What follows is a proposal for a monograph that draws on already completed writings and publications. These texts have been composed over the last fifteen years. As I review them I see an implicit design, moving from the personal to analytical vectors, and tracing three discrete themes: his engagement with cultural perspectives that differ from the mainstream of the United States in the 1950s and 1960’s, his personal sense of himself or his subjectivity both in relation to the world he inhabited and the world he projected, and his method and its influence on contemporary poetry. Each of these threads intertwine frequently in the works that I wish to collect in the proposed volume. The theme of transculturality intersects with that of subjectivity at many points. It is my belief that Olson’s sense of himself or his subjectivity developed through transcultural encounters, both his experience among the Mayan people and his understanding of Gloucester as a multicultural polis are important here. For the purpose of this proposal, I provide a brief text that is both summary and discussion of the relevance of each of the works that I propose to include in the collection. These texts, in a nutshell, form the substance of meta-commentary that will assist the reader in engaging the material outlined below. This commentary might be viewed as shorthand for a series of prefatory essays or headnotes tailored for use with each section outlined below.
May 22, 2010
INTRODUCTORY MATTER
1. “My Life Tangent to the Charles Olson Circle.” Minutes of the Charles Olson Society, Aug. 2007.
2. “The Maximus Poems. First published in The Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (New York: Facts on File, Inc.), ed. Burt Kimmelman. 2005
3. Perception // Projection / Projective // Proprioception
TRANSCULTURAL OLSON
4. “Prose on Uxmal” [comparing approaches to the archaic in Octavio Paz, Charles Olson and contemporary poetry].” Absent Magazine: Poetics, Culture, Policy, 2007.
5. “Incommensurabilities and the Intercultural Text,” portions of this essay appeared in Assembling Alternatives. Similar arguments can be found in “Emergent Subjectivity and the Transgressive Text,” Bridges Across Chasms: Towards a Transcultural Future in Caribbean Literature, ed. by Bénédicte Ledent. Liège: L3 — Liège Language Literature, 2004, released 2005.
6. “The Empire of Reconstructed Memory” (review of El imperio de la neomemoria, HeribertoYépez.
OLSON AND SUBJECTIVITY
1. “Outer Darkness: Charles Olson, Nathaniel Mackey and the Poetry of Incommensurable Realities.” MLA Convention, Washington DC, Dec.
2. “Olson and Subjectivity: ‘Projective Verse’ and The Uncertainties of Sex.” Olson Now: Documents. Electronic Poetry Center. SUNY Buffalo. Dec. 8, 2005. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/. A revised version appears in Olson’s Prose, Gary Grieve-Carlson editor. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, 47-61.
3. Olson and Melancholy
POETICS
4. Meaning and Method: Joel Oppenheimer’s Why Not.
5. “Lyric Mode,” paper delivered at the roundtable, Roundtable, “Rethinking the Modern Lyric.” Modernist Studies Association 7th Annual Conference. Loyola University, Chicago. Nov. 3-6, 2005.
6. “Creeley’s Ear.” Jacket Magazine 31(October, 2006).
7. “Seventies Prosody: ‘The Tone-leading vowels.’” Jacket Magazine 36 (2008).
8. “Field Poetics (a compleat history of de-individualizing practices).” EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, Issue 5 (Fall 2009).
INTRODUCTION
The introductory matter, as currently projected, includes both autoethnographic material (examining that matrix that has given rise to my engagement with the poetry of Charles Olson) and an analytical synopsis of the major themes in Olson’s Maximus Poems. The contributions of some of the major Olson scholars are reprised (Don Byrd, Robert von Hallberg, Charles Stein). Additionally, I introduce the theme of Olson’s subjectivity, a matter touched on in several ways by many of the texts that follow. There will also be a brief discussion of terminology relevant to Olson’s poetics: Perception // Projection / Projective // Proprioception.
In the autoethnographic essay, “My Life Tangent to the Charles Olson Circle, I reconstruct my experience of the 1960s, a period that I shared with many who were in different ways very close to Olson including his daughter, Kate. The site of these reflections is an island in Maine that Olson knew. Olson’s approach to geography and ethnography were already deeply at work in my evolving poetics at the time that Richard Grossinger, author of The Book of the Cranberry Islands, published some of my work in the Olson-Melville Sourcebook (1976). My family connection to Cranberry Island, its history and its ecology provides the primary basis for my deep engagement with Olson’s work and his poetics. The text of “My Life Tangent to the Charles Olson Circle” introduces an ethnographic approach to subjectivity. It maps multiple encounters with poets and friends who are important to my life and to my understanding of Olson’s life. It is one of the few texts that I know of that address the relationship between Olson and his daughter with insight or depth of understanding.
Concerning the coherence of my project as a whole, I want to assert the importance of method. Olson writes of method, as a form of dancing while sitting; my poetry and my prose enact a subjectivity that engages documentary facts of history, environment and culture. Crucially, following, Olson’s example, I hope to have addressed the work of language as well as the work of the imagination in creating and shaping both local and global realities. One of Olson’s greatest gifts is the way in which his poetry has turned the face of America outward, away from self absorption, and following Melville, toward the “many” that compose this earth. My understanding of Olson’s transcultural sympathies links to my personal experience as poet/ethnographer who sometime travels the back roads of Mexico, Spain, or Morocco.
