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Theory And Practice In The Black Mountain Poets: Duncan, Olson, And Creeley

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Theory And Practice In The Black Mountain Poets: Duncan, Olson, And Creeley

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Content This dissertation has b m
microfilmed exactly as received 68-10,225
DAVEY, Frankland W llmot, 1940-
THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAIN
POETS: DUNCAN, OLSON, AND CREELEY.
U niversity of Southern C alifornia, PiuD., 1968
I language and L iterature, m odem
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
Copyright © by
FRANKLAND WILMOT DAVEY
1968
THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS
DUNCAN, OLSON, AND CREELEY
by
Frankland Wilmot Davey
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
January 1968
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K
L O S A N G E L E S , C A L IF O R N IA 8 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, w ritten by
F.raziklajad..WiImtJt..Da.Y.e.y...............
under the direction of hia. D issertation C om
m ittee, and approved by a ll its m em bers, has
been presented to and accepted by the G raduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirem ents
fo r the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Date Jaauaxy,...l.96.8.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
..
( j Chairman
fa— i 4 ^ 7 *
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I
i Page
^INTRODUCTION............................................ 1
j
PART I: BLACK MOUNTAIN POETIC THEORY
I. THE THEORIES OF ROBERT DUNCAN.................. 9j
I
The Numinous Powers |
Duncan's Comments on the Anti-numinous j
The Poet
The Poem and Its Making
Summary
II. THE THEORIES OF CHARLES O L S O N .................. 61j
The Human Universe j
Discourse and Ego
The Role of Man
The Poet and the Poem
Composition by Field
Summary
!
III. THE THEORIES OF ROBERT CREELEY.................. 113|
The Limited and Derivative View of the Field
Independence and Magnanimity
Creeley and the Field
The Way to Composition
Summary
PART II: BLACK MOUNTAIN POETRY
IV. ROBERT DUNCAN AS POET: SERVANT OF THE STARS . . 136 |
The Concerns of Duncan1s Poems
The Quest for Revelation
The Poet at Work
ii
I
I
j Composition in Two Major Poems
Summary
I V. CHARLES OLSON AS POET: TEACHER OF A CITY . . .
Olson's Persona: Maximus of Tyre
The Maximus Poems: The Natural Unfolding
The Maximus Poems: Eyes and Ears
The Maximus Poems: Mu-sick, Mu-sick, Mu-sick
1 Maximus from Dogtown I
Summary
; VI. ROBERT CREELEY AS POET: A MAN IN A MAZE . . . .
The Overpowering Field
The Insecure Man
The Struggle to Write
Summary
FINAL COMMENT ..........................................
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED ..........................
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOME WORKS CONSULTED BUT NOT CITED . .
Page
204;
2621
299
304
309
i
i
i
i
iii
INTRODUCTION
I
The Black Mountain Poets receive their name from the
now defunct Black Mountain College at Black Mountain, North I
Carolina. For most of these poets this college was the site|
not only of their most vigorous interactions among them- j
selves but also of the principal developmental periods in !
'their particular careers. One of the leading members of the!
group, Charles Olson, succeeded Josef Albers as head of the
college in 1952, and directed it until its collapse because ;
|of bankruptcy in 1956. Robert Duncan, another leader of the
|group, taught at the college during the period 1951-1954 and
has declared this time so "vital" to him that his poetry has!
i - i
"not had any kind of fundamental change" since.1 A third |
poet, Robert Creeley, who went to Black Mountain college in j
11954 to teach writing, taught intermittently there until j
1956 and edited the Black Mountain Review for the college i
I from 1954 to 1957. j
Lesser poets and writers who have since become widely
published either were present at Black Mountain College dur-
jing the 1951-1956 period or became associated with the group
I
iFrom a tape-recorded lecture at the home of Warren
Tallman, Vancouver, B.C., July 23, 1961.
1
at other times and in other places. Edward Dorn, Michael
Rumaker, John Weiners, Jonathan Williams, Joel Oppenheimer, ,
and Fielding Dawson all attended classes at the college. A
much longer list of writers have become "Black Mountain" by
| •
association with Olson, Duncan, and Creeley, but were not
present at Black Mountain itself. These include such as
Denise Levertov, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman, Paul Black-
i , [
t
burn, Larry Eigner, Gary Snyder, Robert Kelly, and George
Bowering. Many of these latter came into contact through
ianother Black Mountain gathering place, Cid Corman's maga-
j I
jzine Origin (1951-1957). In fact, this magazine was the j
j - '
means of Robert Creeley1s first entry into the community of !
other writers and of his and Duncan's initial friendship. !
i
| Nevertheless, despite the proliferation of the school,
^>lson, Duncan, and Creeley, the three poets who were most
!
instrumental in defining the scene at Black Mountain College
from 1951-1956, remain the center of the Black Mountain
group. They form the core of what M. L. Rosenthal finds in
The Modern Poets to be a "serious body of non-traditional
verse."2, They are the principal poets in the issue of The
Review devoted to Black Mountain poetry.3 Poems by Olson,
Duncan, and Creeley occupy more than sixty per cent of the
pages given to the poets associated with Origin and Black
Mountain Review in Donald Allen's anthology, The New Ameri
2 (New York, 1965), p. 268. ^he Review* No* 10 (1964).
can Poetry 1945-1960.^ Further, at both the University of
British Columbia's and the University of California at
Berkeley's avant-garde poetry conferences (in 1963 and 1965
i
respectively), Olson, Duncan, and Creeley were, with Allen
Ginsberg, the principal instructors, lecturers, and readers.
Certainly, of all the writers that have come to be as
sociated with the Black Mountain movement, Olson, Duncan,
and Creeley have written and published the greatest amount
of material, likely more than the rest of the writers com
bined. Further, Olson, Duncan, and Creeley, as the original
mentors and teachers of the group at Black Mountain College,
are responsible for nearly every Black Mountain critical
document. They are the chief, if not the only, original
thinkers of the group. Their theories provide the starting
point for the writing of their disciples, such as Robert
Kelly and Edward Dorn, and give inspiration to such of their
fellow-writers as Denise Levertov. Any investigation of
Black Mountain poetry must necessarily focus on them.
j To this date the three major Black Mountain poets have
I
been unevenly received. Although all three have been pub-
j i
lishing regularly since 1950, no major literary journal re- j
viewed any of their books until 1962. And until 1966 no i
! i
jsuch journal had published even one significant review of j
any of Charles Olson's publications. Yet, in contrast with
^New York, 1960.
this lack of attention to Olson, Contemporary Authors has
agreed with Robert Duncan in terming Olson "central to any
{description of literary 'climate' dated 1958," and other
agencies and institutions have also appeared to agree with
Duncan's assessment. Not only was Olson (along with Duncan j
and Creeley) selected by both the University of British Co- !
! :
lumbia and the University of California as one of the three i
I ;
j |
{principal poets of their recent poetry conferences, but he j
I |
has received a Wenner-Gren Foundation grant (1952), a Blu-
i !
! , [
jmenthal-Leviton Prize from Poetry magazine (1965), and twicej
i ;
been a Guggenheim Fellow.^
I By and large, in fact, Olson, Duncan, and Creeley have |
i
received far more recognition through awards and prizes thanj
i
they have from scholars, book reviewers, and the editors of j
college anthologies. Duncan has received the Union League
jcivic and Arts Foundation Prize (Poetry magazine, 1957), the
l . t
Harriet Monroe Prize (Poetry magazine, 1961), the Levinson
I :
I ;
krize (Poetry magazine, 1964), a Guggenheim fellowship
i S T |
(1963-64), and the Arts and Humanities award (1966).°
; i
{Creeley has received the Levinson Prize (Poetry magazine,
1960), a Blumenthal-Leviton award (Poetry magazine, 1965), a|
I
D. H. Lawrence fellowship (1960), a Guggenheim fellowship
5Contemporary Authors, XV-XVI, 327-328.
^Contemporary Authors, XI-XII, 119.
(1964), and a Rockefeller grant (1965).7 But the major lit
erary journals have given little space to the works of
Olson, Duncan, and Creeley; scholars such as M. L. Rosen
thal (The Modern Poets) have given their poetries only cur
sory attention; and the editors of those anthologies of
jverse for college courses that I have seen have so far ad-
i ;
mitted only Creeley regularly into the ranks of "approved"
poets.
| The most remarkable aspect of the work of Duncan,
bison, and Creeley since 1950 and the beginning of their as-
i ;
sociations with each other has been the large body of criti-!
cal and theoretical material that they have created. In
jbook prefaces, in essays, in letters, and in tape-recorded
| |
lectures they have defined their literary theories perhaps |
more comprehensively than any other group of English-lan
guage poets since the Romantics. However, much of this ;
large amount of material exists in fragmentary or isolated
! ;
{utterances; none of the three poets has so far attempted to i
integrate his various ideas into a single and complete
statement.
| •
j It is the purpose^f this study both to assimilate and ;
! i
interpret this body of theoretical material and to ascertaxn
i
the extent to which the ideas and principles of this mate
rial have been expressed or carried out in the poetries of
-______
7Who's Who in America, XXXIV (1966-1967), 466.
| 6
|the three poets. The task of assimilation and interpreta
tion of the theoretical writings of the three principal
Black Mountain writers seems as necessary to any understand
ing of their poetical works as a mastery of the materials of
i i
W. B. Yeats' A Vision has been to a full understanding of
!
ihis poetry. And the fact that the three poets themselves in
!
{their theories as stated in prose and verse all insist that
ja man should be completely faithful in every aspect of his
!
!
{life to his own beliefs and to his own individuality seems
to make the question of how much the poetry of the three
{correlates with their theories especially important for the
reader's understanding of their work.
This study will, therefore, first examine the theoreti
cal writings of Duncan, Olson, and Creeley, in that order,
and attempt to demonstrate that, despite possible contrasts
among these writings, they form a single, harmonious j
i
whole. It will then embark on an examination of the poet- !
j
ries of the three writers with the hope of proving these j
poetries to be thoroughly consistent with the expressed the-!
ories of their particular writers. The study will utilize j
{all the available critical and theoretical utterances of the|
three poets— utterances which happen all to post-date 1950. j
Since the three poets are only presently beginning to expe- |
Irience.any ease at publishing their theoretical writings,
! j
|the study will depend heavily on tape-recorded lectures
! I
Iwhich at this date still form the bulk of the writers' j
i -.......................................................... . .. . _ ..................................................................................................... . . . . . .. . . . J
available theory. Prefaces to various books, book reviews,
!
land personal letters will also be relied upon. The poetry
!
to be examined will be mostly restricted to those works
I roughly contemporary to the available theoretical utter-
I
lances. Earlier poems will be referred to where relevant,
l
but for the most part only poems which could have been in-
jfluenced by already recorded theory will be considered sig
nificant to the study.
