Charles Olson's Correspondence and the Emerging of the New American Poetry and Poetics
Organized by the Charles Olson Society
American Literature Association
29th Annual Conference
May 24-27, 2018
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA 94111
The Charles Olson Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/).
In Olson's correspondence with Edward Dahlberg, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Frances Boldereff, and other poets from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, one can track the emergence and development of Olson's poetics. While at Black Mountain College, Olson's correspondence becomes key to shaping the selection of poets published in Origin and Black Mountain Review—two publications that would become foundations of the the New American Poetry. Olson's later correspondence, including his letters to Ann Charters in the late 1960s, bear witness to his later developing poetics. With the recent and upcoming publications of Olson's correspondence by University of New Mexico Press (Olson-Prynne, Olson-Duncan) opening up additional source materials, the Olson panels this year will focus on his correspondences from the late 1940s and beyond as critical sources of his and the movement's developing poetics.
Please send abstracts or proposals for papers on his correspondence with Dahlberg, Corman, Creeley, Duncan, Boldereff, Prynne, Wieners, and others to Jeff Gardiner (jeffreyjgardiner@gmail.com) and Gary Grieve-Carlson (grieveca@lvc.edu) no later than January 15, 2018.
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Paper/Talks on Olson's poetics after "Projective Verse" at the ALA Conference in May, 2016
Here are the papers that will be delivered at the ALA conference in May 2016:
Jeff Davis: Olson’s Later Poetics: Morphology and Voice in Olson’s Later Maximus poems
In his 1968 talk at Beloit College on Black Mountain, a member of the audience asks Olson a crucial question: "Is anyone writing ‘projective verse’ anymore?" Olson’s reply, after a brief discussion of projective geometry: " I do believe in something that the word projective holds, in the way I used it there, actually, as against closed verse ... between closed and open. And even that -- I mean not free or non-metrical, or anything -- I mean open, simply."
Asked "Does your recent poetry form any kind of poetic," Olson replies: "Oh, very much. What I was trying to -- what I called last night the archaic. Yes, quite." (Muthologos II.72-3,71)
He had long since moved on from the initial sense of his own term ‘projective verse.’
This paper will examine phases of that movement.
From the unpublished 1956 prose work "The Morphology" to the 1962 "Proprioception," we get a deepening examination of the human form, one deeper than that proposed in "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe," an ontological, physical grounding, in Proprioception itself, of imagination, of the phenomenology of experience, the sense of self which we know as soul.
Olson’s thought moves from the Objectism of "Projective Verse" toward the examination of Middle Voice (see "Proprioception/ ‘Grammar/a book’"). Middle Voice gives Olson a method for enacting in narrative the relationship proscribed by Objectism which he then applies in the later Maximus poems, which display a range of material and poetic tone not found in the first volume of Maximus poems. They extend the frame -- the form, the morphology -- of the poem, and what we might today call its "voice".
Nathanael Pree: Vertical Kinship, Archaic Affinities and the Poetics of Proprioception
This paper examines how the development of Olson’s thought and craft from the Black Mountain years gave rise to what might be termed a poetics of not only the noted "archaic postmodern" but also a sense of trans indigenous Gestalt.
Moving on from the concept of Projectivism, Olson enunciates the body as a depth-creating object, and of the space onto which its activity is inscribed. Olson’s statement that "the soul is proprioceptive" thus indicates the sites of homing, or grounding, as a further destination for his more famous, initial statement of poetics. In other words, the unconscious place, or cavity, as outlined in ‘Proprioception", becomes an area of synthesis where the projective meets a multidimensional form of expression represented through "logography" and glyphs.
This paper seeks to examine some of the later Maximus Poems in light of these observations, along with a sensibility informed by the glyphic statement in "Proprioception" that:
All
kinship
is known
vertically
not
relationally
The variability of dimension that connects words to typographical space and the topos of Olson’s landscape, recalls the "latent structures" that link Heraclitus and Gestalt psychology. These create an area of poetic inscription with the potential to open up further scenes of reading. The paper concludes with a presentation of previously unpublished material from the Olson archive to show that his references to Ancient History in "Proprioception" resonate in an Antipodal setting, given his references to the Churinga (Alcheringa) as a mode of poetic inscription.
