Charles Olson, I noted a week ago Thursday, insists on being taken as a crank. The fourth section of Proprioception, a page and a half to sum up “Theory of Society,” underscores my point. It begins with this assertion, in parentheses & all in lower case:

(we already posses a
 sufficient theory of
 psychology)

Much of what follows can be read as an assault on one of the “hip” biases of the late 1950s & beyond (versions of which exist today, no doubt), that everything is interesting, at least potentially. Olson calls this “the greatest present danger / the area of pseudo-sensibility.” What follows the colon that ends that line sounds like a direct assault on, of all things, Oulipo, or perhaps Fluxus, movements that began coincidentally in 1960 & ’62 respectively, the exact period of Proprioception.

games

randomness

haphazard

                (I Ching-
                    ness)

Olson decidedly is opposed to the idea that “anything goes or / all is interesting Or / nothing is.” Proprioception is the era of the Bay of Pigs & the Cuban missile crisis – the idea that such proto-hippy sentiments should constitute “the greatest present danger” 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 & where Bucky Fuller orchestrated an event that Kaprow, in particular, would later run with, the happening.

It’s interesting also to think of what Olson means by already possessing “a / sufficient theory of / psychology.” Olson is often treated as if his interest in the evolution of psychology in the 20^th century were largely limited to Jung, though in fact he refers at different points to many of the major writers & will, literally on the next page, present us with a garbled version of Anna Freud’s concept of the stages of psychological development.

But if you look to Maximus, both the poem & the figure – one of two great instances of persona from the poets of the 1950s (John Berryman’s being the other) – you don’t see Olson interested in exploring the historic Maximus so much & certainly not his own motivations, but rather the idea of the self looking out into the world & acting thereon. “Society” here means, I think, exactly that.

So Olson is not, repeat not, interested in sitting still for 4’33” meditating on ambient noise & calling it music. Olson’s piano, where he to compose for such, would certainly be over prepared. Here he offers what he sees as the alternative to the “everything is groovy, dude” worldview:

instead of novelty (“God is the organ of
                           novelty”

This is at least the third time in Proprioception 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’t, say, the steady state that would apply if the so-called natural cycles didn’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: which one? Which is what I take Olson to mean when he says in the next three lines that “the true cast of / the sensible / probability.”

In the next stanza – Olson’s critical prose doesn’t quite get to paragraphs – Olson takes off against “kicks,” phoney (sic) disaffection – anticipating here the “turn on, tune in, drop out” 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 “the elite among / the masses accomplishing / a lateral coup d’état.” Adorno couldn’t have put it more succinctly.

Olson’s straw man, here, never fully figured as such, comes close to Milan Kundera’s 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.

Olson then advances one of his pet theories, that people become identified with the point at which they “fall off” from keeping attuned to the new:

Some fell off at 5 etc some at
17 others 40, like No matter, they
are bombers (carrying forces) of the time
they fell off, not what
they look like talk like
seem etc Or are
taken as

It is this that Olson contrasts with Anna Freud’s developmental phases (infancy, libidinal, oedipean, etc.), a world that was healthier because “rites / de passage existed.”

         Opinion
has replaced all such

Word writing. Instead of ‘idea-writing’ (ideogram etc). That would seem to be it.

Thus begins “Logography,” the second essay, note or section of Proprioception. In the space of one page, Olson makes a couple of basic assertions – that the phoneticization of writing systems comes about from the need to accurately represent proper names & that for a long time after the arrival of phonetic writing, grammatical elements were not indicated. The implication – an important one for a poet whose later writing will often look like notes cast spatially across the page – is that phonetics precedes grammar, both historically & in terms of importance.

This is also unmistakably a shot at Ezra Pound, whose “collaboration” with the late Ernest Fenollosa on ideograms was generative for Pound’s poetry, but also managed to set forth all manner of linguistic myths into the literary culture, partly because Pound was no linguist & partly because Fenollosa wasn’t either.¹ Thus Olson’s concern with “abt the earliest business we can know anything abt, some Sumerian traders in cattle” is not with the detail, the economics of the exchange, but the actual sequence of sounds involved:

Uruk
       Erech
              Orchoe
                       Warka

Try saying that fast three times. Just two firm consonants, r and k, around which vowels are placed in various sequences.

