Olson's Acts
“[B]ecause it rouses the faculties to act,” wrote William Blake in a letter to Dr. John Trusler in 1799, defending “what is not too Explicit as the fittest for instruction.” Another poet interested in action was Charles Olson; the breath in “Projective Verse” not only manifests the heart of the poet and the line of the poem, but is also the locus, at the end of that essay, from which “all act springs.” And “[w]hat he knows,” he writes in the first notes for his Special View of History six years later, “turns out to coincide exactly with another phrase: what he does” (29). Or to use one of the later notes in that book, “that which is” is only one half of the double ax[is]; “Growth is the other half” . . . “that it may do” (49).

It’s exactly the importance of acts—attentions and perceptions—that one takes away from these new revised and expanded editions of Olson’s The Special View of History and Projective Verse. Writing about them is also an opportunity for me to revisit the excited marginal notes I made in their earlier published editions, and to wonder how they might speak to a contemporary audience now that the zeitgeist has mutated a few times. When a work appears, after all, influences the way it’s experienced: I imagine there are some practitioners who think that “Projective Verse” may have been important at one time but has little to contribute to the current environment. It’s true that it didn’t attract a huge audience until ten years after its appearance—in 1960, as the leadoff text in the poetics section of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry—but after that and for the rest of the century, its importance was clear: it was “the essay that changed American poetry,” writes Robert Kelly. And now? One of the things I want to argue is that it’s even more important, in the age of AI and all it portends, today.

I’ll return to that claim at the end of this review, but what else might we take from “Projective Verse” today? One thing to remember is that, even though what most people remember is Robert Creeley’s admonition that “form is never more than an extension of content,” Olson never says that form isn’t important. Far from it: “one loves only form,” he writes in the first Maximus poem, “and form only comes / into existence when / the thing is born” His remarks about the syllable, which make up “the dance of the intellect” and the “PLAY of mind,” are all formal qualities, “what rules and holds together the lines” (33). I’ve always thought that he mangled the medieval poem “Westron Wynde” a bit in his attempt to illustrate the syllable’s importance—he does better a little later with the first lines of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night—but the ear in this essay is never less than the twin of the breath. And like most important works, “Projective Verse” continually offers new insights and perspectives. From its beginning words—
—it never really relaxes, pushing its points further to their natural conclusion, championing “its act of composition” as it goes, because it’s “the acts, the split second acts” that have to be kept moving. Along the way, “the very conventions on which communication by language rests” might be stretched, although Olson confesses that that ambition is “too big for these notes,” which are “merely to get things started” (future essays like “The Vinland Map Review” and “Proprioception” will support that claim). Likewise, the ideas of Process and Reality exist here well before he read Whitehead’s opus five or six years later, and his career-long prejudice against description—because it, and similes, might interfere with “the going energy of the content toward its form”—dovetails nicely with his hilarious (and true!) Hart Crane criticism: “Does not Hart miss the advantages, by such an isolated push [to the nominative], miss the point of the whole front of the syllable, line, field, and what happened to all language, and to the poem, as a result?” I liked The Bridge a lot, but after reading that, couldn’t appreciate all those arpeggios and undinal vast bellies in quite the same way.

And then there’s this rather amazing passage, which I wouldn’t dream of analyzing:
except to say that those swerves, the characteristic stops and starts and curious circumlocutions, is quintessential Olson.

Both books under review here feature new scholarship and add new materials. In The Special View of History, that scholarship has uncovered the actual class notes Olson made for a course with that name at Black Mountain in 1956; in some cases this involved re-arrangement of the material in the 1970 edition, edited by Ann Charters, as well as including notes (primarily but not entirely about Whitehead and Olson’s reading of Process and Reality) not previously published. So we get here a behind-the-scenes look at the material in its provisional sense: notes for a class that would certainly have been revised and expanded in the process of delivering them and in conversation with the students for whom it was written.

