><span style="color: black;">Now It&#8217;s Jazz</span></a>, </i>temporarily (I really hope they mean that) out of stock at SPD<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>It&#8217;s the finest critical writing I&#8217;ve ever read on Kerouac&#8217;s work, which is to say that it&#8217;s passionate &amp; level-headed, with an exceptionally good eye/ear toward the fine points in Kerouac&#8217;s writing, its basis in rhythm, Kerouac&#8217;s own eye (essential to his work), indeed Kerouac&#8217;s mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">You can find one piece of Coolidge&#8217;s Kerouac collection online, <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/kerouac-per-coolidge.html"><span style="color: black;">this</span></a> relatively straightforward, even formal overview from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Poetry Review </i>gathered here amongst the rather breath-taking &amp; eclectic materials put together for Al Filreis&#8217; legendary <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/"><span style="color: black;">English 88</span></a> course at Penn. Of the essays (many of them simply excerpts from letters) in Coolidge&#8217;s collection, this is the closest thing to an normative piece of prose, which makes it, at once, perhaps the most accessible of the essays here, but in some ways the least of them as well. One great section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Now It&#8217;s Jazz</i> consists of a recitation of dreams in which Kerouac has appeared to Coolidge, a riff on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of Dreams </i>no doubt, but an intimate way to let you know not only how much Kerouac means to Coolidge&#8217;s own writing &amp; person, but also in what ways. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">People who don&#8217;t read Coolidge closely sometimes express the sense that his own work is abstract. In fact, much of what Coolidge himself says about Kerouac &#8211; especially about the role of rhythm in the work &#8211; he could say of himself as well. One thing Coolidge obviously is not, tho, is  a Kerouac clone. Rather, Kerouac is one of the major influences on Coolidge&#8217;s work (I&#8217;d argue that Phil Whalen is the other prime source), which takes its essence into places Ti-Jean himself never fully imagined. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">One thing Coolidge does take from the early Kerouac is an enormous sense of dedication to craft and to the idea that the meaning of form is intimately connected to what you can do with it, not how neatly your shoe laces are tied. Coolidge has done his homework here, seeming to have read everything in print many times over &amp; more than a little of what is not yet in printed form. One consequence of this is that Coolidge is brutal with the haphazard nature of many of the Kerouac editions, more than a few of which seem designed to propagate the myth rather than elucidate the writer. Kerouac is one of several recent authors &#8211; Joyce &amp; Duncan come immediately to mind &#8211; where we may just have to wait for copyright to expire &amp; hope that enough of the materials not now in public archives get there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and </i>that each will ultimately find their own Hugh Kenner waiting to unpack the chronological &amp; other difficulties with which the total oeuvre is embedded. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">One test of Coolidge as a critic &#8211; you can find some other non-Kerouac samples as well on his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">EPC </i>web page &#8211; is that he gets the importance of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody, </i>not just as a central work in the Kerouac canon, but quite possibly the Great Novel of the past century, right up on a par with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses </i>&amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gravity&#8217;s Rainbow </i>&amp; the best of Faulkner (who is not unlike Kerouac in that his best work often comes in passages, rather than entire books). Coolidge&#8217;s &#8220;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody </i>Notes,&#8221; modeled after Kerouac&#8217;s own pseudo-script telegraphed prose is this book&#8217;s secret gem as well as the one work entirely devoted to a single volume of Kerouac&#8217;s. </span><u><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">The other echo that Coolidge&#8217;s book sets up for me is Kerouac&#8217;s ideas of spontaneous prose &amp; their relation (or lack thereof) to the folk physiology of Charles Olson&#8217;s poetics, which I&#8217;d been working on prior to my week in Naropa last month. Here is Olson, from &#8220;<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/jarnot/olson.html"><span style="color: black;">Projective Verse</span></a>&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE</span><span style="color: black;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">But consider the role of the eye, alluded to repeatedly in Kerouac&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouac-technique.html"><span style="color: black;">Belief &amp; Technique for Modern Prose</span></a>&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1.  