The third section or note of Proprioception is interesting on at least two dimensions. One is that as almost a footnote – its title is “Postscript to Proprioception & Logography” – this piece suggests that Olson has not, at this point anyway, sketched out the larger plan of this project & that the remaining six sections will be as much a surprise to him as to us.

The other is the pair of terms raised up here as foundational: Landscape – Olson italicizes it – and NOUN (O. puts it all in caps), which he terms “fundamentals of any new discourse.” Beyond these words, as such, it’s worth pausing to think about why, exactly, Olson feels the need for a “new discourse,” what that phrase conveys for him. It’s one thing, at the outset of his project in 1950, to be seeking a new discourse, but to be doing so 12 years later positions it differently, as more of a permanent desire, that discourse itself be subject to the old modernist dictum: make it new.

Landscape is space – a key term for Olson throughout his career – but space of a particular kind, that “which the eye / can comprehend in a single view.” In a sense, landscape would appear to be to space what proprioception would be to the self or soul, that which we can grasp intuitively, or as Olson phrases it, “know it / instantly.”

There is a spatial break midway down the page before Olson tells us:

The other knowing is NOUN, proper (proprius)
noun – that which belongs to the self

Proprius is a term we have already met here, rooted deep in proprioception. Thus Olson sets up that which is not the self, the landscape & the nouns that occupy that space.

 

¹ Realistically, no one was in any meaningful sense prior to the work of Saussure, whose course on general linguistics was first taught in 1906, just two years before Fenollosa died, and whose ideas didn’t become widely understood until after the 1960-62 timeframe in which Olson composed Proprioception. Thus Finnegans Wake, to pick one lurid example, proceeds from Joyce’s understanding of 19th century philology, a fatal starting point. Saussure’s notes, cobbled together by his students after his death in 1913, spread first to the Prague School of Linguistics & then more broadly into cultural theory through the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who was introduced to the ideas while attending a course of Jacobson’s at the New School during World War 2, but whose own writing did not become popular in the U.S. until after Olson crafted Proprioception. Olson’s own conception of anthropology, never very far from the surface of his own poetics, is very much pre-structuralist in its assumptions & vocabulary. Olson must have known the work of the likes of Sherry Anderson & Margaret Mead & all the gentlemen Egyptologists who were plundering the pyramids, but hardly any of the authors who would make anthropology one of the great pop successes of the 1960’s academy. The ghosts that Olson is tackling here are all gone a decade later.

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 19^th 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 village of Gloucester, except as an example of his own role there. Or for any questions concerning Sumeria, Greek mythology, the Maya or whatever. At least no more than I would turn to Ezra Pound for information on economics.

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 Tyre, talking about one thing — Homer’s Odyssey.

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 Cambridge could best be described as fitful.

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 Williams College, Labor Day Weekend, Sept. 2-4, 1951

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.

One of the interesting – problematic may be a better word – aspects of reading not just Charles Olson, but any poet of the last century on subjects that move even a little away from the realm of the close inspection of poetic texts, as such, is positioning – framing may be the better word – their arguments within the broader landscape of contemporary intellectual discourse. Read Ezra Pound after Marx, or even after a few issues of the Monthly Review, and you realize that Pound’s initial impulses weren’t so bad, but that addressing problems of justice through monetary policy requires a theoretical infrastructure so vast – precisely because you are so far from root causes – that the opportunity to go astray is huge. And Pound is sort of the test case to demonstrate just how far astray one might wander. There’s a viciousness in his radio broadcasts that registers just how maddening – I’m choosing my words carefully – it must have been to see his vision of the future coming asunder. And it’s no accident that his very best writing occurs next, at the moment when, living in a wire cage in a prisoner of war camp, waiting to be sent back to the U.S. for trial or possibly just taken out & shot, Pound is stripped of all his books & intellectual trappings, penning the Pisan Cantos literally on scraps of paper.

