Reading the Modernist Long Poem

John Cage, Charles Olson and the Indeterminacy of Longform Poetics

Brendan C. Gillott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501363795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

How do readers approach the enigmatic and unnavigable modernist long poem? Taking as the form's exemplars the highly influential but critically contentious poetries of John Cage and Charles Olson, this book considers indeterminacy – the fundamental feature of the long poem – by way of its analogues in musicology, mycology, cybernetics and philosophy. It addresses features of these works that figure broadly in the long poem tradition, such as listing, typography, archives, mediation and mereology, while articulating how both poets broke with the longform poetic traditions of the early 1900s. Brendan C. Gillott argues for Cage's and Olson's centrality to these traditions – in developing, critiquing and innovating on the longform poetics of the past, their work revolutionized the longform poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.

1

Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’

Since it first appeared in 1950’s third issue of Poetry New York, Olson’s essay-manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ has been the central object of a morass of scholarly wrangling, poetic riffing and enthusiastic Olsoniana. It has received many reprintings: the first, partial replication in 1951’s The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams; then as a stand-alone pamphlet from Totem Press in 1959; in Donald Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960), which volume it bookends along with Olson’s poem ‘The Kingfishers’; in the first collection of Olson’s prose, Human Universe and Other Essays, from 1965; in 1966’s Selected Writings, edited by Robert Creeley; and in a wide variety of editions which emerged after the poet’s death in early 1970. There is then no reason to doubt that ‘Projective Verse’ was read both widely and with great interest throughout Olson’s life. This situation was not changed by his untimely death, and indeed it is possible that in recent years ‘Projective Verse’ has come to stand in for ‘Olson’ as such. Certainly in the present day it is the best-read (or at least most-read) of Olson’s writings. It has been hugely influential in the formation of a range of poetic practices on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond the English-speaking world, and belongs to a core ‘postmodern’ or ‘avant-garde’ poetics syllabus familiar no doubt to many readers of this book. And yet it is not obvious quite why any of this is the case. To say that the message, or thesis, or lesson of ‘Projective Verse’ is fundamentally indeterminate is, as I hope to show, perfectly true; but it is a truth which cuts both ways. Many readers are likely to find it a frustrating text, obscure and frequently obtuse. To make explicit what is really going on in ‘Projective Verse’, and why, is no simple task. If it is fair to say that the essay is foundational, a crucial contribution to Anglophone poetics, it is equally fair to say that its focus on the indeterminate and the processual often overwhelms its capacities as a propositional text – and many critics have said just this, sometimes in less diplomatic terms. The deep uncertainty surrounding and lodged in this most ‘basic’ Olsonian text goes some way towards explaining broader problematics within the history of his work’s reception, but it also delineates some central tensions which carry through the next two decades of Olson’s writing.

Despite an ever-increasing body of scholarly and critical work, our understanding of how to read Olson’s writing remains much as it did at the time of his death. Notwithstanding the existence of a good dozen monographs and several essay collections dedicated to his work, a number of what might seem to be basic questions have yet to be settled, even (perhaps especially) in the cases of texts, like ‘Projective Verse’, which are universally read as central to Olson’s thinking and writing. In the introduction to a recent and significant collection of essays entitled Contemporary Olson (2015), David Herd writes of the new proliferation of Olson studies that ‘[t]he degree to which, as a consequence of such sustained scholarship, we know how to read Olson remains a moot point’.¹ This uncertainty is hardly confined to younger or more recent commentators. Elaine Feinstein, the poet and correspondent of Olson’s (his ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’ is seen as one of his key theoretical statements, and as a sequel to ‘Projective Verse’), writes that ‘[i]n my own poems, it’s easier to make out what Olson liberated me from than exactly what I learned from him’.² Since Olson first rose to prominence, the consensus has been that his work stages a specific, but also a paradigm-changing, set of challenges to reading, even as it provided a number of hugely permission-giving gestures to contemporary writing. One of the distinctive characteristics of Olson scholarship is the readiness with which this uncertainty is admitted.

* * *

‘Projective Verse’ begins with a set of sharp distinctions: ‘Projective Verse / (projectile (percussive (prospective / vs. / The NON-Projective’; ‘closed’ verse against ‘open’ verse; Wordsworth and Milton against Pound and Williams.³ The rhetorical force of these divisions does much more than it explicitly says – readers are pulled directly into a formal, cultural and historical polemic which is already an unanchored, floating zone of contention – already a vortex, one might say – even before any term is defined or given much context. ‘Projective Verse’ is divided into two sections (‘I’ and ‘II’), which, it is claimed, will first pin down some of these terms and judgements, and then proceed to elucidate their significance and their ‘essential use’.⁴ The first section is loosely technical and the second is more speculative. Olson writes,

I want to do two things: firstly, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective, it is accomplished; and II, suggest a few ideas about what stance toward reality brings such verse into being, what the stance does, both to poet and to his reader. (The stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to a new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.)⁵

The first section is the one more familiar to most readers and critics, containing a number of analyses, examples and suggestions which are frequently understood as a set of ‘tips for poets’, providing Olson’s pronouncements on the primacy of breath in poetry, on poetry considered as ‘high-energy transfer of perception’, on the necessity of ditching received syntax, on the reclamation of the syllable against received metrics and on the utility of the typewriter pursuant to this project.⁶ These have become the traditional talking points for scholars and readers of ‘Projective Verse’.