TRANSCULTURAL OLSON
Olson saw in Moby Dick the new paradigm of democratic man, a paradigm tying New England, with its seafaring heritage, to the Pacific, opening man to space so vast that archaic time and postmodern time fuse. The first site of this theoretical engagement is Call me Ishmael, a problematic text that affects Olson’s conception of his work throughout his career. Interest in alternative understandings of time and space mark different phases of Olson’s career. Olson’s explorations on the Yucatan in 1951 allowed him to engage the prehistory of modern man. In my “Prose on Uxmal,” I have been able to compare his take on Mayan architecture with the response made by Octavio Paz upon visiting Uxmal. Letters written to Robert Creeley at this time reveal Olson’s disquiet at prospects of commercial globalization, archaic sites becoming touristic venues.
Olson’s transcultural research deeply influenced his poetry and that of his associates. Creeley, visiting the Yucatan, felt that he, for the first time in his life, saw the world with an immediate freshness like that he attributed to the Lacandon Indians. Olson inspired many of his friends and associates to encounter transformative meanings, to adapt dispositions different from those inculcated by North American consumer-oriented culture. Olson’s transcultural awareness, going beyond the Mayan, reached all the way back to Sumerian sources. He also embraced what he understood of Iranian Sufism thanks to the scholarship of Henri Corbin and shared this knowledge with LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, thus participating on the level of knowledge, as well as that of innovative method, in one of the most vital chains of influence shaping contemporary African-American poetry, for instance that of Nate Mackey..
The following essay, “Incommensurabilities and the Intercultural Text,” places Olson’s poetics into conversation with the Wilson Harris’s “cross-cultural imagination” ( a move first made by Mackey) and with the anthropological theory of liminality developed by Victor Turner. It is at the boundary between territories, in the interstices where new cultural forms emerge, according to Homi Bhaba, but this construct may be too simple. Michael Taussig has argued that the boundaries now overspread the heartland. The conception of boundaries must be understood in relation to the concept of fields, not only fields geographically delimited but also fields like those described in different systems of physics and different geometries, a concept that fascinated Olson. It can be said that it is in the overlap between fields that knowledge announces it self, forming a concretion, as Olson understood from his reading of Whitehead. Here Olson’s speculations link with the intercultural thinking of anthropologists including Victor Turner, Vincent Crapanzano, and Michael Taussig.
The last essay in this section is a review of the radical re-consideration of Olson’s work offered by Herman Yépez in his Imperio de la neomemoria. This essay allows me to place the transcultural Olson into a transcultural perspective, a perspective that calls for a reconsideration of Olson’s subjectivity.
OLSON AND SUBJECTIVITY
Olson’s physical stature was intimidating to many. Obsessed by his insecurities, he might overcompensate with actions that mentors, peers, and students found alienating. And yet he also charged the imagination of many of these same persons with a thirst for new knowledge and new ways of seeing. It is a complex heritage that transformed modern poetry, especially in so far as the stance of his “Projective Verse” is concerned. In the Maximus Poems, the poet’s size often functions as a figure of speech. It is a projection meant to instill independent resolve. It also betrays a welter of insecurities at cross purpose the goals of citizenship and polis.
Nathaniel Mackey is a contemporary American poet deeply influenced by the transcultural aspects of Olson’s work. Mackey like Olson experiences what might be called maimed or wounded subjectivity. The experience of incompleteness has a transformative potential with respect to ways of knowing. My argument is that Olson’s interrogation of his insecurities resonate with similar movements in the development the “cross-cultural imagination” (Wilson Harris’ phrase) in the Caribbean. Like Mackey, I place Olson into a necessary conversation among poets individualized subjectivity. The essay, “Outer Darkness: Charles Olson, Nathaniel Mackey and the Poetry of Incommensurable Realities” is one of several in the collection that explore the continuing resonance of Olson’s poetic method. The relation between experienced incommensurabilities, often figured as incompleteness, even amputation, is crucial to identity formations. The Brazilian anthropophagists turned to cannibalism of European sources as a form of remediation necessary for producing an authentic avant-garde poetry.
The essay, “Olson and Subjectivity: ‘Projective Verse’ and The Uncertainties of Sex,” explores some of the transformative insecurities that lead to the evolution of Olson’s “field poetics” in his “Projective Verse” essay. I argue that some of Olson’s language is overdetermined in the Freudian sense and that his quest for coherence leaves him personally vulnerable in a way that prefigures subjectivity as understood in postmodernist terms. Thus Olson is not only postmodern in his attempt to align the archaic with the present in a rejection of modernism, as it has evolved from its Greek and Renaissance roots, he is also postmodern in how he sees the individual a term of reference in an interactive field of colliding possibilities.
The emotional response to this lack of implicit coherence can be melancholy. That is the subject of the last essay in this section. This essay is underdevelopment and will, I think contrast Olson’s melancholy with Williams’ joy in the affirmation of his poetic nature, experienced in “The Desert Music.”
POETICS OR METHOD
The contents of this section may be self-explanatory. The first essay, uses the publication of Joel Oppenheimer’s last book as an occasion for examining the projective method in relation to the emergence of meaning and understanding. After a consideration of some of the distinctive qualities of the “lyric mode” of poetic production in comparison with what is often called “epic.” I turn to a consideration of the essentially lyric prosody that has come to frame the work of Robert Creeley and then Robert Duncan and through the example of these figures the language of larger works like those of John Taggart and Susan Howe. The final essay is a synopsis of all the various forms of “field poetics,” contextualizing Olson’s work within this larger modern and postmodern project.