Similarly, I wonder how Olson’s Proprioception, specifically the title essay, three page outline that it is, might have proceeded had Olson ever read Althusser. Or, at the least, extracted from Althusser the concept of ideology as it is expressed in the essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”. The question is bogus, at least partly, simply because Olson wrote Proprioception between 1960 & ’62, while Althusser first published his essay in La Pensée in 1970, very much as a reformulation of theory in the wake of the failed French revolution of 1968. Olson lived just two weeks beyond his 59^th birthday, dying on the tenth of January 1970 – he never lived to read Lenin and Philosophy, really to absorb any of the material that would begin to flow forth in great quantity in the U.S. after the height of the anti-Vietnam war movement peaked in 1970 with the murder of students at Kent and Jackson State Universities. Olson may have, almost inadvertently, been among the first to coin the phrase post-modern to characterize the epoch then coming into existence, but if, for example, he knew of the “Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” conference held at Johns Hopkins in October, 1966, the iconic tipping point between the structuralism of the 1950s & the new world of Post-everything that this conference announced, I haven’t seen evidence.¹ Although the conference, whose speakers included Derrida, Lacan, Todorov & Roland Barthes (presenting “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?”), occurred just 16 months after the Berkeley Poetry Conference in which Olson gave his infamous lights-out marathon talk, by 1966 his critical writing is already largely behind him. My own impression, based I must say largely on my reading of Tom Clark’s gothic bio of Olson, is that his drinking ramped up significantly after Betty’s death in an auto accident in 1964. Beyond sketching out “A Plan for the Curriculum of the Soul” in early 1968, Olson will make no more major theoretical statements in his life. The productive core of his life – from the first poems in the late 1940s until the work begins to trail off in the late ‘60s, is just twenty years. Longer perhaps than the careers of Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara, perhaps, but not very long.

Ironically, soul is exactly the word I wish Olson had had the opportunity to interpenetrate with Althusser’s conception of ideology. It is the third term in Olson’s dialectic, between physiology & the unconscious, and it’s the focus of the second half of Proprioception’s title essay. The sidebar to the next full paragraph beyond the one I ended Monday’s note with is: the soul is / proprioceptive. And is worth quoting further:

the ‘body’ itself as, by movement of its own tis-
sues, giving the data of, depth. Here, then wld be
what is left out? Or what is physiologically even
the ‘hard’ (solid, palpable), that one’s life is
informed from and by one’s own literal body –

What obsesses Olson here, the point if you will, of Proprioception, is that

which is what gets ‘buried,’ like, the
flesh? bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., what one
uses, literally, to get about etc

that this is ‘central,’ that is – in
this ½ of the picture – what they call the SOUL,
the intermediary, the intervening thing, the inter-
ruptor, the resistor. The self.

This key passage of Olson’s sounds like nothing so much to me as this:

ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it recruits subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or it ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”

Which is the key paragraph in Althusser’s essay. In each instance, the intervening/interrupting thing at home in our identity is being defined as X, whether X is ideology or X is Soul.

This does not mean that I think what Olson is describing here necessarily is ideology, whether in the broad Althusserian sense (ideology is that which defines us) or the more narrow daily meaning (ideology as a political label). For one thing Althusser’s ideas themselves – like those of any of the major structuralist theorists of the past half century – are themselves deeply problematic, flamboyantly so in the instance of the French philosopher who later murdered his own wife and was at least as psychiatrically challenged as Pound, let alone Olson. But it would be of extraordinary use, I think, if we could read these twin conceptions – ideology/Soul – as partaking of one another, seeing what each might then tell us further about the other.

It is clear, to my eye at least, that Olson’s goal in identifying the Soul is construct a dialectic, as he literally says in the next paragraph, that the “gain” is

to have a third term, so that movement or action
is ‘home.’ Neither the Unconscious nor Projection
(here used to remove the false opposition of
‘Conscious’; ‘consciousness’ is self) have a home
unless the DEPTH implicit in physical being –
built-in space-time specifics, and moving (by
movement of ‘its own’)   – is asserted, or found-
out as such. Thus, the advantage of the value
’proprioception.” As such.

Althusser himself has gotten to his essay on ideology immediately after one on dialectics in Lenin, quoting Lenin on Hegel as follows:

Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract . . . does not get way from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice – such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.

Olson rejects the unbodied presence of categories – his fascination with the details of historical record is just the surface of a deeply anti-Platonic nature, although it is interesting to see where in his system he puts this:

the three terms wld be:
surface (senses) projection
cavity (organs – here read ‘archetypes’)
unconscious the body itself – consciousness:
implicit accuracy, from its own energy as a state of
implicit motion

Identity,        therefore (the universe is one) is supplied; and the
abstract-primitive character of the real (asserted)
is ‘placed’: projection is discrimination (of the
object from the subject) and the unconscious is the
universe flowing-in, inside.

