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Charles Olson and the 'Inferior Predecessors': 'Projective Verse' Revisited

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Olson's essay ["Projective Verse"] begins with this diagram:

      (projectile       (percussive     (prospective
                     vs.
              The NON-Projective

To Creeley, this terminology and mode of presentation was enormously exciting, a way of breaking out of the "closed system," of "poems patterned upon exterior and traditionally accepted models."… [This vocabulary] occurs in Pound's Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. In this essay, Pound praises the composer-theorist Antheil for his understanding that "music exists in time-space; and is therefore very different from any kind of plastic art which exists all at once."… The "monolinear," "lateral," and "horizontal" action of … "musical mechanisms" is, in Pound's words, "like a projectile carrying a wire and cutting, defining the three dimensions of space."… The projective element in music—its locomotive quality—is defined as the fourth dimension.

The notion of the poem as projectile, a mechanism or force projected through time-space, is thus not as revolutionary as Olson's admirers have professed it to be. The synonymic use of "projectile" and "percussive," for that matter, makes little sense until one has read Pound's Antheil, in which he devotes a whole section to the role of percussion in the "time-spacing" created by "musical mechanisms."… (pp. 287-88)

In the first two pages of his essay, Olson defines "OPEN verse" and discusses "COMPOSITION BY FIELD" under three headings: its "kinetics," its "principle," and its "process."… Note that although … Olson singles out Robert Creeley and Edward Dahlberg as the fellow writers who most influenced his theory, the text of "Projective Verse" itself suggests that their concepts as well as Olson's were in turn derived from the critical writings of Pound and Williams. (p. 288)

Such indebtedness is not, in itself, a fault; Williams himself, after all, derived many of his critical concepts from Pound and then adapted them to his own purposes. The difference is that Olson consistently insinuates … that his theory of poetry is revolutionary. Yet his main deviation from the Pound-Williams aesthetic is that he muddles their concepts.

Take, for example, the tripartite division into the kinetics, the principle, and the process of projective verse. The division sounds impressive but what is its real point? If poetry is a "high energy-construct" (Rule 1), clearly its form will be determined by the content or energy to be conveyed from poet to reader (Rule 2). Why the first is kinetics and the second principle is never made clear. The third division—the "process of the thing"—seems to be no more than a corollary of (1), for if the poem is an "energy-discharge," it follows that one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further one (Rule 3). This is kinetics all over again. Or process if you want to call it that. Olson's three-step definition is, in short, merely pretentious, a device used to convince the reader that the argument in question is proceeding logically or that, at the very least, it is highly complex. (pp. 290-91)

Olson is again following Pound and Williams in his insistence that the basic unit of prosody can no longer be considered the foot, that, as Pound said in Canto LXXXI, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave." In the "new poetry," the basic unit becomes the line or breath group of artfully arranged syllables. Olson's emphasis on the centrality of syllable and line thus has ample precedent. But his conclusion is his own:

  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….

This formulation, like the distinction between kinetics, principle, and process discussed above, has more manner than matter…. [The formula could] be reversed, and in any case it hardly seems to matter which of the two—syllable or line—is HEAD or HEART. (pp. 292-93)

The necessity of "getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego" and of avoiding the traditional mimetic role of poetry is one of Olson's obsessive themes. In "On Poets and Poetry" (1953), for example, he defines the image "as a 'thing,' never so far as we know, such a nonanimal as symbol," and in the "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" (1959), which serves as a postscript to "Projective Verse," he declares that in the past few centuries, "representation was never off the dead-spot of description. Nothing was happening as of the poem itself—ding and zing or something. It was referential to reality."

If this allegedly new concept of the image as thing, as object relating not to any external reality but only to other objects within the field of the poem, has a familiar ring, it is because Olson's "objectism" is merely Pound's "objectivism" in not very new dress. (p. 294)

[Although] Olson uses the analogy of "clean wood" rather than of granite or marble—Pound's favorite building materials—to define poetry, the doctrine is really the same. Williams summed it up in his famous phrase, "No ideas but in things"…. (p. 295)

"Projective Verse," one concludes, is hardly the break-through in literary theory it is reputed to be. It is essentially a scissors-and-paste job, a clever but confused collage made up of bits and pieces of Pound, Fenollosa, Gaudier-Brzeska, Williams, and Creeley. One could argue, of course, that Olson repeatedly acknowledges his debt to "the work of Pound & Williams," and that he admittedly uses their poetics as a springboard from which to chart the directions the "new poetry" should take. But this is not quite what happens. We have already seen that Olson claims his "objectism" to be a "more valid formulation for present use" than the "objectivism" of his Masters. In the years following the publication of "Projective Verse"—years in which Olson began to publish his own poetry—he became increasingly testy about his relationship to Pound and Williams. (pp. 295-96)

Evidently, Olson's aim [in "I, Mencius, Pupil of the Master …"] is to use the typographical spacing and verse technique of the Cantos to criticize Pound's unfortunate return to the "closed verse" of traditional poets. But despite its parody rhymes …, its recurrent metal images, or its witty allusions …, "I, Mencius" is no more than a superficially clever poem. For one thing, Olson's own Rule #3—"ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION"—is not observed in this poem, which basically restates the same theme over and over again. (p. 299)

[Despite] Olson's repeated insistence that "contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN," his own prosody is not in any way remarkable. In ["I, Mencius,"] for example, it is not clear that the line always ends "where its breathing, shall come to, termination."… Olson insists that "only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending," but in that case, "only he, the man who writes" can know why the line ends when it does…. One finds … no sense of inevitability in Olson's verse line, no principle which may be said to govern the way syllables must be combined to constitute lines. The poet simply breaks off where he happens to break off….

