But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing the – what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the “Single Intelligence.” And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending – where its breathing, shall come to, termination.

Last Tuesday I noted that whenever I sense a hinge in Charles Olson’s critical writing, I pay close heed. Just as, in “Projective Verse,” Olson’s discussion of breath takes him to the syllable, a unit of language that he then describes as coming not from the breath, the play of air in vowels or the stops & slides of consonants, but to the ear & explicitly the ear’s proximity to the human brain: I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous… it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born. The paragraph cited above is what comes immediately next. Here we have a second definition of poetry, to go with A poem is energy transferred. Now we find the syllable and the line, they make a poem.

What I find most interesting here is Olson’s lack of bona fides for his claim that the line comes (I swear it) from the breath. Of all the literary devices that will become associated with Olson over the next 20 years, none will have the power of his equation of the line with breath – it dictates not only much that will go in projectivist poetics, but even the likes of Allen Ginsberg & Frank O’Hara were known to at least nod in its direction when discussing their own use of the line. By the time I was in college, in the latter half of the 1960s, having an identifiable line was tantamount to finding your voice, that elusive creative writing program quest. Your line was your brand. So it is fascinating here to think that Olson’s first argument for this equation comes down to a parenthetical I swear it. Talk about taking someone at his word!

And what is it that is so privileged here? That only he, the man who writes, can declare…where its breathing, shall come to, termination. The line is defined not by what goes on, but by how it ends.

What Olson preaches & what Olson practices, even here, maybe especially here, in a prose note he was intending to send off to a journal that had no particular reason to favor his stylistic quirks, is quite different. The use of “ungrammatical” commas in where its breathing, shall come to, termination can be accommodated only as pauses within the prose line, a mode of internal organization that any Olson reader will recognize as characteristic, at least up until the final notational poems with which Maximus concludes.

At this moment Olson is able to articulate his double-sided aesthetics, in which one (the syllable) represents freedom, the other (the line) responsibility:

The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say, Chaucer’s Troilus or S’s Lear, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.

Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE

And the joker? that it is in the 1st half of the proposition that, in composing, one lets-it-rip; and that it is in the 2nd half, surprise, it is the LINE that’s the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going.

Thus it is breath, the heart, that must be the responsible half, not at all the Freudian model of ego, id, superego here.

“Projective Verse” has a two-part structure, first part poetics, second part philosophy, yet it is here, just halfway through the piece’s two numbered sections, that Olson has already fully articulated his poetics, as such. One might say that what has preceded up to this point has been strategic – the remainder of part I starts off as if tactical. For example:

The descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second, in projective verse, because of their easiness, and thus their drain on the energy which composition by field allows into a poem.

But this is more than just a warning that story as such too easily turns into vulgar narrative. The problem ultimately is ontological. Consider the broader picture:

Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand at the moment, under the reader’s eye, in his moment. Observation of any kind is, like argument in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content toward its form.

Form may never be more than an extension of content. But the two have very different relations to the poem itself. One is the poem. The other mostly threatens to get in the way. It is, Olson writes,

a matter, finally, of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used…. The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made to hold, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being.

For someone who never showed much, if any, interest in the Objectivists (he will prove this at the start of part II), Olson certainly sounds like an Objectivist here.