Charles Olson was not a man to be content with fascinating images. Arrogant, confusing, paralyzed at times by perpetual struggle with the language of the tribe, Olson nonetheless is the prototype for those contemporaries who insist that "arguing a world which has value" forces one beyond imagination to direct perception, to the cutting edge where man and the world are in perpetual interchange…. Only by absolute attention to this experience can we "restate man" in such a way as "to repossess him of his dynamic," to face the failures of humanism and rationalism and to create a postmodern definition of reality answering Rimbaud's, "what is on the other side of despair."… (p. 93)

Any cosmology that looks to only a specific part of itself, like man, as its measure and ultimate purpose borders always on despair; there are always potential contradictions between the multiplicity of the whole and the limitations of that measuring agent…. Olson requires instead a cosmology in which the multiplicity provides for its own measure, in which meaning and value are functions of events and not of underlying fictions.

Olson's dream, then, is a total revaluation of values, and, like Nietzsche, the first to make such a claim, he has a vision complex, confusing and at times contradictory. Yet, as also in the case of Nietzsche, there are important rewards if one has the patience to sort out his thoughts and to imagine their possible coherence. The first reward is an obvious one—Olson's thought has been very influential, and if one understands him one comprehends the relationships among a set of concepts basic to much contemporary poetry. More important, though, is the kind of speculation Olson offers. Like Nietzsche's, his vision is radical and total; it gives no quarter to the compromises normally made to preserve many humanist values but demands instead that one envision human values only as the extension of the conclusions science has made and probably will make about man's relationship to natural forces. We usually do not think that way. Our commonsense assumptions about the ego, the mind, human freedom, and many other phenomena are a complex blend of humanism, Christianity, and awareness of practical exigencies. To me this blend is necessary if we are to live in the society our traditions have prepared for us, but it is a tenuous one capable of being altered in numerous ways. And nothing opens possibilities so effectively as imaginative participation in radically different conceptual schemes derived more or less logically from reflections on the direct implications of scientific thinking on human behavior. Finally, Olson's basic dream was to be an epic poet, and the great epics, he saw, always tried to render the human significance of the cosmology of their age. It is likely now that such a project is impossible because modern cosmology is so complex and so apparently isolated from ordinary experience. The attempt even to imagine its possibility, however, deserves some attention…. (pp. 93-4)

The easiest entrance into Olson's thought is by way of his theory of meaning. Meaning, he feels, is unmediated and depends neither on concepts of representation nor on the dichotomy between descriptive facts and interpretive values. Meaning, Olson is fond of repeating, is "that which exists thru itself" …, that which emerges as active presence or defined energy in an event…. Like many modern philosophers, Olson locates the problem of absence in [Western man's] desire for referential explanation, for it demands the distinction between an event there and interpreting mind here, stimulus or matter there—response and secondary qualities here. It necessitates, in addition, a gap between temporal flux and the permanent and hence limited and inadequate interpretive structures in the mind…. The ground for values becomes relative; one seems bound to accept either the primacy of individual fictions or the conservative claims for social and traditional codes supported by history, if not by God. But either way, man stands deprived of cosmos and choosing in a void without valid support for his choices.

To fault referential theories of truth is easy, to provide alternative models far more difficult. Yet here the poet has an advantage over the philosopher because he works in a tradition only rarely committed to the primacy of reference…. The poem's full meaning is never in its references outward to interpretive systems but lies in the multidimensional interplay of forces that constitutes the event of reading the poem. Yet for Olson poetic theory that brings one to this point has not completed its task because it has not created the bridge between aesthetic events and ordinary experience. (pp. 94-5)

Olson's poetic occupies this liminal place between aesthetic and ontological experience. That is one reason one is tempted to adapt his concepts to conventional Romantic or New Critical ideas. Yet to halt at these parallels is to overlook the genuine radicalism in Olson's enterprise. Olson always seeks naturalistic definitions in order to extend terms usually limited to an aesthetic vocabulary. In discussing form, for example, he begins with what are by now truisms, but continually seeks out natural, scientific, and mythological analogues to obliterate the gap between aesthetic and existential values. To those trained in the New Criticism there is certainly nothing surprising in Olson's famous formula (taken from Creeley, he says) "Form Is Never More Than An Extension of Content."… Yet few in that same tradition would accept the literal way Olson applies this formula. Form is literally within the event as dynamic union of world and acting agent; in no way is it the structuring of an event by a responding, interpreting mind. Form is the property of an event as experienced by a responding consciousness; it does not depend on an interpretive arrangement by consciousness in reflective tranquility once the event has been completed. In other words, form is radically organic and within experience. Form is really the unity of that which, existing through itself, has meaning. So Olson rejects as allegorical refusal of the secular world any attempt to refer experience to orders of significance either hidden beneath it or imposed upon it…. In practice this leads Olson to deny the priority of ideas as the agents by which man imposes order on his world. (p. 96)