At one level, one could read Olson here as being part of a long chain – stretching out beyond Althusser or Henri Lefebvre & Lenin or Hegel, all the way back to Socratic method.² Yet these are largely disconnected discourses – even more so now than in 1970 in fact. If the rise of theory, specifically the rise of the continental tradition of the human sciences, so called, in the wake of the collapse of the left in the west after 1970, was part of a flow back into the academy of a generation of intellectuals who now used this thinking not just to try & understand what had so profoundly not worked in the late 1960s, but eventually also as an emerging professional language, focused not on understanding the world & changing it so much as on the more pedestrian goals of academic professional life, the long-term transformative potential of theory in the west was doomed from the start.

But if the banalization & bureaucratization of theory was in the cards as soon as the activists of 1968 began to realize that they needed tenure if they were going to raise families & have personal lives of their own, Olson’s own Curriculum of the Soul was never aimed in the same direction. He’d already lived the experience of Black Mountain College, which was – at once, as it only could have been – it proved both the most successful educational experiment in the history of the arts in America and a complete & utter disaster administratively & financially.

What would a Curriculum of the Soul for a post-theoretical age look like?

 

¹ The one poet I know who did attend the Johns Hopkins event was Bruce Andrews, still a teenager at the time.

² It is, after all, Engels who first discusses dialectics in terms of its (partial) roots in Buddhist practice, where it was a already a descendant of earlier Vedic thinking.

I was asked to come & teach this summer at Naropa, specifically to talk about “dialectical materialism” as part of a weeklong unit on philosophy & poetry, an interesting proposition, and this is what took me back to Charles Olson. Years before, at a time when I’d been part of a study group in San Francisco on the general topic of Marxism & modernism, I had been reading Henri Lefebvre’s great Dialectical Materialism, a work written right on the cusp of the Second World War – the first publication was by Presses Universitaires de France in 1940 – and, quite by chance, happened to be reading Proprioception at the same time. At some point during those readings, it occurred to me that I was not reading two books nearly so much as I reading two instances of the same argument. "Proprioception," the title piece, is (or at least can be read as) dialectics for poetry. So when I got the invitation to go to Naropa this year – I’m there the last week of this month & first couple of days of July – my immediate instinct was to turn back to Proprioception & see how it stood up now, roughly two decades after I’d had that initial reaction.

The relationship of Proprioception – and Olson’s project on an even broader scale – to the question of dialectics makes an intuitive sense. First, the Lefebvre volume, written decades before the French philosopher became the critic of everyday life who inspired the students on the barricades of 1968, was published in English translation by Cape/Grossman in the very same series edited by Nathaniel Tarn that included the republication of Olson’s Call Me Ishmael & the initial release of The Mayan Letters. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the first four volumes in that series overall were Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Scope of Anthropology, Call Me Ishmael, and two volumes by Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, followed immediately with volumes by William Carlos Williams, Václav Havel & Nazim Hikmet (at a time when the latter two were almost entirely unknown in the West).

The Cape/Grossman series itself was as erratic as it was inventive – as I understand it, Cape Editions published in the U.K. volumes chosen by Tarn & those that were not already being marketed in the U.S. (like the Barthes’ volumes) got the “/Grossman” slip jacket added for import here, at least until, at some point after 1970, Viking Compass took over that side of the operation (which is how Viking came to publish Zukofsky’s “A” 22-23). Dialectical Materialism, no. 27 in the series, comes roughly midway between Mayan Letters (no. 17) and Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems (no. 38). Some of the other volumes that occurred during that particular stretch included Julian Huxley’s The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe & Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Francis Ponge’s Soap & Fidel Castro’s History Will Absolve Me, plus volumes by Alfred Jarry, Nicanor Parra, Louis Zukofsky, André Breton, Yves Bonnefoy, Georg Trakl, a volume by Lucien Goldmann, another volume by Lévi-Strauss, A Critique of Pure Tolerance by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr & Herbert Marcuse, and a second volume by Václav Havel. Nor was it any accident that when Harvey Brown published the Frontier Press edition of Williams’ Spring & All, the book was designed to mimic the pocket-sized Cape volumes. More important that who or what got published in the series is the degree to which it reflects one of the most important features of the decade, which is the miscegenation of ideas from different – often conflicting – discursive & professional fields. Just as both Marxism & Freudian analysis proved far more pervasive throughout a wide range of disciplines because neither had a “home church” in any given college department – Freudian analysis evaded the psych department by training its practitioners outside of the university system altogether – the range of possible codes that could be brought to bear on any given subject seemed at least potentially limitless.

