There is a hinge of sorts in Charles Olson’s argument in “Projective Verse,” and I’ve learned over time that one should pay close heed to these moments. When Olson, having laid out his three simplicities and his claim for the importance of breath, concludes

I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.

Olson then moves, instanter as he would say, to this:

Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem.

What Olson does not say here is that breath – that which flows in vowels & abrupts or grinds in every consonant – leads to, causes, or otherwise inscribes the syllable. Indeed, that isn’t where Olson is going in “Projective Verse” at all. In the final phrase of that previous paragraph – the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath – it is the ear to which Olson will pin the syllable, not the breath.

King and pin of versification: it is worth keeping in mind that Olson does not appear, here or elsewhere, to have seriously studied linguistics, for the syllable hardly is the “smallest particle of all,” but rather is a construction – one whose architecture is always evident – out of such truly smallest particles, phonemes. One-syllable words are themselves most often marvelous schemes of conjoined phonemes, so that it is rare to find one – I, oh, possibly you – that is coterminous with a lone phoneme. Be, after all, contains two.

Olson’s perception of the syllable has a historical dimension –

verse here and in England dropped this secret from the late Elizabethans to Ezra Pound, lost it, in the sweetness of meter and rime, in a honey-head. (The syllable is one way to distinguish the original success of blank verse, and its falling off, with Milton.)

– but it is not the historical that principally concerns Olson here, so much as the dynamics of the syllable in sounding the poem:

It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity of words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on.

Leading the harmony on, because

In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. The fineness and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech.

This is an argument for melopoeia over logo- and phano-, Pound’s old troika, and worth considering, especially when one thinks of that branch of Olsonian post-Projectivists (Paul Metcalf, say) who envisioned The Big O as permission for a logopoetics of the archives. Again, tho, we note that return to the idea of syllable as “the minimum” and – this is new and troubling – “source of speech.”

But to those who would let the syllable lead the harmony on, Olson issues

this warning, to those who would try: to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless – and least logical.

The idea that the least careless should also, at the same moment, be the least logical is worth thinking about. Even as he clumsily wades through his homegrown linguistics, Olson here echoes Jack Spicer’s Martian radio, insisting on the importance – and formal inclusion – of some aspect of the irrational:

For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance:

After which colon, Olson inserts an unattributed quotation identifying etymological sources for common English one-syllable words that propose more weighty philosophic dimensions, such as “’Is’ comes from the Aryan root, as, to breathe.” From folk etymology, Olson moves very rapidly to folk physiology (the ellipses in what follows are Olson’s):

I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed . . .

it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . .

it is from the union of the mind and ear that the syllable is born.

The mind chooses what the ear hears – that seems to be gist, that there should always be this privilege. But what is most fascinating here is the metaphoric family invoked by Olson in which the king is born of brother & sister. Which in turn makes me very curious about that list at the end of that second paragraph: the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . . To my mind, that is perhaps the most mysterious single sequence in all of Olson’s writing. Trying to figure out not only how ear & mind are siblings & equals (having thus to resist my own instinct that what Olson calls the ear is always already a part of mind, just as is recognition of shapes & objects in sight – there are no innocent senses beyond the age of what? three?), but also how those three cognitive domains include one another or at least overlap.

Breathe, say all manner of meditators. Tho he was obviously interested in the work of Carl Jung, it’s hard – impossible – to envision Charles Olson, all chain smoking, chain drinking six-foot-nine of him, sitting Zazen. Olson is nothing if not the antithesis of the stereotype of the mellow Zen acolyte dressed in natural fibers, nibbling tofu with chopsticks or else engulfed in the presentness of inhaling, then exhaling, with no further agenda than being here now.

Yet no other poet of his generation – or any other, for that matter – has so directly connected poetry to the physiological process of breathing itself. Listen to him, in 1950, writing in his most famous essay, ”Projective Verse”:

If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and head. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.

It’s worth keeping in mind where precisely this fits into the logic of Olson’s poetics. He’s concerned here with defining what he alternately calls Projective or Open verse or Composition by Field, “as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the ‘old’ base of the non-projective.” Which is to say that Olson is very much proposing this as a poetics of all that is alternative to the School of Quietude, a claim that both empowers and limits his argument, ultimately (e.g. Olson will thus write prose poetry out of his picture, regardless that it is equally opposed to “inherited line, stanza, over-all form”).

