If you were only going to own two books of poetry, you could do far worse than making them the two volumes of The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley. UC Press has finally released a paperback edition of the original Collected Poems, 1945-1975 to coincide with (and echo in look) its new Collected Poems, 1975-2005, which is just out in hardback. The two volumes together will run you $75 and change – that may be the best deal in all of poetry.

Robert Creeley already was the dean of American poets – I can think of no better way to describe him – by the time I first wandered onto the scene in 1965. It is difficult – impossible – to imagine that at the moment he was only 39 years old.¹ His first trade press book, the 1962 Scribners volume, For Love, gathering together material from eight earlier chapbooks, had made him the most popular – and accessible – of the non-beatniks involved in the New American Poetry.

His was also the last generation in which every young poet of substance could expect reasonably to have a book by a major trade publisher & thus in most bookstores in the country. Soon enough, the rapid increase in the number of poets & the decrease in the number of bookstores willing to stock much in the way of verse beyond Blake, Gibran & Rilke caused the trades to retrench into becoming essentially a small press scene of their own, albeit with distribution, ad budgets & some ability to influence institutional awards. Even poets just a few years younger than Creeley, such as Ed Dorn, soon found such doors shut to them.

So we turn out to be incredibly fortunate that Creeley had such distribution while still in his thirties & at a moment when it still meant something in terms of reaching a broader audience. The brevity of Creeley’s poems belies the fact that he was, throughout his life, one of the most brilliant of innovators & with perhaps the most subtle ear of his generation. If the arc of these two volumes differs, it is that the earlier one shows the work of a young man anxious to remake the world of verse over in his own aesthetic image. The poems are intense & often need to be read with a great sense of urgency & even an tone of anger or despair, pausing – as he invariably did – audibly at the end of every line. By the start of the second volume, Creeley was already the most widely imitated poet in the English language & was in the process of concluding his long relationship with Bobbie Louise Hawkins. In 1976, while doing a reading tour of New Zealand, he met Penelope Highton, who was to become his wife & companion for the last 27 years of his life. Both her spirit and the more settled domesticity of his last marriage are inseparable from the poems of the second volume. It’s easier going & the quest isn’t so much to change poetry – Creeley had already accomplished that – as it was to always stay attentive to the immanence of daily life.

Close readers of Creeley’s verse may be surprised to discover that there are only four “uncollected” poems to the second volume, works I suppose that were written after he’d completed the manuscript for On Earth which was in production at UC when he died. Here is the most amazing of the four, entitled “Poets”:

Friend I had in college told
me he had seen as kid out the
window in backyard of an
apartment in upscale Phila-
delphia the elder Yeats walking
and wondered if perhaps he
was composing a poem or else
in some way significantly thinking.
So later he described it, then
living in a pleasant yellowish
house off Harvard Square,
having rooms there, where,
visiting I recall quick sight of
John Berryman who had been
his teacher and was just leaving
as I’d come in, on a landing of
the stairs I’d just come up, the
only time and place I ever did.

If you’re still an undergraduate or elsewise challenged economically & your parents or spouse or whomever ask you what you want for this year’s forthcoming holidays, print out the online ads under the links to these two volumes above, and tell them to get you these. They’re a present you’ll keep – and use – for the rest of your life.

 

¹ This made him the same age as my mother, which I, in my teenage wisdom, was certain was a very old age. My own father died that same summer at the age of 38.

Of all the poets included in the watershed 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, edited by Don Allen, perhaps only Bruce Boyd is less widely known than the late Kirby Doyle. He has just one poem in the book, in its “San Francisco Renaissance” section – a grouping that I’ve argued before was largely a fiction created by Allen’s need to organize his materials – sandwiched betwixt Boyd & the not-a-whole-lot more famous Ebbe Borregaard. A brief one-paragraph bio note indicated that he had been a grad student at SF State, but was then in New York, working on his poetry & a novel “under the dubious security of unemployment checks.” When Doyle died in 2003, the poem in the Allen anthology was his one poem still in print.

The book I came across the other day in Oakland, Doyle’s Collected Poems, was published in 1983, his fourth volume to appear, one of which was a novel, Happiness Bastard, composed entirely on a single roll of newsprint a la Kerouac. There were four more books after the Collected, all in the 1980s. If I read his entry in Wikipedia right, there remain unpublished at the least one epic poem, Pre American Ode, and another novel. There is an excerpt in the Collected, which it describes as “End Section of Book Five (Glacial Nocturne)”:

In my forty-ninth year
with a few dollars
& many poems
I salute you, Tomales –
O fecund & friendly coast
of my native land,
deeper than genius
(or as deep).
This hand salutes
thee
& not th’ death threats
of a non-existent god
marrying children to murder

Poorer than a priest
& certainly healthier
nature loves & is profound’d
by me –
Sappho calls to me
beyond & prior to
the’ ill-focus’d folds
of th’ priestly & alien calendar.
I would die before
I (intentionally) call’d
this earth a planet –
would perish myself a’fore
I would deliver earth to th’ universe
Fields love me in fields
I do not count.
I am welcome in earth –
there is no death for me.
I am no ace of space
but a walking land.
If there is an America,
if there is a west
I am that America
& that west.
I too have lean’d w/mean
estates
& have straighted from them –
O they are worthless in their
viewings & importance,
& O I have happy – pointless.
O Spirit be not spirit;
God be not god.

