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.

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.

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.

I’ve written on numerous occasions that the so-called San Francisco Renaissance was largely a fiction, perpetrated in part by Donald Allen in order to give The New American Poetry a section that acknowledged just how much of this phenomenon rose up out of the San Francisco Bay Area – a literary backwater prior to WW2, but now suddenly a primary locale for much that was new. The other part – and it’s not clear to me who, if anyone, could be said to have perpetrated this – was an allusion back to the earlier Berkeley Renaissance, which had been a decisive, thriving literary tendency in the late 1940s, early 1950s. If you look at Allen’s S.F. Renaissance grouping, you call still make out the vestiges of that earlier moment in the presence of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer & Robin Blaser, the trio that had given rise to the Berkeley Renaissance while studying at the University of California, along with, I suppose, Helen Adam, who at the time of the anthology was something of a Duncan protégé. Yet there are also poets representing an older San Francisco scene, such as Madeline Gleason & James Broughton & even – tho it’s a stretch, given what a loner he was, at least when he wasn’t actively channeling Robinson Jeffers – Brother Antoninus (William Everson). Then there are a group of younger poets – Richard Duerden, Kirby Doyle, Ebbe Borregaard & Bruce Boyd – whom it’s harder to place aesthetically, a fact that is still true some 45 years after the book’s initial publication, as they’ve become its least published participants. That Allen placed Lawrence Ferlinghetti into this grouping, rather than with the Beats, suggests just how arbitrary these distinctions were.

Given that he was improvising & fabricating in search of clustering principles in general, it’s curious that Allen completely missed one of the most interesting & useful formations among the New Americans, a western poetics that may have first revealed itself at Reed College in Portland, and which didn’t fully take flight until the mid- to late-1950s in San Francisco. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch & Phil Whalen in fact were just the first of a number of poets who came out of this aesthetic – one could probably put Duerden & Borregaard there as well, plus three other contributors to the Allen anthology, all of whom joined Snyder & Whalen in Allen’s curiously amorphous unaffiliated fifth grouping: Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer. Beyond the Allen anthology itself, one might add Richard Brautigan, James Koller, Joanne Kyger, David Schaff, Bill Deemer, Drummond Hadley, Clifford Burke, David Gitin, John Oliver Simon, Lowell Levant, John Brandi, Gail Dusenberry & a host of others. In general, these poets were straight where the Duncan-Spicer axis was gay. Perhaps most importantly, this cluster really had no leaders as such. It was not as though some, such as Snyder or Whalen, might not have led by example, but that their personalities were not given to the constant marshalling of opinion that one could identify in such others as Olson, Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, O’Hara or even Creeley. This mode – lets call it New Western – perhaps reached its pinnacle of influence during the heyday of Jim Koller’s Coyote’s Journal during the mid-1960s. But without anything like a leader or a program, poised midway aesthetically between the Beats & Olson’s vision of Projectivist Verse, the phenomenon never gelled, never became A Thing & by the 1970s already was entering into an entropic period from which it has yet to re-emerge.

Just 23 when The New American Poetry hit the streets, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer were the babies of that project (indeed, they’re just one year older than David Bromige & David Melnick & eight years younger than Hannah Weiner, all of whom would be associated more closely with language writing come the 1970s). Loewinsohn went on to become a literature professor & novelist, but Meltzer has hung in as a poet, with a few side forays into music, jazz writing & erotic fiction, all these decades. Now, with David’s Copy just out from Penguin, Meltzer seemed poised to get the attention his work is due.

Actually, considering just how many of the Beat poets were treated like rock stars while Meltzer, fronting Serpent Power with his late wife Tina (and drums by Clark Coolidge), actually had a rock band long before Jim Carroll or Patti Smith, it’s odd that Meltzer hasn’t become much more widely known, celebrated before this. David’s Copy is at least the fourth selected poems he’s published, the others being Tens, Arrows & The Name, and many of his earlier books were published by Black Sparrow, one of the rare small presses to have had some volumes – mostly those by Charles Bukowski – widely distributed through the big book chains.

There are, I suspect, multiple reasons for this. One is that New Western aesthetic never really broke through, even if a few of its practitioners – Whalen, Snyder, McClure – did. A second, more important aspect is that old bugaboo of so many poets – Meltzer’s not a compulsive self-promoter. As the youngest of the New Americans, his timing was just a little behind from a marketing perspective. Indeed, as Ginsberg et al became folk icons in the 1960s, Meltzer’s first books that decade were from small Bay Area fine presses like Auerhahn & Oyez – his one big trade publication prior to David’s Copy being an anthology he edited in 1971, The San Francisco Poets, a collection notably missing the Duncan/Spicer axis, including just Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, Welch, McClure, Brautigan & Everson. Meltzer’s first sizeable collection doesn’t appear until 1969, when he brings out Yesod with the British press, Trigram. It didn’t receive much distribution stateside. Black Sparrow releases his first large collection in the states, Luna, in 1970.