Scribbled secret notebooks,and wild typewritten pages, for yr own  joy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">2. Submissive to everything, open, listening <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">4. Be in love with yr life <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">5. Something that you feel will find its own form <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">7. Blow as deep as you want to blow <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">9. The unspeakable visions of the individual <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">10. No time for poetry but exactly what is <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">19. Accept loss forever <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">20. Believe in the holy contour of life <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &amp; knowledge <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">29. You're a Genius all the time <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored &amp; Angeled in Heaven <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">If the tug-of-war in Olson&#8217;s  work, the forces that give it its internal energy, is that battle between syllable &amp; line, for Kerouac it&#8217;s between &#8220;the visual American form,&#8221; &#8220;pithy middle eye&#8221; &amp; the mind, by which Kerouac does not mean logic or reason. &#8220;Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better.&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t get much more explicit than that, yet Coolidge shows how precisely Kerouac gives head to words &amp; depiction simultaneously, citing the great cafeteria description from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody </i>(possibly the best description of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything </i>in the whole of literature)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>and this much shorter passage from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Old Angel Midnight: <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look and there&#8217;s a tangled eucalyptus hulk stick fallen thru the late sunlight tangle of those needles, hanging from it like a live wire connecting it to the ground &#8211; just below, the notches where little Fred sought to fell sad pine &#8211; not bleed much &#8211; just a lot of crystal sap the ants are mining in, motionless like cows on the grass<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">There is a great riff of prosody in that first interior phrase &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">where little Fred sought to fell sad pine </i>&#8211; that makes you realize just how completely Kerouac is in control of (and driven by) the sound of the passage, tho it is not ultimately the sound that&#8217;s at play. This is a rare moment in American fiction &#8211; one wants to say American poetry tho Kerouac himself would not have agreed &#8211; and that Coolidge is capable of foregrounding a moment like this is a sign of his own considerable skill thinking through these materials. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, June 22, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The ninth and final work in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>is in some ways the strangest precisely because it isn&#8217;t. Composed for the most part in &#8211; for Olson &#8211; relatively straightforward prose paragraphs, Olson argues for a history of letters that, as I read him, divides roughly into three periods: from the Second Millennium BC backwards perhaps as far as the Sixth, this being the time of the gods; the two millennia after that; the two millennia that lead up to our own time. It&#8217;s not as clean as that, though, since for Olson the central figure reporting on that first period is the poet <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesiod"><span style='color:black'>Hesiod</span></a>, who lived around 700 BC. At the very least, Hesiod is nearly as far from the end of the Second Millennium as we are from, say, Anne Bradstreet. At the other extreme, Hesiod is as far from its start as we are from 700 AD, which is to say well before the English had English, let alone writing. Roughly as far as the Battle of Tours, where <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Martel"><span style='color:black'>Charles Martel</span></a> in 732 turned back the Islamic army that sought to expand its European empire beyond </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Spain</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> northward.<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;color:black'>Olson states his motivation forthrightly:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Immediately my purpose is only to wake up the time spans and materials lying behind Hesiod, so that they can seem freer than they have; but essentially I&#8217;m sure a line drawn through Hesiod himself will already demark the difference the materials and times behind him will yield. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The Second Millennium is <span class=GramE>key</span>, according to Olson, because the wars of the gods were all concluded &amp; this was the time of &#8220;the general overthrow of the ancient settled world, which was neither East nor West.&#8221; Considering just how attentive Olson is to agency and case in language, his wording is almost startling: &#8220;Around about 1800 things shook up.&#8221; But the gist is unmistakable: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>This [Zeus&#8217; victory over the Titans &#8220;322 years before the siege of Troy&#8221;] then can be taken to be the line of the end of God-Father change and or transmission, as well as a good controlling date for the emergency of the <span class=SpellE>Mycenean</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>(sic)</i> or Aegean Greek governance of the Mediterranean: 1505 BC.