PART I
BLACK MOUNTAIN POETIC THEORY
CHAPTER I
I
THE THEORIES OF ROBERT DUNCAN
In beginning a study of Black Mountain poetic theory
with an examination of the critical writings of Robert Dun- |
can, we are turning immediately to the ideas of the leading ;
theoretician of the group. Even though both Charles Olson
i
land Robert Creeley have written and lectured widely, neither
has attempted to explain the grounds of the group's poetries!
|as clearly and comprehensively as has Duncan. Further,
j !
neither seems as much in command of his beliefs as does i
i , i
Duncan, as much able to work out the implications of these
beliefs and apply them to any context. Olson has firm con- ;
jvictions, to be sure, but some of these, notably his scorn
for the artificialities of literary discourse, even impair
his ability to communicate them. Creeley, as we shall see, I
I j
has such a respect for the integrity of the contents of the |
; j
universe that he hesitates to risk definite declarations fori
I j
fear of committing travesty. Thus, much of Olson's criti- !
jcism is dense and confusing, while much of Creeley's is
i
i
vague, generous, and but semi-committal. And both, in terms
of the scope of Black Mountain theory, are fragmentary. Of
: ....................... ' ." io
the three theorists, only Duncan can be depended upon to
illuminate broadly every time he writes or speaks— and hap- !
; i
pily his critical utterances are many.
The Numinous Powers
~ “ “ i
i
In 1959 Robert Duncan published the following note from
j
remarks he made at a reading of his poems at the Poetry CenH
ter in San Francisco: j
In declaring that there is a Poetry, a man in order that
there be a poet seeks to open his mind and heart to be a
dance-floor where a new, an Other, life may come to dance j
in this world. A poem is news of an other life. And from
childhood I have been seeking the lore of that other life,!
with a faith that everything that is realized here is
there, and real only there-— thus I call it the real world;
that everything we do here, each act, the actual world, is
a sign, an omen of the real, and an enactment of its real
ity, as the actual words in actual script or print on the
actual page are signs of a real spiritual world. This is
| the mystery of the stage; it is the magic of writing; it
j takes place in the transubstantiation of the Host; it is
j contained in the doctrine that Christ is the Word. Thus
in the actual world, this world as we call it, men have
j "found" or founded signs of God, perceived or believed,
and in this realized, that this Being was all, and that j
one's own existence was but part among such a multitude,
inconceivable, of parts in the Universe of that Being, co
existing thru time and space as Eternity, that self ex
isted only in terms of that Being. The realized world
will return in being made real entirely to God-ness, for
the real world is God.l j
i |
Immediately we are taken to what is the fundamental assump- !
I j
! i
Stion of Robert Duncan's theory of poetry. The most remark- |
; I
I |
able thing about this assumption, and what makes it most
characteristic of Black Mountain criticism, is that it is
1"Notes from a Reading at the Poetry Center, San Fran
cisco, March 1, 1959," The Floating Bear, No. 31 (1965),
[p. 13].
not one limited at all to any artificial world of writing.
On the contrary, it is an assumption about the universe it-
: i
self, about life and its sources. It is an assumption whichj
lifts poetic theory away from all "literary" or arbitrary
values and makes it entirely dependent on such absolutes as |
the human condition and the relationship between man and the!
!divine. It is an assumption about the universe and about
the relation between writing and the universe that we shall !
j ■ ;
find echoed in all the Black Mountain theorists.
i ;
We have in this passage in capsule form all the basic
jelements of Robert Duncan's convictions. First, there is j
for him an "Other" world, a numinous or divine world of the
■ i
spirit on which all life in this our actual world depends, i
Second, our own world is so informed by this "real spiritual
world" that it is, in fact, a composite of signs by which
I
this "Other" can be perceived. And third, the role of the j
I
writer is prophetic, is to perform the perception of the j
!
jspiritual world, to keep his senses open to that real world |
I i
j
which is God. i
Robert Duncan believes that there are "real trees and j
real angels," and his juxtaposition indicates that these
trees are something more than the ones we encounter in our
actual world. He believes in what he calls the "numen"—
"the place or thing where the god was."2 His sense of the
2From a tape-recorded lecture at the home of Warren
Tallman, Vancouver, B.C., July 23, 1961.
12
numen encompasses both the mysteries of Christianity, as we
have seen, and the older cults of place and fountain where
the gods have been thought to reside. In fact, in any human;
religious faith Duncan feels the numen is present.
As in the ritual of the Mass in the Roman Catholic
Church, the numinous, according to Duncan, feeds and nour
ishes both the physical world and the spiritual part of man.
To Duncan, the investigators of science have been attempting
only to uncover the principles by which the numinous powers
arrange the world so that it is as benevolent and nourishing
as it has been so far. He speaks of Jung's notion that the
alchemists "were seeking something spiritual, that seems to
jbe quite clear," and adds, "Jung is very good in that book
jon psychology and alchemy because he comes very close to
jseeing that our only realm of spirit is in the things of
fertility." However, the numinous can nourish through more
than just natural laws. Duncan remarks,
Think of the fact that the very meaning of being fed by
something also means those meaningful moments of experi
ence fed us, and changed us, and they were all moments of
something that was like responsibility. (Lecture,
July 23, 1961)
For Duncan, the moments of man's being fed by the nu
minous can be moments of responsibility because man has the i
ipower of choice. He can choose to recognize the process of i
feeding, or else he can ignore it. He can yield to being
fed or he can refuse. To illustrate his thesis he cites thel
jmyth of Erysichthon, who cuts down the oak tree of the
earth-mother, Demeter. In retaliation, Denieter goes to her
jother, her unself. Famine, and gets her to breathe on her
[tormentor. Erysichthon then finds that all has turned to
famine, that no matter what he eats he cannot be fed. "Ev-
j I
erything refuses to feed him,"3 says Duncan, and he dies
| ' j
gorged, finding relief only in death. To Duncan he repre
sents the kind of man who has attacked the numen, who has
attacked the earth that feeds him. And as a result he has
I '
caused, as any man can cause, the numen to refuse to feed
him, has, in fact, caused the earth's other, its black part,
!
to destroy him.
j For Duncan, we all have the choice of attending or at- !
i ' !
!
tacking this tree. And modern man, he feels, too often fol-j
i
lows Erysichthon in attacking it, or at least in ignoring j
I
it. Too often in our current idiom, he finds, things once i
sacred, such as the bull, are used as pejoratives. "We talk
i
of tossing the bull— throw the bull— and we have our disre- t
gard for it too, because we've felt cheated," Duncan says.
|lt is as if man recognized the holiness of the numinous ob- I
Iject, he feels, but gave its name a double meaning because j
of his determination not to be fed by it.
j Almost every item of the holy has an expression in our
common speech that means "Oh that's just nothing!" And
every one of those "That's just nothing's," every time we
say them— well, take "shit," which is extremely important
in the whole of the magical operations, and we have only !
I
3Untitled evening lecture, University of British Colum-J
bia Poetry Conference, Vancouver, B.C., August 5, 1963. j
to think of our agriculture, and that we now increasingly
try to use chemical fertilizer and not the actual shit.
The actual shit we put into salt water where we hope it
will do nothing.^
Man, Duncan believes, has become increasingly disappointed
with his own failure to attend to the numen in the excremen-l
jtal, which is to Duncan just as much an occasion of the di- i
j ,
vine as is any other part of the universe. He speaks thus
i ;
of man's tendency to wish to dispose of the stuff despite
| ;
the nourishment and truth it can provide. j
I And it's [man's disposal occurs] because the "Oh shit" re-j
| mark is entirely our disappointment that it has not
yielded the experience. We know that people with aberra- j
; tions come into some kind of intense experience, eating
| shit, covering themselves with it, and so forth, and we doj
kind of know that as compost it works, I guess. But we
are the first civilization that has thought the thing to
j do with it is to put it in a porcelain bowl and then get |
it quickly out of sight. And scientists, by the way,
i don't. Scientists at the present time— one of the wonder-1
ful ironies is that in the very period when~we are trium- |
phantly using plumbing— and yet the only time they did i
find out where that rice came from [Duncan here refers to j
the research of Carl Sauer of the University of California;
j into the origin of domesticated rice in the Amazon basin],i
' by the way, and where the first wheat was grown, was be
cause only five years ago did those archaeologists realize;
that people wanted to know what was in the turds, not whatj
| the bowls were like any longer. And suddenly they found a;
few fossilized— because how did you know what the people
j were eating? You had no idea what people were eating ex
cept in those few fossilized remains. (Lecture, July 23, !
i 1961)
i i
I !
| The numen that can both feed man and provide him with
I !
truth, then, is frequently to be found in the elemental. j
For Duncan, it can be found in anything natural, spontane
ous, or cosmic, in anything, however humble, that has come
4Lecture, July 23, 1961.
into being through cosmic law rather than through an artifi
cial creation. Two of Duncan's guides are H. D. and D. H.
Lawrence, who, he says, "sought a language for things, to
restore the moon or revolving worlds to deeper roots and as-!
isociations, to recover a commune of spirit in the image."5 |
However, the numen can also reveal itself through human ac- j
i I
tions and their products, since these actions are often un- 1
conscious obediences to the condition of the universe.
i
1
Men believe in money and in war as they believe in elves
and gods, to make real their lives. Swords, spades, draw-
I ings on the walls, poems keeping their time too, are con
ditions of the real, of What Is, man-made. All makers are
at work between thought and the actual, feeling their way.
It is what we call Poetry or The Making that articulates j
! the feeling in language towards the fullness of experi
ence . ("From the Day Book," p. 8.)
i i
But the numen makes its presence felt more obviously in
Art, through the agency of the artist, whose perceptions of
the numinous in the actual world are more acute than those
| r
jof most men. Here, says Duncan, the numen is "an intensity
i i
iof excitement which compels a man to work out a designd
feeling" and which results ini "the evident manifestation or |
| |
trace we in the xxth century worship as Art and declare im- ,
! J
mortal." At another point he says, "In the orders of the
iactual and in the orders of the fantastic, a world— worlds
! i
{are constantly reveald thru mediums of the arts."6 Duncan j
5"From the Day Book," Origin, No. 10 (July, 1963),
p. 34.
^Letters: Poems 1953-1956 (Highlands, N.C., 1958),
pp. i, iv.
! ' ' ' ' --- — " - 16
'quotes at length Carlyle, when he declares that through art
|and imagination man receives intimations of the real. His
quotation reads:
All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very es
sence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings j
and hulls 1 The primal element of us; of us, and of all
| things. The Greek fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the
I feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature, that
the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect mu- |
sic. Poetry, therefore, we call musical Thought. The j
Poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom it turns I
j still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and j
depth of vision that make him a Poet. See deep enough,
and you see musically; the heart of Nature being every- !
| where music, if you can only reach it.?
i l
Indeed, like Carlyle, Duncan does believe that the cos-!
I !
jmic laws which nourish this world, and which modern science j
i i
Iseeks to discover, are the equivalents of musical structure,;
|
i
not perhaps of those limited and artificial musical struc- ;
tures perceived by musicians from Beethoven to Rachmaninoff,
but of those more open structures seen by Stravinsky and
i
I
Sch&nberg, whom Duncan, incidentally, deeply admires. But ;
to Duncan, writing, when it obeys the cosmic laws that a
i |
! scientist such as Heisenberg or a musician such as Schdnberg
! ' I
gives obeisance to, can convey even more powerfully than
: i
; music a sense of the divine. For language itself, being a
j I
ispontaneous, natural, and living thing, contains within it-
|
self laws as divine as those of the universe. Duncan says:
Carlyle's thought opens up a vista towards what our own
?"Ideas of the Meaning of Form," Kulchur, I, No. 4
(Winter 1961), 62-63.
inspired science of linguistics has made part of our re
sponsibility, if we are concerned with the nature of
things. Carlyle's thought going toward the inner struc
ture of nature had intuitions of the inner structure of
language. ("Ideas . . .," p. 63) ■
For Duncan, this presence of musical structure in language
! i
marks the presence of divine law. And the presence of di- !
i
i
vine law in language means that the writer is perhaps the
most powerful medium of the numinous known to man. For,
I !