One can hear the degree to which Olson himself internalizes this in how he describes the nominal subject of his epic poem. Far from being Russell Crowe in Gladiator, the historic Maximus of Tyre was, to use Olson’s own term for it, “a 2^nd Century dialectician.” In a talk that he gave at Goddard College right at the end-point of composing Proprioception, Olson describes Maximus this way:

I mean this creature Maximus addresses himself to, to a city, which in the instance is, is Gloucester, which, then in turn, happens to be Massachusetts. That is Gloucester, Massachusetts. I’m not at all under the impression that it is necessarily more to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in any more meaningful sense than the creature is, either me, or whom he originally was intended as, which was a, was Maximus of Tyre, a 2^nd Century, uh, dialectician. At least on the record, what he wrote, was Dialethae which I guess we have in the word “dialectic” meaning intellectual essence, or essays on an intellectual subject, and uh, he mostly wandered around the Mediterranean world from the center, from the, from the old capital of Tyre, talking about one thing — Homer’s Odyssey. I don’t have much more of an impression of him than that. I’ve tried to read his, dialethae and found them not as interesting as I expected. But he represents to me some sort of a figure, that centers, much more than, much more than the 2nd Century A.D. In fact, as far as I feel it like, he’s like the neighbor of the world, and uh, in saying that I’m not being poetic or loose, uh. We come from a whole line of life which makes Delphi that center. I guess, I guess I, can say that amongst you and still be heard. And this I think must be the kind of a theory that can at least be disturbed.

So Maximus means – or at least conveys at some level – dialectics, although as one wades through Proprioception, it is worth keeping in mind Olson’s other, rather off-the-cuff definition of dialectics: intellectual essence, or essays on an intellectual subject.

I’m not at all sure just how he might have dealt with the vagaries & limitations of HTML, but I am certain of this. Olson himself would have been a great blogger.

In his address to the May 20 OlsonNow event at MIT, Ben Friedlander proposes that “Olson’s ideas were not static, but always in flux.” There is an important truth here, but. But. But it is worth noting that Olson begins his other great manifesto project, ”Proprioception,” in the exact same place he did “Projective Verse” some 12 years earlier, with the body. His body.

Physiology:     the surface (senses – the ‘skin’: of ‘Human
Universe’) the body itself – proper – one’s own
’corpus’: PROPRIOCEPTION the cavity of the body,
in which the organs are slung: the viscera, or
interoceptive, the old ‘psychology’ of feeling,
the heart; of desire, the liver; of sympathy, the
’bowels’: of courage – the kidney etc – gall.
(Stasis – or as in Chaucer only, spoofed)

         Today:     movement, at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (nik)
the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles,
tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily
tensions (– or relations of same). Violence:
knives/anything, to get the body in.

To which

PROPIOCEPTION: the data of depth sensibility/the ‘body’ of us as
object which spontaneously or of its own order
produces experience of, ‘depth’ Viz
SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM

     BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES

That passage is worth quoting at some length just because it does so position Olson: meat before mind. Olson starts from a phenomenological premise – that we can only know what our senses tell us (even as, in Maximus, what they so often tell us is about the historical record, the merest suggestion of connections). The animal – not yet even “I” – sees, hears, feels, smells, is aware but not yet conscious. If this wasn’t already apparent, Olson lays it out next, adding.

   ‘Psychology':   the surface: consciousness as ego and thus no flow
because the ‘senses’ of same are all that sd contact
area is valuable for, to report in to central. In

THE WORKING     spection, followed hard on heels by, judgment

   ‘OUT’ OF         (judicium, dotha: cry, if you must/all feeling may

‘PROJECTION’      flow, is all which can count, at sd point. Direction
outword is sorrow, or joy. Or participation: active
social life, like, for no other reason than that –
social life,. In the present. Wash the ego out, in its
own ‘bath’ (os).

That physiology and psychology both begin for Olson at the same place – the surface – can be no accident. Yes, it’s intimate division between self & other, here & there, fort & da, but it is also, or so Olson appears to be suggesting, something prior even to that.

