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Body Poetics, Body Politics: The Birth of Charles Olson's Dynamic

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SOURCE: "Body Poetics, Body Politics: The Birth of Charles Olson's Dynamic," in Sagetrieb, Vol. 10, No. 3, Winter, 1991, pp. 63-82.

[In the following essay, Kellogg examines Olson's shorter poems in light of the poet's own principles of direct experiential knowledge.]

It's going to be somebody else's business to say, see, hear, eventually, what's been done.

-Charles Olson to Robert Creeley

Twenty years after his death, Charles Olson's 1950 statement to Robert Creeley still applies as much to the content of Olson's writing, a great deal of which remains unpublished or only narrowly available, as to questions of meaning or interpretation. If, as there is reason to believe, Olson's writing significantly challenges our conceptions of meaning in the first place, we may be tempted to wait until the drama of textual recovery is complete before attempting thoroughly to revaluate Olson's contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics. However, with the death of Olson's heroic editor George Butterick we have reached an impasse, and who will pick up the torch is unclear. Furthermore, recent publication of the Collected Poems (one of Butterick's last and most important editorial accomplishments) presents a less somber reason to pause and consider Olson's achievement. Unencumbered by the large architecture of The Maximus Poems, Olson's shorter poetry allows more direct access to his poetic than does the Maximus sequence, thus providing an interesting point of departure.

In this essay I would like both to examine the dynamic of some of Olson's short poems, particularly as a way of revising often rather simplistic discussions of his poetic, and to consider this poetic asa critique of Western metaphysics. While there is not space fully to examine the implications of this critique, I find that Olson's poetic has significant affinities with recent philosophical discussions of the role of the body in, as one writer has put it, "the making and unmaking of the world" (Scarry); mapping some of these affinities may allow us to rethink the radical nature of Olson's poetic theory and practice. Indeed, it may be that Olson's work comes to us as part of a larger, and ongoing, reconsideration of the role of the body in knowledge and human creation. By understanding one, we contribute to our knowledge of the other.

Olson's poetry stands at the border, or perhaps the rupture, between what are somewhat misleadingly termed modernism and postmodernism, terms which, in discussions of English-language poetry at least, often revolve around the figure of Ezra Pound. Olson freely admitted in his 1950 essay-manifesto "Projective Verse" to being one of the "sons of Pound and [William Carlos] Williams"; [Selected Writings]; to that degree, Olson might be viewed as carrying on the imagist, vorticist, or objectivist traditions they began. In his emphasis on speech, in his use of free verse and "unpoetic" language, indeed in his very idiom, Olson obviously has strong affiliations with Pound and Williams. He is distinctly not of the Eliotic school, in spite of his New England education. As his poem "ABCs" puts it:

The word
is image, and the reverend reverse is
Eliot

Pound
is verse
[Collected Poems]

Clearly, and as many (Olson not least of these) have remarked, Olson learned much from Pound.

Yet this attribution is misleading, for Olson's differences from his masters outweigh his affinities. Influence is a difficult beast to track; while Olson's idiom, especially in his early writings, sprang directly or indirectly out of the imagist mode, his thinking was always his own. Olson came to poetry late, many of his views already formed; his "influences" were wide-ranging: Melville, Whitehead, the Gloucester community, F. D. R. Though it is helpful to place Olson in a Poundian line, his differences from Pound are greater than many of Olson's proponents, to say nothing of his detractors, would allow. Hugh Kenner, for instance, in A Homemade World, finds Olson interesting only insofar as he carries on the Poundian tradition; his low appraisal of the later Olson suffers from a narrow Poundocentric orthodoxy that refuses to take Olson on his own terms. Thus, Olson's radicalism gets dismissed as bluff.

Indeed, in spite of surface similarities, Olson's verse flies in the face of the simplicity and clarity we associate with Imagism, and the observer or speaker of Olson's poems is regularly implicated in the act of observation in a way that an Objectivist poet like Louis Zukofsky would find both careless and alarming. Olson's abstraction, as well as his interrogation of referentiality, also distance him from both Imagism and Objectivism. The confusion must lie partly with Olson himself, whose term objectism too easily slides into objectivism, and whose comments on technique often overplay the role of Pound. Still, more than idiom or technique are at stake here, as Olson knew full well: "the projective involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem itself [Selected Writings]. It is this stance which I would like to examine here, especially as it relates to the concept of reference.