From which foundational claim – this will account for all that is anti-SoQ – Olson then proceeds to stake out what he calls “simplicities that a man learns” – his language is hopelessly sexist – “if he works in OPEN,” this phrase never to join up with an ultimate noun. The “simplicities” are, as I read them, three underlying dynamics, true of all poetry (or so he claims), the second being the most famous, Creeley’s dictum: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.” But the first, what Olson calls “the kinetics of the thing,” includes an actual definition of the poem:

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself, must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy discharge.

This is one of the most overlooked claims in the recent history of poetry, given just how much attention has gone to other parts of Olson’s project, and to all the work by others (not just Creeley & Duncan, say, but virtually everyone who came in contact with any of the three Projectivist musketeers). The most important single word here, I swear, is the simplest: Okay. Olson’s prose, not unlike his verse, perpetually twists & turns, rushing propulsively forward, often sounding quite breathless in the process. This one word interjection is exactly not that. It’s a pause, a punctuation, an emphasis. He wants us to take that claim in: A poem is energy transferred.

What does he mean? Why must the poem, at all points, be an energy discharge? This is a far cry, actually, from Pound’s dichtung = condensare. Until you consider that condensare just might be a necessary compacting process required to amp up the voltage so that energy is maximized through pressure. Olson very carefully declines to define this energy – we know only that it will have some several causations – nor to tell us, here at least, how this pseudo-electrical current gets from writer to reader.

Then, after Creeley’s dictum, comes the third “simplicity,”

And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.

This, it is important to note, is antithetical to the traditional rules of exposition. Olson is not only arguing for a particular mode of writing, but against another, in this instance the sort of thing that could be crafted into an outline, converted into a series of topic sentences, then laid out in an orderly, but definitely hierarchical structure. Olson’s argument is the absolute opposite of such hierarchy. The only moment to consider is neither the proposition at the start of the argument, nor the conclusion at its end, but rather now. In this way, Olson again anticipates the present-centered strategy of a whole host of Eastern practices, even tho, the advice he then gives, as consequence & example, sound about as unholistic as one might get:

get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split-second acts, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.

That sense of constant & frenetic motion is a characteristic of Olson’s writing, even as, with that articulation of the third simplicity, the adverbial phrase IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY keep Olson’s key verb phrase from immediately & directly completing itself. One might think of this, as David Saffo suggests in the latest issue of H_NGM_N, as a rhetoric for phenomenologists.

It is impossible, to my ear at least, to see that term, simplicities, without hearing Olson’s words elsewhere, in “Maximus, to himself”:

I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.

Olson actually calls his “simplicities,” “the dogma.” This is the set up for the first of his claims “inside the machinery, now, 1950, of how projective verse is made,” which leads us directly to Olson’s claim for breath.

All weekend I’ve been thinking that there’s an absent third missing between Collecteds & “Books as They Happen” – it’s the case of the Selected. Sometimes even that literary act of category miscegenation, the “New & Selected” (a.k.a “Didn’t write enough new poems for a full book, but wanted/needed to publish one anyway”).

Selecteds are notoriously problematic & there are the horror stories about different ones, such Bob Grenier’s editing of a Creeley Selected that proved too radical for its publisher & was scrapped for something that the publisher thought more of as a Greatest Hits volume. You can find Grenier’s original table of contents in the 1978 Boundary2 issue devoted to Creeley – it would have been a great book.

So I was trying to think about how you might do that. How would one approach the question of thinking it through? I’ve always thought, for example, that my own work wouldn’t lend itself to that form, that you couldn’t intelligibly “excerpt” from these booklength poems that are themselves parts of larger projects. But I wanted to think it through without that double-sided investment of editor/author, so thought about who hasn’t ever had a Selected, and how would I approach their work. Louis Zukofsky. How would I think to edit a Selected works of his poetry?

Even as I’m resistant to the idea that one could/should excerpt from my own poems, I don’t sense that same taboo with his. Is that because it’s not my own work, or because there’s something fundamentally different between his poetry & my own (well, there is, obviously, but besides all of those reasons)?

