Once at a poetry reading at Brandeis Charles Olson "got so damned offended" that he screamed at his audience, "You people are so literate I don't want to read to you anymore." To underscore the seriousness of his point, he added, "It's very crucial today to be sure that you stay illiterate simply because literacy is wholly dangerous, so dangerous that I'm involved everytime I read poetry, in the fact that I'm reading to people who are literate—and they are not hearing. They may be listening with all their minds, but they don't hear." (p. 38)

Illiteracy, or to use its more respectable name, the "projective," is no mere peevish kicking of syntax in the teeth to spite Aristotle; it is a humanist attempt to subvert the inhuman rigidities and inflations of reality that lie embedded in classical "humanism" itself. The specific rigidities and inflations it seeks to purge are: forms, classes, ideals, conventions, similes, symbols, allegories, comparisons, and descriptions—all things, in short, that betray "particularism" by remaining referential rather than of reality. (pp. 46-7)

"Projective Verse," which first appeared in Poetry New York in 1950, was Olson's first public defense of the grammar of illiteracy…. In a broad sense, the grammar of illiteracy is the grammar of talk, and "Projective Verse" is Olson talking—talking rapid-fire, urgently, and with more concern for the act of his own engagement with his material than with his comprehensibility to a general audience. It is full of "difficulties" and "proper confusions" that are not limited to the infamous violations of "correct usage and form" that Olson's critics wince at with regularity. The essay assumes rather than creates its context. The uninitiated reader feels as though he is entering an ongoing conversation late after the terminology has been established and the issues already defined….

With little contextual assistance from Olson, and thus thrown on their own resources, these critics understandably assume their own contexts for "Projective Verse," which are usually much, much narrower than Olson's, and which inevitably confine his dogmas exclusively to the Pound-Williams objectivist axis. The result is usually a plausible critique of a misleadingly "reduced" Olson. (p. 47)

The problem is that Olson regarded "Projective Verse" as merely the literary tip of a metaphysical iceberg. His detractors tended to see it as an autonomous poetics. Consequently, Olson's dogmas, some new, many borrowed, seem derivative rather than revolutionary when they are extracted from their larger context. Consider dogma one, for example:

(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it … by way of the poem itself to … the reader…. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge….

Certainly this is little more than Fenollosa's concept of the sentence as a "transference of power" applied to verse. Defining the poem as an "energy-construct" is hardly innovative either; Williams and Pound had been saying as much for years. But the intensity with which Olson urges the perhaps tired dogma overwhelms an important qualification that follows it and that at least suggests a philosophical depth to Olson's version relatively absent in Pound and Williams. (p. 48)

Dogma number two … emerges from an underlying epistemology:

(2) … the principle,… FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT….

As a principle of poetics, this statement yields little more than the commonplace notion that subject matter should be allowed to discover its own natural form, but again, from the perspective of Olson's comprehensive stance, it involves the status of a man (be he poet or not) in relation to his environment. Man should resist imposing his forms egotistically upon Nature as a matter of perceptual propriety….

Dogma three reads:

(3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished…. ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION….

Here we see once again the poetical application of an ontological truth. If reality … is a continuous rather than a discrete manifold, the expression of that reality accordingly should be continuous and not discrete. Thus the dogma proposes a poetic process consonant with the natural process of the universe. (p. 49)

The genuine originality of "Projective Verse" cannot be appreciated from the dogmas, which, like gaudy blossoms, inevitably steal the show, but must be savored at the roots that lie deep in the soil of an alternative humanism. In "Projective Verse" this alternative humanism is dubbed "objectism." Olson is obviously nervous about that term and goes to some lengths … to distinguish it from the "objectivism" of Pound and Williams. He defines it as

a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. 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, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use….