Even a short survey of scholars reveals that the question of Olson and reference is by no means resolved. Robert von Hallberg, for example, in his book on Olson's poetics, claims that Olson's "is first of all a referential poetics," and criticizes Olson accordingly, in a disparaging comparison with Pound:

What makes Olson different from Pound in his handling of such material is his willingness to make—actually, his frequent insistence on making—his point directly and explicitly, only too often at the expense of flat and uninteresting language.

It is unclear whether von Hallberg means by this that Pound is never explicit, or for that matter never flat and uninteresting; perhaps he never read the Adams Cantos. In any case, as we shall see, Olson's revisions of Pound are at once more radical and more interesting than von Hallberg knows.

Thomas F. Merrill, on the other end of the spectrum, claims rather broadly regarding Olson's poetic:

[S]uch constructions of the ego as metaphysical systems, logic, classification, abstractions, ideal forms, symbols, similes, allegory, comparison—all that is referential to reality rather than of it—must be purged.

While Merrill grasps much of Olson's poetic, his obliter ation of the concept of reference in a single sentence is as striking as von Hallberg's pithy affirmation of it, not least because Merrill admits such "constructions of the ego" into his own dissection of Olson's poems. Obviously the question of reference has to be reassessed, and we might well begin by moving beyond the Romantic paradigm of mirror v. lamp proposed by M. H. Abrams, a paradigm which hamstrings both von Hallberg and Merrill. Abrams's formulation attempts to account for the "radical difference between the characteristic points of view of neoclassic and romantic criticism," and his models for these—the mimetic mirror and the expressive lamp—have had enormous impact upon subsequent readers, including von Hallberg and Merrill. Both of these critics, caught in a vocabulary which distinguishes only between a poetry of mimesis and a poetry of expression, find themselves unable fully to account for Olson's procedure, one of the major achievements of which is its interrogation of those distinctions themselves. For the mirror/lamp paradigm assumes an easy separation of subject and object, of self and world, that Olson repeatedly calls into question.

Many critics and poets have remarked on Olson's somatic focus. Everywhere in Olson's writings are references to the material of the body, as well as to its poetic extension in the breath. Poet Michael McClure contrasts Olson's complex poetics of the body, which McClure relates to action painting, with the "overabstracted [type of] nature that does not see the complexity, or feel the complexity, of the body." Charles Altieri, in a perceptive discussion of Olson's postmodernism, uses similar termsto summarize much of Olson's practice:

But if we can't trust the synthesizing imagination [cf Pound], how do we apprehend the unity inherent in the event? Olson turns to the most physical aspect of the poem—its rhythm—and redefines [it]…. Our bodies are the place where the fullest union of man and world takes place, and it is within them that the unity of experience can be grasped. Discussion of rhythm must be taken out of formalist contexts and related explicitly to the acts of the body.

I would question Altieri's use of the term union—Olson's poetic seems to me far more contingent, fluctuating, and thus radical—but his summary is the best I know, and what follows largely extends his formulation to contemporary discussions of the body.

Olson puts it bluntly:

[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 the achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use.

This observation (some of the terms of which need fuller examination) is central to Olson's practice. It leads Olson to propose, in his still underread essay "Human Universe," the Heisenberglike axiom that "we are ourselves both the instrument of discovery and the instrument of definition." Rejecting summarily the metaphysical tradition beginning with the Greeks, Olson asserts against all idealisms that "[i]f there is any absolute, it is never more than this one, you, this instant, in action."

This assertion sounds dangerously close to subjectivism, as Olson knows full well, but he will make the case for a more positive relativism based on the self-evident fact that "any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any experience, even an overwhelming single one, on several more planes than the arbitrary and discursive which we inherit can declare." Rather than an idealistic, static world, Olson sees a post-Einsteinian universe in which matter and energy exchange, in which object metamorphoses into act. Thus, Olson sees the regaining of a sort of epistemological dynamism as the way out of subjective despair, indeed as the door to a truer knowledge than is possible in the static separations of subject and object typical of Western thought.

Later in the same essay, he asks whether it is possible to "restate man in any way to repossess him of his dynamic." As one answer to this question, he makes an interesting proposition, which has considerable importance for his poetry:

[M]an at his peril breaks the full circuit of object, image, action at any point. The meeting edge of man and the world is also his cutting edge.