So what would I pick from “A,” for example? I tend to read “A” not as a continuous whole, but as a series movements:

• 1 through 6, the opening sequence written very much under the influence of The Cantos
• 7 through 11, the poems in which LZ first reaches his mature works
• 12 all by itself, the great WW2 poem, heavily influenced by Paterson
• 13 also by itself, “partita,” one of LZ’s finest works, as finely tuned a modernist work as exists
• 14-20, not “formally” the whole of An (that poem-within-the-poem that is a major sequence unto itself), but its gut”
• 21, “Rudens,” a text I never understood until I saw it performed last year at the Centennial Conference at Columbia, LZ’s lust for Shakespeare’s late fantasies, the weakest section in the entire work¹
• 22-23, which I think of as “the twins,” the finest writing LZ would ever do
• 24, Celia’s gift to LZ proved to be closure, or perhaps cloture

Of these, I would include the following:

• 1 through 3, a brilliant opening, it shows his roots, his indebtedness to Pound & the role of music as a template
• 6, because it is where LZ really is thinking through the problem of the form of the long poem
• 7, because it’s a great poem & where LZ really takes leave of his predecessors
• I love “A” – 8, but realistically, it's too long for a Selected & its involvement with issues of labor, Marx, the question of social movements are all handled more compactly – and more profoundly from a poetic perspective – by the great double-canzone of “A” – 9. “A” – 9 is a must
• “A” – 10 is the first WW2 poem & not nearly so long as “A” – 14, but in the compact environs of a Selected, I’m caught by the easy, careless (and never redacted) racism of lines like “No slant-eyed devil on stilts,” so I wouldn’t include it, even tho the evocation of a lost Paris is one of the most powerful images of the war from an American poet
• “A” – 11, a love poem to his wife & son, one of the clearest statements of his theme of family love, one of his finest poems
• “A” – 12 is both long & problematic from my perspective – this is the only number I would pull excerpts from: the first nine-plus pages up through the stanza on “How does the Czar sleep Nights?” – the section beginning with (big cap) “Blest” and continuing through the passage that starts (also big cap) “Ardent” – the final 11 pages or so, beginning with “These are some things I wanted / to get into a poem” –

Thus after the first 261 pages of the volume, I’ve selected just 70, and if I had to cut back, “A” – 12 would be the first to get cut. The second “half,” by which I mean “A” - 13-23, is not a whole lot longer, 302 pages, but I would include considerably more from this second half of the volume, which LZ did not begin until nine years after completing 12. The second half where Zukofsky’s greatest work lies.

• I would include all of “A” - 13 through 16, an uninterrupted swath of 114 pages.
• I love “A” - 17, the coronal for Floss & elegy for her husband William Carlos Williams, but it’s not Zukofsky’s best work, in spite of its embodiment of poetry as community (&, as such, one of the first truly post-avant works) – likewise, I wouldn’t think to include “A” – 18
• I would include “A” – 19, formally the strongest of the later portions of the 1960s work, a period when, from my reading, LZ’s work was again starting to level off – Zukofsky had a pattern of making enormous strides in his work, followed by longer fallow periods.
• For those reasons, I wouldn’t include either “A” – 20 or 21, but I would include all of “A” – 22 & 23, written in the early ‘70s after the gift of Celia’s musical montage of 24. These two pieces are Zukofsky’s very best work.

That’s a total of 265 pages taken out of a work that contains over 800 once you fold Celia’s piece in. It would of course be the core of any Selected. But would these excerpts “represent” or at the least not entirely gut “A” ? My sense is that it wouldn’t, tho I think you could argue for including others, especially 8, 10 & 17 (another 85 pages). That’s where I’d have to start thinking about just how large my Selected would be, and just how adequately I thought to represent the shorter poems.

 

¹ This is where it becomes clear that Olson’s uses of Shakespeare completely trumps Zukofsky’s.

Rob Stanton has some follow-up questions.

Dear Ron,

Huge thanks for your thorough and thoughtful blog-response to my query about Engines. I think I was hoping that you might say something more about collaboration in general, just as you did - the proliferation of poet/poet and poet/artist collaborations in the current poetic climate is something I find particularly fascinating (just thinking about examples you mention, I recently read - and loved - Leningrad, and the idea behind The Grand Piano seems both interesting in itself and strangely inevitable). I was intrigued that you picked "A"-24 as a possible precedent - I too feel distinctly ambivalent about whether it really does 'cap' "A" (and whether that sort of 'terminal' idea was tenable in the first place). In a sort of sentimental way, I think it does - making semi-actual the scene envisioned in "A"-11: music, words and performance. Apart from that, the nature of the collaboration in "A"-24 seems particularly complicated: firstly, there is Celia Zukofsky's work in setting Zukofsky's words to music, then there is the actual presence of Handel's music (suggesting a Handel/Zukofsky interaction, mediated by Celia), and then there's the question of whether the four 'voices' of Zukofsky presented actual represent a unified 'whole' (one of the joys of that Factory School site is the recording of the 'live' version organised by Barrett Watten*).