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Olson sees this correction as necessary, because<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>With that one can then begin to work Hesiod back &#8211; as well for that matter as the Iliad &#8211; and at the same time come forward toward Homer and <span class=SpellE>Hesiod&#8217;s</span> day (850-800 BC) from a &#8216;true&#8217; origin of much which they include, the thousand years of writing some of which is now known which precedes them by a term of time as long as 1000 years. In other words Indo-Europeans and Semites had, for that long before Homer and Hesiod, power and governed an earlier literary and historical tradition which itself preceded them by two full millennia, the 3<sup>rd</sup> and the 4<sup>th</sup>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The implication as I read it is that to get &#8220;from the old discourse to the new,&#8221; one must in fact identify the oldest discourse of all, the alleged &#8220;&#8217;true&#8217; origin.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If one were to align Olson&#8217;s nine pieces in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>according to their focus on time, one would see that we are proceeding backwards. We start with the self, a present fact, before it can even identify itself &amp; we end with the origins of writing, the founding of cities &amp; the emergence of civilization out of Paleolithic man&#8217;s bigger &#8220;brain-case, like the present / porpoise&#8217;s&#8221; &amp; the implications hidden in primitive art, &#8220;the so-called &#8216;Venuses&#8217;.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As I read here, Olson&#8217;s desires are two: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>first, </i>to understand how the new occurs; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>second, </i>to carry into the present all of the knowledge of the past. In a sense, Olson is proceeding as though he thinks the first sentence of Wittgenstein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus </i>cannot be true. If the world indeed is all that is the case, as Wittgenstein postulates, then it is complete. There is no way in that equation for the new to occur. Olson&#8217;s strategy here &#8211; and elsewhere in his work &#8211; is to focus on the tectonic shifts in culture &amp; see what arose where &amp; if possible how, an anthropological refutation of positivism. Second, Olson is trying mightily here &#8211; it is his most postmodern impulse &#8211; to break free of the myth of progress. Where a generation before people would have seen only gain in the arrival of the new &#8211; think of how Williams uses the term in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All </i>&#8211; Olson marks it always as a site of forgetting &amp; of loss. But it&#8217;s not that he doesn&#8217;t want to engage it. Rather, he wants to understand the process &amp; to recognize it always as two-sided. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, June 20, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The single longest section in Charles Olson&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>is the seventh, &#8220;GRAMMAR &#8211; a &#8216;book&#8217;,&#8221; checking in at five pages, six sections. It&#8217;s the one you&#8217;ll never see printed in native HTML, at least not the first two sections &#8211; passages appear at different angles, lines go from A to B connecting different terms, at least once traveling through some other text to get there. Olson also shifts here from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>italics, </i>with a notable exception,<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>to <u>underlining </u>for emphasis. This is true in both the Four Seasons Foundation and UC Press editions of the text. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;color:black'>Olson begins with a typically curious claim:<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=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>why<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>(</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;adv.&#8221;!)<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><span class=GramE>instrumental case of <span class=SpellE><u>hw&#257;</u></span>, <u>hwaet</u>.</span> See <u>WHO<o:p></o:p></u></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;<u>WHO</u>,&#8221; all in caps, is underlined three times, an effect I can&#8217;t duplicate here. The instrumental is a case that was already beginning to fade from existence in Old English, where, in the words of <a href="http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl401/grammar/cases.htm"><span style='color:black'>one online source</span></a> of Old English cases, it was<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<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;color:black'>only distinct from the dative case for a few pronouns and for strong adjectives.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'> It is used to indicate the thing or person <em><span style='font-family:Verdana'>by means of which</span></em> the action of the verb is accomplished.<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'>A diagonal line at a 50º angle juts down from the period after <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><u>hwaet</u></i> to a line that reads &#8220;Goth <span class=SpellE>hvas</span> (<span class=SpellE>Skt</span> <span class=SpellE>kas</span>).