Proprioception differs from “Projective Verse” in that it’s not an essay in any usual sense, but a book of notes – the sections quoted above are as normal as the prose writing gets here & several sections are simply beyond my ken with HTML to reproduce. Specifically, it’s a series of nine notes – what I’ve quoted thus far amounts to the first third of the initial one – all published in various journals (Kulchur, Yugen, Floating Bear) edited by the then-LeRoi Jones before being issued as a book in ’65 by Donald Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation. In the ten years that separate out “Projective Verse” from Proprioception, many things have happened to Olson: meeting Creeley (which he does right at the moment when he’s writing “Projective Verse”), the start of Maximus, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, the rise of New American Poetry generally, the dissolution of his marriage & subsequent partnership with Betty Kaiser, the publication of his first important books of poetry, the reissue of Call Me Ishmael (with an audience now assured for it), and the publication of The New American Poetry in May, 1960, where Olson’s position as the very first author seems absolutely intended as a signal that it is he, not Ginsberg, not O’Hara, not Duncan, not Creeley, but Olson who is the driving force behind the broad new aesthetics then rising up everywhere in American verse. It can be daunting to imagine the chutzpah of Olson writing “Projective Verse,” having at that point published just one book of poems, X & Y, and having just written a handful of the pre-Max poems (such as “The Kingfishers” and “The Praises”) after that. In 1960, Olson is unquestionably a central figure in American poetry.

Olson’s writing is different in 1960 as well. The propulsive, rapidly shifting movements that characterize both the early prose & early verse are in fact more calculated now. He still believes, as he writes, in “movement, at any cost,” but the writing is far less mimetic about it. If anything, that sentence fragment -- movement, at any cost – is a strikingly static way to put this. Or perhaps it is less anxious.

The other thing that immediately strikes me, reading Proprioception up against “Projective Verse” with some 40 years’ hindsight, is just how much more ambitious it is, as a program, than even that of its audacious forerunner. “Projective Verse” really had two primary moves, one to set out grounds for poetic practice, the second to frame that practice within the world. That Proprioception will go further is signaled here by an attempt, in the next small paragraph, to identify actively as a thing that which exists materially only as context, that space within our bodies between organs:

The ‘cavity’/cave: probably the ‘Unconscious’? That
is, the interior empty place filled with ‘organs’? for
‘functions’?

This paragraph is atypical for Olson, precisely because it is so halting & open about its own uncertainty. He uses question marks, he cushions his claim with “probably.” Then, in the next paragraph – this on carries the sidebar title of “THE ‘PLACE’ / OF THE / ‘UNCONSCIOUS’” – Olson explains:

The advantage is to ‘place’ the thing, instead of
it wallowing around sort of outside, in the
universe, like, when the experience of it is intero-
ceptive: it is inside us/& at the same time does
not literally feel identical with our own physical or
mortal self (the part that can die). In this sense
likewise the heart, etc, the small intestine, etc, are
or can be felt as – and literally they can be –
transferred. Or substituted for. Etc. The organs. –
Probably also why the old psychology was chiefly
visceral: neither dream, nor the unconscious, was
then known as such. Or allowably inside, like.

There is, I think, something very human – appealing to me in any event – in Olson’s desire to ‘place’ the thing, to render the Unconscious as an object, as such, that he might query it, study it as if it were yet another organ, rather than, in this folk physiology, the absence of organs as such. Again, Olson seems quite aware of just how much he is taking on here & repeatedly telegraphs cautions, that one not read this as too literal or fully baked – the use of etc, the reiterated Probably – and that almost Valley Girl final qualification, ending this assertion with the qualification like.

When I read the sexist language in Olson’s “Projective Verse,” my instinct is to see Olson as a not-too-atypical male of his generation, chronologically positioned midway between my grandfather’s generation born in the late 1890s & my father who was born in 1927. He sounds like a case of testosterone poisoning & is no doubt the person intended by the rubric given to the macho side of the New American Poetics as the Wounded Buffalo School. Yet dismissing that language as a sign of generational ignorance – Zukofsky & Pound & Eliot all had their visibly patriarchal sides – and keeping in mind that the Allen anthology has just four women among its 44 contributors – is not too unlike dismissing the equally unmistakable anti-Semitism in Pound, Cummings, Stevens or Eliot. You do it at some risk.