Given your point about how collaboration provides an opportunity to sidestep and/or interrogate the 'raging control freak' aspect inherent in an individual 'style', I was also interested in your mention of 'the metabolism of one's own processes'. I'm not sure to what degree you intended the biological inference, but this immediately put me in mind of Olson's repeated emphasis on the physicality of the poet/m. I've always felt that his talk about the individual 'breath' of the poet was strangely close to mainstream whitterings about the necessity of 'individual voice' etc., despite the very different poetic 'ends' advocated. Is 'self' inevitable in poetry? Does the inevitable communality of collaboration offer a real alternative, or does it simply place the problem at one remove (I hate to admit it, but despite the efforts toward some kind of group expression in Leningrad , I found it hard not to 'see' differing styles in the separate passages)? Or, to put it another way, if the problem with most mainstream poetry is the foregrounding of 'unified self' as end rather than mean, is all poetry simply somewhere along a sliding style of degrees-of-leaning-on-personal-experience? (I've been reading The Prelude recently and have been intrigued by the incredibly arbitrary and piecemeal nature of the Wordsworthian 'epiphany' on a larger canvas.) You've written of 'the abstract lyric' before in your blog in relation to the work of Barbara Guest, but is such a thing 100% possible?

Anyway, this has been a horribly rambling email. Apologies in advance, and thanks again.

All the best,

Rob Stanton

The question of the person, in Olson or in collaboration, is invariably a difficult topic, precisely because works are written by individuals, either singly or in groups, & yet we know that “the individual” itself is a complex & internally contradictory construction. If we follow the cognitive scientists and neurobiologists, one of the first things we will discover is that, even within the human being, there is no “monad,” no single site of thought or language. Rather, different portions of the brain work in conjunction to apprehend our world & build responses to it – many of these occur below the level of consciousness & outside of our waking life.

When Olson first began to produce the poems for which we remember him today in the late 1940s, he actually appears to have been almost the only poet in the United States to demonstrate any awareness – more anticipation than knowledge, really – of these issues. In his “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn,” first written in 1955, one year ahead of Ginsberg’s Howl, Olson notes that “millennia . . .  & . . . person”

are not the same as either

time as history or as the

individual as single

The first three pages of “Proprioception,” written six years later & easily Olson’s most ambitious & successful critical project, show O working through this problem, this question, at great length. He is so concerned with place that he is driven to find such, somewhere. Proprioception itself, kinesthesia, one’s awareness of the actual physical rubbing together of one’s inner organs, the growl of the stomach & peristaltic pulse of the bowels, is for Olson a key, an awareness that precedes any other mode of knowing – “I am I because my little gut knows me.” The body for Olson is the place of the unconscious. The “soul,” an entity with which Olson was much obsessed, proved to be profoundly physical. Projection – the meat of his practice as a writer, a (literally) Projectivist poet –

is discrimination (of the object from the subject) and the unconscious is the universe flowing-in, inside.

Maximus, this great comic persona that both is & is not Olson – and most certainly is not Russell Crowe – represents O’s attempt to have it all ways. And while Olson is most certainly not the only poet among the New Americans to push the person beyond its traditional boundaries & unveil the constructedness of such “natural” categories – think of Kerouac’s “Imitation of the Tape” in Visions of Cody, Burroughs’ use of cut-ups in Naked Lunch & The Ticket that Exploded, Spicer’s theory of Martian radio – Olson appears to have been the only one to have had a critical understanding of the question, as such.

So, sure, there is a fair amount of persona floating about Maximus that is not so terribly different in its own way from the imaginary blue-collar worker Phil Levine posits in his “I.” The self in such poetry is largely a type, & I always think of the stereotypical signals thereof worn by the ‘70s rock group The Village People: you can tell which one Levine would have been, though I fear that may be Olson under the feathered headdress. Bly’s serape, Blackburn’s cowboy hat & Duncan’s purple cape were hardly more subtle. Yet it’s Olson, among all of these, who understands not only that it’s funny, but that there are issues here, & as such worth exploring.

