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From the unpublished 1956 prose work "The Morphology" to the 1962 "Proprioception," we get a deepening examination of the human form, one deeper than that proposed in "Projective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.