I '
says Duncan, "powers and forms, gather in the mind where it
1 j
feeds on any written thing" (Letters, p. i).
I -------
:
Duncan's private mythology, for such his belief in the [
existence and revelation of numinous powers should be j
i !
! termed, gives him a most definite view of man and his rela- j
tion to the rest of the universe. To Duncan, man is no morej
and no less than one part of the cosmos. He is, says Dun- j
I
|
can, "one of the many poems in which the Cosmos seeks to j
i
realize itself."® Being only one of "many poems," man musti
! I
I j
pay attention to the other members of the actual, to the
! i
other poems, if he is ever to learn anything of the powers j
i • • i
! I
which give him life. For man is not in charge of these
| |
I other objects or "poems in which the Cosmos seeks to realize
|itself." He is only, to Duncan, another divine occasion
|
like each of these others. "In this Creation," says Duncan,
"we are not initiators but participants."® And if we are to
8The Years as Catches (Berkeley, 1966), p. xi.
9As Testimony (San Francisco, 1964), p. 16.
r
18
learn, we must give attention and respect to the other par-
i
ticipants.
This is the hardest ground for us to know, for we are o£
it— not outside, observing, but inside, experiencing. It
is, finally, I believe, the only ground for us to know;
for it is Creation, it is the Divine Presentation, it is |
the language of experience whose words are immediate to
our senses; from which our own creative life takes fire,
within which our own creative life takes fire. This ere- '
ative life is a drive toward the reality of Creation, pro
ducing an inner world, an emotional and intellectual fic
tion, in answer to our awareness of the creative reality
of the whole. If the world does not speak to us, we can- |
not speak with it. If we view the literal as mere fact, |
as the positivist does, it is mute. But once we apprehend
the literal as a language, once things about us reveal j
depths and heights of meaning, we are involved in the j
sense of Creation ourselves, and in our human terms, this ;
is Poetry, Making, the inner Fiction of Consciousness.1° j
Once anyone admits with Duncan that the divine or nu
minous informs and gives being to all natural objects, in
cluding man, he must accept here with him a condition in
which all his fellow inhabitants of the universe are signs,
I
even "spokesmen," of the divine. In such a view as Dun-
!can's, the imagination, the spiritual part of man, must !
! I
: i
jbuild a concept of the world that is in accord with the j
world's divinity. And to reach "depths and heights of mean-f
■ing," a man must allow this world to speak. Otherwise he j
jwill address himself to it, perhaps impose himself on it, j
| I
|in ignorance. "If the world does not speak to us, we can- !
j
jnot speak with it." Indeed, to Duncan, this is not just
the rule of a poet, but the rule of all careful scientists
J-OThe Sweetness and Greatness of Dante's Divine Comedy
(San Francisco, 1965), tpp. 4-5].
; " .......... .'........ ' 19 |
— and of any man who would act with care, accuracy, success,
and integrity.
Man, to Duncan, then, is a being at the mercy of the
forces which gave him life. "Radical1 Our roots are in the;
sky," he proclaims.
The Milky Way appears, cross-section of our galaxy. In
the earliest news out of heaven, what they said, the
mythos, was that it was the slain body of the dragon, it
was the flow of everlasting mothering milk, it was light, ;
it was rhetoric, river, fluid. A stream of suns.11
i
And on this mothering milk, this stream of suns, he must be !
fed, or else die, for to Duncan man cannot be any more than
i ;
one of the spawn of the universe. j
1
Phases of meaning in the soul may be like phases of the
moon, and, though rationalists may contend against the |
| imagination, all men may be one, for they have their ;
j source out of the same earth, mothered in one ocean and !
i fathered in the light and heat of one sun that is not j
| tranquil but rages between its energy that is a disorder !
! seeking higher intensities and its fate or dream of per-
| fection that is an order where all light, heat, being,
1 movement, meaning, and form, are consumed towards the |
, cold. The which men have imagined in the laws of thermo- i
dynamics. j
! i
And this state of things, even if it be more confused or |
I ' i
complex in its patterns to the human eye than it immediately
appears, Duncan would attempt neither to rationalize nor es
cape. For he knows both life and knowledge are contingent
upon reality, are contingent upon being, as he says in con
clusion here, "infected by what is."
But if our life is mixed, as the suspicion comes from the
Gnostics and from Blake, and rays of many stars that are
11"From the Day Book," p. 2.
suns of all kinds. Aiel if we are so many fathered, or
if, as the theosophists have feared, we were mothered in
the various chemistries of the planets, still let the war j
be done and the adultery rage on, for my soul is sick withj
fear and contention wherever 1 remember the claim of mind j
against mind and some ass praises me because a line rimes
who would despise me if he knew the meanings, and I am
aroused myself towards thoughts of vengeance and triumph. ;
Thus, I say, "Let the light rays mix*" and, against the
Gnostics, who would free the sparks of spirit from what is
the matter, and against the positivists and semanticists
who would free the matter from its inspirational chaos, I j
am glad that there is night and day. Heaven and Hell, love:
I and wrath, sanity and ecstasie, together in a little {
place. Having taken thought upon death, I would be ;
infected by what is.12
i
Whatever be the nature of things, Duncan, recognizing |
i
[that he has only come into being because of the nature of
| ' j
Ithings, is determined to accept it. Whatever be the proc
esses that formed him, other men, and the rest of the actual
world, he will accept them as good and as fruitful, and have!
j
jno reservations about their continuance— "let the war be
i
'done and the adultery rage on." If adultery brought man
into being, then adultery must be accepted. Life must be
[allowed to fall into its own orders, for only these orders
i j
will yield life, or will be life.
Similarly, the life of an individual cannot be planned,
feels Duncan, nor his personality imposed. He can only ful-
fill_his own potentialities; the orders of life must be j
obeyed.
The flower of life opens, falls into its seeds. In whose
orders, Adam falls into his selves; ancPover and over
again, we, you and I— all of you and all of me— flower
12"ideas of the Meaning of Form," p. 60.
: “ ~ _ “ 21
into whatever place and time of being and fall apart into '
ourselves.I3 >
!
To Duncan, a man's only viable way of existence is to follow!
and fulfill one's given destiny. Plotting, planning, and
other rational ploys can only kill the spirit within the man'
and deaden his ears to the voice of the numen. Care must be!
taken to develop along the ways of nature. "Where we are
: j
not careful," Duncan says, "the intellect can overreach and i
the world recedes as God recedes. It ceases to converse and
; |
mirrors our unconcern."14 l
j l
To illustrate how a man must follow his own destiny or j
I
being, Duncan frequently cites both Oedipus and Christ. He |
; feels that modern psychology often advises men to act out-
| :
side one's own being, to shirk the fulfillment of one's own!
i
form. He says of Oedipus in relation to Freudian psychol- j
ogy:
| j
! . . . he certainly doesn't behave according to the "real
ity principle"— a good social worker could have straight- j
! ened him out long before the play began. He doesn't take j
the "pleasure principle"; he could have had a good time i
and said, "Well, everybody knows it isn't very serious |
this business about mother. And she's getting a little
old and maybe we can find a substitute." He actually is
involvd in the drama; he has to come to the fulfillment of
i a f o r m .15 j
13caesar's Gate; Poems 1949-1950 (Mallorca, 1955),
! [p. iiiTI
i
14As Testimony, p. 17.
15"The Psyche-Myth and the Moment of Truth," lecture
delivered at the University of California, Berkeley,
July 13, 1965.
22
In another place he says of Oedipus:
The only glory man knows is the glory that gets cured on a:
psychoanalytic bench. The difference between somebody
who's gotten straightend out and Oedipus who tears his
eyes but with the brooch, is that Oedipus stands in the
only glory that man knows. Because Oedipus has put a law
over himself and risen in that law to his consequences andj
is liberated. I mean— all right, he finally comes to the
epiphany and it's absolutely shattering, and he sees that j
the consequence of this law is to tear his eyes out. And I
everything that happens on the analytic bench is trying toj
weasel out of the consequences of the law. (Lecture,
July 23, 1961)
'The form that you are to fulfill, whether you be a planet
following an orbital path, a continent taking shape, a crys-j
tal assuming structure, or a man working out his life, is
I the law which you must be willing to obey in order to '
jachieve the full glory of the self-realization permitted you
i
by the forces of the cosmos. Rationalism, common sense, I
psychiatric "knowledge," advises you to avoid the stresses j
of self-fulfillment, of fulfillment of your form, and to |
[assume the deadness of mediocrity.
; |
i Even a Christ would today be asked to view the world as|
;a mute thing amenable to reason, suggests Duncan.
For the modern sensibility that belongs to this world that
avoids myth, Christ himself is a sort of a sick baby on j
that cross. If only a nice psychoanalyst along the line
■ would have explained to him about poppa and momma and j
: about how it wasn't really very important that you weren't
sure who poppa was, and all of us know that gods are al- :
ways fathering around, that boy would never have had to go
thru such a terrible thing in order to cry out on the
cross. (Lecture, July 23, 1961)
However, Christ also accepted the law that was over him, co
operated with the cosmos while "everything cooperated" with
him, says Duncan, and thus reached the fulfillment of his
form.
Robert Duncan firmly believes that this world that we
see is everywhere created and informed by a world of spirit :
that is itself an ever-changing thing. Further, he believes
i |
jthat we ignore this other world at our peril, but that, if
we cooperate with it, we can achieve glory. Attention to
these numinous powers presents to us the splendor of the
juniverse of which we are a form.
It was Charles Olson who brought me to read Whitehead,
| where I found principles that paralleled those of the art j
I longed for: that "we may not neglect the multifarious- ,
ness of the world— the fairies dance and Christ is nailed !
| to the cross" towards fullness of feeling.
And attention to the numinous powers can be given particu-
]
larly by attention to language, which preserves for Duncan j
i
in its most vivid form the mothering spirit of the cosmos. ;
i :
i Where the language has magic properties, as it has in the |
work of Pound, H. D., and Williams, it moves to give birth
to feeling and thought. It is felt as our Mother-Tongue. |
We see not only gods but words anew: "their secret is
| stored / in man's very speech, / in the trivial or / the
real dream." ("From the Day Book," p. 24)
To Duncan, the existence of numinous powers means that "ev-
jerything is meaningful, if one learn to read," that "the
Ipoet does not give meaning to the word but draws meaning,
j i
touches meaning, or participates in meaning there" ("From
the Day Book," pp. 24-25). And, as we shall see, it causes
^■^Robert Duncan, "Robert Duncan," The New American Po
etry 1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York, 1966), p
24
Duncan to believe in a special role for the poet, in a
unique function for poetry, and in a particular way of com-'
position. And it will cause him to be especially scornful 1
of the rationalists who would deny both to poetry and to
the cosmos all magical or spiritual qualities.
Duncan's Comments on the Anti-numinous
Duncan has always been quite aware that the bulk of
educated people in North America not only ignore the numin-j
ous powers but scorn to admit their existence. Thus he hasj
given a large portion of his critical writings to attacks
i
: i
on these people, especially on those who would deride or
| condemn the possibility of divine inspiration in poetry.
i These parts of Duncan's writings can go a long way toward |
i ' !