A hundred lines before breakfast
& O I am living!
a hundred lines after
& life is original again –

kiss’s from everywhere –
flowers tuba bass notes
of welcome.

Simpler than schemes o’ killers
I give no false directions.

An over-abundance of myself
weathers all genius, all originality –
weathers time, weathers sleep,
unempires forests, makes unstrange
of friends.
Gardens celebrate themselves
by my wealth.
Voices cease,
& stillness enters all places,
all persons, all causes & deeds.
Th’ hills are still –
O th’ hills are living still!

(Priceless drafts of rough poems
stain’d & wealthy –)

Th’ freedom o’ Adam
far from th’ craze of killers
straining for bondage,
alive & nonchalant
is my companion –
O happy th’ furls of smoke,
my companion tobacco –
O profound cigarette,
profounder than bells.

’Ways of life’ only live –
ambition prays itself.

I am yet born
O the’ angels o’ Blake
are too precious –
I have no angels,
just ageless seed companions
of th’ endless forests of earth.
Now half-a-century long
now my birth –
I am earth.
Conquerors who could not (would not)
conquer themselves
have come upon me
asleep in my time
and perish’d –
fear’d & cunning hags
worthless in antiquity
& too stupid in incessance
of old & unwant’d sex
have shriek’d & faded.

Th’ ego of independence
is a priority of my rights –
I accept only th’ teaching
of the poem.
Th’ ambitious ordinances of God(s)
cannot force my love.

Friend, I tell you I am asleep
& am sleeping in my own time –
that the succulent living growth
of all fruits & food
is a product of my sleep.
Too many claims, old gods,
I shall not awake unto you.

Ride not, ye priests,
upon th’ sleep of a babe –
you are sleepless, & without time
No fruits of life have ever claim’d
you –
death is y’r dear toy.

Over exposed, mad ambitious
religion –
thou are over exposed.

Without a word doth life occure –
without a word.
Hug thy tricks to coin, prayerful –
thou hast stolen from babes.
No easy theft, mark you –
th’ cries of innocence
dismember universe(s).
Check th’ lust of thy attention,
Holy –
suffer’t y’rself.

Goodly companion Tobacco –
most medicinal witness,
thou art nation.

O contending suitors of Belief –
So what thy over-praised Zions
hate us that we would not chase,
would not praise –
What care we, th’ people,
I, this hand, th’ earth –?
(art thous not praised well enough
slave by thy slaves
in th’ far fear?)
Th’ field is not a mouth,
nor a house made of mouth.
By (th’) field this poem life,
this hand.
When th’ ‘eternal’ of history(s)
has completed
th’ field lives yet.
I am th’ field, not God.
I am asleep, not awake.
I am time before count, my own.
My only sky
th’ ever still hills –
flowers my only stars.
Th’ shadows of my seasons
strata within me
my true clouds.
My total knowing is only life.
Death knows only dead.
I am not ye.
Temple not upon me.

Unnamed nature my only name.
I am without a game.
Verse is my signature.
I know nothing of space.
I am earth uncreated.
There is nothing of God about me.

I am a hand that
holds a cigarette, writes.

Good darkness, pre darkness –
I salute myself.

I’m not going to argue that this is great or, for that matter, even good verse, tho there are examples of such in the Collected, as in:

Leave us Presume
thy eye’s the noon –
thy mouth’s the moon –
Thy Death’s disbanded calliope’s in society
too soon – my room,
my mind’s the loom.

The underlying influence of Blake in both pieces is palpable (plus Whitman, Ginsberg, McClure & Bremser in the first poem), but Doyle is hardly alone in heeding Blake in his generation, from Roethke to Duncan to Ginsberg. Where Doyle’s at his best – say, at the start of the passage from Pre American Ode & all of the untitled piece – eye & ear are both at work & there’s a level of specificity to the writing. But towards the end of this excerpt of Pre American Ode, a poem he continued to work on, so far as I can tell, the rest of his life, tho there were apparently long bouts of not writing as well, his attention flags. The poem lapses into predictability.

There are, of course, always people on the fringe of any literary scene who get caught up in the energy of a collective activity – the excitement is contagious & to some degree so is the writing (this is one of the great secrets of literary groups & movements – that the process itself makes all of its members better writers, at least for a time) – and one way to read Doyle is as an instance of this phenomenon. As a part of the Beat scene, the writing makes a kind of sense that it will later lack once that scene has moved on. Pre American Ode has never been published in book form, but one wonders if the context for it as a book exists in 2006. Or even if the manuscript survives: Doyle died in San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital – essentially the City’s charity facility – after “a long illness.”