Olson's entire poetics and ontology follow from his redefinition of form and content. One might notice first of all what becomes of the ideal of reconciling opposites. For Olson such an ideal is at best empty and at worst destructive. In so far as the full event is realized, it contains within itself the opposites and hence determines their true relationship. Beyond the human consciousness, which usually creates rather than reconciles opposites, "is direct perception and the contraries which dispose of argument."… (p. 97)

But if one cannot trust the synthesizing imagination, how is one to apprend the possible unity of an event?… Olson turns to the most physical aspect of the poem—its rhythm—and redefines that to fit his sense of experience…. Olson's elaborate (and questionable) arguments for breath as the rhythmic measure of poetry have their source in this need to link a poetics of event with a full and active mode of human response. To further sustain the links between the body and complex experience, Olson redefines complexity; he substitutes for mystical metaphors of depth, the physical metaphor of intensity. Rhythm becomes "a pumping of the real" …, and breath the physical measure of intensity. Rhythm allows one to participate in experience, not to control it.

Given the primacy of content over form and of body over consciousness, Olson must redefine human creativity. Once poetic intuition becomes so closely linked with "the dogmatic nature of experience," once poetics also becomes ontology, there is little room for the traditional doctrine of poet as artificer or self-expressive genius…. Olson does not oppose inwardness, or even the idea of man as maker if interpreted properly…. What is crucial is the moment of contact. Man's creative being then is best considered as a "pressure" on experience …, rather than a recasting of it. In other words, man is the world's limit …, he allows events to assume their full meaning and hence their value by pushing through "the glowing surfaces" to the presence of nature's energy and hence her measures. As Heidegger says, consciousness is not the center or telos of being, but it is necessary for the full creative nature of the real (for the gods perhaps) to emerge. For Olson the creative consciousness intensifies the real in two ways—by exerting pressure on the surface of things ("de-creation") and by becoming a focus for large complexes of energy freed from space time and caused to "interact" … in a nexus of conflicting forces. Intensity is a measure of tension, and it depends on the power of consciousness to gather or fold together the multiple aspects of the real…. (pp. 97-9)

As breath is a physical measure of intensity; its intellectual counterpart for Olson is the image…. Like so many moderns, Olson uses the idea of image to draw together the various strands of his poetic. The concept then functions as a useful way to see how Olson tries to synthesize his predecessors. He shares first of all their sense that the poem must ultimately be conceived as a single intensive entity, in a sense free from the sequential displacements of ordinary discourse. And like them, he stresses the nondiscursive quality of that unified entity. But Olson makes clear his difference from the symbolist proponents of the Romantic image by insisting on the image as the intensification of objective reality, not a transcending of it. Image does not, like symbol and allegory, refer beyond itself to conscious intentions and thus disperse energy away from the emerging present. Instead, image gathers those energies, which might otherwise be dispersed into the independent fictive mind, within a single dynamic movement. Yet that movement must be more intellectual, more related to imaginative archetypes than it is with his objectivist masters. (p. 99)

Olson, I think, is the central figure of postmodern poetics. Because of his difficulty, Olson's direct influence has not been very great outside limited circles. Yet even without grasping the full doctrine, young poets could not but be struck by both its suggestive image of an ontological project to be undertaken by postmodern poetry and by the numerous flashes of insight it provides as useful means for realizing that project. (p. 102)

Olson's poetry, on the other hand, is neither so influential nor so central. First of all, its content is often private or recondite, and the poems for the most part are difficult to see as coherent human experiences. And it just does not bring "the news" as the prose does. Moreover, in his best lyrics Olson is trying to enact certain qualities of his metaphysic not easily assimilated into one's expectations about the modern lyric…. For Olson poetry is the relationship of things and uses, not of images and dramatic subjects. Hence, in his poems, there is not only the paucity of lyrical images that his critics point out, but language is asked to carry a special burden. Olson does not use a particularly fresh language, but he invests syntax with enormous significance. That is where energy manifests itself, in the processes of mind appropriating nature and adjusting itself to her orders. Moreover, he emphasizes the etymological rather than the dramatic qualities of language. For in asking readers to reflect on the etymological layers of a word, Olson calls attention to qualities of the interchange between mind and nature that have collective significance. He points to the history of the way a word has been used and thus leads readers to see their own speech as at once participating in a historical process and readapting the energies of the past to the demands of the present. He makes them aware that consciousness is a force more expansive and more intensive than is normally recognized by those who see the individual as the source of meaning. (pp. 102-03)