The second section, briefer and more gnomic, deals with what Olson calls the ‘stance toward reality’, and later ‘the new stance toward reality of the poem itself’, which such an ‘open’ or ‘projective’ poetics would entail.⁷ That this latter section has received less attention and comment is unsurprising, in part because it is unclear whether Olson’s ‘new stance to reality’ inheres in poetry particularly or instead in some broader shift in phenomenological attitude – a tension which replicates itself across all of Olson’s work, and is never really resolved – and this uncertainty makes the stakes of Olson’s claims hard to assess. Primarily, however, the statement that the stance involves ‘a change beyond, and larger than, the technical’ is hard to square with the avowedly ‘technical’ recommendations of Projective Verse Part I in anything but the broadest and most metaphorical terms – the ‘opening’ of the page as field allowing for an ‘opening’ of the poet’s ‘projective size’ in some more general sense, for example. What I want to suggest here is that redescribing ‘Projective Verse’ according to this ‘meta-technical’ formula, as a text which begins to orient modernist versification in a more indeterminate fashion, provides a helpful way of thinking about the essay’s significance both for Olson’s own writing and for the criticism that has grown up around it. As Olson composed ‘Projective Verse’ he had already begun to imagine and produce what was to become The Maximus Poems – the work from which, as he has it, ‘some sort [. . .] of epic, perhaps, might emerge’ – and in this context it is not only fruitful but crucial to consider the essay operating on a level ‘beyond the technical’, tipping into a more ambitious and more indeterminate act of inauguration.

* * *

Most readings of ‘Projective Verse’ share a number of common features and concerns. These primarily coalesce around two allied issues: the openness of the ‘field’ in Olson’s writing – the free use of the page and the accelerated breakdown of received poetic form he prescribes – and the corporeality of the future verse he imagines will populate it. This is as close as it comes to a consensus view on ‘Projective Verse’, a representative example of which can be found in Kaplan Harris’s survey-essay on ‘Black Mountain Poetry’: ‘[Olson’s] major accomplishment was to define verse according to the body rather than traditional poetic form.’⁸ Questions of majority aside, this is an essentially accurate assessment of Olson’s proposition in ‘Projective Verse’. But it is not clear what such a statement means or indicates in practice; it risks setting up an unsustainable gulf between received and ‘bodily’ form in poetry of a type which seems untrue to the history of writing and theorizing poetics ranging generically from epic to lyric, and historically as far back as Homer. Nor is it obvious that ‘non-traditional’ poetic form is concurrent with ‘the body’ – notably, Olson is adamant that Eliot’s (un)free versification is ‘not projective’.⁹ This distinction is significant. Eliot expressed qualified opposition to the idea of a vers libre, writing that no verse is fully free because all verse can be described under the rules of traditional scansion, however provisionally.¹⁰ In Eliot’s view, traditional versification forms the backdrop to all English-language verse, such that in vers libre, so-called, the versification is not so much free as it is engaged in a game of cat and mouse with iambic pentameter and other received forms.¹¹ In other words, the ‘freedom’ of free verse only emerges in distinction from, and in dialogue with, received forms. For Eliot, traditional verse forms parallel Iser’s ‘minus functions’ in that their absence summons their memory, and supposedly ‘free’ verse is only readable in contrast to them.¹² Whilst this seems a viable way of understanding the variable versification of The Waste Land, and even the somewhat pastiche formality of sections of Four Quartets, it is less clear that it is a paradigm to which Olson’s adventures in non-traditional verse are easily accommodated.¹³ This suggests it is not the replacement of the traditional with the bodily as line-measure which marks Olson’s poetics out from those of his predecessors but rather a more ‘open’ liberation from the idea of a governing paradigm for versification as such. Furthermore, critical emphasis on the corporeality of Olson’s poetics fails to account for the regularity with which ‘traditional form’ appears in his own work, with rhyme and ballad meter especially being fairly common devices. Either Olson is not following his own advice, or his own understanding of ‘Projective Verse’s significance was rather more complex than this skeleton account suggests. Both of these options contain some truth, and the strictures of ‘Projective Verse’ certainly recede as Olson’s writing progresses, but it is nonetheless evident that the ‘open field’ and the ‘bodily’ require further elucidation to establish their importance both as part of ‘Projective Verse’ and for Olson’s writing as a whole.

Throughout Olson criticism, some account of ‘composition by field’ is more or less ubiquitous, although precisely how to read the ‘field’ (how to ‘beat a path through the field’ as Peter Middleton puts it) is a matter of perennial disagreement.¹⁴ Olson’s notion of breath-composition, in which ‘the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment he writes’, perhaps the text’s most famous single prescription, is usually taken in tandem with the idea of the ‘field’ to mean that lines can be as long as they ‘feel’ rather than as long as they are prescribed.¹⁵ The obvious point here is that in tying the line to the variable length of a breath, Olson is explicitly demoting the importance of ‘form’ understood as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Indeterminacy
• 1 Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’
• 2 Poetics of speed: Mediation in Maximus
• 3 Mycopoetics: Cage’s Mushroom Book
• 4 Olson, lists and archives
• 5 Ideas in Cage’s I-VI
• 6 Models and mereology
• 7 Typos
• Conclusion: Nonunderstanding
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Index
• Copyright