There is a lot of discussion, in his obit in the San Francisco Chronicle & in the memorial site on Empty Mirror, of the impact that drugs & alcohol played in Doyle’s later life. One comment on the latter site that has the ring of authority is T. Walden’s “Doyle's drug use was clearly an attempt to ‘self-medicate’ a severe mental illness.” This would hardly be a first. Indeed, poetry is one field – from John Clare to John Wieners to Jimmy Schuyler to Hannah Weiner to Robert Lowell – in which a person with a serious psychiatric condition is not necessarily at a disadvantage. There is, in fact, a history yet to be written about this genre’s role in the history of disability in general – think, for example, of Larry Eigner with his profound physical challenges.

But Doyle here deserves the last word. Here is a link to a 15 minute reading of his (in WMA format) from Howls, Raps & Roars: Recordings from the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Berkeley, CA : Fantasy Records, 1993.

Here, in its entirety, is the history of Jack Kerouac’s Book of Sketches as given in that book itself:

In 1951, it was suggested to Jack Kerouac by his friend Ed White that he “sketch in the streets like a painter but with words.” In August of the following year, Kerouac began writing down prose poem “sketches” in small notebooks that he kept in the breast pockets of his shirts. For two years he recorded travels, observations, and meditations on art and life as he moved across America and down to Mexico and back. In 1957, Kerouac sat down with the fifteen handwritten sketch notebooks he had accumulated and typed them into a manuscript called Book of Sketches; he included a handful of new sketches he had written that year.

This information comes not from an editor’s forward, but rather on the front jacket flap. If there is an editor here, he or she has gone the Alan Smithee route and chosen to remain anonymous. What introductory essay there is here is by painter and onetime William Burroughs collaborator George Condo. Here is Condo at his most analytic:

Read this Book of Sketches and you’ll be amazed at what a genius Jack Kerouac was.

It’s a good thing, given that Kerouac’s work appears to be in the hands of what could be charitably described as people unfamiliar with handling substantial literary archives. There are a million questions here, many of which have to do with the relationship between the 15 small notebooks, the eventual typescript and what appears here on the page, short stanzas of print that don’t look much like prose at all, tho they read Kerouac’s version thereof:

Saturday afternoon in Rocky
Mt. woods – in a tankling
gray coupe the young father
crosses the crossroads with
his 4 dotters piled on the
seat beside him all eyes
– The drowsy store the
great watermelons sit dis-
posed in the sun, on the
concrete, by the fish box,
like so many fruit in
an artist’s bowl –
watermelon’s plain green
& the watermelon with
the snaky rills all
tropical & fat to burst
on the ground – came
from viney bottoms of
all this green fertility –
Behind Fats’ little shack,
under waving tendrils
of a pretty tree, the
smalltime Crapshooters
with strawhats & overalls
are shooting for 10¢
stakes – as peaceful &
regardant as deer in
the morning, or New
England boys sitting in
the high grass waiting for
the afternoon to pass.
Paul Blake ambles over
across the road to watch
the game, stands
back, arm on three,
watching smiling silence.
Cars pull up, men
squat – there goes Jack
to join them, everywhere
you look in the enormity
of this peaceful scene
you see him walking, on
soft white shoes, bemused
-- Last night a few
hotshots & local sailors
on leave grabbed those

There is a line break right here, tho the sentence itself continues onward, a typical detail that makes you wonder if this reflects the typescript, the notebook, both, neither, or what precisely. There is no way here to tell.

In his introduction, Condo writes “These poems just breathe and flow…” tho the book itself carries (in what I take to be Kerouac’s own hand) a frontispiece that reads parenthetically “(Proving that sketches aint verse).” The only other clue comes from a half-title page that reads:

Printed Exactly As They Were Written
On the Little Pages in the Notebooks
I Carried in My Breast Pocket 1952
Summer to 1954 December ………

(Not Necessarily Chronological)

You can see Kerouac’s bulging breast pocket in the infamous Kerouac wore khakis ad & as someone who periodically writes on the street, in public transportation, even in office meetings, I’m completely sympathetic with Kerouac’s occasional comments about what a weirdo this makes him seem at times to others. When I worked in the Tenderloin in the late 1970s, where I would occasionally find myself writing away in a notebook in a residential hotel that served as a shooting gallery while a septuagenarian drug dealer was going around the lobby with a literal TV tray full of offerings – as if it were dim sum or the dessert tray at a restaurant – the only way I could get away with writing was because everybody there already knew me & understood that I wasn’t a narc, even if I wasn’t a buyer either. No one has captured this aspect of writing so well as Kerouac – in some ways, I’ve never tried simply because he ensured that I didn’t need to do so.

So Book of Sketches proves to be, like so many recent additions to the published Kerouac oeuvre, half a loaf. On the one hand – and this is the most critical point – it is great to have this in print, it’s a fabulous read, a chance to watch Kerouac actively thinking about honing specific details of his obsessive, but quite freehand craft. On the other hand, it’s a poorly done version that stands as a placeholder for a properly edited and contextualized publication that won’t appear for decades, if at all.