! improving our understanding of Duncan's concept of the |
| j
divine.
Duncan traces the present scorn of the numinous back
to the thirteenth century and the Roman Catholic Church's
| i
attempts to deny the image. Led by such theologians as
Aquinas, the church, according to Duncan, "tried to take
away the numinous quality of the image." It sought to ra- j
tionalize, to draw "off from the image what it was and what!
; I
it wasn't." And "what it wasn't" seemed to the church to j
be that part which "belonged to heathenism, because it was
. . . exactly like what the Africans worshipped." To Dun
can, the fact that the images which the church sought to
suppress did have counterparts in other religions was pre
cisely the proof that they were worthy of worship, that they
jcontained the numen. But the church, he says, had become
{interested more in correctness than in the divine, and was,
unlike Duncan, unable to see all religions as "real terms of
living."17
In Duncan's view, the Protestants, both inside and out-j
side their churches, have been even more eager to deny the !
{presence of the spiritual in the concrete object. And it isi
|the Protestant ethic which has, to Duncan, set the dominant j
tenor of thought in North America. I
! |
The light of Dante and of Plato, but also the matter of
the ancient world, the mothering life or Great Mother, th0
mysteries of Eleusis, offended the Protestant ethos. The I
small town closed round its marketplace and customs, |
closed round its mind, and grew fearful of man's nature as
| it grew fearful or grew from fear of the nature outside, i
j {"From the Day Book," p. 23) i
! I
|The Protestant ethic brought into being the culture that i
would deny the fertility of excrement and discourage man
from the glory of the realization of his form. Fearful of
i 1
the unknown, of the mysterious, of human nature itself, it
{would counsel the modern Christ or Oedipus to employ "common
t |
|sense" to escape his destiny and his greatness. To the Rev*
| ' |
{Parrish, quaking in the possibility of powers greater than
himself, John Proctor is an incomprehensible fool. |
The Protestant obsession with the mundane, the mechan-
17Lecture, July 23, 1961.
ical, with the lethal fact, is what Duncan sees Keats pro-
i !
testing against in his well-known outburst on negative capa-t
I bility: "that is, when a man is capable of being in uncer- j
itainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching j
! ' !
jafter fact or reason."1® To Duncan, the "irritable reaching
after fact or reason" that Keats refers to is nothing more
i
than the result of the Protestant fear of accepting the uni-
jverse as a living, changing thing, and of accepting man as
|nothing more than another participant in the greater proc-
i i
jess. He comments after quoting Keats:
j
It is against some first-hand intuition that men strove to
render wisdom sensible and the immediate experience pass-i
ing, haunted by some premonition of the uncertainty prin-1
I ciple in physical measurements that our own science must j
i face, of the uncertainty of self-knowledge in terms of
our psychology and physiology, of the uncertainty of our j
role in life raised by information of evolution. A psy- j
che that is not all to be lightened! a universe that is |
not all to be oursl
]
The Protestant cannot bear to be haunted, cannot bear to
I !
I live in a world that is not just for man.
Fact and reason are creations of man's genius to se
cure a point of view protected against a vision of life i
where information and intelligence invade us, where what !
we know shapes us and we become creations, not rulers, of!
what is. Where, more, we are part of the creative proc- I
ess, not its goal. It was against such intolerable real-,
j izations that these men took thought. ("Ideas . . .,"
p. 70) !
; i
I Particularly Duncan finds that "these men" have taken j
I
thought against the numinous in the field of literary I
1®Letter to Geo. and Thos. Keats, Dec. 28, 1817, The
Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.,
1958), I, 193.
27 |
i I
criticism, where they seek to protect man from all intima
tions of "what is" by exorcizing these from all literature. |
"It is the essence of the rationalist persuasion," says Dun-!
' i
pan, "that we be protected, by the magic of what reasonable j
I i
men agree is right, against unreasonable or upsetting infor-;
mation" ("Ideas . . .," p. 63). The English departments of j
! ;
universities, according to Duncan, led an unholy crusade
I
against mystery, against the angels, against incantation,
and against dream. "The literary, professional orthodoxy
that had replaced the church authority concurred in outlaw-
j
jing Romance.1 1 Duncan adds,
| "Inspiration," "spell," "rapture"— the constant terms
| of the War Trilogy [by H. D.]— are not accepted virtues in
> the classroom, where Dream or Vision are disruptive of the
| student's attentions. But more than that, these new pro
fessors of literature were counterparts of those ministers
of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, holding out
against the magic of poetry as they had once held out— by
burning or ridicule— against the magic-religion of the
witch-cults or the saint-worship of ecstatic Catholi-
| c i s m . 1 9 j
I I
| While Protestantism "has absolute abhorrence of numin- i
i i
jous creed, of image, and image-worship,"20 the university
i |
also has a particular distrust of the numinous, and it was
t
inevitable, remarks Duncan, that they should get together. I
"You do not have control . . . at the point where the numin-
i
ous descends," he says. And "what if you started to speak
with voices in the middle of the classroom?" "You start
19"Prom the Day Book," p. 22.
20Lecture, July 23, 1961.
28
talking with voices, and there's someone in your class who's
going to run away and say there was a whole class which was
not what we were supposed to be studying!" The university,
in Duncan's view, has felt that it had an interest in ex
cluding the numinous, and poet-critics like Ransom, Tate,
Auden, and Jarrell went to the university "because it was
the numinous that they were afraid of, the gods that might
enter the scene" (Lecture, July 23, 1961). He says of
Jarrell's criticism:
Jarrell's great forte was that he successfully imperson
ated and then genuinely represented the needs and atti
tudes of a new educated literary class that was making its
way in the English Departments of American colleges and
universities, an increasingly important and established
group of professor-poets concerned with what poetry should
be admitted as part of its reading lists. His appeal in
rejecting even the "felt" and "sincere" where it was
"queer" and "more than a little silly" was to some right,
proper, and respectable range of thought and feeling that
any member of a university faculty must keep in order to
maintain his position. ("From the Day Book," p. 20)
Members of this "new educated literary class" have, in
Duncan's eyes, led a critical reaction against any litera
ture that locates both its and man's sources in something
jgreater than man itself. This reaction snubs the given or
the revealed, and gives worship to the artificial. By rev
erencing the artificial, it pays homage only to man's
i ;
! i
powers, to his reason and his skill. It raises him above |
the other members of the universe, raises him even above the
universe itself. Its watchwords are "control" and "disci- i
pline," and, by placing these at the core of art theory, it
encourages an arrogance in the artist successful at achiev
ing these that is hardly fitting in such a minor member of
[the cosmos. i
Against the mothering language in which our spirit is |
continually reborn, the matrix of meanings, of evolving
i thought and feeling, the critical reaction raises its se- j
mantic boundaries, its language as gesture or equation or |
communication. "Discipline", "control", "responsibility" !
i assume prohibitive definition, arriving to exorcize the
medium. ("From the Day Book," p. 25)
j i
Duncan is prepared to fight against what he sees as a sense
less faith in "control" and "discipline," and a dangerous j
reliance on man's own power. He is prepared to fight for
j ’ ;
disorder, for dreams, for divine inspiration, for that world!
I |
"where we are used by things even as we use them" ("Ideas j
j ' i
. . .," p. 62). Perhaps the best measure of his determina
tion in this is the following indictment he has written of
that "mind obsessed by convention," of Jarrell, Tate, Ran- ;
i
som, of all the members of the "critical reaction." j
i
Form, to the mind obsessed by convention, is signifi-
! cant in so far as it shows control. What has no rime or j
reason is a bogie that must be dismissed from the horizons
of the mind. It is a matter of rules and conformities,
taste, rationalization and sense. Beyond, as beyond in
the newly crowded Paris or London of the Age of Reason,
lies the stink of shit and pestilence. Wherever the feel-
j ing of control is lost, the feeling of form is lost. The
reality of the world and men's habits must be constructed
; to a realm— a court or a salon or a rationale— excluding
whatever is feared. It is a magic that still survives in
j Christian Science and the New Criticism, a magic that re-
. moves the reasonable thing from its swarming background of
! unreason— unmentionable areas where all the facts that
reason cannot regulate are excluded and appear as error,
savage tribes, superstitions, and anarchical mobs, pas
sions, madness, enthusiasms and bad manners. Metaphor
must be fumigated or avoided (thought of as displaying the
author's fancy or wit) to rid the mind of the poetic where
’ ' .... '... '.."" "".......... "...." . 30 I
: !
metaphor had led dangerously towards Paracelsus's. universe!
of psychic correspondences, towards a life where man and
things were beginning to mix and cross boundaries of
knowledge. Poets, who had once had dreams and epiphanies,;
now admit only to devices and ornaments. Love, that had
been a passion, had best be a sentiment or a sensible af- |
fection. Rational piety and respect for God stood strong j
against divine inspiration and demonic possession. The j
struggle was to have ideas and not to let ideas have one. |
Taste, reason, rationality rule, and rule must be absolute!
and enlightened, because beyond lies the chiaroscuro in !
which forces cooperate and sympathies and aversions min
gle. The glamor of this magic haunts all reasonable men
today, surrounding them with, and then protecting them
from, the shadows cast by the enlightenment, the darkness
of possibilities that control cannot manage, the world of
thought and feeling in which we may participate but not
dominate, where we are used by things even as we use them.!
i ("Ideas . . pp. 61-62) I
Through Duncan's relentless campaign against the sup- |
j
jpressors of the numinous, both sides in the contest assume j
blearer form. On one side, to Duncan, are the purveyors of
jillusion who would cut man off from his roots and make him
jhis own god. These are the men who seek to conceal under
jimposed form the natural disorder which gave man birth. '
|
These are the men who seek to make the universe mute and
t
material, and to make man the sole fountain of life and
i
reason. These are the men who deride image-worship, who
j
ridicule inspiration, and who are nauseated by the element- |
al.
i
| In opposition to these Duncan sees the entire living
universe that has fed and given birth to such a variety of
forms. Here the terms are divinity, mystery, intuition,
inspiration, possession, spell, rapture, the numen. And
31
these terms lead to a recognition that the world is more
than we are, that we are, in fact, no more than minor cosmic
events inextricably woven into the fabric of the whole.
Here individual ego and individual action diminish, if not
!
vanish. Even minor events occur because of the cooperation
of the whole community of things in such a manner that no
one person could ever comprehend. Individual glory can only
be earned by cooperating with the forces that serve one, by
fulfilling the form that has been opened before one. It is
: I
an ecological view of man in which the great majority of the!
; |
terms of his environment are beyond his control. It envi- j
1 !
sions a world which uses man more often than he uses it, a
i
world in which man is forever buffeted from moment to moment
i
|as the fellow-occupants of his field of existence conspire
about him. It is a humbling view of man that can alter
jeverything we have thought about man and art.
The Poet j
I
i
In a world in which everything is dependent on the di- ;
vine for its origin and sustenance, in which everything is aj
participant in immeasurable and purposive cosmic processes,
j
in immense disorders proceeding toward form, each individual
i
man, and especially each individual man who is a poet, must
conceive of his relationship to these larger powers care
fully and accurately. To Duncan, every man is caught up in
these processes, and, even if he rebels against them, his
32
i i
perversity reveals something about the structure, laws, and
justice of the universe.
