[In Call Me Ishmael Olson] makes clear his relation to a responsiveness and decision in such writing to be found only in such comparable works as D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, W. C. Williams' In The American Grain, and Edward Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live. In this respect, criticism is not only a system of notation and categorization—it is an active and definitive engagement with what a text proposes. It is not merely a descriptive process. Call Me Ishmael begins:

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration….

                                             (p. 2)

Olson's approach was thus … removed from the terms of any other critical intelligence of that period. He spoke of "geography" and that was clearly anti-literary. He proposed a sense of the literal nature of this country quite distinct from those critics influenced by European traditions.

It is relevant, then, that Olson's particular nature should lead him in Yucatan to just such exploration as he values in Parkman…. In "Mayan Letters" we have unequivocal evidence of a kind of intelligence which cannot propose the assumption of content prior to its experience of that content, which looks, out of its own eyes. This does not mean that conjecture is to be absent, insofar as jacio means "throw" and con, "together"—however simply this point may note the actual process. It is a consistent fact with Olson that he does use his legs, and does depend on what his own instincts and intelligence can discover for him. In this way he throws together all he has come to possess.

But humanism, as a system of thought or ordering of persons in their relations to other things in the world, is distinctly absent. Even the most sympathetic ordering of human effects and intelligence leads to unavoidable assumptions, and the test—which is the reality of one's quite literal being—denies any investment of reality prior to its fact. (pp. 3-4)

Camus despairs of his inability to fit experience to possible orders of language, whereas Olson would insist that language be returned to its place in experience, neither more nor less than any other act.

William Carlos Williams had said, "No ideas but in things," thereby insisting that reality was a real matter. Pound equally insisted, "Any tendency to abstract general statement is a greased slide." Both men have clearly to do with possibilities in writing of which Olson is the further evidence, but his own qualifications of either man are also relevant. For example, Pound he felt limited to an "ego-system."… (p. 5)

By contrast, Olson feels that Williams offers an emotional system, which does not limit the context of writing to an assumption of understanding—or, better, it attains a way of writing that feels as it goes as well as sees. This allows the experience of writing to be more sensitive than the ego alone can admit.

In the second part of "Projective Verse," Olson makes this useful summary:

Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the "subject" and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use.

                                             (pp. 5-6)

[What] confronted us in 1950 was a closed system indeed, poems patterned upon exterior and traditionally accepted models. The New Criticism of that period was dominant and would not admit the possibility of verse considered as an "open field."

But, thinking now of what else was clearly happening, that attitude was already losing ground. If one reads Jackson Pollock's comments on his painting at that time, he can note for himself the obvious parallel…. (pp. 6-7)

A like situation was clear in the work of John Cage, which involved the introduction of "chance" factors and reconsidered the whole context of a "melodic" modality in music. And similar circumstances were very clear in the sciences as well. "Formal" order, taken as a sine qua non, could no longer be assumed as a necessary virtue.

How, then, manage its alternatives—in such a way that the result be not random but rather the most precise discrimination and attention of which the man writing is capable? Olson's premise is this:

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader …

This means, very literally, that a poem is some thing, a structure possessed of its own organization in turn derived from the circumstances of its making. Thus far, it could, of course, be a sonnet—and under given circumstances well might be, supposing that the man writing discovered that possibility as he did, in fact, write. But what one is saying has intimate relation to how one is saying it—and/or the content, in this sense, is that which qualifies the possibilities of form. Valéry, in The Art of Poetry, qualifies as lyric that mode of poetry in which the content and the form are realized simultaneously. Neither one can precede the other as a possibility. It is this sense, then, which Olson extends to all occasions of writing in verse. It is hardly a careless procedure, in that no order more than that so recognized can be gained. (pp. 7-8)

The most insistent concern I find in Olson's writing is the intent to gain the particular experience of any possibility in life, so that no abstraction intervenes. (p. 9)