Kerouac noted to his friends that by the time On the Road made him famous overnight in 1957, he had already written a lifetime of work over the previous decade, much of it in the compacted 1950-57 timeframe, between the good critical reviews and total lack of sales of his first (and most conventional) novel, The Town and the City, and the actually over-edited Legend of Duluoz books that were issued in the wake of The Road¹. Watching Kerouac invent fiction, invent prose, completely rethink the task of the writer from the ground up is the real story here, much more so than the romantic tale of the questing Beat guru whose beatific surface barely covers over the thick sludge of sentimental (or worse) stereotypes that represent the worst of Catholic working class culture in the Northeast.

Sketches partakes of both sides of Kerouac – there are passages here that could easily convince a woman never to read him again, a man who could have taken sensitivity training from Archie Bunker – and there is the careful, utterly honest crafter of observations trying to fathom how best to put down everything (note that depiction of watermelon or the comparison of craps players with deer & especially Kerouac’s use of the French form regardant there), with just an occasional hint of the alcoholism that would overwhelm Kerouac in just a few short years, robbing him of his ability to think & see well before it killed him. Unlike Jack Spicer, who was killed by booze even more quickly than Kerouac, but who wrote his very best work at the end, Kerouac was a writer who dwindled throughout his final decade, becoming more & more pathetic in stages.

So Sketches is still Kerouac on the ascent &, as such, represents a major publication of one of the towering talents of the past 50 years. But as a publication, Sketches also reminds the careful reader of all that can go wrong with the works of a major author.

 

¹ An unexpurgated version of On the Road is due to be released next year, on the 50^th anniversary of the first publication.

Clark Coolidge gets credit for a lot of things, virtually all of it deserved, but generally I don’t think there has been enough recognition of his stellar work as a literary critic, as such. Over my trip west, I read the Kerouac sections – roughly 80 pages from a 140-page book – in his 1999 Living Batch collection, Now It’s Jazz, temporarily (I really hope they mean that) out of stock at SPD. It’s the finest critical writing I’ve ever read on Kerouac’s work, which is to say that it’s passionate & level-headed, with an exceptionally good eye/ear toward the fine points in Kerouac’s writing, its basis in rhythm, Kerouac’s own eye (essential to his work), indeed Kerouac’s mind.

You can find one piece of Coolidge’s Kerouac collection online, this relatively straightforward, even formal overview from American Poetry Review gathered here amongst the rather breath-taking & eclectic materials put together for Al Filreis’ legendary English 88 course at Penn. Of the essays (many of them simply excerpts from letters) in Coolidge’s collection, this is the closest thing to an normative piece of prose, which makes it, at once, perhaps the most accessible of the essays here, but in some ways the least of them as well. One great section of Now It’s Jazz consists of a recitation of dreams in which Kerouac has appeared to Coolidge, a riff on Book of Dreams no doubt, but an intimate way to let you know not only how much Kerouac means to Coolidge’s own writing & person, but also in what ways.

People who don’t read Coolidge closely sometimes express the sense that his own work is abstract. In fact, much of what Coolidge himself says about Kerouac – especially about the role of rhythm in the work – he could say of himself as well. One thing Coolidge obviously is not, tho, is a Kerouac clone. Rather, Kerouac is one of the major influences on Coolidge’s work (I’d argue that Phil Whalen is the other prime source), which takes its essence into places Ti-Jean himself never fully imagined.

One thing Coolidge does take from the early Kerouac is an enormous sense of dedication to craft and to the idea that the meaning of form is intimately connected to what you can do with it, not how neatly your shoe laces are tied. Coolidge has done his homework here, seeming to have read everything in print many times over & more than a little of what is not yet in printed form. One consequence of this is that Coolidge is brutal with the haphazard nature of many of the Kerouac editions, more than a few of which seem designed to propagate the myth rather than elucidate the writer. Kerouac is one of several recent authors – Joyce & Duncan come immediately to mind – where we may just have to wait for copyright to expire & hope that enough of the materials not now in public archives get there and that each will ultimately find their own Hugh Kenner waiting to unpack the chronological & other difficulties with which the total oeuvre is embedded.

One test of Coolidge as a critic – you can find some other non-Kerouac samples as well on his EPC web page – is that he gets the importance of Visions of Cody, not just as a central work in the Kerouac canon, but quite possibly the Great Novel of the past century, right up on a par with Ulysses & Gravity’s Rainbow & the best of Faulkner (who is not unlike Kerouac in that his best work often comes in passages, rather than entire books). Coolidge’s “Visions of Cody Notes,” modeled after Kerouac’s own pseudo-script telegraphed prose is this book’s secret gem as well as the one work entirely devoted to a single volume of Kerouac’s.