; I
I think that every single thing we do as human beings, any
of us, with talent, without talent, the things that seem
dull, the things that seem exciting, all of them reveal I
the truth to everyone around us. A liar reveals the
truth. We immediately read behind the lines, or we imme
diately see the dimension right away.21
A man, then, can never act solely for himself. No matter
what he does, or determines to do, he can never tear himself
]
from being a sign of that Other, of that numinous world.
In a universe so arranged, personal identity and per
sonal importance become much less significant than most
Western men have felt ever since the coming of the Renais- j
sance. A man is much more a part of what happens to him, of:
|
the events in which he participates, than he is a being of
i
i
his own determination and will. He is mostly the person j
l
l
that the gods have permitted him to be, that thing which !
I ' ' |
eons of evolving and gigantic natural processes have sud- j
denly allowed, here, in this instant of time, to be. Says |
Duncan,
j It doesn't make any difference about "what identity"; it
seems to me you're engaged in what you are in, and my gen-!
eral feeling is that I take place out there. What I see, |
what I hear, is constantly informing me of a thing I am, |
| as I work with it, and that can change any way.22 |
j |
Man is a cosmic person, a cosmic event, and must find what- |
21Lecture at home of Warren Tallman, Vancouver, B.C.,
July 25, 1961.
22Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth and the Moment of Truth."
ever identity he has in the cosmos. And he must reconcile
himself to being a part of that cosmos, of its indestruct- !
ible energy.
And one thing, then, I acknowledge the thing we know deep ;
within ourselves as the great promise, a great threat-
promise, and wish, fear, that we will simply all be re
duced, increased, to sheer energy and matter. And this is,
the great wonder, anyway, that we are sheer energy and
matter, potentially. I recently found in reading neo-
Platonic commentaries on Plato . . . a thing that came
into a poem of mine, that man's evil simply is insignifi- j
cant, because man can never not be a material part of the i
I universe. He always is potentially part of the materials i
— you can change him in many ways— he always is, actually,j
elementally there. (Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth")
As a man, the poet too is also an integral part of the j
: i
living cosmos, and in his life and art owes a responsibility
Itowards that mothering cosmos, a responsibility that is far
j
i
jgreater than any that he might owe to any other, such as to
i
mankind, or, especially, to himself. For Duncan, the poet
must speak for the cosmos before he speaks for man, and for
!
man long before he dare speak for himself. For speech is a j
divine gift that distinguishes man from the other animals, j
And poetry is a divine gift that distinguishes the poet as |
"a numinal p e r s o n " 2 3 from the rest of mankind. The poet, j
says Duncan, is "barely capable, but divinely gifted."2* He
I
|himself is a power, a place where the numen speaks.
i
| To move as a power and to know yourself as a power moving,
to know yourself as a power in the language, to know your
self as a power among people. (Lecture, Aug. 5, 1963)
But to accept the role of a power means also to accept
23Lecture, Aug. 5, 1963. 24caesar's Gate, [p. iv].
34
bounds, to accept those bounds imposed by your context which
is cosmos.
To be a power is to have bounds, and you re-discover your-i
self and a freedom in terms of the things you draw on and
then fulfill. (Lecture, Aug. 5, 1963)
The entire role of the poet, receiving bounds rather
than imposing them, divinely gifted rather than supremely
clever, is, Duncan feels, close to that of the shaman. It
i '* i
contains elements of three previous concepts of the divinelyj
i . !
inspired poet: the ancient Greek, the Biblical, and the
I ;
Celtic.
i I usually get the picture now of the poet as being three |
primary entities that have merged into one. One from the ;
Roman-Greek world which is poin^, which is to make the
poem, which is the art, the artisan, the craft and the
art. But the second is a very definite one from the j
Bible, from the Jewish source, which is to speak with j
God's voice or with god-voices. And so intense was the
Jewish sense against the art that Buber quotes a Hassidic j
interpretation of the commandment not to make a graven |
image that it meant specifically that you were not to make;
a poem, that your poetic impulse was to speak forth with- ;
out making a poem out of it, and without carving it.
I A third one . . . the Celtic bardic poet, and here I'm go-!
ing on what I think the bardic poet is, because there's
nothing that's more way out there on the borderline than |
the picture of the bard. The bard, then, is the one where;
we verge upon the shaman world. Actually we find that allj
( three of these go back to the figure of a shaman, of the j
man who has to do with the death, and of the man who can
translate himself into an other world. And actually our
i requirement of the poem that we have now that's paramount,
I that we see into this world where we are, and see its un-
j derlying meanings, is to see the other world in this world
we are in. (Lecture, Aug. 5, 1963)
Always, for Duncan, the poet is the voice of an other
world, a numinal person who can read that other world in the
actuality about him and speak with authority in the voice of
35
that which he has seen. He is always a perceiver, watching,
listening for signs of the real in the actual world. For he
has for his writing nothing purely his own; he is forever
reliant on that which the cosmos gives.
A poet who sits in the light of words like a cat in the
mote-filld sunlight of a window. Where he is in the sen
tence is there. And he listens. His poetry pictures his
listening.25
i
He must listen and gain "access to a world of sight and |
feeling, a reality, deeper, stranger, and larger than the j
1 ■ ;
world of men's conventional concerns."26 And he must listen
particularly to the language, for to Duncan the autonomous
i ' i
and evolving structure of the language is one of the major
i ‘ i
indicators of the real and one of the major sources of in-
! i
spiration. "A servant of the genius that lies in language j
j
before which I have no genius,"27 Duncan has called himself.j
The poet, in Duncan's view, has a complex function. He
I :
iis to serve the language as its loyal spokesman and guardi- :
i '
an, announce its laws and its structure, and discover and
preserve its complexities of meaning. He is to serve the
cosmos, "to reveal the objects of our world in its poetic
light."2® And by serving the cosmos and language he is to
serve man by presenting him with more and more accurate
25Writing Writing (Buffalo, 1964), n.p. j
26?he Years as Catches, p. iii. 27Letters, p. iv.
28The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante's Divine Comedy,
[p. U.
images of himself and his world. Duncan remarks, "Just as
the psychoanalyst searches the language of Man for its uni-
versal sexual or archetypal content, so too all the content
]
of Man's drama and destiny is reveald in the workings of
jthat language; the poet releases formulations at once pro
phetic and projective."29 At another point he declares,
t
"Beginning definitely with my work in the book Letters, the
I i
scope, intent, and character of my writing has risen from
jthe study and imagination of what man is."30
| By "imagination" here Duncan means that faculty by
which a man can apprehend or intuit the real. It is not an j
j !
image-making faculty but an image-reading faculty, similar
|
to that "fusing" or "completing" power which Coleridge be- |
lieved the imagination to be. For Duncan, the power to use
this faculty helps clear the way toward eventual universal
understanding. "Our powers must lie now not in defeating
j
jthe enemy but in the more problematic and longer effort to '
understand our common humanity with him."3^ The poet can
I j
expose this common humanity by penetrating to the heart of !
j ■ J
I "what is" and by "involving" himself or "fusing" himself j
|
29a Book of Resemblances: Poems 1950-1953 (New Haven, I
1966), p. viii.
30"a Projection for 1963: in Applying for a Guggenheim
Fellowship in Creative Writing in Poetry," quoted in Pauline
Wah, "Robert Duncan: The Poem as Process" (unpublished Mas
ter's thesis, Dept, of English, University of British Colum
bia, 1966), p. 70.
31"From the Day Book," p. 11.
37 ’
with it.
The allegorical or mystic sense, Dante says in his letter !
to Can Grande, is the sense which we get through the thing
the letter signifies. It is our imagination of what the
universe means, and has its origin in the universe. To
put it another way, it is by the faculty of imagination
that we come to the significance of the world and of man,
imagining what is in order to involve ourselves more
deeply in what is.32
Through what we might call the "fusing power" of the
imagination, the poet communicates and cooperates with the
| • j
| !
numinous powers, in particular, with the powers of the poem j
i :
he is writing. Says Duncan, "The ground of my art is a kept
1 ' i
faith with that which would s p e a k . " 3 3 The poet's aim is not
i I
|to create but to write. It is not to have written, but to j
jcontinue communicating, to continue writing, "to overcome
Iwriting in writing."34 to be a poet he must maintain con- !
tact with the powers of the poem he has become the agent of.;
j
For the poem does not belong to the poet; he merely is
j"Maker" in so much as he participates with the other agents ;
l i
jof Creation in the making of the poem. "It is the Making
and we are to be makers, those who participate in the Mak- I
j ;
| i n g . " 3 5 At another point Duncan states: "What I make at
|all, my craft, is to open a way in the language for that
32^he Sweetness and Greatness of Dante's Divine Comedy,
[p. 5].
33"a Projection for 1963," in Wah, p. 4.
34writing Writing, [p. 71. 35as Testimony, p. 12.
: 38
speech that comes only in song."36 Since his "making" is
limited only to the making of a way, the poet must ignore
the incidental formal beauties of the parts of the poem as
it unfolds, must restrain himself from elaborating these,
and devote himself to aiding the poem to achieve its own
form.
This is the great temptation of all true poets to be so
enraptured by the beauty of the language in love of which
they have been called to their life work, so taken in by
the loveliness of words or by the wonder of images and |
persons that art projects, that they lose the intent of I
the whole, the working of the poem towards the fullness in
meaning of its form.3'
! i
To Duncan, the formal beauties of the poem are spurious;
< i
if they keep the poet from "the demand of the poem to come i
!into its proper form." And the poet who indulges himself ini
I
i
these beauties, and fails to follow the powers of the poem, !
i
I
is giving worship to a false goddess. Duncan says of this
i i
igoddess: !
In the realm of poetics, she is the false muse of the
poet's vanity in which he no longer aspires to be a good s
workman but admires what he has done, no longer follows
the inspiration of the Lady in High Heaven but is lost in {
the gratifications his own voice provides. ("The Sweet
ness and Greatness . . .," [p. 21])
i
; I
This goddess is the poet's own skill, and is a paltry thing
jin comparison to the poem to which he denied life. The gooc(
iworkman would have devoted himself to the service of a poem I
36"a Projection for 1963," in Wah, p. 4.
37The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante's Divine Comedy,
[p. HI.
which he knew would never be his; the other poet serves only;
the puny altar of his own ego. Duncan continually argues
I !
that the poet's own abilities and aspirations are sterile
sources for poetry.
One of the earmarks for me . . . of the school that has
dominated in teaching in schools about poetry and has dom
inated, for instance, in the school of masters who write j
poetry, is their idea that the poet's own powers and the
poet's own choice, and the poet's own cleverness . . . is i
what happens; but it is a matter of cooperating with the
thing and in a way you come into tune. (Lecture, July 25,
! 1961)
| ;
To Duncan, poets "do not do things with words"; they
! i
I !
merely "learn to participate with what it is that is going ;
i , i
|on in the poem" (Lecture, July 25, 1961). Further, a poet's
I \
sense of identity is of no help in his work as a poet. Says
i !
| l
Duncan, "In writing I am not but I am writing." The poem isj
what should receive attention, not the writer's ego. The i
poet should have no thought of personal enhancement but
i
ishould dedicate all his labors to the service of the infin-
Entirely at home in writing. Not famous, not talented,
not expanding but including, not promising but missing the
blessing, not profound but professional professing ah at-
homeness. Not printed but writing, not convincing but ap-j
pealing, not succeeding but succeeding ourselves, not
winning but beginning. Entirely at home in b e g i n n i n g .38
; i
In a universe of process everything is a beginning, and to j
! I
write is to attest to the continual beginnings. The poet j
I reaches no end, the poem reaches no end, even as the uni-
i
I
I
38Writing Writing, [p. 18].
verse reaches no end.
