“What does one mean by 20th-century American poetry? Where does one start? Robert Frost’s rugged philosophizing or Wallace Stevens’s imaginative dreamscapes? And what binds Claude McKay’s socialist realist sonnets to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets’ scientistic abstractions? Can we really expect to sort through so many different voices from so many different backgrounds?”
“In fact, there are many points of entry. And one of the most promising takes us back to an unlikely place and time: North Carolina, in the depths of the Great Depression, where a number of faculty members recently dismissed from Rollins College for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge founded the legendary Black Mountain College. Here, the ideas and inventions of American icons such as John Dewey and Buckminster Fuller would merge with the teachings of exiled European intellectuals and artists, including Albert Einstein, Walter Gropius, and Josef Albers”
“A partial list of Black Mountain teachers and students will suffice to indicate its central role in 20th-century American culture: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov”
“But what ever happened to the legacy of Charles Olson? Why does his surname lack the resonance of Cage and Ginsberg?”
“Olson’s influence — pervasive, perennial — is plain to see. It stems from his central project: the establishment of so-called “projective verse.””
“The three main features of “projective” verse are kinetics, principle, and process”
“Olson asserts that in order to ensure this forward propulsion, a poet must not remain fixed upon a single perception for long, avoiding excessive description, but rather constantly shift through various modes of perception. A poet must open herself, and compose “by field.””
“The rhythm of a poem should accommodate the exigencies of each breath that the poet breathes in speaking”
“For him, the poetic unit of sound is the syllable, which has mythopoeic origins: “‘Is’ comes from […] as, to breathe […] ‘not’ equals the Sanscrit na, […] to be lost, to perish [… and] ‘be’ is from bhu, to grow.” What a syllable means is intuitively linked with how it sounds, and a poet must follow these links”
“Olson provides a famous formulation that encapsulates the parallel relationships between the poet’s body, perception, and product — “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.””
“Olson intends projective verse to enact a form of ego death through self-objectification”
“The preferred ethos of “humilitas” effects what Keats calls “the poetical character,” which “is not itself — it has no self — it is everything and nothing.” If one sees oneself in nature, rather than nature in oneself, one will “sprawl,” and so “find little to sing but himself.” However, if one sees nature in oneself, such that “he stays inside himself […] he will be able to listen” to things outside of oneself — and, thus, lose oneself.”
“When a poetic self strives for the maximal, when it strives for an expansion of its perceptual horizons, when it frees itself from the shackles of inherited form — how could it not attest to its own particular capacities and energies, to the power of its own senses, its own voice?”
“Olson’s principles, when put into practice, work. The success of his ideas remains manifest to anyone who cares about the history of postwar American poetry. However, the success of his poetic principle may not have lead to the world that he wanted to live in, one in which the poet escapes the confines of his ego through the rigors of contemplating objects and ideas. Any exposition of a perceived object, when made well, draws attention to the power of the perceiving subject”