Suzanne posted a comment to Monday’s note that’s worth repeating:
PROPRIOCEPTION
is the true sixth sense
not defined as Olson does it
but as the perception of the body;
of its parts in relation to its whole
it is about balance
or lack thereof
it is how we walk
without tripping or falling
it is the knowledge built into the parts
of the placement
and location
of the other parts
In fact, the concept of kinesthesia, which the Wikipedia discussion under the link above characterizes as “another term that is often used interchangeably with proprioception,” is integral to Olson’s definition also: movement, at any cost, kinesthesia: beat (nik) starts the second paragraph of Olson’s initial definition, the one labeled Today. Olson’s name, by the way, pops up in the external links to the Wikipedia definition, as one of the sources for Charles Wolfe’s essay by the same name. Also invoked are dance, yoga and Alexander Technique, a 19th century mode of body work. It’s not that Olson’s conception of proprioception is wrong per se, but rather that he is using a broader term to try to focus in on a particular subset of the experience, that sense of absence, of between-ness, that exists inside our own bodies, a sense specifically of the body as manifesting many surfaces, interior as well as exterior. The iconic gesture of proprioception, touching your nose with your eyes closed, isn’t possible without a sense of your nose having a surface & some general idea where that might be.
But the point raises the question of the nature of knowledge & its value within a poem. If I were, to use Suzanne’s example, a sufferer of peripheral neuropathy, I wouldn’t be turning to the poems of Charles Olson for medical help. Nor even those of William Carlos Williams, Gael Turnbull or C. Dale Young, poet-physicians at least insofar as each practices (or practiced) both professions. I’m not at all certain that I would turn to Olson, even, if I were researching a history of the
What then is the value of all this research that is so much a part of Olson’s poetic practice, a dimension that he directly takes from Pound in fact, the poet as ‘istorin, the ancient mariner of the archives who emerges from deep in the library’s stacks to address his city? How is this information the same or different from, say, the data you pick up in a Frank O’Hara lunch poem or Ed Sanders’ investigative poetics or Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson?
While investigative poetics does seem to have a direct relationship back to Olson’s practice – substitute the poet as reporter for Maximus’ ‘istorin – all poems use data from the external world simply by employing language, a medium that exists (unlike paint or sound) only in pre-existing social tokens called words. Michael Magee’s use of an appropriated linguistic source for his project is, ultimately, no better or worse than Pound wandering through Van Buren’s written record or Jackson Mac Low’s reading through insurance texts in Stanzas for Iris Lezak, or Frank O’Hara recounting what he saw as he walked into the department store to type out a poem on one of the typewriter display’s store models. It’s a source of material, which can be used inventively or not (the Van Buren Cantos would actually represent the lower end of creativity here), to the uses of the poem, which really are what the poem does with whatever it has at hand. Clark Coolidge’s use of the dictionary as a source for The Maintains does not depend on the reader recognizing the source, nor the source’s truth function in the world (“this definition is accurate”), nor even the metaphysics of dictionaries as such, a linguistic and social phenomenon all their own. It’s what Coolidge does with this that makes The Maintains one of the great books of the 1970s.
But what then of the neighboring category, the use of terms in a poet’s critical or theoretical prose, which is where we find Proprioception? More than any other poet of his generation, Olson produced a large quantity of such texts, for which the Collected Prose is but the tip of an iceberg. There is, for example, an as yet still unpublished book on Shakespeare written in 1954, according to the chronology of his life and work at the remarkable Looking for Oneself: Contributions to the Study of Charles Olson website. There are, among others, The Mayan Letters (a distinct publication from the Cape/Grossman series extracted from the voluminous correspondence with Bob Creeley), The Special View of History (reconstructed notes from a class given at Black Mountain), two volumes of Muthologos, which collects talks & interviews, plus volumes of correspondence, and fugitive enough fare, like his reading & talk at Goddard College in 1962, which Slought has up on its website both as a sound file & transcript.
This is not, I think, the same level of work as a New York School poet, whether of the New American generation or thereafter, who does double duty as an art critic – tho the fields are different, that seems to me a lot closer to the poet-physician model – nor is it only Olson working, as did Creeley, Sorrentino, Baraka, Spicer or Duncan – as a poet discussing poetry. Although I think it can be read as that, and may well have its greatest value there.
Olson wants, I believe, very much to be what Antonio Gramsci described as an organic intellectual. This is quite distinct from a “professional” intellectual, such as a tenured history or philosophy professor at West Chester University, but rather fits quite close to Olson’s conception of Maximus of Tyre –
he mostly wandered around the Mediterranean world from the center, from the, from the old capital of
The wandering scholar fits Olson’s own critical project, although with the notable difference between & his doppelganger that Olson talks about many things, depending almost on the wind & the whim. He is a perfect bricoleur.
This lines Olson up alongside some other interesting characters:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose relationship to his chair at
Walter Benjamin, one part philosopher, one part literary critic, one part mystic.
Paul Erdos, the homeless mathematician
The key to Olson’s work here – and it’s not so far from Benjamin’s arcades project or Wittgenstein banning students from his classes who intended to become philosophy professors – is its commitment to amateurism. Or, to be even more clear, its adamant opposition to professionalism. As an ism. The mode of address, in the poems & Olson’s critical prose as well, is almost invariably that of the letter to the editor, not the report of the hired consultant brought (and bought) in by the authorities.
Olson insists on being taken as a crank. And being taken seriously. There is nothing in any way professional driving his investigations, nor what he learns, nor what he thinks you should know. Thus a poem in the form of “Letter for Melville 1951” which carries the note betwixt title & text:
written to be read AWAY FROM the Melville Society’s “One Hundredth Birthday Party” for MOBY-DICK at
Because of the nature of his particular project, there is less of a gulf between Olson’s critical prose & his poetry, perhaps – during the Goddard sessions, he is challenged on what makes his work poetry – but perhaps the deeper question ought to be the other way around: what makes his critical writing not poetry? Certainly Charles Bernstein & others since 1970 have shown the ways in which both critical writing can be streaked with the poetic & verse can be conversely critical.
Which means that I do take Proprioception completely seriously – it is not, to my mind (as one correspondent this week put it) “the rantings of a drunken seventeen-year-old Philosophy sophomore at a rave party,” but in fact, word-by-word as densely written as anything produced by Derrida. Or – to use a more direct comparison – the prose in Williams’ Spring & All. But when I do read it or any of Olson’s prose, my concern is not whether his definition of a given term will get you through a med school exam, but rather to examine the play of the mind as covers issues of interest, I should think, to many a poet.