This provisional form is entirely appropriate to its subject matter. Enthusiasts of Olson, a group in which I include myself, have always run the risk of appearing as gullible acolytes, preaching wonders to anyone impeded from seeing them. What makes that notion especially amusing is that what Olson is advocating here is the furthest thing imaginable from any kind of structured program; rather, it’s an invitation and exhortation to inhabit one’s own body and to keep oneself alive to the currents of creative accident, “not in any serial order imposed at random on either chance or accident . . . but in the factual observation of how creation does occur: by the success of its own accident” (63), “in that wonderful sense that one does what one knows before one knows what one does.” (56)

With that in mind (!), I’ll try and trace Special View’s main argument, such as it is, through the various weeks of class notes. First, it’s important to note that one of Olson’s most magical poems, “Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele” with its truncated Rimbaud translations, was being worked on at exactly this time, via letters from and to Frances Boldereff; indeed, Olson mentions Rimbaud at the very beginning of the lecture notes, praising him as a means to divert attention from “the baggage of environment, in the full sense of how society moves” (28). That baggage, he suggests, is the fate of the realist, wedded to “things as they are,” but there’s a different path ahead for lovers of the actual (as opposed to the real), who can perceive that “nature is as essentially moving as any one of us is, even to the core of matter itself” (29).

Later notes expand on this fundamental proposition: in the fifth week of the class (the first of the two new “Whitehead” sections), Olson writes “nothing is at rest, an impossible state, no molecules ain’t dancing” (49). But there are two ways of experiencing motion, one in and of itself, and the other an imagination of its future: “Growth is the other half, and is cause/change... that which is, that it may do.” “You can’t stop motion,” he writes a few sentences later: “You can only yrself move” (49). That movement, he suggests, IS “the special view”: history depends on what each of us make of it.

Special View’s origins in 1956 come between “Projective Verse” and the piece that’s usually appended to it, the “Letter to Elaine Feinstein” in 1959: that letter expands on the essay’s second half, which considers “a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem itself” (39). Special View can be considered as an essential building block of that stance; it’s meant to provide an experience where (as Olson states in the letter) “one is equal across history forward and back, and it’s all levy, as present is, but sd that way, one states...a different space-time” (43). Miriam Nichols, in her Introduction to Projective Verse, calls this “the capacity to remain in one’s own skin and to participate from that situatedness in the larger world of species life and historical artefact” (21). Participation is the key. One could do worse than simply treat the word “view” as a verb, not a noun: we view history as we shape it through our acts, “until” (as Creeley paraphrased it a few years later, in his introduction to The New American Poetry), “the noun he is—a house—is seen as motion.”

Thinking about verbs and nouns is a reminder that the entire essay (lecture? syllabus?) can be seen as an ars poetica, as most of his essays can: “It is actually form that I am seeking to draw out of the thought,” he writes in the notes for the fifth week, “to seize a tradition out of the live air, or something” (57) (he’s half-remembering Pound’s Canto LXXXI). Another new section not included in the original 1970 edition, “The Place & The Thing & The Act, of the Action,” raises the prospect of “turn[ing] motion itself into a solid . . . without stopping the action, in fact the point is to know & intensify the action—to make action like a pond with a clear frozen surface, look down into it—& without freezing it at all!” (72) It’s this process, what Olson elsewhere identifies as using our powers to impose form on content (or chaos), that becomes “the primary requirement of the experience of the space-time continuum...One then knows something one can’t know without so disposing oneself to one’s self: one acquires the outward experience inside: one discovers that one is a directed magnitude” (72).

Another word for this process is “actualization”: it’s what Michael Boughn, in his Preface to Projective Verse, calls a “reorientation” that “resituates you, adds perspective and depth to your vision that expands your experience and knowledge, enlarges and returns your soul to distinguish and receive whole ranges of knowledge previously unrecognizable” (13). But this process doesn’t involve anything out of the ordinary; it’s the ordinary and familiar that Olson says we’re estranged from and wants to get back to. As he makes Keats say, “the condition itself is the penetralium” (33). So, for example, “There are steps. To dance is an experience of the experience. How far one can lean before topping over. Lift an arm. Etc.” (72). And how can one describe the following passage any other way than dancing?
Testify, brother. In this context, it’s important to remember that Olson left his potential career with the Democratic Party in 1944 “because” (as Nichols has it in her Introduction), “he could not act freely”:
“The World is a huge noun requiring a verb,” Olson says, and they both keep mutating in the sections of the book that act as ballast to the class notes themselves: “Like it or not, see it or not, history is the function of any one of us” (93); “History is the practice of space in time” (95); “It is what I mean by no choice. History is to want to. It is the built-in.” (96). That the actual “will be verbs—actions—STORIES DRAMAS OBSERVANCES—instead of nouns—molecules, atoms, protons, electrons – makes them no less laws” (79).

