Charles Olson

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Thom Gunn

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Charles Olson … exists in the world of factions—of manifestoes and extravagant gestures. He appears to be influenced by such rebels against orthodoxy as Pound and the Rimbaud of Les Illuminations. So far so good, I suppose: Pound and Rimbaud were geniuses who succeeded, against all probability, in expanding the boundaries of poetry. In Olson, however, the habit of scholarly detail inherited from Pound clutters the imagination, and the habit of recklessness in imagination (inherited maybe from Rimbaud) cancels out any possible consistency or relevance in the scholarly details. These twin disasters come about, I suspect, because he has little interest in the sensible world except as a handle on which to hang bits of poetry…. If we want the explanation of his technique, we may find it in his essay on "Projective Verse," printed in The New American Poetry 1945–1960 …, which though it has been very influential, it would not be unfair to describe as the worst prose published since Democratic Vistas. This passage opens with the statement of a rule:

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER.

The description of this psychological process was first made several hundreds of years ago, and the recommendation of it as a specifically poetic process was made at least as early as the start of the nineteenth century, but it is the complete lack of qualification, the absolutism of his demand, that distinguishes Olson's enunciation of it as a rule for writing poetry…. "Put down anything so long as you keep writing" would be a fair enough paraphrase. The result is The Distances, which consists of performances as flat and inept as the feeble rhymes that are printed daily in [newspapers]. (pp. 595-96)

Thom Gunn, in The Yale Review (© 1961 by Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), June, 1961.

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