[During] the sixties, Olson became such an oracle, even if to a relatively small coterie, that he could and did say almost anything—banal, confusing, contradictory, meaningless—and get away with it. (p. 300)

[We] might conclude by looking at a late Olson poem so as to see to what extent Olson has managed to MAKE IT NEW.

My text is, appropriately I think, a late Olson poem entitled "from The Song of Ullikummi," which bears the subtitle: "(translated from Hurrian and Hittite and read at Spoleto 1965 to honor the presence of Mr. Ezra Pound)." At this festive occasion, one gathers, Olson finally wanted to make peace with his "inferior predecessor." Like his first Master, he would base his poem on an ancient myth, only he would go one step further than Pound by choosing an obscure Hurrian myth, wholly beyond Pound's own scholarly range.

"From The Song of Ullikummi" is based on Hans Güterbock's 1951 translation of the incomplete epic, which is in turn based on the following myth. The god Kumarbis has dethroned his father Anus but is in turn threatened by Anus's second son, the storm god. Kumarbis sends his messenger, Imbaluris, to the Sea to seek her advice. She summons Kumarbis to her house and feasts him. As a result of her advice, Kumarbis leaves his native Urkis and goes to a place where he meets a huge rock. He has intercourse with this rock and bears a son called Ullikummis, who grows into a gigantic pillar of diorite. He rises from the sea like a tower until his height is 9,000 leagues and his girth the same. To the consternation of the gods, he reaches up to heaven. A conflict between Ullikummis and the storm-god now ensues.

Olson's poem is based on the first twenty-two lines of the first tablet. The Güterbock text prints the Hittite transcription of the Hurrian myth on the left side of the page and the English translation on the right…. (pp. 301-02)

In his version, Olson omits the statement of epic theme, the reference to the conflict between Kumarbis and the storm god, and the description of the journey. His subject, rather, is the act of intercourse itself, yet, although his poem deals only with this one event, it is more than twice as long as the relevant portion of the original narrative. (p. 303)

[The] lines are somewhat reminiscent of Pound: the retelling of ancient myth in contemporary idiom, the casual free verse, the juxtaposition of foreign text with its English equivalent. Yet the differences outweigh these superficial similarities. Whereas Pound usually juxtaposes different myths, playing off one against another to create a new image, Olson harps with tiresome monotony on the same theme:

       the fucking
  of the Mountain
       fucked the mountain went right through it and
  came out the other side….

And, although he often copies the Güterbock translation verbatim,… in the few cases where he does make changes in the parent text, it is in order to turn a neutral narrative statement into a cute sexual reference…. [Note] that the wit, which does not rise above the most banal locker-room joke, is fraudulent in that Olson depends upon our not being able to read the Hittite…. (pp. 303-04)

The novelty of [the] linguistic juxtapositions rapidly wears off once we know what the Hittite means. If a poem is meant to be, in Olson's words, "a high energy-construct" or "energy-discharge," it is difficult to justify the essential repetitiveness of "from The Song of Ullikummi." Nor does the "FORM" of this particular poem seem to be "AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT," for as we can see by looking at the parent text, the same content can be and is presented in very different form. One would be grateful if, in keeping with the doctrine of "Projective Verse," the "PERCEPTION" of the opening line—"fucked the Mountain"—ever led to a "FURTHER PERCEPTION," but Olson seems to find the notion of a god fucking a rock so titillating, so enchanting, that he can think of nothing else, and the poem ends as it began….

One can object at this point that it is unfair to judge Olson by this relatively unimportant poem, that the Maximus Poems, say, or "The Kingfishers" would give us a different image of the poet. No doubt there is some truth in such an objection—Olson did write better poems than "Ullikummi"—but we must take the poem seriously because Olson himself took it very seriously indeed. (p. 305)

"Ullikummi" … simply manifests in particularly blatant form Olson's central imaginative failure. Pound and Williams, one should recall, talked of prosody only after long and ardous experiments with different verse forms, line units, and syllable combinations; theirs was what Eliot liked to call "workshop criticism." Olson, on the other hand, began by announcing that the syllable and the line were the "HEAD" and the "HEART" of the new prosody and hoped that no one would notice that, in his own poetry, he let the lines fall where they may. Again, whereas Pound's and Williams' objectivist theories were the natural outgrowth of their experiments with imagery, Olson simply announced that the "objects in field" that compose a poem must refer to nothing outside themselves, only to discover that in his own poetry, references to external reality became increasingly obtrusive. (pp. 305-06)

Marjorie G. Perloff, "Charles Olson and the 'Inferior Predecessors': 'Projective Verse' Revisited," in ELH (© copyright 1973 by The Johns Hopkins University Press), Summer, 1973, pp. 285-306.

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