The other echo that Coolidge’s book sets up for me is Kerouac’s ideas of spontaneous prose & their relation (or lack thereof) to the folk physiology of Charles Olson’s poetics, which I’d been working on prior to my week in Naropa last month. Here is Olson, from “Projective Verse”:

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

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

But consider the role of the eye, alluded to repeatedly in Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks,and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

29. You're a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

If the tug-of-war in Olson’s work, the forces that give it its internal energy, is that battle between syllable & line, for Kerouac it’s between “the visual American form,” “pithy middle eye” & the mind, by which Kerouac does not mean logic or reason. “Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better.” It doesn’t get much more explicit than that, yet Coolidge shows how precisely Kerouac gives head to words & depiction simultaneously, citing the great cafeteria description from Visions of Cody (possibly the best description of anything in the whole of literature) and this much shorter passage from Old Angel Midnight:

The Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look and there’s a tangled eucalyptus hulk stick fallen thru the late sunlight tangle of those needles, hanging from it like a live wire connecting it to the ground – just below, the notches where little Fred sought to fell sad pine – not bleed much – just a lot of crystal sap the ants are mining in, motionless like cows on the grass

There is a great riff of prosody in that first interior phrase – where little Fred sought to fell sad pine – that makes you realize just how completely Kerouac is in control of (and driven by) the sound of the passage, tho it is not ultimately the sound that’s at play. This is a rare moment in American fiction – one wants to say American poetry tho Kerouac himself would not have agreed – and that Coolidge is capable of foregrounding a moment like this is a sign of his own considerable skill thinking through these materials.

The ninth and final work in Proprioception is in some ways the strangest precisely because it isn’t. Composed for the most part in – for Olson – relatively straightforward prose paragraphs, Olson argues for a history of letters that, as I read him, divides roughly into three periods: from the Second Millennium BC backwards perhaps as far as the Sixth, this being the time of the gods; the two millennia after that; the two millennia that lead up to our own time. It’s not as clean as that, though, since for Olson the central figure reporting on that first period is the poet Hesiod, who lived around 700 BC. At the very least, Hesiod is nearly as far from the end of the Second Millennium as we are from, say, Anne Bradstreet. At the other extreme, Hesiod is as far from its start as we are from 700 AD, which is to say well before the English had English, let alone writing. Roughly as far as the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel in 732 turned back the Islamic army that sought to expand its European empire beyond Spain northward.

Olson states his motivation forthrightly:

Immediately my purpose is only to wake up the time spans and materials lying behind Hesiod, so that they can seem freer than they have; but essentially I’m sure a line drawn through Hesiod himself will already demark the difference the materials and times behind him will yield.

The Second Millennium is key, according to Olson, because the wars of the gods were all concluded & this was the time of “the general overthrow of the ancient settled world, which was neither East nor West.” Considering just how attentive Olson is to agency and case in language, his wording is almost startling: “Around about 1800 things shook up.” But the gist is unmistakable:

This [Zeus’ victory over the Titans “322 years before the siege of Troy”] then can be taken to be the line of the end of God-Father change and or transmission, as well as a good controlling date for the emergency of the Mycenean (sic) or Aegean Greek governance of the Mediterranean: 1505 BC.

Olson sees this correction as necessary, because

With that one can then begin to work Hesiod back – as well for that matter as the Iliad – and at the same time come forward toward Homer and Hesiod’s day (850-800 BC) from a ‘true’ origin of much which they include, the thousand years of writing some of which is now known which precedes them by a term of time as long as 1000 years. In other words Indo-Europeans and Semites had, for that long before Homer and Hesiod, power and governed an earlier literary and historical tradition which itself preceded them by two full millennia, the 3^rd and the 4^th.

The implication as I read it is that to get “from the old discourse to the new,” one must in fact identify the oldest discourse of all, the alleged “’true’ origin.”

If one were to align Olson’s nine pieces in Proprioception according to their focus on time, one would see that we are proceeding backwards. We start with the self, a present fact, before it can even identify itself & we end with the origins of writing, the founding of cities & the emergence of civilization out of Paleolithic man’s bigger “brain-case, like the present / porpoise’s” & the implications hidden in primitive art, “the so-called ‘Venuses’.”

As I read here, Olson’s desires are two: first, to understand how the new occurs; second, to carry into the present all of the knowledge of the past. In a sense, Olson is proceeding as though he thinks the first sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus cannot be true. If the world indeed is all that is the case, as Wittgenstein postulates, then it is complete. There is no way in that equation for the new to occur. Olson’s strategy here – and elsewhere in his work – is to focus on the tectonic shifts in culture & see what arose where & if possible how, an anthropological refutation of positivism. Second, Olson is trying mightily here – it is his most postmodern impulse – to break free of the myth of progress. Where a generation before people would have seen only gain in the arrival of the new – think of how Williams uses the term in Spring & All – Olson marks it always as a site of forgetting & of loss. But it’s not that he doesn’t want to engage it. Rather, he wants to understand the process & to recognize it always as two-sided.