Kirsty Singer: History, Unrelieved: Mass Images and the Gravitational Field of Man's Interiors in Olson's "Billy the Kid" Essay
In "Billy the Kid," a 1954 book review essay that ends with the declaration of his "archaeological" method, Charles Olson articulates a central problematic for American politics: that of an "unrelieved" history. Beginning with America's resistance to adequate representation, Olson identifies the inadequacy of form itself as a category through which historical damage can be thought. 'History' is rethought not only as method—'istorin, finding out for oneself—but also as overwhelming force and ineradicable material. I consider Olson's preference for image over action to convey "the mass of it which is it" alongside his early feeling that "I am a landscape and not a man" (1946) and later insistence on history as gravity ("The Animate" 1969). At stake in the mass image, drawn from man's "interiors" via archival work, is the ability to properly read oneself and others, an ethical imperative that does not entail transcendence, but materially assumes the alterity of history itself. While Olson is generally read through phenomenological or radical empiricist lenses, I argue that in reaching back behind our colonial history and Western philosophic inheritance for an alternative to its ontological and epistemological violence, he resists the frequent tendency to elide historical content. Instead of a relatively frictionless perpetual becoming, Olson decomposes the self into its enabling conditions, thereby assuming, in all its detail, the historical damage that for Afro-Pessimism constitutes an ontological divide. Through his attention to historical ontology—the human object's burden—Olson offers a vital practice of "egological vertigo" (Marriott 2011) and not just political agency.
Jeff Davis: Olson’s Later Poetics: Morphology and Voice in Olson’s Later Maximus poems
In his 1968 talk at Beloit College on Black Mountain, a member of the audience asks Olson a crucial question: "Is anyone writing ‘projective verse’ anymore?" Olson’s reply, after a brief discussion of projective geometry: " I do believe in something that the word projective holds, in the way I used it there, actually, as against closed verse ... between closed and open. And even that -- I mean not free or non-metrical, or anything -- I mean open, simply."
Asked "Does your recent poetry form any kind of poetic," Olson replies: "Oh, very much. What I was trying to -- what I called last night the archaic. Yes, quite." (Muthologos II.72-3,71)
He had long since moved on from the initial sense of his own term ‘projective verse.’
This paper will examine phases of that movement.
From the unpublished 1956 prose work "The Morphology" to the 1962 "Proprioception," we get a deepening examination of the human form, one deeper than that proposed in "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe," an ontological, physical grounding, in Proprioception itself, of imagination, of the phenomenology of experience, the sense of self which we know as soul.
Olson’s thought moves from the Objectism of "Projective Verse" toward the examination of Middle Voice (see "Proprioception/ ‘Grammar/a book’"). Middle Voice gives Olson a method for enacting in narrative the relationship proscribed by Objectism which he then applies in the later Maximus poems, which display a range of material and poetic tone not found in the first volume of Maximus poems. They extend the frame -- the form, the morphology -- of the poem, and what we might today call its "voice".
Nathanael Pree: Vertical Kinship, Archaic Affinities and the Poetics of Proprioception
This paper examines how the development of Olson’s thought and craft from the Black Mountain years gave rise to what might be termed a poetics of not only the noted "archaic postmodern" but also a sense of trans indigenous Gestalt.
Moving on from the concept of Projectivism, Olson enunciates the body as a depth-creating object, and of the space onto which its activity is inscribed. Olson’s statement that "the soul is proprioceptive" thus indicates the sites of homing, or grounding, as a further destination for his more famous, initial statement of poetics. In other words, the unconscious place, or cavity, as outlined in ‘Proprioception", becomes an area of synthesis where the projective meets a multidimensional form of expression represented through "logography" and glyphs.