&#8221; The idea that untangling the origins of a given term will tell you some essential feature thereof is the linguistic equivalent of justices <span class=SpellE>Scalia</span>, Thomas, <span class=SpellE>Alito</span> &amp; Roberts claiming that the original intent of the writers of the Constitution is what determines a phrase&#8217;s meaning today. Yet a phrase like &#8220;all men are created equal,&#8221; was created in a time when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>all </i>did not mean <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>all, </i>when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>men </i>meant <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>some men and no women, </i>and when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>equal </i>did not mean <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>equal. </i>Language itself is infinitely malleable &amp; the social circumstances of one utterance to the next can and do change dramatically, altering content with every turn. <span class=SpellE>Originationism</span> is a vestige of 19<sup>th</sup> century historical linguistics, known then as philology, and though Olson understands that this is not the whole of language, this process is for him still a very powerful mode of proceeding. Looking up historic precedence is what Olson means by research. Yet one thing he doesn&#8217;t note, tho one might think he would <span class=GramE>had</span> he known it, is that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>hwaet </i>is itself the first word of Beowulf, &amp; thus in some sense, the first word of English poetry as such.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The page at this point divides roughly into three columns, only the rightmost of which is printed in approximately the standard orientation to horizontal &amp; vertical axes (approximately, but not in fact entirely!). This column traces the history of the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that, </i>which interests Olson apparently because it serves both as a pronoun &amp; a connective. The center passage, which starts at roughly the left margin &amp; then moves downward in a very tight column no more than eight characters wide, appears at first to trace the relationship of the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>how </i>with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>who, what, </i>&amp; again <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>why, </i>then, as it moves downward seems to alternate from annotating the discussion of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that </i>to its right to ending up on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>who.<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'>The left-hand column, boxed in by a border on three sides &amp; tilted so that its bottom crowds the center of the page considers the term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>quantum, </i>&#8220;neuter of <span class=SpellE>quantus</span> (cf. page 192&#8221; tho there be no closed parenthesis, nor even an allusion to suggest which book&#8217;s page 192 might be in mind. It&#8217;s the assertions that occur beneath this that, I think, pull this term into what otherwise appears to be a discussion of the syntactic potential of pronouns:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.85in;text-indent:-1.35in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>the process is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i><span class=GramE>continuous</span><br>
[pattern]<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><u><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>but takes place by steps<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
</span></u><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>each step being the emission<br>
or absorption of an amt. of<br>
energy called <u>the quantum<o:p></o:p></u></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.5in'><span class=GramE><u><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Math.</span></u></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>  distinguished <span class=SpellE>fr</span>. a<br>
magnitude<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><u><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Phil.</span></u><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> the char. of a thing<br>
by virtue of which measure<br>
or number is applicable <span class=GramE>to<br>
it,</span> or it can be determined<br>
as more or less than some<br>
other<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Olson proceeds to give us similar considerations of other pronouns: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>like, an, another, who, </i>while on the next page, proceeding to argue <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>quantus</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>as pronoun &amp; adjective, which we are told is &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Relat</span>. <span class=SpellE><span class=GramE>correl</span></span><span class=GramE>. with <span class=SpellE><u>tantus</u></span>, / of what size, / how much.&#8221;</span> This leads eventually to:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>absence of any such a word in English<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<span class=SpellE>fr</span> <span class=SpellE><u>tantus</u></span>? <span class=GramE>Result, or confusion over<br>