The single longest section in Charles Olson’s Proprioception is the seventh, “GRAMMAR – a ‘book’,” checking in at five pages, six sections. It’s the one you’ll never see printed in native HTML, at least not the first two sections – passages appear at different angles, lines go from A to B connecting different terms, at least once traveling through some other text to get there. Olson also shifts here from italics, with a notable exception, to underlining for emphasis. This is true in both the Four Seasons Foundation and UC Press editions of the text.

Olson begins with a typically curious claim:

why (“adv.”!) instrumental case of hwā, hwaet. See WHO

“WHO,” all in caps, is underlined three times, an effect I can’t duplicate here. The instrumental is a case that was already beginning to fade from existence in Old English, where, in the words of one online source of Old English cases, it was

only distinct from the dative case for a few pronouns and for strong adjectives. It is used to indicate the thing or person by means of which the action of the verb is accomplished.

A diagonal line at a 50º angle juts down from the period after hwaet to a line that reads “Goth hvas (Skt kas).” The idea that untangling the origins of a given term will tell you some essential feature thereof is the linguistic equivalent of justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito & Roberts claiming that the original intent of the writers of the Constitution is what determines a phrase’s meaning today. Yet a phrase like “all men are created equal,” was created in a time when all did not mean all, when men meant some men and no women, and when equal did not mean equal. Language itself is infinitely malleable & the social circumstances of one utterance to the next can and do change dramatically, altering content with every turn. Originationism is a vestige of 19^th century historical linguistics, known then as philology, and though Olson understands that this is not the whole of language, this process is for him still a very powerful mode of proceeding. Looking up historic precedence is what Olson means by research. Yet one thing he doesn’t note, tho one might think he would had he known it, is that hwaet is itself the first word of Beowulf, & thus in some sense, the first word of English poetry as such.

The page at this point divides roughly into three columns, only the rightmost of which is printed in approximately the standard orientation to horizontal & vertical axes (approximately, but not in fact entirely!). This column traces the history of the word that, which interests Olson apparently because it serves both as a pronoun & a connective. The center passage, which starts at roughly the left margin & then moves downward in a very tight column no more than eight characters wide, appears at first to trace the relationship of the word how with who, what, & again why, then, as it moves downward seems to alternate from annotating the discussion of that to its right to ending up on who.

The left-hand column, boxed in by a border on three sides & tilted so that its bottom crowds the center of the page considers the term quantum, “neuter of quantus (cf. page 192” tho there be no closed parenthesis, nor even an allusion to suggest which book’s page 192 might be in mind. It’s the assertions that occur beneath this that, I think, pull this term into what otherwise appears to be a discussion of the syntactic potential of pronouns:

the process is not continuous
[pattern]

but takes place by steps,
each step being the emission
or absorption of an amt. of
energy called the quantum

Math. distinguished fr. a
magnitude

Phil. the char. of a thing
by virtue of which measure
or number is applicable to
it, or it can be determined
as more or less than some
other

Olson proceeds to give us similar considerations of other pronouns: like, an, another, who, while on the next page, proceeding to argue quantus as pronoun & adjective, which we are told is “Relat. correl. with tantus, / of what size, / how much.” This leads eventually to:

absence of any such a word in English,
fr tantus? Result, or confusion over
quantity? Therefore not understanding
quantus is the neuter case of pronoun,
not an adjective???

Hidden here, tho not very, is Olson’s application of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, the central tenet of any linguistic determinism, the implication that if there is not a single word in English to ask how many, how much, there is some gap in our understanding of the world.

The second section of “GRAMMAR – a ‘book’” is devoted to the middle voice – the middle, so to speak, between active and passive. This is the distinction between The fox ate the chicken, which is active, The chicken was eaten by the fox, which is passive and The chicken cooked in the oven, which is in the middle voice in that the subject of the sentence is in fact the object of the action. The second section, labeled “’Case’” – the inner quotation marks are Olson’s – is not, theoretically or linguistically, his finest critical writing, but what Olson is after is precisely that hybrid phenomenon. This is why, midway down the page, Olson will draw a line from ”future perfect” to “middle” – because it invariably combines some form of will have with a past participle. This is followed by a passage on the “indicative middle,” a phrase inserted with a ۸ between the words Middle and voice. The indicative middle, although Olson doesn’t note this, is a case one finds most often in Classic Greek or Old Iranian. Further, Olson’s notes here appear to be cribbed almost directly from William Hersey Davis’ Beginner’s Grammar of the New Greek Testament, published in 1923, an author Olson does not cite.

The third section of ”GRAMMAR” is entitled “The Indo-Europeans Anyway,” describing their migrations around 1800 BC and the impact this had on the language. Olson’s second (of two) paragraphs is almost entirely a quotation from Edward Sapir:

The first [of the three drifts of major importance at work in the language] is the familiar tendency to level the distinction between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases…. The distinction between the nominative and accusative was nibbled away by phonetic processes and morphological levelings until only certain pronouns retained distinctive subjective and objective forms. (Bracketed language, ellipsis and italics all Olson’s)

The fourth section, entitled “Syntax (‘ordering’),” is entirely a quotation of Sapir, arguing that language invariably begins as concrete – Sapir’s example is the origin of of, as it appears in the English phrase, “law of the land,” a pronoun that began as “an adverb of considerable concreteness of meaning, ‘away, moving from, ’and that the syntactic relation was originally expressed by the case form [ablative] of the second noun.” (Bracketed insert Olson’s). Thus:

An interesting thesis results: – All of the actual content of speech, its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm.