Duncan's sense of a poet's service to the universe
jwhich feeds mankind is so great that he has compared the |
poet's writing of the poem to the priest's performing of thej
Mass. To Duncan, both poet and priest, in serving the nu-
! ' i
minous, fill an office in which their personal identities
are, of necessity, completely submerged. The poet, he
jclaims, "for all people . . . has been an office no matter j
jwhere, fulfilling an office— and my word 'obedience' has to '
i ■ i
j j
do with fulfilling an office. My word 'service'" (Lecture, j
Aug. 5, 1963). j
: i
At a poetry reading in San Francisco Duncan protested
| !
his being described as a "first-rate poet." j
i |
It is meant, I think, as an honor and as an advertisement,|
but it is mistaken. The Roman Catholic Church very early |
recognized that priesthood was an office not a personal
achievement; thus what might have been a fraud became a
sacrament. There is no such thing as a first-rate priest,
and, because a poem is a service of the Divine, I would
maintain that there is no such thing as a first-rate poet.j
My view of what a priest is differs somewhat I believe j
| from that of the Church, for it is my belief that whoever j
enacts the sacrament in the name of God is ordained in
that Name, for the sake of the sacrament. Likewise,
wherever a man writes in the name of Poetry he writes in j
the office of the Poet in order that there be a poem, andj
if he claim personal honor for this act he usurps the
! honor.39
, |
i !
At another place he writes: !
All Paradise and Saint Peter wax red in a famous scene
of the Paradiso at the thought of how Boniface VIII uses
the office of Pope as a personal power. "He who usurpeth
upon the earth my place, my place, my place," Peter
39"Notes from a Reading," [p. 121.,
[ ' ' ... ........ ........... ....... ' ". 41
i ;
exclaims: " 1 il loco mio, illoco mio, il loco mio. '1 1 It:
is the wrath of the office misused. ("From the Day Book,"
p. 36)
Accordingly, Duncan denies that a poet deserves ap
plause after having read his poems aloud to an audience. |
j i
| j
|"You see, when you are performing the office you are not inj
| i
the state of how good your performance is."40 A poet is !
Inot, in Duncan's view, "specifically gifted or talented."
i ' !
:"These things, the poet testifies, I did not see by my own
j virtues, but they were revealed to me."4- 1 - Thus he declared
to the audience of that San Francisco reading:
The poem exists in order for you to enter therein, not for
your approval or disapproval. To applaud after a poem is
to put up a thunderous wall of acclaim for the performer j
| against the music where the poem exists in the heart of
God. The audience of poetry does not clap; it endures
whatever excitement or pleasure, and seeks to dwell thru
the performance in the mystery performd. In hell the
damnd clap continuously against the silence in which they
fear there is no god. ("Notes from a Reading," [p. 13])
There is nothing in poetry for the poet, according to
Duncan, other than the satisfaction of an office duly
I
filled. Like the priest, the poet stands half way between j
god and man, and his glory is to be found in the self- I
abnegation with which he serves both. Duncan may believe
with Blake that the authors are in eternity, but he knows
that in this world the unenlightened are all around. In
such a world, for Robert Duncan, there is no room for the
40Lecture, Aug. 5, 1963.
4l"From the Day Book," p. 35.
frivolity of a vain priest.
The Poem and Its Making
When the poet is a "nameless agency of movements in a
book that unimagined generations project,"42 when "a poem
is a service of the Divine," it is obvious not only that
Duncan's concept of poetry is greatly different from that
usually encountered in English but also that his concepts
both of form and of the way of composition are likely to be
somewhat unusual. Throughout his writings Duncan stresses
that poetry is "an art that sought routes in experience to
ithe divine," that it is a way to "a commune of spirit,"43
j
that it is "some sort of ritual.”44 For Duncan a poem is
j
always a participation in the numinous. It is "the very
life of the soul," he has said, it is an "occult document."
lor it is a fountain: a fountain "of life or of forgetful
ness of self-life."45 Always it finds its source in some-
ithing that lives on for the most part outside of human
|
existence and certainly outside of human control.
The poem itself is like the mass, a magical operation,
using language, as those things in the mass are a magical
operation and close upon the numinous world, close upon
the world charged with divinity. (Lecture, Aug. 5, 1963)
42Letters, p. v. 43"From the Day Book," pp. 23, 34.
I 44Lecture, Aug. 5, 1961.
45"Pages from a Notebook," in The New American Poetry
1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York, 1960), pp. 401,
4 T O T " 4 '( 5 " Z .
As a magical operation, the poem is something in which
anything can happen.
Every single part of our experience can be in the poem but
because the poem, like the universe, the wonder of it is
what it contains, not that like it's important, but all j
| the varieties that we see happening in it.46 :
jpoetry can reveal "design" and thus "the presence of a cre-
iator,"4? and it can even converse with ghosts. "The poem
i j
j
became an agency for me to move into another world and to
talk with the dead." For Duncan believes that the dead, who
jparticipated in advancing our language toward its form, are
I
still alive in the language that throws poems forth to the
;poet.
If the language is charged with all the meanings that men |
I can put into it, then those men are still there and then |
i those dead are still there too. So the language has
ghosts. (Lecture, Aug. 5, 1961)
Duncan will never, agree that the poem can be chiefly a
"culture-commodity," a material boast of human accomplish
ment, or "an item of education." Nor will he agree that it
i
exists primarily for its "aesthetic qualities"48 or as "an
exercise to improve sensibility."48 To Duncan, art is a
"means of human experience," a way "for experience to become
communal and actual," a way for the human to realize his
46Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth." The confused syntax herej
is accurately transcribed.
4^Lecture, July 25, 1961. |
i
48"From the Day Book," p. 5. - I
48"Robert Duncan," The New American Poetry, p. 432.
44
bond with the cosmos.
Poems are for me only occasions of Poetry, of coming
into the consciousness of things as potentials for making
a universe real— celebrating, is it? or evoking? Of
singing and dancing What Is.5°
The poem is man's way of discovering his true relation
ship to a confusing and moving universe. This true rela
tionship changes, even as man lives or as poet writes. "For
the artist there is no established Truth, but events, ideas,;
things have their truth hidden in a form yet to be realized"!
("From the Day Book," p. 27). If even truth is not abso
lute, certainly the structure of the cosmos is not absolute,:
and thus the form of the poem (by which the poet seeks to
i
understand the truth of the cosmos) also dares not be abso- ;
j i
lute. For the poem itself, as a message to the poet, is as !
! !
much a production of the evolving cosmos as any other natu- j
| i
ral object. A new rationale of poetic form comes out of
Duncan's world-view that has a profound effect on the proc- |
ess of composition on which he relies.
In our immediate oceanic being, we can seem to our examin
ing conscious view all but hopelessly lost in a medium at
once overpowering and vague, too huge to be true. Yet the
tide lines of Okeanos we see traced in the rock formations
of concrete thought, contours we take for granted once the
movement in which they were carved has retreated. So the j
lines of a poem are tied to its realized form, the form of
a process whose traces are left over after the excited j
language of poetry so eroded the shape of its shores, sen-y
tences, and definitions, that the land, remaining, seems |
to us fundamental. As we near the language itself (the
poem had presented itself as a welling up of words or
waters that was yet a well in its fullness, eternal and
50"From the Day Book," pp. 5, 10.
! 45 !
motionless), we see it as an ocean that is at work at its |
own boundaries we feel as the reveald contours of the poem
we, being of the ocean, would shape. (A Book of Resem
blances , p. viii)
I To Robert Duncan, then, form is not something imposed
i
or immediate. It is something spontaneous rising out of the
life of the thing that is seeking to achieve its form. All
things, rivers, lakes, rocks, poems, or men, are "immediate
occasions of the divine"51 and thus gain their form in this
way.
After Freud, we are aware that unwittingly we achieve our |
form. It is, whatever our mastery, the inevitable use we j
make of the speech that betrays to ourselves and to our
hunters (our readers) the spore of what we are becoming.
("Pages from a Notebook," p. 400) '
Says Duncan, "1 think the feeling of form has something to
do with chemical, with crystal, with the principles that the!
j
universe itself has a form. "52 Form is something which
comes to anything if it is let be, if the orders of the cos-;
mos are left undisturbed by potentially willful man. In a
poem this nearly always means that the poet will be unaware
t
of where the poem will lead, of what the consequences of his
letting the orders of the poem rule will be— "you admit that
you do not know what the consequences are of having these
orders."53
Duncan's chief metaphor for how the things of our
SlLetter to the author, June 14, 1967.
33Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth."
53Lecture, July 24, 1961.
universe achieve their form is the "ill-kept garden":
i ’ I
We can have an ill-kept garden. And the ill-kept garden
is certainly something that has attracted me in poetry.
No matter how austerely we can do service to our knowledge
of the lawful formality of the whole universe we live in,
the ill-kept garden has that same lawful formality. I
| mean, it's the universe. (Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth")
He remarks that a poet who keeps his garden, who arbitrarily
imposes form, is in the same position as a gardener who
i
i
weeds and thins his garden so that it produces only one
I ' i
thing.
; i
i I
Now in some sense in a poem you do not weed a poem. Be- !
cause you really are not producing lettuces. Well, there |
are poets who produce lettuces and there's nothing like
having a poet give you lettuce and then the second course |
is lettuce and then the third course is lettuce and the
fourth course is lettuce, and there ain't no other kinds j
of plants coming along. (Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth") !
!
To Duncan it is "invaluable to have an ill-kept gar
den," or a "kept-by-itself" garden, because this is the onlyj
; l
way in which true form will happen. Form grows out of the
thing it is in, and is strictly determined by the particular
nature that the thing is attempting to achieve. Things are
not what they are because of the form they have been given;
they possess their particular form exactly because of what
they are. Duncan says,
The ecology of your own poem is what I'm talking about,
when you begin to be fascinated by your own psyche life or
anything else, not because it's getting down to something
interesting but because you want to find out— you want to
deal with, find out, get something of the form that is
really happening there. (Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth")
Both the poem and its form are "out there" external to
the poet and his working of the poem. So that Duncan's
process of composition necessarily involves perception much j
jmore than fabrication. With the poem a received thing, com-j
iposition becomes, to a large extent, reception. Although
i
Jthe poet may be said to "make" the poem, in that he makes a
■way for it, the poem also affects him.
Now this is the meaning of a creative act, that it is a
spiritual event, and it can't just take place, something
has to be done, something has to be enacted, something
: has to be made, and the little secret poets kept going,
even in the worst times, was that when you made a poem,
no matter what someone else was going to do with it, as
far as being a commodity or object of value, if you took
it as an entire experience, if you were responsible thru-
out, this would mean a change, a change in spirit. (Lee-j
ture, July 23, 1961) |
i
Certainly Duncan does not wish to say that the process of |
: i
composition is entirely passive. To the contrary, it re-
j
quires much initiative, it requires listening, and watch- '
! i
ing, and reading the universe as if it were a text. How- !
i
ever, in taking these steps, the poet incurs the risk that
he will be changed thereby. For the poem has its own laws,
and these must be kept by the poet, obeyed, and likely ab
sorbed into his own being.