Olson would recenter our knowing in the dynamic material body rather than in a disembodied mind; seeing the human as material object opens the door between subject and object, or shatters the wall that divides them. When "man [is] at his peril," he is most aware of his body, most fully somatic. This formulation, the radicalism of which is rarely appreciated, resembles some of thepropositions of Mari Soori and Jerry H. Gill in their recent book, A Post-Modem Epistemology. Extending some observations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Polanyi, and others, they propose that

[A] more somatic understanding of cognitive activity, one which takes human embodiment as crucial to knowledge, both avoids the traditional difficulties of Western epistemology and clears the way for more fruitful dialogue with other fields of investigation and with everyday experience.

Obviously such an understanding, if fully developed, would revise our view not only of cognitive activity but of our more immediate concern, Charles Olson, whose poetic bears striking resemblance to the project of Soori and Gill.

Finding the locus of poetic action, the "cutting edge" of man, at the "meeting edge" of the body and the world, Olson in "Human Universe" approaches a poetic of pure expression, pure "lamp" in Abrams's terms, when he claims that "[a]rt does not seek to describe but to enact." However, this needs to be qualified; art enacts in the world, as Olson realized: "his [that is, man's] door is where he is responsible to more than himself." The dynamic of Olson's poetry at its best enacts a dialectic of mimesis and expression, a meeting of world and body which becomes (one might say enables) a radical critique of Western metaphysics. If our examination of Olson's poetry focuses on poems of birth and origin, it is because here Olson's formulation of body poetics relates explicitly to his own physical body, its birth and dynamic action.

Olson's poem "La Préface" is rightly regarded as his first attempt at what he would later define as projective verse, verse which explores the meeting-point, the cutting edge of body and world through the medium of the breath. One of the first poems in English to face the reality of the Holocaust, "La Préface" is also one of the first poems fully to earn the name postmodern. Von Hallberg notes that in "La Préface" [h]istory … has left poets only bare bones"; his metaphor, though apt, obscures in its allusion to Eliot. "La Préface" sees modernist searches for closure and explanation through delving into a mythic, religious, and usually valorized past as escapist, and demands a greater life in the "space" of the present. It asks the reader to "Put war away with time, come into space." Soori and Gill, in their discussion of the epistemological dynamic of the body, argue that "space becomes space as we interact and move within it," and also that "our body is not a neutral object in abstract space, it is our way of being-in-the-world." Surely Olson's admonition to "come into space" serves partly an invitation to a fuller "beingin-the-world"; who does not live in space exists in a state of non-being, dead.

Indeed, the ancient dead—the subject of so much modernist speculation à la Eliot—are, as an early line of "La Préface" states, "in via," in the way, and must be pushed aside. Why? Because this is a "vita nuova"; the speaker of the poem, like Dante's narrator, confronts a recent and overpowering death. The ancient dead obstruct the path to a proper dwelling in the space of the present, a space inhabited by the "unburied dead"—the new dead of the new life, of the Holocaust. Methods of describing this fresh horror are, of course, not yet worked out:

"I will die about April 1st …" going off
"I weigh, I think, 80 lbs …" scratch
"My name is NO RACE" address
Buchenwald new Altamira cave
With a nail they drew the object of the hunt.

Faced with such a reality, old methods of articulation get nowhere. The poet must find models in his own time.

Olson in this poem finds one in his friend, the Italian artist Corrado Cagli. As von Hallberg and others have noticed, the line "It was May, precise date, 1940" refers both to the German invasion of France (and thus the effective expansion of the war) and to Olson's first meeting with Cagli, who was to illustrate Olson's volume Y & X. Cagli and Olson begin a conversation without words, in object-language:

He talked, via stones a stick sea rock a hand of earth.

In a marvelous act of poetic hubris, Olson dates the beginning of the postmodern era 1910, the year of his own (and of Cagli's) birth, placing closed parentheses before, and an open parenthesis after that year. The poem sees the "root" of the matter not in another world (as in Eliot) or in Pound's search among the heros of the past in The Cantos, but in the material fact of the body itself, seen as more fluctuating but more communal than the escapist solipsism of modernism: "It is the radical, the root, he and I, two bodies." In von Hallberg's phrase: "1910 … marks a new, postpastoral epoch of documentation." When Olson writes that new method entails "no parenthesis," he means that the ego must refrain from constructing some sort of rational validation for the horror of Buchenwald. The new method forces not justification but witness: "We put our hands to these dead." The act centers not in the reasoning mind but in the witnessing body, seen here in a community of two.