Section five, entitled “Concord, in Bantu and Chinook,” again quotes Sapir at length, presenting “an alternative to syntrax [at least as we have understood it] altogether." Olson’s point would appear to be the inner logic is radically different – again, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis.

The sixth and final section is “Number,” specifically the singular, since it can be nominative whereas plurals necessarily distribute. This passage, read in the context of the whole of Proprioception feels less like the end of book on grammar & more a staging for the next section, entitled, in all of Olson’s quirky uses of capitalization & speech:

A Plausible ‘Entry’ for, like, man

This, as it turns out, is a time line from Paleolithic man to Eric the Red, 1025 years ago. A long horizontal line divides the page in the middle, with HOMER, all in caps, above it and below the date “450, Athens” and the note “logos invented (universalism possible” tho Heraclitus had been dead for 25 years by then.

The most important date in more recent years, to Olson, would appear to be 732 AD, the “date Martel turned back Moslems at Tours, one has to see a ‘Europe’ – and new “West” – arising.” Europe, thus, is relatively recent as a possibility. This is followed by a list of dates, Names and prepositional phrases:

771    Charlemagne
790    Irish monks to Iceland
823    Norse, to Dublin
862    Swedes to Novogrod
871    Alfred
981    Eric the Red, to Greenland

Never one to leave his bibliography to the end, Charles Olson uses the fifth of his nine pieces in Proprioception to a reading list. Or, more accurately, a list of names, date March 1961 “with / acknowledgements to / Gerrit Lansing.” The title of the piece is “Bridge-Work,” the bridge being

fr the Old Discourse to the New

Italicized by Olson, immediately characterized as “men worth anyone’s study,” and (with two exceptions) the names that follow are all boys. Some of these names are well enough known – cultural geographer & longtime Berkeley professor Carl O. Sauer, mystic Aleister Crowley (of whom Olson writes, “?: particularly his / book on the Tarot”), Pound’s favorite Fenollosa, Edward Carpenter (mentioned as being “Whitman’s friend” & then as “Eileen Garrett’s / teacher,” tho it is unlikely that many now will recognize the name of this once famed medium), and early linguists – post-Saussure, pre-Chomsky – Edward Sapir & B.L. Whorf.

Some of the names are less well known today: Andrew Lang was a collector of folk tales and early anthropologist, tho like Crowley & Garrett he was also a popular author on psychic phenomena. Olson notes, next to Lang’s name, “on hypnagogic vision, / as well as trans. of / Homer.” Hypnogogy is a term for the drowsy consciousness that often precedes sleep and one finds a many references to it on sleep disorder sites, but Olson here must be alluding to its use identifying trance states.

Lang is not the only translator of Homer on this list. Victor Bérard translated Ulysses into French as well as authoring other works on a wide range of subjects. An historian of antiquity around the turn of 20^th century and an authority on ancient trade routes, Lenin is known to have read his Britain and Imperialism. Fenollosa was of course a translator as is Edward Hyams, who also wrote a work called Soil and Civilization that argues – in a proto-Jared Diamond sort of way – that some civilizations have been destroyed through poor soil management practices. G.R.S. Mead translated the Gnostic text, Pistis Sophia.

Cyrus Gordon was a Bible scholar, the first Jewish one to get a teaching job at a U.S. university, the lone contemporary of Olson’s on the list. But to call him a Bible scholar places him too narrowly. During his career, he taught Egyptology, Coptic, Hittite, Hurrian, Sumerian and classical Arabic. Another scholar of antiquities, L.A. Waddell, is the author of The British Edda, tracing Anglo myths back to their origins. Waddell has become something of an important figure in the reading of the White Aryan Brotherhood and other neo-Nazi groups in recent years.

At first glance, this seems like something of a bizarre list, mixing the history of antiquity with early anthropology and linguistics and mysticism. Pointedly absent are two names one often hears in Olson scholarship: Carl Jung & Alfred North Whitehead, each of whom proved to fit more comfortably in the academic canon than many of those on this list, with the possible exceptions of Mead, Sapir & Whorf. Sapir, it is worth noting, goes first in Olson’s list, followed by Carpenter, Sauer, Lang & Mead.

What are the threads that bind this roster of 14 names – 15 if we include Homer – together? One obviously is anthropology, a second ancient history, a third linguistics, the fourth the psychic dimension. My sense is that Olson is reasonably in touch with anthropology as it stood in the early 1950s, interested in that part of linguistics that could reasonably be expected to be of interest to poets, eclectic and not necessarily orthodox in his sense of history – it seems almost hit and miss there. And for this X-files dimension? Tarot, séances, trance states – there’s more than a little Fox Muldur in Olson.