The keeping of the laws of the poem requires action
and watchfulness of the poet, but not craft and cunning.
Says Duncan,
The keeping is cooperation of the conscious mind with the
unconscious, and the poem is not a simple of unconscious
processes; it's the two together and actually we find that
the unconscious becomes vital when the conscious becomes
flooded with it, and cooperates with it. (Lecture,
July 24, 1961)
The keeping, however, must be conscious even to the point
48
of determination. For the laws of the poem which must be
kept, if the poem is going to unfold successfully, involve j
! i
the most complex parts of the art of the poem: rhythm,
| 1
rime, melody, and theme. If these are not kept as the poem
I
presents them, the poem has been forced away from the real.
The secret of the poetic art lies in the keeping of
time, to keep time, discovering the line of melodic coher
ence. "Here," "there," what once was, what is now— this
i return in a new structure is the essence of rime— the re- j
1 turn of a vowel tone, of a consonant formation, of a ;
theme, of a contour, where rime is meaningful, correspond-?
ing to the poet ' s intuition of the real. "The heart of j
Nature being everywhere Music," Carlyle had written in The
Hero as Poet, "if you can only reach it." H. D. in her \
work with Freud followed, she tells us, "my own intense, |
dynamic interest in the unfolding of the unconscious or j
the subconscious pattern." There is something in the un-!
folding of the poem that corresponds to the unfolding of
the psyche. The poet, like the scientist, works to feel j
or know the inner order of things. The form in the proc-j
ess of the poem, the form in the process of the psyche,
correspond in turn to the form in the process of What Is.;
"There [sic] world ever was, and is, and shall be," Hera-
klitus says, "a Fire, kindled in measure, quenched in
measure." ("From the Day Book," p. 12)
In composition the poet asks the world "to reveal it
self" ; 54 he seeks "to feel or know the inner order of
things." He searches through the objects and events of the
actual world for signs of the real, seeking to advance "as
far as one can (as far as one dares) toward an adventure."
He must have courage, "courage to travel on roads of no
glory,"55 and fidelity, fidelity to "the process of What
54Lecture, Aug. 5, 1963.
55"Pages from a Notebook," The New American Poetry,
p. 402.
r . ......' " '" '""" ' ‘" ““ ~ 4 9 '
i • !
i I
Is." Duncan declares, "The words I entertain are not my j
i ;
i !
own. Do I propose to own them as I propose them?" But j
these words come slowly, with laborious expense and devo-
Ition, and where they lead is often not clear: ". . .we are
moving ourselves word after word walking by words and sylla-
|
bles until the arrival pronounces the structure of how we
have been m o v i n g ."56
! In the process of composition the poet is fed by the
poem and the poem is fed by the events that have thrown it
jforth. The role of the poet, says Duncan, "is not to seek
perfection but to draw honey or poetry out of all things."5^
!
He contends that the poet must always be awake to the nour- !
|
ishment offered to him by the numinous powers. |
The real role of the imagination is to find: if you !
have any sense the milk is there, if you have any sense |
the good is there— even if you don't know any more than
the Koreans did how in the world you're going to get it— '
you have a work to do. (Lecture, July 23, 1961)
The idea that composition involves receiving nourishment re
quires of the poet a definite willingness to be fed. Duncan
expresses the necessary submission in a variety of ways.
"These mere poems, contrived however they were, responded to
the whispering angels of the language," he says of his 1949-
1950 poems in Caesar's Gate.58 In a 1963 publication he
56writing Writing, [p. 38].
57"Pages from a Notebook," The New American Poetry,
p. 400.
58caesar's Gate, [pp. i-ii].
remarks that "structure is not given but emerges from the
cooperation of many events in syllable, in word, in phrase,
to be satisfied only as their complex interrelations are
jfulfilled."59 xn another place he suggests that this being |
i
fed, this fulfilling of the "complex relationships" of the
I j
various elements of the poem, is much like satisfying the
jreguirements of a spontaneous dance. "If you do have that
jdance coming up, you do; this is the other compelling thing
I
|of a p o e m ."60 if the poet will realize his poem, or fulfill
the dance, he must conform to the will of the powers that
[inform that dance or poem. As Duncan quotes Christ from a
heterodox gospel of St. John: "He who joins not in the
dance mistakes the event."61
When the poet writes under compulsion, when what hap- j
: i
pens to him can be more significant than himself, his own
will and identity play little part in the process of compo
sition. "We do have this compelling reality that is formed,
so all right, if the dance comes, we have to obey it."62
His identity is only significant in as much as it is part of
the dance. It has its true importance only after the poet
has seen himself as part of "the totality of what has
59"From the Day Book," p. 7.
60Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth."
61"From the Day Book," p. 29.
62Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth."
happend, that will be, is, the universe,"
sion of the d i v i n e " *>3 equally significant
multifarious occasions with which he must
most important for composition, words are also such occa
sions .
i
You do not do things with words; words are real things an
when they are in a place where you can see what it is
they're doing and you can cooperate with them, then some
thing unfolds and you can feel it's in you but it's reall
| unfolding in the language. And you have suddenly enterd
realm so much larger than your own mind, because language
is all of human experience. And absolutely as a medium o
the human language, you step out of your own bounds wher
ever you come from, your own feeling of coming from San
Francisco or your own feeling of having crosst eyes or
whatever and you're suddenly in an entirely different ;
world because the language doesn't have crosst eyes, you j
know, it does and it doesn't--it has everything. (Lec
ture, July 25, 1961) |
The artist's identity is not primal, because he is only
one among many, and yet it is still operative, since it too !
I
is contained in both the universe and the language, which i
has "everything." The poet can contribute something of him
self to the poem, and yet for the most part the poem com
poses him.
The image comes to the artist to create him and is charged
then with the numinous aura, the daemonic import, of the
creative: what we see and read informs us. This is one
operation of the work of art; yet in the same work the
artist projects— more than the image— the form of its
actualization, illustrating the universe anew with the
signature, in part of his identity, in part of his experi
ence. In style we recognize immediately what we feel to
be the identity of an historical period and of a particu
lar artist; but style also communicates to us in our
response to it the imprint of a way of experience, the
63Letter to the author, June 14, 1967.
51
as one more "occa-
as those other
cooperate. And,
i spirit of its formation. (A Book of Resemblances, p. x)
i ‘ i
In his criticism Duncan more often emphasizes the losing of j
identity during the process of composition than he does the
jretaining of it. In Writing Writing he implies that the
jentire person of the poet becomes absorbed into the orders
I
of the poem,^lost in the delight of its patterns.
A delight. \ In the telling an excitement beginning and an
inherent pleasure becomes absorbd in the measures; an emo-
i tion growing, expressing, showing in all its phrases is
becoming a multiple flavoring of all unknown knowing. I
am no longer sincere, I am no longer expressing, I am no
longer addressing but filld up to exclude all other feel
ing with the language which is ours unfolding itself,
revealing its spirit in the words I was using. I am no
longer choosing but losing myself; it is the medium, the
means that is revealing its meaning.
For the most part, then, in the process of composition
the poet forgets himself and his own will in the patterns
I
i
of the poem. He gains these patterns from outside himself, |
from the language which is one of the voices of the cosmos, j
His responsibility is to keep these patterns, and to regard;
the poem as something which will attain its form with a
minimum of interference from the poet who delivers it.
We know that an idea, or a poem, may begin at some
point or germ, grow, finding its being and necessary form,
rhythm and life as the germ evolves in relation to its en
vironment of language and experience in life. This is
the art that rises from a deep belief in the universe as
a medium of forms, in man's guest as a spiritual evolu
tion. ("From the Day Book," p. 7)
In actual composition, Duncan feels, the poet has "no
alternative but to use those words,"64 those words which
64Lecture, July 23, 1961
the poem proposes. He remarks, "Often I will hear lines be-!
i f ore I begin to write and they will insist and insist and |
i i
insist as a kind of melody beginning." To Duncan, "you are
jstuck with whatever comes alive to you at the moment and
I
must work with it." The poet must allow the poem to domi-
i
nate his direction, or else the poem will fail to arrive.
;"The form will not take 'no' for an answer; the form will
!
not permit me to say 'no' when a word comes, and it forces
me forward into what in another way is the death of my own
; i
c h o i c e . "65 just as man has no alternative, if he will be
man, but to live in the universe which has given him life,
i
so the poet, if he will be poet, can only use those words
and those patterns which are revealed to him. "So, where w^
feel our words as if they were drawn and released by a lunar
|
magic, tied as our inner nature is tied to an elemental
compulsion, we are moved to poetry."66
The poet, contends Duncan, as he begins that first sen
tence of the poem, is in truth under a sentence to keep the
laws of the poem. It is a sentence, "an elemental compul
sion," which he must serve. Serving this sentence is the
only way to freedom as a poet, he says, and he refers to
the Zohar where "in order to master anything you had to
serve it, because you had to have a Lord over you— the Lord
65Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth."
66A Book of Resemblances, p. vii.
over you— before you had freedom." He continues, "So that
when you are obeying the sentence, you are in the freedom of
writing." "And if you're under a law to keep those sounds,
i
;not to have them re-occur, but you've got to keep all of
them so that when they re-occur they re-occur as part of the
form."67
In composition, according to Duncan, the poet's chief
duty is "obedience,"x^or^he must seek the elimination of
self-aggrandisement and the beginning of homage to the uni
verse. j
i
The end of masterpieces . the beginning of testimony.
Having their mastery obedient to the play of forms that
makes a path between what is in the language and what is
in their lives.68 j
j
Throughout the time of composition the poet must serve the |
i
poem. |
t
Isn't this our obedience, in writing as well as in read
ing, to clear our own minds of our meanings in order that
"the poet" may fill them with his meanings? to serve the
meanings of the Poem. (As Testimony, p. 9)
The poorest way of composition is embraced when the
poet is disobedient. Such a way can have two results:
either self-indulgence or inability to write.
Your writing block is entirely a resistance of the sen
tence which is above you. Usually what happens is that
you want to express something rather than follow what is
being said. (Lecture, July 24, 1961)
67Lecture, July 24, 1961.
68Duncan, "Ideas of the Meaning of Form," p. 61. The
punctuation and spacing of this quotation approximates its
appearance in the published article.
| ' 55
Self-indulgence, Duncan feels, is for the poet a ridiculous
and ruinous luxury.
Of all the absurdities, to try to express something or
want to express something when you're writing when you
have only to follow what you're saying when you write be
cause your writing is ultimately such a neutral document
that you and anybody else, once it's there on that paper,
are in the same relation to it to read. You don't really
care after you have written it and nobody else does if
something of you gets expressed or not. What you read and
what is fascinating is the world that emerges in there.
And, ofJcourse, so you can call it you expressing, but the
block is usually a feeling, "Oh, I ought to perform in
here or something," and you don't go ahead with what it
was you'd started to do. You keep thinking it ought to be
better. (Lecture, July 24, 1961)
As a result of the poet's worrying about self-expression and
personal performance, says Duncan, "the exchange or interac
tion with What Is is closed off, and an inflation of atti
tude is drawn from the hubris involved." The man arrogates
himself over the universe, and his own poem over that of the
language. If he maintains the exchange with "What Is," he
"makes a place for the God to be"; if he inflates himself, .
he deifies his own "unloving" being.69
To Duncan, poor principles of composition can manifest
themselves in many ways. They can be revealed in one's dis
satisfaction that a poem is not going where one expected.