Rejecting Eliot and Pound, Olson rejects also any valorization of the past:

The postmodern poet puts himself in the open, and declares that "we are the new born." Furthermore, while concerned, even obsessed with death, the new poets as Olson conceives them encounter the deaths of their own time—"these unburied dead" of Auschwitz, Buchenwald—rather than the ancient dead, who are already buried. When at the end he declares his generation

it is a birth without explanation in the past, without metaphysical meaning or purpose, into an inexplicable, horrifying present.

Though much of Olson's verse explores the past, it does so without the search for ultimate grounding in another world. In many ways a materialist poetic, Olson's search for ground remains shifting, contingent, moving forward, without ultimate explanation of the kind sought in Pound's The Cantos or Eliot's Four Quartets. Furthermore, it locates knowledge not in the mind's unifying force, but in the physical body and its acts of forceful witness. The witness, who puts his hands to the dead, becomes part of the scene witnessed: he is a body among other bodies, caught in a web of implication and possibility. Observation is participation; the poem's confusion of reference enters the realm of common implication we find, for instance, in the recent Holocaust documentary film Shoah:

He put the body there as well as they did whom he killed.

This is the postmodernism of projective verse.

Recently, Elaine Scarry's brilliant The Body in Pain has taken up issues paralleling those raised by Olson: specifically, the development of a somatically focused theory of human creation. Part of the continuing reexamination of the role of the body in our knowing, Scarry's project does not, like the work of Soori and Gill, trace the philosophical dismissal of the body in Western thought. Rather, she uncovers a more harrowing phenomenon—the way the body "disappears from view" in our descriptive language precisely at those points when it ought to be most visible: when being tortured, when in war, when performing physical labor. Scarry tracks human experience along a line, the end-points of which are body and voice, or pain and imagination. As she puts it:

Physical pain … is an intentional state without an intentional object; imagining is an intentional object without an experienceable intentional state. Thus, it may be that in some peculiar way it is appropriate to think of pain as the imagination's intentional state, and to identify the imagination as pain's intentional object…. "[P]ain" and "imagining" constitute extreme conditions of, on the one hand, intentionality as a state and, on the other, intentionality as self-objectification; … between these two boundary conditions all the more familiar, binary acts-and-objects are located. That is, pain and imagining are the "framing events" within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.

There is not space in this paper adequately to explore the implications of Scarry's powerful project. It should be obvious from this excerpt, though, how Scarry attempts to "repossess" the human "dynamic," to use Olson's words, in a strikingly somatic fashion. By proposing a dialectic of pain and imagination, of body and voice, Scarry has opened the door to a positive and body-centered theory of human creation. As Yeats came slowly to realize, "In dreams begins responsibility."

Returning to Olson, we find that "The Babe" both anticipates Scarry and extends the questions of "La Préface," again locating the crucial point in the material body, as its opening lines express:

Who is it who sits
behind the face,
who is it looks out by both,
by beauty and by truth,
those cheeks …

The question is the identity of the human, the answer sought through perception, eyes searching the eyes of others for a reality outside the self. Realizing a somatic poetic, " The Babe" accepts Keats's equation of beauty and truth but amplifies both, having them participate in a dynamic material space. The word is responsible to the world. There is no question here of deep calling unto deep, of soul-to-soul conversation; the material body steps between. Thus the act of the poem finds its way out of solipsism through recognition of the somatic other. The search is anti-lyric—"not by lyric, not by absolute"—and grounds itself in something

Of use: the poetic act as communal, fluctuating, dynamic. Olson uses the same phrase in "Projective Verse," as we have seen, and the term deserves examination. It is perhaps clarified by Olson in a playful letter to Creeley which, though it does not use the term use, raises the issue in another context:

what, at root, is the reality contemporary to us, & which we are, which is, therefore, the CONTENT (the contest leading to issue arriving at CHANGE)

is NO LONGER, THINGS, the TERMS, but WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN THINGS

In the world since Heisenberg (whom Olson mentions earlier in the same letter) the verb is a form of the noun. Truth does equal Beauty, yet both are involved in participating action. The point is "CHANGE," or the opening of possibility. Indeed, Olson's use of the word issue in the letter brings the language full circle, back to the birthgiving body, and inscribes another sense of action into the birth-imagery and title of "The Babe."