You could also take exactly the other tack, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis did about ten years back in an issue of Diacritics, in an essay called “Manifests” that likewise close reads “Projective Verse,” but as a sexual text rather than merely one on poetics whose arteries are clogged with the prejudices of the time. It’s a fascinating alternate path into the work, informed externally by the discovery of Tom Clark’s – the real literary coup of his Olson bio – that Olson’s primary mentor in the post-War years before he met up with the chicken farmer from New Hampshire named Creeley was a book designer, Frances Motz Boldereff, with whom he had an intense & informing affair that he subsequently kept secret from very nearly everyone, so that it came as news two decades after his death. Reading Olson through the Boldereff correspondence, now quite thoroughly in print, reminds one of nothing so much as Olson’s own way of reading Shakespeare into Melville, the informing thesis of Call Me Ishmael. The cover of the Wesleyan University Press edition shows photos of Olson & Boldereff from the 1940s – his (from the same shoot as the photo I used on May 23, wearing dark shirt & tie) above the title, hers below. So far as I know, no photo of the two together was ever taken.

In that wonderful way she has in her poetry as well as her criticism of looking at an issue from all perspectives, DuPlessis doesn’t just dismiss the replete sexism with a sigh, nor throw Olson overboard for it, but uses it to interrogate Allen Grossman’s critical work, Summa Lyrica, which, in DuPlessis’ words “announces the force of poetics as ideology.” Nor does she stop there, but rather proceeds to read the text through the works of other recent theorists, including Deleuze and Guattari (there is that question of incest to deal with, after all, and, following Grossman, the whole oedipal ball o’ wax), Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous. But then DuPlessis does this both ways, reading them through Olson & Grossman. It’s a process that eventually will lead you to understand what DuPlessis means when she claims that “I don’t write ‘poetry,’” a tricky position to hold if you’re one of the best poets going, which she is.

Nor does DuPlessis let Boldereff off the hook. What does it mean for a woman to be a muse, to choose that role rather than put her own work forward for what it is? The answers aren’t simple, and they may not even be answers, certainly not in the “settled argument” sense of that term.

You can get DuPlessis’ essay from Diacritics if your library belongs to the appropriately named (for this discussion at least) Project Muse, a service whose sole function is to keep critical writing out of the hands of independent scholars and general readers, so as to maintain the two-tier (or more) system of authorities by which the tenured speak only to the tenured & tenured-to-be (they hope). Or you can wait until Blue Studios comes forth as a book, which I am told it shall, very soon, from the University of Alabama

Charles Olson between
Robert Duncan & Ruth Witt Diamant
San Francisco State, 1958

Of the slightly more than 4,500 words that make up “Projective Verse,” 1,198 – just over one-quarter – appear in part II. Whereas the first part was devoted, both strategically & tactically, to poetics, II is concerned with the status of the poem in the world, as object & as knowledge:

Which gets us to what I promised, the degree to which the projective involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance toward reality of a poem itself. It is a matter of content, the content of Homer or of Euripides or of Seami¹ as distinct from that which I might call the more “literary” masters. From the moment the projective purpose of the act of verse is recognized, the content does — it will — change. If the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. It has to. It starts with the composer. The dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter’s use.

I myself would pose the difference by physical image.

It sounds as if Olson is about to head into Williams’ machine-made-of-words territory, but, even tho what he will say eventually leads to the idea, first voiced in Spring & All, that poems are objects as additions to nature, this isn’t the path Olson will take to get there. Instead, Olson makes what is decidedly the oddest detour in this essay, distinguishing – or trying to – what he’s after from an Objectivism that he patently seems not to understand or know. 1950, it is worth remembering, is the absolute nadir of Objectivism, 19 years after Louis Zukofsky coined the term to justify his gathering of the younger poets of the Pound-Williams tradition into Poetry. Late modernists who were, for the most part, Marxists or fellow travelers, the Objectivists were at odds with the vulgar poetics of the so-called New York Intellectuals (who would, in fact, be morphing soon enough from their lightly held Trotskyism into becoming the base for the first wave of the neoconservative political movement). And the Objectivists were – with the notable exception of Basil Bunting (a notable exception on many counts, working as a British spy in Persia) – quite apart from the expat culture of the high modernists in Europe. During the 1940s, virtually all had stopped publishing. Some had stopped writing. In an age where books were far harder to come by than they are today, when the idea of Googling a source wasn’t even fathomable, Olson’s characterization of Objectivism as opposed to a simplistic School of Quietude confessionalism that had, in his terms, “excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying,” is understandable, tho hardly accurate & more interesting for what it projects onto Zukofsky et al than as an analysis of that poetry.