                                             (p. 50)

["Objectism"] is no mere literary bias; it is a way of life. It is humilitas, a rejection of the "Egotistical Sublime," a denial of the subject-object predication of Alexandrian grammar and Western epistemology, a "contrary Renaissance," and a useful creative attitude. Why useful? Because when it is employed as "the artist's act in the larger field of objects, [it] leads to dimensions larger than the man."… (p. 51)

Those dogmatic blossoms of "Projective Verse" (the "kinetics … the principle … the process of the thing") are vulnerable to the worst kind of reductio ad ordinarium when they are lopped from the plant that nourishes them. The same is true of other corollary points. Olson's comments on "breath," for example: "the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment he writes … for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line, its metric and its ending where its breathing shall come to termination."… (pp. 51-2)

A poem that is act itself, not thought about act, is beholden to that authority that issues through the breath from where "all act springs" …; that is, the physiology of the poet. (p. 52)

The "projective" poet, Olson maintained, was one who "manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath."… In terms of his "stance toward reality," this complementarity of breath and ear is the poetic counterpart to the principle of "physicality," that is, bodily depth sensibility, the notion of the "body-subject." The ear, Olson insists, "is so close to the mind that it is the mind's" …, just as the breath is so obviously of the body. From the "union of the mind and the ear … the syllable is born"…. The poem therefore becomes the uniting act of mind and body achieved through the creative coalition of ear and breath as they spontaneously merge syllable into line. Hence, Olson's much-maligned formula:

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE….

                                       (p. 53)

Breath, as Olson means it, then, is the instrument of the larger stance towards reality that he has identified as "physicality," but it also serves as means for restoring "speech" to discourse…. Breath reifies experience by creating an awareness of bodily "depth sensibility" that assures its being felt in addition to its being observed, but it also, Olson claims, reifies the elements of verse. This certainly sounds like standard Objectivist logic: "No ideas but in things" (Williams); "The World must be measured by the eye" (Stevens); "the rock crystal thing" (Marianne Moore); but the difference in Olson's "objectism" is breath. Breath shifts the basis of objectivist reification from perception to physical "depth sensibility," and this is why Olson insists that his position be called "objectism." "Objectism" is no perceptual attitude toward things; it is a comprehensive stance that man assumes toward the world that deliberately humiliates his epistemological status by insisting that he be merely a "thing among things." (pp. 53-4)

In a very real sense, then, breath liberates the self from the mind (or soul) and places it physically in the body so that our knowing of the world, our experience and discovery, comes from "inside us / & at the same time does not feel literally identical with our own physical or mortal self."… (p. 54)

In short, the "projective" mode asks the poet to assume an attitude of passive obedience to the inner and outer experiences that he registers.

Perhaps the greatest burden of patience falls on the readers of projective literature, for they, even more than the projective writer (who at least has the guidance of his own experiences to assist him) are truly "naked" in the open field…. They are asked to "avoid all irritable reaching after fact and reason" and to remain "in the absolute condition of present things" …—that is, in the poem itself.

And yet, is this projective nakedness in the open field, this remaining "in the absolute condition of present things" all that unfamiliar? So many times Olson's art is characterized as mere conversation—Olson talking—and there is more than just a ring of truth to such observations. Talk is the template of Olson's style and it is talk that links his style to its underlying ontology. Talk, as opposed to frozen discourse, is spontaneous, ongoing, irreversible, verbal act. (pp. 54-5)

Can we, though, seriously regard "you and I in urgent talk" as Art? What happens in talk? Is it a mimetic activity? Does it hold up a mirror to Nature, as Plato insisted Art does? Or, if that claim seems irrelevant, can we hold that talk "improves" on Nature, idealizes it? Obviously, none of the classical approaches touch even near the actuality of Olson's enterprises, for they are mesmerized by the metaphor of artist-as-maker and Art as the-object-made. Talk, however, is an activity, a process, an event. True, it can be notated on a printed page, but its essential value is its movement. Its shifts, its false starts, its indecisions, its non sequiturs—Olson's intensified stammerings, juxtaposings, indirect guesses—these are participatory events that rise to Art when, through heightened intensity and sense of collective experience, they become the requickening of a previous or anticipated emotion through rite, what the Greeks called dromenon, "the thing done."

It is the "doing," the acting, that sets the value to Olson's "talk." (pp. 56-7)

One final dimension of Olson's "illiteracy" ought to be savored if for no other reason than to appreciate how comprehensively the poet applies and translates his notion of the projective to the whole front of reality. It is his willingness to expose writing to the same ontological challenge that has faced mathematics and physics—that is, how to make it "Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself"….