The end of that poem deserves full quotation, expressing as it does the communal quest of Olson's best poetry:

one to another separate, but
the form we make by search, by error, pain
be seen by eyes other than our own

dedicate, thus, one to another, aid:
to offer, able to offer the just act, the act
crying to be born!

The search of the poem comes out of pain, "man at his peril" as Olson had put it previously. The form is found not in the synthesizing ego but rather "by search, by error," in the flawed trajectory of the quest. Approaching an ethic of shareable pain, it recognizes a fact Elaine Scarry finds crucial:

[Pain] achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, [an] absolute split between one's sense of one's own reality and the reality of other persons.

Thus when one speaks about "one's own physical pain" and about "another person's physical pain," one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct orders of events.

"[T]he just act" of "The Babe" is seen in witness as a form of aid: that "pain / be seen by eyes other than our own." Pain is first witnessed, then expressed not privately but in the shared context of a community.

Olson's poetic is activist not because it takes up a certain political cause (though it does, and often), but because the poetry itself is act as much as object. We find, as Olson writes to Creeley, "RE-ENACTMENT displacing REPRESENTATION." As Soori and Gill argue, "truth is better construed as a process than as a static quality; it is … a way of being." Or, in an observation relating more directly to "The Babe,"

the human being is a subject-object phenomenon, not a purely objective being…. The subjects interlace with each other because they are mediated to each other rather than … separated from each other by their bodily dimension.

Coincidentally, Soori and Gill use one of Olson's favorite terms when they speak of our moving in "a diffuse field of unknown particulars" (emphasis added)—that is, in space. Olson sees the space of "La Préface" and "The Babe" not only, as he once wrote of one of his favorite maxims, as "at once aesthetic and metaphysic," but also as political, "the act / crying to be born." Olson's somatic poetic thus becomes a complex politics of the body, the articulation of pain in a field of empathy, a shared dwelling in a bodily space.

We can explore some of the implications of bodily pain for Olson's postmodern project by examining Olson at his most perilous, encountering his own new birth through facing the loss of his mother. Though not directly political, Olson's mother-poems confront the issue of the unburied dead in a forceful manner, and thus impinge upon the politics of the poetic. In fact, by admitting the self back into the poem, they move beyond the impersonal poetics of modernism and powerfully raise the issue of personal (and, by implication, political) responsibility.

The loss of a parent is for anyone a highly traumatic experience, destabilizing in the most fundamental sense. As the loss, quite literally, of origin, the parent's death holds a special place in the chronicle of losses that make up a life. One might say it makes people aware of their own bodies, which is in fact the way Elaine Scarry defines bodily pain. While not wanting to construct a monomyth of origin which sees woman as some transcendant, Jungian Other and thus not quite human, we need to see how Olson's poetic both raises the issue of such myths and finally surpasses them. For Olson, highly indebted to Jung as well as to modern science, the time in the womb might be seen as the beginning of art as well as the state in which "space" is most fully inhabited, subject and object are at one. The mother's death, then, assaults and shatters idealistic notions of return; the survivor is forced to live in a radically contingent space. One might say that the death of the mother is the last casualty in the war with time. Olson's mother, to whom he remained extremely close until the time of her death, remains for him one of the unburied dead, preying upon him, existing beyond her death in and through his consciousness of loss. Paradoxically, it is through reenacting that loss that Olson makes some of his own most significant poetic gains.

One can only speculate on why Olson wrote "Tanto e Amara" when he did, over two years before his mother's death in 1950. Perhaps in part a rehearsal, "Tanto e Amara," whose title is stolen from Dante, prepares for the bitter loss to come. The poem presents itself as anti-Platonic, countering the idealistic statement that "nothing dieth / but changing as they do one for another show / sundry formes" with what the speaker knows: "I cannot have back my mother." Still, the language is Platonic insofar as it remains idealized, a state rather than an activity. While in some ways a moving poem, "Tanto e Amara" evokes sympathy rather than empathy, pity rather than shared pain. Olson does not in this poem realize the potential of a somatic poetic, perhaps because he has not yet had the experience described. His song is stunted, and ends by questioning its own possibility:

And what shall I be, which forms will plague me then
where shall I go, in what ditch pour what blood to hear


her voice, the love I hear, that voice now mingled
in the song,
the song of the Worms?