Part of this neglect may also be due to the fact that Meltzer is Jewish. It’s not that there were no Jews among the New Americans – Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Eigner all come instantly to mind. But the intersection between the New American poetry & the New Age approach to religious experience in the 1960s (Serpent Power?) tended to mute its presence in all but Ginsberg’s writing. Indeed, I wouldn’t be at all shocked to discover that many readers of Eigner were late to discover the heritage of the bard of Swampscott. In the 1960s, the Objectivists were only gradually coming back into print. And Jerome Rothenberg didn’t really begin making the space for an active presence for a Jewish space within American poetics until late in that decade, during that interregnum betwixt the New Americans & language poetry.

Finally, Meltzer – and this I think is a sign of his youth relative, say, to Whalen or Snyder or Ginsberg or Olson or Duncan or O’Hara et al – lacked the kind of visible trademark of a differentiated literary style that one associates with all of the above, and even with someone closer to Meltzer’s age, like Michael McClure. Meltzer’s work has always been in the vicinity of New American poetics without ever being its own recognizable brand – as such, it would be difficult if not impossible for a younger poet to mimic. It’s not that Meltzer lacked the chops & more as though he never saw the need per se. In this sense, Meltzer’s situation is not unlike that, say, of a Jack Collom, another terrific poet of roughly the same generation who has never really gotten the recognition he deserves. In a sense, those who were a little further outside the New American circle – like poets in New York who were visibly not NY School, such as Rothenberg, Antin, Ed Sanders or Joel Oppenheimer – had an advantage because their circumstance forced them to define themselves in opposition even to poets whose work they cherished.

Indeed, if there is a defining element or signature device in Meltzer’s work, it’s that he alone among the New Westerns has an eye for the hard edges of pop culture, something one expects from the NY School. Often, as in this passage from “Hollywood Poems,” it’s accompanied by a tremendously agile ear:

                De Chirico without Cheracol
saw space where its dead echo opened up
a plain unbroken by the dancers.
Instead
a relic supermarket nobody shops at.
Plaster-of-Paris bust of Augustus
Claude Rains Caesar face-down beneath
a Keinholz table
whose top is blue with Shirley Temple’s saucers,
pitchers. Mickey Mouse
wind-up dolls in rows like Detroit.
All tilt out of the running without electricity.
Veils of history,
garments worn in movies, hung on
steel racks at Costume R.K.O.
R. Karo would’ve used the tower’s light.
He’d wear it as a cap to re-route lost energy.

So dense with details that it rides like a list (& sounds like a Clark Coolidge poem), this passage is actually a better depiction of a De Chirico landscape than those one finds in John Ashbery’s poetry. David’s Copy is filled with such moments, which makes it a terrific read.

One might squabble with the fact that the book is not strictly chronological, or that the first 25 years of his writing gets more weight (over 150 pages) than does the last 25 (roughly 100), tho I suspect that’s because more of the recent work is still in print. On the whole, such squabbles are few. Editor Michael Rothenberg had done a first-rate job here, smartly including bibliography & a decent two-page bio note from Meltzer & an excellent introduction from Jerry Rothenberg. Toward the end of the introduction, Rothenberg notes:

Elsewhere, in speaking about himself, he tells us that when he was very young, he wanted to write a long poem called The History of Everything. It was an ambition shared, maybe unknowingly, with a number of other young poets – the sense of what Clayton Eshleman called “a poetry that attempts to become responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world.” Then as now it ran into a contrary directive: to think small or to write in ignorance of what had come before or in deference to critic-masters who were themselves, most often, nonpractitioners & nonseekers.

From my perspective, it’s a shame that project never took hold, but then I don’t think there’s any contradiction between such scale & the desire to “think small” (or, as I might put it, to write in the present) – that’s one lesson one takes from Zukofsky’s “A.” Throughout, there are works that evidence an impulse to “go long,” almost in the sense of a football quarterback, but most often they come back to the compilation of shorter works that one might expect to see from the likes of Whalen, Welch or Snyder. The whole of David’s Copy offers us a deeper link into that New Western poetics, even as it connects that world outward, toward the New York School & the poetics that would emerge in the 1970s & ‘80s in a journal like Sulfur. The key, as it is in New Western poetry in general, is precisely that desire to “think small” as Rothenberg puts it, to write in the complete present. Meltzer is less openly Zen-like than, say, Whalen or Joanne Kyger, but the pleasure can be every bit as deep.

Left to right: Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Ruth Witt Diamant,
San Francisco State University 1958

 

This is a test. I want to see if I can use an online program entitled Writely to write a note in lieu of doing my first draft in Microsoft Word, then having to do a lot of HTML-patching in the Blogger editing tool before I post it. Just the idea of being able to get away from a Microsoft Office product is sufficient motivation. I've already converted from Outlook to Gmail &, at least for now, Yahoo mail as well.¹ One problem that I see right off the bat is that the program doesn't offer a "print view" or "page view" version of the screen, a device I use to get a visual sense of how text will appear before I try loading it into Blogger.