After the better part of two paragraphs on the topic, Olson finally turns toward his point:

For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.

It isn’t the poem as object that Olson here is after, but the poet. Olson is very much proposing an ecological vision of human activity, just one species among many. And his argument is not that it will be good for the planet, but rather good for the poems, because the poet will be closer to a world of species & artifacts, each of which has, as Pound might have put it, its virtue. There is more to this than just the idea that your dust bunnies are keeping secrets from you, or that animations like Toy Story are right, at least in spirit. And this is where he begins to sound very much like the William Carlos Williams of 1923:

And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature.

To give his work … a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is almost Spring & All verbatim.

But Olson’s ultimate goal – and this is worth thinking about in a man who stood at 6’9” & must have weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds – is size:

But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size.

It is projective size that the play, The Trojan Women, possesses,

Olson reiterates, ticking off his three examples – the other two are Homer & Zeimi’s Nōh play, Hagoromo, all of which bear the notable stamp of Ezra Pound.

Nor do I think it accident that, at this end point of the argument, I should use, for examples, two dramatists and an epic poet. For I would hazard to guess that, if projective verse is practiced long enough, is driven ahead hard enough along the course I think it dictates, verse again can carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans.

This is a man who has, in 1950, not yet come to know the work of Robert Creeley, who would seem to me absolute proof that scale is not the issue, regardless of what Olson would do with Maximus, a project that Olson began this same year, or what Duncan might do a 15 years or so hence with Passages.

But Olson cannot stop here – he has to turn in yet another direction to pick a last fight, with the plays specifically of the poet then known best for writing works of drama: T.S. Eliot.

Eliot is, in fact, a proof of a present danger, of “too easy” a going on in the practice of verse as it has been, rather than as it must be, practiced.

Olson concedes that he likes Eliot’s line, especially in early works like ”Prufrock.” But,

it could be argued that it is because Eliot has stayed inside the non-projective that he fails as a dramatist — that his root is mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that (no high intelletto despite his apparent clarities) — and that, in his listenings he has stayed there where the ear and the mind are, has only gone from his fine ear outward rather than, as I say a projective poet will, down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has come from, where, the coincidence is, all act springs.

That is, I think, an interesting, even curious, place to end such a piece as this manifesto. It shows Olson the neurotic as well as Olson the theorist. Had he in fact had more the courage of his convictions, he might instead have turned his attention elsewhere, skating, as Wayne Gretzky puts it, to where the puck will be, rather than where it seemed at rest mid-century. As powerful as Eliot was as an organizing figure, especially for the School of Quietude in this country, in 1950, his reputation had virtually nowhere to go but down, and that’s a slide that has been almost entirely uninterrupted now for more than a half century. Far from being the central figure whom one has to position in order to have a theory that proposes to accommodate the whole landscape, he now is a footnote, someone who produced some raw footage that Pound edited down into something akin to a fine flarf fugue.

It is too soon to consider, in 1950, what the New Americans might produce. For all purposes, they hadn’t at that point. But if only Olson had known the Objectivists, had thought more historically about their absence at that moment in history, and actually read the work, “Projective Verse” might well have had a much more interesting end. Admittedly, Olson’s disinterest in Zukofsky, even 15 to 20 years later, appears to have been match only by Zukofsky’s disinterest in Olson. But there has to be more to it than the fact that one was the most anal retentive poet in existence & the other his absolute polar opposite. For, tho Zukofsky does not rely on Olson’s folk physiology, what work at mid-century better poses itself as the test case of Olson’s thesis than “A”?

 

¹ Olson is referring to Zeami Motokiyo, 14^th & 15^th century Nōh master, one of whose works, Hagoromo, or Robe of Feathers, was translated by Ezra Pound & Ernest Fenellosa, Jo Kondo’s recent opera for which was recorded in 2002 by the London Sinfonietta, Paul Zukofsky conducting.

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.