Anticipating the loss of his mother, the speaker realizes that the problem of new forms of articulation must be raised sooner or later. It is fundamentally a problem of language: how will he communicate with his dead mother, how can he construct a communal poetic when the other end of the line goes silent?

Though Olson composed a draft of "The Moon is the Number 18" in late 1946, he revised it radically on 8 January 1951, just weeks after his mother's death on Christmas day 1950. As Richard G. Ingber has noted, the poem focuses on "the possibility of … a spiritual initiation" which is incomplete; the poem ends literally in "conjecture." The tarot definition of the moon in the title is modified throughout the poem: the moon becomes "a monstrance," while later it "is a grinning god, is / the mouth of, is / the dripping moon"—it comes back to itself. "The Moon is the Number 18" exists, as it were, in its ebb and flow.

Though "the son sits, / grieving" outside the tower with the blue dogs, there is no explicit I in the poem. Rather, the reader proceeds through the poem in the same manner as the grieving son watches the metamorphoses of the moon: tentatively, alert to the swift changes that alter perception and meaning. Ingber, analyzing the poem in terms of its Tarot allusions, finds in the speaker a sort of motherless Christ figure. Without parents, the speaker identifies himself with the blue wolfish dogs who feed on the waste of grief:

The blue dogs paw,
lick the droppings, dew
or blood, whatever
results are.

Thus, the poem is a sort of secular pilgrimage.

While not wanting to discount the religious imagery in the poem, I would relate Ingber's concept of "spiritual initiation" here to a more Jungian possibility, the devouring of unconscious shadow energies. "Spiritual" seems to admit a finality which I simply do not find in the poem, while shadow as a term keeps the movement tentative:

The poem inhabits a Heraclitean universe of flux as against a Christian or even post-Christian stasis. The religious imagery serves merely as a rung on the psychological ladder.

Finally, the speaker absorbs his shadow through recognizing the materiality of the body. When the speaker accepts his mother's absence ("wind … rocks what was her"), he finally moves from prayer and the moon. The poem walks away from symbolism toward a confrontation with the actual:

in that tower where she also sat
in that particular tower where watching & moving are,
there,
there where what triumph there is, is: there
is all substance, all creature
all there is against the dirty moon …

Hardly an epiphany, such an end is powerfully anti-idealistic.

"As the Dead Prey Upon Us," a much later and longer poem, reexamines some of the problems involved in "The Moon is the Number 18"'s lack of resolution. Robert J. Bertholf has said that "[t]he poem attempts to show the complexity of the process of the mind viewing, in an instant, the unity of the past and the present—the breakage, whole," a formulation both memorable and inaccurate, as the body, which I take to be a central fact of the poem, goes undiscussed. Though there is not space exhaustively to consider this extraordinary poem, we can briefly examine it as it relates to the issues we are pursuing. Opening with an invocation, it seeks at first a resolution of the problem of the unburied dead:

As the dead prey upon us,
they are the dead in ourselves,
awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,
disentangle the nets of being!

The unburied dead are "the dead in ourselves," those dead who coinhabit the space of our consciousness. Unlike the ancient buried dead, about whom we read in books, the dead who "prey upon us" are the dead of our own time, the dead who live in personal memory (though they need notbe personally known, as "La Préface" shows).

From this invocation we move suddenly to Olson trapped under his car, which has rolled over him as he tried to push it—underneath the vehicle, he is suddenly faced with a vision of his mother, alive. What had seemed solvable problems, both with the car, which the poet thought "only needed air" in the tires, and with his mother, whom he had thought was dead, now present themselves as deeply entangled with his own body. They literally invade and threaten his space.