This paper seeks to examine some of the later Maximus Poems in light of these observations, along with a sensibility informed by the glyphic statement in "Proprioception" that:
All
kinship
is known
vertically
not
relationally
The variability of dimension that connects words to typographical space and the topos of Olson’s landscape, recalls the "latent structures" that link Heraclitus and Gestalt psychology. These create an area of poetic inscription with the potential to open up further scenes of reading. The paper concludes with a presentation of previously unpublished material from the Olson archive to show that his references to Ancient History in "Proprioception" resonate in an Antipodal setting, given his references to the Churinga (Alcheringa) as a mode of poetic inscription.
Kirsty Singer: History, Unrelieved: Mass Images and the Gravitational Field of Man's Interiors in Olson's "Billy the Kid" Essay
In "Billy the Kid," a 1954 book review essay that ends with the declaration of his "archaeological" method, Charles Olson articulates a central problematic for American politics: that of an "unrelieved" history. Beginning with America's resistance to adequate representation, Olson identifies the inadequacy of form itself as a category through which historical damage can be thought. 'History' is rethought not only as method—'istorin, finding out for oneself—but also as overwhelming force and ineradicable material. I consider Olson's preference for image over action to convey "the mass of it which is it" alongside his early feeling that "I am a landscape and not a man" (1946) and later insistence on history as gravity ("The Animate" 1969). At stake in the mass image, drawn from man's "interiors" via archival work, is the ability to properly read oneself and others, an ethical imperative that does not entail transcendence, but materially assumes the alterity of history itself. While Olson is generally read through phenomenological or radical empiricist lenses, I argue that in reaching back behind our colonial history and Western philosophic inheritance for an alternative to its ontological and epistemological violence, he resists the frequent tendency to elide historical content. Instead of a relatively frictionless perpetual becoming, Olson decomposes the self into its enabling conditions, thereby assuming, in all its detail, the historical damage that for Afro-Pessimism constitutes an ontological divide. Through his attention to historical ontology—the human object's burden—Olson offers a vital practice of "egological vertigo" (Marriott 2011) and not just political agency.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
After a long break from posting a blog entry on this site, I am starting up again as a lead-up to the ALA Conference in May and the Olson Panel there. The topic and the Call For Papers is listed at the bottom of this posting.
What prompted the topic is the continued reference to "Projective Verse" as though that is the definitive and concluding statement of Olson's poetics. Also, prompting this panel topic is the characterization of Olson's poetics as a "spontaneous poetics" by Daniel Belgrad, understandable there given the broader scope of his work (The Culture of Spontaneity) and placing Olson within a larger cultural movement, and that characterization accepted verbatim by Eva Diaz in her recent book, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (an excellent book). In the latter case, Diaz missed a chance to look at Olson's poetics and pedagogy in her larger framework...had she considered Olson's poem "Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele," she would have recognized the inadequacy of describing Olson's poetics as one of spontaneity and might have given Olson at BMC greater play in her book.
Finally, the essays in the recent publication, Contemporary Olson, largely focus on the Olson of the early to mid-50s and, again, mostly refer to "Projective Verse" when discussing his poetics. There are notable exceptions in this book, and Elaine Feinstein's comment in her essay in this work could be taken as a prelude to this panel: "I sense a change in my own work after taking a fresh look at Olson" (132). However, one only needs to scan the book's "Index of writings by Charles Olson" and the Index itself to see that the focus is on the Olson responding to Pound and what came before and not on the Olson of the mid- to late 60s.
Thus this panel:
Beyond Projective Verse: Olson's Developing Poetics from the Black Mountain College years to the late 1960s
Organized by the Charles Olson Society
American Literature Association
25th Annual Conference
May 26-29, 2016
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA
The Charles Olson Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/).
Olson's poetics continued to develop from his years at Black Mountain College until his death, but critical attention to Olson's poetics continues to focus on "Projective Verse." This panel calls for papers that track his developing poetics as evidenced in works from the Black Mountain years (The Chiasma, Shakespeare lectures, The Special View of History) through the Sixties and works such as "Proprioception" (1961-62), "Causal Mythology" (1965), and "The Animate versus the Mechanical, and Thought" (1969).
Please send abstracts or proposals to Jeff Gardiner (jeffreyjgardiner@gmail.com) and Gary Grieve-Carlson (grieveca@lvc.edu) no later than January 15, 2015.