quantity</span>? Therefore not understanding<br>
<span class=SpellE>quantus</span> is the neuter case of pronoun<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
not an adjective???<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'>Hidden here, tho not very, is Olson&#8217;s application of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, the central tenet of any linguistic determinism, the implication that if there is not a single word in English to ask <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>how many, how much, </i>there is some gap in our understanding of the world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The second section of &#8220;GRAMMAR &#8211; a &#8216;book&#8217;&#8221; is devoted to the middle voice &#8211; the middle, so to speak, between active and passive. This is the distinction between <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The fox ate the chicken, </i>which is active, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The chicken was eaten by the fox, </i>which is passive and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The chicken cooked in the oven, </i>which is in the middle voice in that the subject of the sentence is in fact the object of the action. The second section, labeled &#8220;&#8217;Case&#8217;&#8221; &#8211; the inner quotation marks are Olson&#8217;s &#8211; is not, theoretically or linguistically, his finest critical writing, but what Olson is after is precisely that hybrid phenomenon. This is why, midway down the page, Olson will draw a line from &#8221;future perfect&#8221; to &#8220;middle&#8221; &#8211; because it invariably combines some form of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>will have</i> with a past participle. This is followed by a passage on the &#8220;indicative middle,&#8221; a phrase inserted with a <span dir=RTL></span><span lang=AR-SA dir=RTL><span dir=RTL></span>&#1784;</span><span dir=LTR></span><span dir=LTR></span> between the words <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Middle </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>voice. </i>The indicative middle, although Olson doesn&#8217;t note this, is a case one finds most often in Classic Greek or Old Iranian. Further, Olson&#8217;s notes here appear to be <a href="http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/davis/page36.html"><span style='color:black'>cribbed</span></a> almost directly from William <span class=SpellE>Hersey</span> Davis&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Beginner&#8217;s Grammar of the New Greek Testament, </i>published in 1923, an author Olson does not cite. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The third section <span class=GramE>of &#8221;</span>GRAMMAR&#8221; is entitled &#8220;The Indo-Europeans Anyway,&#8221; describing their migrations around 1800 BC and the impact this had on the language. Olson&#8217;s second (of two) <span class=GramE>paragraphs is</span> almost entirely a quotation from Edward Sapir:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first [of the three drifts of major importance at work in the language] is the familiar tendency to level the distinction between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases&#8230;. The distinction between the nominative and accusative was nibbled away by phonetic processes and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>morphological <span class=SpellE>levelings</span> </i>until <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only certain pronouns </i>retained distinctive subjective and objective forms. (Bracketed language, ellipsis and italics all Olson&#8217;s)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The fourth section, entitled &#8220;Syntax (&#8216;ordering&#8217;),&#8221; is entirely a quotation of Sapir, arguing that language invariably begins as concrete &#8211; <span class=SpellE>Sapir&#8217;s</span> example is the origin of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>of</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>,</i> as it appears in the English phrase, &#8220;law of the land,&#8221;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>a pronoun that began as &#8220;an adverb of considerable concreteness of meaning, &#8216;away, moving from, &#8217;and that the syntactic relation was originally expressed by the case form [ablative] of the second noun.&#8221; <span class=GramE>(Bracketed insert Olson&#8217;s).</span> Thus:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>An interesting thesis results: &#8211; All of the actual content of speech, its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm.<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'>Section five, entitled &#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Concord</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, in Bantu and Chinook,&#8221; again quotes Sapir at length, presenting &#8220;an alternative to <span class=SpellE>syntrax</span> [at least as we have understood it] altogether." Olson&#8217;s point would appear to be the inner logic is radically different &#8211; again, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The sixth and final section is &#8220;Number,&#8221; specifically the singular, since it can be nominative whereas plurals necessarily distribute. This passage, read in the context of the whole of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception</i></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> feels less like the end of book on grammar &amp; more a staging for the next section, entitled, in all of Olson&#8217;s quirky uses of capitalization &amp; speech:<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'>A Plausible &#8216;Entry&#8217; for, like, man<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This, as it turns out, is a time line from Paleolithic man to Eric the Red, 1025 years ago. A long horizontal line divides the page in the middle, with HOMER, all in caps, above it and below the date &#8220;450, Athens&#8221; and the note &#8220;<u>logos </u>invented (universalism possible&#8221; tho Heraclitus had been dead for 25 years by then.