That “worth exploring” is, I think, the answer to the question of whether or not “self” is finally inescapable. It will always be, like “the social,” one possible horizon among several, regardless of how nuanced our understanding of its composition might become. After all, how far have we advanced in this regard from Shakespeare’s Lear, responding with a quartet of words that operate like a series of concentric circles, moving from the outer inward: Edgar I nothing am? The same response – worth exploring – is, I suspect, also the underlying principle beneath the continued attraction of the abstract lyric, even if I personally find the issue less compelling. The answer to Stanton’s question’s isn’t ultimately so much why as it is why not?

 * For some reason, the Factory School site fails to credit Bob Perelman, though my understanding is that it was Bob who initiated this collective process in the first place as well as substituting his piano for Handel’s harpsichord. In my video copy of the November 15, 1978 San Francisco State performance, it is Perelman whom Poetry Center director Tom Mandel has introduce the event in addition to his performance therein.

Where is the center of human
suffering? A tight pit at
the pit of the city with the brighter
flesh radiating outward. Or inside
out, the dark rings around the city moving
in and in? At St. Denis? A man
by the freeway picks black-
berries, and no wood-

lot loomed without song.

Fields of wild mustard outside the sub-
division mushroom, each
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one a Flower Beneath the Foot / Sudan / cut off the hands

of my dream when waiting for such things as “Good
night” at the end of the beginning of sleep. Pledge

allegiance, he said, or the pain

starts again. I lived by my book but they asked me to move my body

through a series of movements called “work”     What is the name

that is the game, of the essences of objects of pain? I is another

name of the labels

of laughable
[detours], contents, i.e.,

Night Road Work

These lines are among the most thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly heard (&, not coincidentally, felt) since Charles Olson was a young man. The comparison is apt if only because the writer, Eleni Sikelianos, uses many, if not all, of the devices in Olson’s tool kit as she works through this passage, the first third or so of a poem called “The Brighter Flesh,” from Blue Guide, the first of the two books that make up Earliest Words (Coffee House Press, 2001). This formal vocabulary, I would argue, is carried further than Olson himself could have done – follow the “i” and “t” sounds through that first stanza, initially separated in “is” and “center” (that sibilant s sound hissing their segregation), joined in the second line, playing off the contrast between long & short vowel in  “tight pit,” then again in the third line – “pit,” “city,” “brighter” – only to foliate in the fourth within “radiating” (Sikelianos gets more emphasis out of that intervening long “a” than any poet I can recall), only to turn them around & around again through the end of this sentence nearly two lines later. As an instance of pure technical brilliance, the passage is breathtaking, but where it is propelling us as readers turns out to be even more so: to the violence of Sharia, the rule of law imposed by Islamic fundamentalists. Enjambment here governs the prosody of nightmare. 

Earliest Words (and Blue Guide in particular) is filled with such mouth-dropping moments, many of which have relatively little to share with Olson or the Pound/Williams tradition in general (there are, for example, some great prose poems here). But reading this passage & others like it for the first time this past spring made me realize just how long it had been since I had seen anybody do something profoundly useful with this set of discursive tools. You have to go back to the books of the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz from the late 1970s to see poetry achieve anything genuinely new in this vein. 

An interesting poet to contrast with Sikelianos might be Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose Drafts also sometimes carry the surface characteristics of the Pound/Olson tradition of the long poem. If you read DuPlessis chronologically, however, I think you see a rather different developmental journey from her early post-Objectivist impulses toward a work with extraordinary scope and complexity. In short, she has arrived at this outer appearance to her texts quite independently and, if you look at the individual sections closely, they don’t function anything like logical extensions of Pound’s or Olson’s uses of history and reference. Where “the guys” expound, argue and hector in their poetry, DuPlessis thinks. Not surprisingly, it is DuPlessis you meet in the text of Drafts, while Pound & Olson both used the written as though it were a wall they were building between themselves and the reader (Pound’s “great acorn of light” is, in  fact, intended to blind). The result has a radically different affect. It is this point at which DuPlessis’ poetry and that of Sikelianos meet.