I’ve noted here before that Olson’s own death in 1970, combined with Robert Duncan’s 15-year hiatus from publishing books, a self-enforced silence that began in 1968, precipitated a major shift in American poetics, one that I think is most visible looking at some of the publications of the time, such as George Quasha’s Active Anthology, which came out in 1974 – still recent enough to have previous unpublished pieces in from both Olson & Paul Blackburn. In addition to the Olson’s own work, many of the pieces here have or touch on aspects of this same spectrum of alternative reality. Armand Schwerner dedicates his “Bacchae Sonnets” to Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche “with love.” Ted Enslin’s excerpt from Ranger touches on the teachings of Don Juan, on Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Chuck Stein offers a poem entitled “Vajra – Guru – Padma – Did – She.” Editor Quasha offers “The Sufi Singer” as well as some sections from his Somapoetics. Anselm Hollo & Jonathan Greene both have poems with the word dream in their titles. Nathaniel Tarn has his Lyrics for the Bride of God. David Meltzer has poems that he terms “amulets.” Richard Grossinger presents an excerpt from The Slag of Creation, Frank Samperi an excerpt from The Kingdom, Ed Sanders offers a “Prayer for the Unity of the Eye,” dedicated to ”my friend Horus.” Robert Hellman & Spencer Holst both offer works with the word Magician in the title. Even John Giorno chimes into the theme here with an excerpt from Suicide Sutra. Indeed, Buddhist scholar Rick Fields has a poem entitled “Realm of the Gods.” And Chögyam Trungpa himself has four poems in this one-short anthology. None of this may seem exceptional if we take each piece by itself, each contributor by him- or herself. But across a field of 65 contributors – 55 men, 10 women¹ – the impact is unmistakable. Olson was just one key part in a broader field of poetics that was deeply spiritual, but not at all within the orthodox Judeo-Christian frame.

This disappears in the 1970s almost completely. And my test of this is to look at the poetry of Robert Kelly, in particular, from the 1960s and the same poems from that era that he chooses now to include in various contemporary selected works. It’s not that he’s rejected his worldview, I think, so much as he may feel that the more secular poems travel better across time.

I’ve also written that I that what took the place of mysticism and the wisdom traditions in American poetry in the 1970s was theory, specifically continental theory of the structural & especially post-structural kind.

But Olson’s death & Duncan’s hiatus are, I think, the hinge events in that transition – as they were the two people who really could have made that larger dimension cohere. The one other poet of like mind & similar stature, Gary Snyder, was far too much of an isolato to have the same effect. Allen Ginsberg was too caught up in too many other things to focus on just this one.

This I think makes a section like “Bridge-Work” particularly difficult for a younger reader today to grasp. What may at first glance appear completely daft in Olson’s interest in séances & Tarot was by no means exceptional at the time he wrote this.

And it’s interesting to see, in the sixth section of Proprioception, the seven “hinges” Olson proposes, specifically “of civilization to be put back on the door,” where Olson addresses questions of the secular & divine fairly directly. It is precisely this balance point I see at work in these “Hinges.” The first is a reconsideration of the dating of what Olson calls “original ‘town-man,’” which Olson wants to push back; the second, Indo-European, where Olson wants to connect the Bible to Hittite, Sumerian & Canaanite texts of the period, as well as

roots:                     the linguistic values of Indo-
          European languages, the
          original minting of words
          & syntax

Throughout, Olson is trying to connect these “hinges” not to our time (or at least his), but precisely in the opposite direction:

[as in other hinges of the direct line, there
is an advantage to the leaping outside as
well as connecting backward: for example
American Indian languages offer useful
freshening of syntax to go alongside
Indo-European]

This same backward motion appears again in the third Hinge: “to turn the 5^th Century / BC back toward the 6^th” – to the right of which runs a vertical list: “Heraclitus / Buddha / Pythagoras / Confucius.” It’s not that Olson wants us to proceed backwards through history, but rather an insistence that whatever is new not displace the old, thus (Hinge # 6):

the 17^th [Century], seen as the brilliant secular it /
was, without the loss of alchemy etc
it unseated

leading finally to “the 20^th, release fr / both the 18^th . . . & 19^th, the new progress of / Marxism,” to which Olson concludes by appending the most straightforward statement in all of Proprioception:

otherwise the present will lose what America is the inheritor of: a secularization which not only loses nothing of the divine but by seeing process in reality redeems all idealism fr theocracy or mobocracy, whether it is rational or superstitious, whether it is democratic or socialism.

A secularization which ... loses nothing of the divine. Not an either/or, but a both/and. This would seem to be where Olson has been aiming all along.

 

¹ It’s interesting to see this 6.5-to-1 ratio in 1974, a moment when langpo elsewhere already had brought the difference down to 4-to-1, a distinct – if still too short – step toward the parity we have routinely 30 years later.

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