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The most important date in more recent years, to Olson, would appear to be 732 AD, the &#8220;date Martel turned back Moslems at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Tours</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, one has to see a &#8216;</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'>&#8217; &#8211; and new &#8220;West&#8221; &#8211; arising.&#8221; </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'>, thus, is relatively recent as a possibility. This is followed by a list of dates, Names and prepositional phrases:<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'>771<span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp;&nbsp;    Charlemagne<br> 
790  &nbsp;&nbsp;    Irish monks to Iceland<br> 
823  &nbsp;&nbsp;    Norse, to Dublin<br> 
862  &nbsp;&nbsp;    Swedes to Novogrod<br>
871  &nbsp;&nbsp;    Alfred<br>
981  &nbsp;&nbsp;    Eric the Red, to Greenland<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Never one to leave his bibliography to the end, Charles Olson uses the fifth of his nine pieces in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception </i>to a reading list. <span class=GramE>Or, more accurately, a list of names, date March 1961 &#8220;with / acknowledgements to / Gerrit Lansing.&#8221;</span> The title of the piece is &#8220;Bridge-Work,&#8221; the bridge being<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><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>fr</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> the Old Discourse to the New<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Italicized by Olson, immediately characterized as &#8220;men worth anyone&#8217;s study,&#8221; and (with two exceptions) the names that follow are all boys. Some of these names are well enough known &#8211; cultural geographer &amp; longtime Berkeley professor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_O._Sauer"><span style='color:black'>Carl O. Sauer</span></a>, mystic <span class=SpellE>Aleister</span> Crowley (of whom Olson writes, &#8220;?: particularly his / book on the Tarot&#8221;), Pound&#8217;s favorite Fenollosa, <a href="http://www.edwardcarpenter.net/"><span style='color:black'>Edward Carpenter</span></a> (mentioned as being &#8220;Whitman&#8217;s friend&#8221; &amp; then as &#8220;<a href="http://www.fst.org/garrett.htm"><span style='color:black'>Eileen Garrett&#8217;s</span></a> / teacher,&#8221; tho it is unlikely that many now will recognize the name of this once famed medium), and early linguists &#8211; post-Saussure, pre-Chomsky &#8211; Edward Sapir &amp; B.L. Whorf. <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'>Some of the names are less well known today: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lang"><span style='color:black'>Andrew Lang</span></a> was a collector of folk tales and early anthropologist, tho like Crowley &amp; Garrett he was also a popular author on psychic phenomena. <span class=GramE>Olson notes, next to Lang&#8217;s name, &#8220;on hypnagogic vision, / as well as trans. of / Homer.&#8221;</span> Hypnogogy is a term for the drowsy consciousness that often precedes sleep and one finds a many references to it on sleep disorder sites, but Olson here must be alluding to its use identifying trance states.<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'>Lang is not the only translator of Homer on this list. <a href="http://www.archatlas.dept.shef.ac.uk/Portages/Portages.htm"><span style='color:black'>Victor <span class=SpellE>Bérard</span></span></a> translated <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ulysses </i>into French as well as authoring other works on a wide range of subjects. An historian of antiquity around the turn of 20<sup>th</sup> century and an authority on ancient trade routes, Lenin is known to have read his <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/ni-gamma/berard.htm"><span style='color:black'>Britain and Imperialism</span></a>. </i>Fenollosa was of course a translator as is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc_By_Herself_and_Her_Witnesses"><span style='color:black'>Edward <span class=SpellE>Hyams</span></span></a>, who also wrote a work called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Soil and Civilization </i>that argues &#8211; in a proto-Jared Diamond sort of way &#8211; <span class=GramE>that</span> some civilizations have been destroyed through poor soil management practices. G.R.S. Mead translated the Gnostic text, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pistis</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Sophia. <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'><a href="http://www.sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleId=343"><span style='color:black'>Cyrus Gordon</span></a> was a Bible scholar, the first Jewish one to get a teaching