What prompted the topic is the continued reference to "Projective Verse" as though that is the definitive and concluding statement of Olson's poetics. Also, prompting this panel topic is the characterization of Olson's poetics as a "spontaneous poetics" by Daniel Belgrad, understandable there given the broader scope of his work (The Culture of Spontaneity) and placing Olson within a larger cultural movement, and that characterization accepted verbatim by Eva Diaz in her recent book, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (an excellent book). In the latter case, Diaz missed a chance to look at Olson's poetics and pedagogy in her larger framework...had she considered Olson's poem "Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele," she would have recognized the inadequacy of describing Olson's poetics as one of spontaneity and might have given Olson at BMC greater play in her book.
Finally, the essays in the recent publication, Contemporary Olson, largely focus on the Olson of the early to mid-50s and, again, mostly refer to "Projective Verse" when discussing his poetics. There are notable exceptions in this book, and Elaine Feinstein's comment in her essay in this work could be taken as a prelude to this panel: "I sense a change in my own work after taking a fresh look at Olson" (132). However, one only needs to scan the book's "Index of writings by Charles Olson" and the Index itself to see that the focus is on the Olson responding to Pound and what came before and not on the Olson of the mid- to late 60s.
Thus this panel:
Beyond Projective Verse: Olson's Developing Poetics from the Black Mountain College years to the late 1960s
Organized by the Charles Olson Society
American Literature Association
25th Annual Conference
May 26-29, 2016
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA
The Charles Olson Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/).
Olson's poetics continued to develop from his years at Black Mountain College until his death, but critical attention to Olson's poetics continues to focus on "Projective Verse." This panel calls for papers that track his developing poetics as evidenced in works from the Black Mountain years (The Chiasma, Shakespeare lectures, The Special View of History) through the Sixties and works such as "Proprioception" (1961-62), "Causal Mythology" (1965), and "The Animate versus the Mechanical, and Thought" (1969).
Please send abstracts or proposals to Jeff Gardiner (jeffreyjgardiner@gmail.com) and Gary Grieve-Carlson (grieveca@lvc.edu) no later than January 15, 2015.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
NEH Black Mountain College Workshop
The week long NEH workshop whirled through the curriculum at BMC: touching on courses and activities of Josef Albers, MC Richards, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson... Little was done on Olson's teaching at BMC. Olson's teaching is still largely unexamined in the writing about his work yet he delivered three prolonged series of lectures and presented in them material that shaped his later writing. The three main lecture series that he delivered were The Chiasma: Lectures on the New Sciences of Man, lectures on Shakespeare (over 100 pages of text), and The Special View of History. The latter is the only one that is still in print. Of the Shakespeare lectures, only his brief essay "Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays" has been published. The Chiasma published in the last issue of the Olson Journal in 1979.
Generally, there is a large gap in the Olson canon due to the lack of a volume on Olson's Black Mountain Writings and Lectures. Such a volume would be longer than the existing Collected Prose and would only duplicate a fraction of the texts in that volume.
Back to the BMC Workshop. Impossible to cover much in 5 days, but enough was done to show other influences on Olson's thinking that have barely been touched upon. Albers "color" course...is that the backdoor to a phrase in the last line of the Maximus poems? Are the three pillars of "Projective Verse" all indebted to his exposure to ideas from other faculty members at BMC?
What was he talking about in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains? How much of that talk came over into his poetry and prose?
Generally, there is a large gap in the Olson canon due to the lack of a volume on Olson's Black Mountain Writings and Lectures. Such a volume would be longer than the existing Collected Prose and would only duplicate a fraction of the texts in that volume.
Back to the BMC Workshop. Impossible to cover much in 5 days, but enough was done to show other influences on Olson's thinking that have barely been touched upon. Albers "color" course...is that the backdoor to a phrase in the last line of the Maximus poems? Are the three pillars of "Projective Verse" all indebted to his exposure to ideas from other faculty members at BMC?
- typos (from Klee by way of Albers?)
- tropos (Cunningham and dance?)
- topos (the work on topology done by BMC math teacher, Max Dehn?)
What was he talking about in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains? How much of that talk came over into his poetry and prose?
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