Olson also mentions drama in the second half of “Projective Verse,” offering Euripides’ The Trojan Women as a play “that is able to stand, is it not, as its people do, beside the Aegean” (40). (In this year of The Odyssey, it’s interesting to remember that Euripides’ play dealt with the fallout from the destruction of Troy). Dramas and epic poems of that time, Olson speculates, “could not issue from men [sic] who conceived verse without the full relevance of human voice,” and he praises those ancient writers who weren’t concerned with being “literary”—as, for example, “O.M. Eliot”: “his root is the mind alone,” he writes at the end of Projective Verse, “and he has stayed there where the ear and the mind are, has only gone from his fine ear outward” instead of “down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has to come from, where, the coincidence is, all act springs” (41).

An early important essay of Olson’s, “Human Universe,” both expands on that notion of “action” and previews The Special View of History: “who can extricate language from action?” he asks, and the answer is the Greeks after about 600 BCE, who “went on to declare all speculation as enclosed in the ‘Universe of Discourse’...as though language, too, was an absolute instead of (as even man is) instrument” (50). This “universe of discourse” has experienced a rebirth in various AI platforms today, which purport to make available the sum total of human knowledge. For example, I’ve been using an “AI Assistant” called “Muse” from Meta for a few weeks now, and anyone who’s had a similar experience knows how uncanny it is to be having conversations with a hyper-articulate and extremely polite...machine. But it’s just an extension of an erroneous 2500-year-old metaphysic, Olson writes in his notes for the fifth week, which “did interfere with reality by making our tool verbal and thus descriptive” (50). Here it’s important to remember that many of Olson’s “new-old” sources predate written records: I can’t think of another poet as vigilant as he was in reclaiming the visual and kinesthetic senses of language instead of resorting to abstraction.

In fact, “Projective Verse” itself is impossible in an AI universe: “ONE PERCEPTION,” reads its third dictum, “MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (32). This is a feat that would be difficult for the algorithm to reproduce: it might be able to leap from one verbal trope to another, but it won’t perceive anything. And this is where Olson’s emphasis on act, combined with an observance of ethos—“custom use habit fashion manner usage practice; a rite ceremony institution ordinance” (71) —can yield the great conjunction of the mysteries: the ancient myths were records of the things done, just as the special view of history yields the actuality that “This is eternity. This now. This foreshortened span,” as Olson writes in the short essay “The Resistance.” As Michael Boughn reminds us, “The foreshortened span is not the negation of eternity. It is its realization in our world” (13).

The important theorists of deconstruction, Derrida, Lacan, and Baudrillard, all appeared in translation after Olson’s death in 1970, but it’s not difficult to imagine, as Charles Stein says in his brilliant Afterword to Projective Verse, that Olson “was proposing, and indeed performing, an act of resistance to a picture of the world—an ontology—that he already sensed was coming on.” The body and its sensory apparatus, Stein writes, “is not merely and fundamentally conditioned by what its culturally determined mental apparatus puts in front of it” (53). Rather, Olson’s emphasis of and insistence on acts creates a new kind of realism—or “actualism”—one essential for survival in the digital age that AI and information technology has brought about. Or as Olson had it, at the end of The Mayan Letters,“The trouble is, it is very difficult, to be both a poet and, an historian.”

Joe Safdie’s latest book of poems is Greek to Me (Chax), a selected poems exploring Greek mythology; another recent publication, essays on poets and poetics, is called Poetry and Heresy (MadHat). These days he channels William Blake from his home in Portland, OR, where he retired after twenty-eight years of teaching English and Creative Writing.