job at a </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> university, the lone contemporary of Olson&#8217;s on the list. But to call him a Bible scholar places him too narrowly. During his career, he taught </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Egyptology, Coptic, Hittite, <span class=SpellE>Hurrian</span>, Sumerian and classical Arabic. <span style='color:black'>Another scholar of antiquities, <a href="http://hiddenmysteries.com/xcart/product.php?productid=16242"><span style='color:black'>L.A. Waddell</span></a>, is the author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The British Edda, </i>tracing Anglo myths back to their origins. Waddell has become something of an important figure in the reading of the <a href="http://www.stormfront.org/truth_at_last/books/The-British-Edda.htm"><span style='color:black'>White Aryan Brotherhood</span></a> and other neo-Nazi groups in recent years. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>At first glance, this seems like something of a bizarre list, mixing the history of antiquity with early anthropology and linguistics <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>mysticism. Pointedly absent are two names one often hears in Olson scholarship: Carl Jung &amp; Alfred North Whitehead, each of whom proved to fit more comfortably in the academic canon than many of those on this list, with the possible exceptions of Mead, Sapir &amp; Whorf. Sapir, it is worth noting, goes first in Olson&#8217;s list, followed by Carpenter, Sauer, <span class=GramE>Lang</span> &amp; Mead. <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 are the threads that bind this roster of 14 names &#8211; 15 if we include Homer &#8211; together? One obviously is anthropology, a second ancient history, a third linguistics, the fourth the psychic dimension. My sense is that Olson is reasonably in touch with anthropology as it stood in the early 1950s, interested in that part of linguistics that could reasonably be expected to be of interest to poets, eclectic and not necessarily orthodox in his sense of history &#8211; it seems almost hit and <span class=GramE>miss</span> there. And for this X-files dimension? Tarot, séances, trance states &#8211; there&#8217;s more than a little <a href="http://www.foxhome.com/trustno1/"><span style='color:black'>Fox <span class=SpellE>Muldur</span></span></a> in Olson. <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'>I&#8217;ve noted here before that Olson&#8217;s own death in 1970, combined with Robert Duncan&#8217;s 15-year hiatus from publishing books, a self-enforced silence that began in 1968, precipitated a major shift in American poetics, one that I think is most visible looking at some of the publications of the time, such as George Quasha&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Active Anthology, </i>which came out in 1974 &#8211; still recent enough to have previous unpublished pieces in from both Olson &amp; Paul Blackburn. In addition to the Olson&#8217;s own work, many of the pieces here have or touch on aspects of this same spectrum of alternative reality. Armand Schwerner dedicates his &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Bacchae</span> Sonnets&#8221; to Chögyam Trungpa, <span class=SpellE>Rinpoche</span> &#8220;with love.&#8221; Ted <span class=SpellE>Enslin&#8217;s</span> excerpt from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ranger </i>touches on the teachings of Don Juan, on <span class=SpellE>Popocatapetl</span> and <span class=SpellE>Ixtaccihuatl</span>. Chuck Stein offers a poem entitled &#8220;Vajra &#8211; Guru &#8211; Padma &#8211; Did &#8211; <span class=GramE>She</span>.&#8221; Editor Quasha offers &#8220;The Sufi Singer&#8221; as well as some sections from his <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Somapoetics</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>Anselm Hollo &amp; Jonathan Greene both have poems with the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>dream </i>in their titles. Nathaniel Tarn has his <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lyrics for the Bride of God. </i>David Meltzer has poems that he terms &#8220;amulets.&#8221; Richard <span class=SpellE>Grossinger</span> presents an excerpt from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Slag of Creation, </i>Frank <span class=SpellE>Samperi</span> an excerpt from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Kingdom, </i>Ed Sanders offers a &#8220;Prayer for the Unity of the Eye,&#8221; dedicated to &#8221;my friend <span class=SpellE>Horus</span>.&#8221; Robert <span class=SpellE>Hellman</span> &amp; Spencer <span class=SpellE>Holst</span> both offer works with the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Magician </i>in the title. Even John <span class=SpellE>Giorno</span> chimes into the theme here with an excerpt from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Suicide Sutra. </i>Indeed, Buddhist scholar Rick Fields has a poem entitled &#8220;Realm of the Gods.&#8221; And Chögyam Trungpa himself has four poems in this one-short anthology. None of this may seem exceptional if we take each piece by itself, each contributor by him- or <span class=GramE>herself</span>. But across a field of 65 contributors &#8211; 55 men, 10 women&#185; &#8211; the impact is unmistakable. Olson was just one key part in a broader field of poetics that was deeply spiritual, but not at all within the orthodox Judeo-Christian frame. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This disappears in the 1970s almost completely. And my test of this is to look at the poetry of Robert Kelly, in particular, from the 1960s and the same poems from that era that he chooses now to include in various contemporary selected works. It&#8217;s not that he&#8217;s rejected his worldview, I think, so much as he may feel that the more secular poems travel better across time. <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'>I&#8217;ve also written that I that what took the place of mysticism and the wisdom traditions in American poetry in the 1970s was theory, specifically continental theory of the structural &amp; especially post-structural kind. <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 Olson&#8217;s death &amp; </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s hiatus are, I think, the hinge events in that transition &#8211; as they were the two people who really could have made that larger dimension cohere. The one other poet of like mind &amp; similar stature, Gary Snyder, was far too much of an isolato to have the same effect. Allen Ginsberg was too caught up in too many other things to focus on just this one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This I think makes a section like &#8220;Bridge-Work&#8221; particularly difficult for a younger reader today to grasp. What may at first glance appear completely daft in Olson&#8217;s interest in séances &amp; Tarot was by no means exceptional at the time he wrote this. <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 it&#8217;s interesting to see, in the sixth section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>the seven &#8220;hinges&#8221; Olson proposes, specifically &#8220;of civilization to be put back on the door,&#8221; where Olson addresses questions of the secular &amp; divine fairly directly. It is precisely this balance point I see at work in these &#8220;Hinges.&#8221; The first is a reconsideration of the dating of what Olson calls &#8220;original &#8216;town-man,&#8217;&#8221; which Olson wants to push back; the second, Indo-European, where Olson wants to connect the Bible to Hittite, Sumerian &amp; Canaanite texts of the period, as well as<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'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>roots:<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;    &nbsp; &nbsp;               </span></span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>the linguistic values of Indo-<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;          </span>European languages, the<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>   &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;        </span>original minting of words<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;          </span>&amp; syntax<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'>Throughout, Olson is trying to connect these &#8220;hinges&#8221; not to our time (or at least his), but precisely in the opposite direction:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>[as in other hinges of the direct line, there<br>
is an advantage to the leaping <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>outside </i>as<br>
well as connecting <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>backward: </i>for example<br>
American Indian languages offer useful<br>
freshening of syntax to go alongside<br>
Indo-European]<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This same backward motion appears again in the third Hinge: &#8220;to turn the 5<sup>th</sup> Century / BC back toward the 6<sup>th</sup>&#8221; &#8211; to the right of which runs a vertical list: &#8220;Heraclitus / Buddha / Pythagoras / Confucius.&#8221; It&#8217;s not that Olson wants us to proceed backwards through history, but rather an insistence that whatever is new not displace the old, thus (Hinge # 6):<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>the 17<sup>th</sup> [Century], seen as the brilliant secular it /<br>
was, without the loss of alchemy etc<br>
it unseated<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>leading finally to &#8220;the 20<sup>th</sup>, release <span class=SpellE>fr</span> / both the 18<sup>th</sup> . . . &amp; 19<sup>th</sup>, the new progress of / Marxism,&#8221; to which Olson concludes by appending the most straightforward statement in all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception: </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>otherwise the present will lose what </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> is the inheritor of: a secularization which not only loses nothing of the divine but by seeing process in reality redeems all idealism <span class=SpellE>fr</span> theocracy or mobocracy, whether it is rational or superstitious, whether it is democratic or socialism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A secularization which ... loses nothing of the divine</span></i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>.</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Not an either/or, but a both/and. This would seem to be where Olson has been aiming all along.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; It&#8217;s interesting to see this 6.5-to-1 ratio in 1974, a moment when langpo elsewhere already had brought the difference down to 4-to-1, a distinct &#8211; if still too short &#8211; step toward the parity we have routinely 30 years later. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<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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