It's a comic moment, to be sure, but terrifying as well. "[T]he nets of being," the contingencies of existence, entangle and trap the poet, and escape seems impossible. In addition, the nets are not only difficult to get out of, they are inextricable from each other. The psychological and the physical are equally involved with the poet's space. Thus the associative technique of the poem diverges widely from that of Eliot in The Waste Land and Pound in The Cantos. Instead of the dance of the intellect among words or the search of the past for meaning, we find the pose of the body in material space:

But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires
were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together

as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered
about my mother …

Olson converses with them all, who are "all of them / desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell." Faced with this tragicomic technological Inferno, Olson discovers that his mother "returns to the house once a week" and that he can talk to the dead, among them a blue deer. Things of this world exchange with the other world: the automobile metamorphoses into a chair at the edge of the yard, at the farthest reaches of his "space":

Walk the jackass
Hear the victrola
Let the automobile
be tucked into a corner of the white fence
when it is a white chair….

He wants his mother to rest easy (meaning away from him):

O peace, my mother, I do not know
how differently I could have done
what I did or did not do.

As the language of this passage indicates, the poet is confronted here with his own guilt, sins of commission and omission. The poet's invocation to his mother changes into a prayer to the self:

However, this Poundian prayer is immediately qualified by what Olson elsewhere calls "the sliding present":

The desperateness is, that the instant
which is also paradise (paradise
is happiness) dissolves
into the next instant, and power
flows to meet the next occurrence

At this point the speaker comes to realize that he will not be rid of his mother in this life: "Is it any wonder / my mother comes back?" Projecting his own guilt onto his mother, he decides that she comes to relive her life. He would prefer escape from his own entanglement in being:

The vent! You must have the vent,
or you shall die. Which means
never to die, the ghastliness

of going, and forever
coming back …

He prefers the purity of death: "I want to die. I want to make that instant, too, / perfect."

This is the poem's lowest point. To release himself from his mother, the speaker attempts to reassure himself that it was only a dream, but that effort, too, is thwarted:

The car did not burn. Its underside
was not presented to me
a grotesque corpse. The old man

merely removed it as I looked up at it,
and put it in a corner of the picket fence
like it was my mother's white dog?

or a child's chair

Back in reality, the speaker remains oddly confronted by the presence of his mother and the fluctuating terms of reality. He cannot escape their force; they do prey upon him.

The scene immediately shifts to an embarrassing encounter with a neighbor, a meeting which only heightens the narrator's emotional instability. He comes back to the house to find "my mother sitting there / / as she always had sat, as must she always / forever sit…." One can almost see the narrator being scolded by the mother. At this point, there is no choice; seeing her there, he comes to a final recognition, an acceptance of the nets of being, an affirmation of this-worldly transcendence:

The nets, the knots, the skin of bodily existence, are the stuff of poetry.

At the end of the poem the narrator asks his dead mother "to stay in the chair"; by this he means the chair "in the corner of the fence," at the edge of his space. But by now she's the one in control, and takes a seat at the center of his being, "by the fireplace made of paving stones." By affirming the material life of this world, the poet can accept death wholly, can allow the unburied dead to live with him. Rather than push her off, he accepts the reality of her death and his implication of her life. The poem's conclusion—

And if she sits in happiness the souls
who trouble her and me
will also rest. The automobile

has been hauled away

—is one of the most positive ends anywhere in Olson's poetry, a ringing affirmation of the complex, entangled life of the body.

If in "Moonset, Gloucester, December 1, 1957, 1:58 am," written years later, Olson has not yet come to the end of his dialogue with his mother nor to the end of his anguish, he has found the source of a new type of poetic, a poetic of the body in pain, a struggling through experience at the edge, at the painful, cutting meeting-point of the body and the world. Again in this poem the mother invades the speaker's space; again he must free himself from her. Olson was born December 27, so his mother was buried some time around his birthday; the line "you set I rise" admits not only his freedom from origin, living in the space of the present, but his continual feeding on her death:

you set I rise I hope
a free thing as probably
what you more were …

The end of the poem, though forceful and startling, recognizes the complex entanglement of the body, the inhabiting of bodies in a common space, the continuing encroachment of painful memory, and the need for repeated exorcism:

While "As the Dead Prey Upon Us" affirmed that the mother, though dead, would not leave, "Moonset, Gloucester" takes it a step further: her death is necessary for his life. If "As the Dead Prey Upon Us" concluded with the dead still preying on the living, "Moonset, Gloucester" reverses the process. He, the living, feeds on her, the dead. As in "La Préface," where the speakers are implicated in the very acts of witness, Olson's poems about his mother widen the notion of common space and common implication to include the realm of the personal dead. The poetics of the body become political; the poem is a shared expression of implication and opens the door to a political poetics of responsible action.

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