That last phrase is the title of Olson's important review-essay of Milton Stern's The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville in which Olson spells out in remarkable detail, although in the confusing technical jargon of space-age physics, how he regards projective writing as an inevitable consequence of the same non-Euclidean "redefinition of the Real" … that gave birth to relativity theory, quantum physics, and the whole conception of a continuous, as opposed to a classically discrete, universe. (p. 57)

"Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself" is a difficult essay partly because so much of it is eclectically wrenched from an unacknowledged source text, Hermann Weyl's The Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, and partly because it undertakes to talk of fundamental literary problems in an unfamiliar idiom and from an unfamiliar perspective. Still, it affords perhaps the most mature, most sophisticated rendering of the "stance towards reality" and its impact upon "literacy" that Olson leaves us. The essential argument is that adjustments have to be made to the way in which we "know and present the real" (writing) in order for it to "equal" a continuous rather than a discrete reality…. In a discrete universe the norm for evaluating experience is inert matter. Things are regarded as constant and autonomous, sufficiently so that they are perceived as "substance" that possesses classifiable "qualities." In a continuous universe, however, time, as a fourth dimension, forces us to perceive things no longer as inert "substances," but as "events"—"All things flow." Consequently, projective writing characteristically eschews "qualities" (it is rarely descriptive) and stresses instead the intensive "quantities" of things; that is, their "velocity, force and field strength" within the continuous manifold.

An apt metaphor for such a continuous reality is the electromagnetic field in which interrelated transformations of energy points take place. In such a field discrete formulations, such as subject-object, cause-effect, and even mind-body, give way to the notion of flexible interplay between "things among things." (pp. 57-8)

But perhaps the most important adjust ment projective writing strives for has to do with measurement, for "art is measure"…. Euclidean measuring techniques are obsolete in a continuous reality because they depend upon the assumption that rigid bodies can move freely in space in order to determine congruence…. The constant transformations of the continuum cannot be artificially halted to accommodate a yardstick. Reality, Olson concludes, is "a pumping of the real so constant art had to invent measure anew"…. (p. 59)

The unassailable organic integrity of sheer process, which characterizes the continuous manifold, is simply inaccessible to "additive" measurement. As Riemann … [put] it, "for a discrete manifold the principle of measurement is already contained in the concept of this manifold, but for a continuous one it must come from elsewhere."

The "elsewhere" for Olson was "the new world of atomism" that, he claimed, "offered a metrical means as well as a topos different from the discrete."… That means was "congruence," but not the congruence "which had been the measure of space a solid fills in two of its positions" (Euclidean congruence), but a "point-by-point mapping power of such flexibility that anything which stays the same, no matter where it goes and into whatever varying conditions (it can suffer deformation), it can be followed, and, if it is art, led."… (pp. 59-60)

All fine and good. But how does all this affect the projective mode?… Classification, logic, separation of body and soul, and the "complete" sentence are rejected from the projective on the basis of their ontological inconsistency with continuous reality; each, in its way, interrupts the connectedness, of the transformational process of the field.

Olson calls such interruptions of connectedness "discontinuous jumps." In writing these jumps take the form of allegories, symbols, comparisons and all other devices that take us out of the continuum altogether or disturb our equality with it. (pp. 60-1)

They are "tears" or "cuts" in the narrative continuum. But more than that, they also violate the epistemological stance that "objectism" dictates by promoting, rather than suppressing, the "lyrical interference of the ego."… By forcing a subjective significance on images and objects, symbol and allegory demean their "self-incidence" and artificially elevate the human ego to an uncomely status above other objects. (pp. 61-2)

[Olson's] grammar of illiteracy, then, is really the grammar of life—life in all its ongoing continuity and unremitting process. It is a grammar that forbids "sprawl," forbids existence outside the "human universe." But for all that, it is a grammar committed to man's physical being, dictated by the heart's "pumping" of the real and, most of all, by the breath that has its beginning in that place from where "all act springs." (p. 62)

Thomas F. Merrill, in his The Poetry of Charles Olson: A Primer (© 1982 by Associated University Presses, Inc.), University of Delaware Press, 1982, 228 p.