All of which makes me think of the problems of platforms and electronic publishing in general. I've been mulling the subject some already over the past few days, ever since I downloaded the tenth issue of W, the literary mag of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. As you will notice if you download W, the publication is in Adobe Acrobat's PDF file format. That makes it portable - you can read it offline - and ensures that the look of it will be consistent across operating systems, an important consideration for some of the poems included in the 116-page issue, especially those by Leslie Scalapino & Jordan Scott, texts that take explicit advantage of the page's spatial potential. W (dix) is subtitled a Duncan Delirium and seven of the ten features are either explicitly by or about Duncan or by authors, such as Peter O'Leary & Lisa Jarnot who are closely aligned with an emerging "Duncan industry" that is only just now starting to take wing in the academy. The three remaining contributions, by Scalapino, Scott & Kim Duff, are all poems clearly in the spirit of Duncan's own work. For a journal that neglects to list any of its editors, W is remarkably well put together. For those of us who care about Duncan's work, this issue is a great gift.

But. Always with the buts here at Silliman's Blog, never the glass half full. One wonders just what percentage of people who visit the Kootenay site actually download the file &, even more, what percentage of those who download it then sit down & read the thing. It can of course be loaded online, but PDF through the filter of a browser is a great way of slowing down even a souped-up PC. Adobe doesn't help itself any with its basically gray formatting of viewing screen, perhaps the dullest & most boring presentation of any major software program out there -- I'm sure that they must think of it as "neutral." And it's true that in the corporate world, PDF files tend to have a lot of color. But most web publishers involved in poetry appear to follow the metaphor of the physical book, treating the cover as an opportunity to invoke color, but leaving everything else black & white. The folks at W go one step further. It consists of the five words in the issue's title, the school's (new) address & contact data & the Kootenay logo, the silhouette of what appears to be a bear (tho, in fact, it could be a woodchuck or some similar woodsy rodent as well - it's hard to say).

The result is that W (dix) is a terrific issue, but one likely to be read only by those who already know they're serious in thinking about Duncan, and in thinking about people who think about Duncan. I wonder just how many more readers this issue might have if it were run as a feature within, say, Jacket. Case in point: a quick search of my own hard drive turns up 1152 PDF files, perhaps half of which involve poetry & poetics, with the other half all over the place - the September 11th Commission report, Hardt & Negri's Empire, stuff I've done for my day job, documentation for software, the grand jury report on the cover-up of sexual abuse by the Philadelphia archdiocese for the past several decades. But do I ever, ever, scan through all these files the way one sometimes scans a book case looking for something interesting to read? Have I ever done that even once? Not even in the manner with which I've been known with a journal like Jacket or How2 to just scroll around & see what's there.

No, PDF publication is publishing in the technical sense only. It's really more like the small press publisher - I've had more than one of these - who thinks having a box of books in his or her garage means that the volume is published. And has no clue about the mechanics of distribution. Not that HTML publishing is perfect by any means - it exposes just how little some people know about graphic design & it too requires marketing, missives to the Listservs, etc. But I suspect that the chances of an HTML page being read must be about ten times what is ever likely to happen to an Acrobat file. In a way, PDF publication is not unlike the situation one finds in certain branches of the academy, where a book that is typed (versus typeset) can be "issued" at a cost exceeding $100 with the expectation that a certain number of professional libraries will still be compelled to buy the volume. It's there on the shelves for sourcing something should anyone track it down, but will it ever be read? Sigh.

So let me admonish you that this issue of W is worth the extra time & effort, that Duncan's talk on a "life in poetry," from the Vancouver festival of 1963 is absolutely fascinating, as is Pauline Buntling's memoir of Duncan's visits to Vancouver, that Leonard Schwartz, Stephen Collis & Miriam Nichols all add measurably to the critical work now starting to build up around Duncan, and that some of the poetry here (Scalapino, O'Leary, Jarnot) is first rate indeed. But you'll have to work to read it.²

 

¹Yahoo is in the process of beta testing a new version of its mail program currently. It looks - and behaves - far too much like Outlook for me. Its output in "plain text" mode caused lots of hexadecimal garbage insertions when I tried using it to post to Listservs. Even there, however, it refuses to create truly plain text apostrophes, which leads me to some interesting wordings for posting a note to a listserv. Gmail, tho, is even worse in this regard. So I will continue using the current "old" Yahoo mail program until they rip it from my cold, dead fingers. Or something to that effect.

² As it turns out, I had to convert the Writely file into Word in order to get it to format properly. That might be something I could learn over time, but it’s not immediately obvious.