They can be revealed in one's desire to feel constricted by
form, in a conception that composition is a contest between
the cunning of the writer and the limitations of the form.
They can be revealed in one's wish to control, dominate, and
69"prom the Day Book," pp. 34-35.
r"~ .... 56
select: every word of one's, poem. And they can be revealed
In the notion that poems can be "completed." For in Dun
can's view the form of all things in the universe is aperi- j
i i
odic, and, if the form of a thing can be completed, this
only shows that its true form was never begun. His catalog
i
of poor writers runs thus: |
. i
Some feel in writing a law that is demanding, a conflict
of others, of laws to which they are adhering that is not
clearing but marring and denying the law they are command
ing. dome in writing feel such a shape determined in
their beginning that they are continually sinning when
that shape is not emerging. Some in writing push and de
vise words and phrases, phrases and sentences, into a
legal proceeding. Some are needing an absolute form, a
feeling of limiting, to discover without revealing their |
legal proceedings the length of the shape they are to be !
completing. Some need to be policemen, policing and di-
recting, they need a persistent made-up determination not j
to be pretending in order not to be offending the sense |
that there is law in perfecting. Some are gaily devising :
and revising all legalities aware that all their imagining
is desiring and enfiring a law they are admiring. Some j
are filld with rage on the page at all other laws than the
laws they are enraged by; contradicting and dictating in
predicting such wrathful codefications of law as tie up
all talking in finally ending. Finally ending is never
beginning. So their sentences of absolution are laws to
end laws, a hiatus of writing against writing that is
fighting. (Writing Writing, [pp. 25-26])
These writers against writing are making up laws against the
laws of the universe— "laws to end laws." They are the
false lawyers who cannot read the text of the universe be
cause their attentions have been so taken with the mock-
legal fabrications of their own wills.
Duncan believes that the true process of composition
lies in being as a midwife to the poem: one aids and par
ticipates in its birth. One does not try to alter its sex,
j ...... ...... ".... 57;
the color of its skin, or any other of its inherent charac
teristics. One assists the poem in fulfilling its own role
as one occasion of the divine much as all the influences of
any man's life assist him in becoming a similar occasion.
Some of the consequences of holding this theory of
composition are rather remarkable. One, Duncan reminds us,
i
is that the poet must write even poems he would not normally
want to have written. "Since it's happend, we must under
take it,” he says. "I am absolutely obedient to the thing
that's happening and know that if I disobey, that— if I were
not to write . . . I know that everything else would
wreck."70
Another notable consequence is that the poet must ad
mit everything into the poem that the poem wishes to hold.
Even one's most embarrassing feelings must be admitted if
I ;
they seem to belong to the structure of the poem.
One of the things we do in poetry, and around the poetry
that we can do, that we really can't do in life, is to
keep all our feelings in one great organization, or keep
as much as we can. You keep your obsession, the very
thing that you think would render you the least valuable
to any other human being, and to yourself.
In order to be true to itself, the poem must be as compre
hensive as possible.
You keep your obsession, but you . . . keep the dance and |
within the dance you try to keep also every other element 1
you can, so that when the dance, let's say, takes over,
it is not only the dance taking over but as many other :
things and levels of consciousness as can possibly be !
| _________________________
I 70Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth." !
there. (Lecture, "The Psyche-Myth")
jFor Duncan, there are no exclusions to be made on the basis j
i i
of such man-made rationales as "taste," "aesthetics," or j
j
"good manners." The universe itself is the sole arbiter of j
i
what is tasteful or permissible, and, if the poem would ad- |
; ' i
mit something, the universe has necessarily approved. !
i A third consequence of Duncan's way of composition is
ithat revision becomes unlawful. The universe does not
j ;
jrevise its works; it excels them with others. The only I
kind of revision that Duncan will permit himself is literal |
re-vision: an attempting once again to establish contact
I ' j
with a poem which he may have imperfectly set down. "My
previsions are my new works," he tells us, "each one, a
! i
revision of what has gone before. In-sight. Re-vision."71 j
Further, if there is a place within a poem which has not
"come right," this place cannot be filled with fabricated
lines. If the poet has not been able to learn what should
have been placed there, the lines must be left blank.
We cannot afford to "fill a gap". As we learn what the
force of a poem is, we learn that gaps must be acknowl
edged where they are, if the music hold. In this concept
there is no mere effect but what may appear as effect must
prove to be a locus, a necessity of the structure. ("From
the Day Book," p. 4)
Finally, since the poem has been composed by the poet's
aiding it to travel to this world from the lips of God, the
71 "Pages from a Notebook," The New American Poetry,
p. 400.
poem itself is not open to criticism. No critic has the
right to evaluate and judge the works of the divine. All
| ;
that can be rated about a poem is the extent to which the
poet has succeeded in bringing it to its true form. How
well the poet has listened, and how well he has transcribed
the music, become the concerns of the critic, and not any of
the intrinsic characteristics of the poem itself.
Summary
A remarkably high degree of fidelity to the principles
they believe fundamental to life goes into the poetic theo- j
: |
ries of the Black Mountain poets, and such can certainly be j
seen in the critical writings of Robert Duncan. Refusing
to believe that poetry can be isolated from the implication^
of any other part of life, or that art or aesthetics can be |
I
regarded as autonomous fields, Duncan has tried to build
everything he believes firmly on his understanding of what
man, life, and the universe are. Finding confirmation in
Carl Sauer's investigations in ecology, in Heisenberg's dis
covery of the uncertainty principle, in Schrfidinger's obser
vations of organic form, and in Whitehead's theories in
Process and Reality, Duncan envisions a vital, divine, and
chaotically-patterned universe continually evolving toward
new form. The forces of this universe he sees reaching man
as divine or numinous powers in the form of physical laws,
of biological change, of personality development, of
"chance" event, and especially in the form of that other un-j
I . . . . . . |
controllable and living complex, language. And he does not j
i j
shirk the implications such a world-view could have for the j
poet and poetry. Realizing suddenly that the mysteries of
inspiration— the mysteries of the unrepeatable marvels of
Shakespeare's verse, the mysteries of the unanalyzable for
mal beauties of the Psalms— can be approached for possible
jexplanation by recourse to the similarly random and unra-
jtionalizable beauty of the natural world, Duncan has ex- |
pounded a new and coherent doctrine of poetry. The poet is '
I |
empowered to write poems as the earth is inspired to raise
|
{mountains. Poetry achieves form and "spreads in scope as an
: i
aged tree spreads its roots and foliage.And the poet |
i !
|composes the poem the way a parent should let a child grow
— by guidance, help, and participation, and with constant
respect for its integrity.
72"prom the Day Book," p. 8.
CHAPTER II
THE THEORIES OF CHARLES OLSON |
The theoretical and critical writings of Charles Olson, j
i :
unlike those of Robert Duncan, which are available only in j
! j
scattered places such as limited-circulation magazines and |
jthe introductions of out-of-print books, have recently been
j
Collected into one limited-edition volume.1 Despite the
jphysical integration of these writings, however, the rela- |
j !
tionships between the various ideas they contain still have
not been made clear by their author. As Duncan has said of
Olson's essay, "Projective Verse," "These projections are
not even meant to hang together."^ To Olson, things do not
"hang together" in reality; they "hang together" only in the
artificialities of men's talk about reality. Logicality,
consistency, rhetorical organization belong, in Olson's
|
view, only to the man-made "universe of discourse," and this!
I ;
universe Olson has resolved never again to enter. Thus his ;
; j
essays have the organization of what he would believe is !
■ i
J - Human universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen
(San Francisco, 1965). I
i Lecture at home of Warren Tallman, Vancouver, B.C., j
July 24, 1961.
| 62
spontaneous natural form, and they therefore require the j
. .
jreader to piece their ideas together much as a scientist is
i
i
iforced to assemble data about the universe. Duncan has a
j
jsimilar view of formf although the evidence of the two men's
jessays would indicate that the universe is a good deal more
i
harmonious from Duncan's vantage point than it is from
!
bison's position. Olson himself does not seem always to
regard his essays, despite their frequently prophetic tone,
as attempts to communicate or convert, and has declared at
ileast the ones in Proprioception3 "incongestible." He adds,
i
|"I mean they're not readable. If they're interesting they
can be dug up as signs, that's what I mean."4 As signs of
the man, and of the universe as he sees it, his essays shall
: \
be used here. j
I
J
The Human Universe j
Although Duncan's term "numinous" is not a part of
Charles Olson's critical vocabulary, this lack does not mean
that Olson does not believe in the existence of a natural
world with both power and control over man. On the con
trary, nature is to Olson "that force to which he [man] owes
his somewhat small existence.1 ,5 This force Olson terms "the
human universe," primarily because it contains and is
3San Francisco, 1965.
4Reading at Berkeley (San Francisco, 1966), p. 32.
5"Projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 60.
ordered by exactly the same processes as are found in man j
!
himself. And its constituents all have the same rights to
i
existence and activity as has any human being. One of the
jlargest dangers that Olson sees for mankind is the possibil
ity that he will continue to regard the universe as inani-
i
jmate and immaterial. Like Duncan, Olson believes that the
i
universe is a living thing that contains vast numbers of
forms equally significant as man— none of which have been
created specifically for man's service. And, also like Dun-
ican, he feels that the chief enemy of this universe is man's
iwill.
If man choose to treat external reality any differently
than as part of his own process, in other words as any-
| thing other than relevant to his own inner life, then he j
; will (being such a froward thing, and bound to use his |
energy willy-nilly, nature is so subtle) use it otherwise.
He will use it just exactly as he has used it now for too
long, for arbitrary and willful purposes which, in their
effects, not only change the face of nature but actually
change and divert her force until man turns it even !
against herself, he is so powerful, this little thing. !
But what little willful modern man will not realize is,
that when he turns it against her he turns it against him-r
self, held in the hand of nature as man forever is, to
his use of himself if he choose, to his disuse, as he
has.6
To Olson, nature is relevant to man's "inner life" in as
much as its processes are identical with those of this life
and thus reveal the processes of the human psyche. More
important, nature nourishes man— he is held in her hand— and
yet, like Duncan's example of Erysichthon, man is all too
6"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 11
r~ .. .. . ............. ...~~... 64;
i !
filling to ignore the nourishment and to subject nature to
■ ' j
his own determinations. \
Olson firmly believes that nature has a power which can
jbe tapped, a power, in fact, which modern science is already
i
|tapping. What has gone wrong with man's relation to nature
centers on the fact that man wishes to give far more credit
|to himself for having tapped this power than he will give tc
nature for having the power. In his increasing ability he
has lost reverence for the very power which makes this abil
ity usable. Olson says of man:
The trouble with the inherited formulations which have
helped to destroy him (the notion of himself as the center'
of phenomenon by fiat or of god as the center and man as
god's chief reflection) is that both set aside nature as
an unadmitted or suppressed third party, a sort of Holy
Ghost which was allowed in once to touch men's tongues anc.
then, because the fire was too great, was immediately
banished to some sort of half place in between god and the
devil— who actually, of course, thereby became the most |
powerful agent of all. ("Human Universe," p. 8)
Again as in Duncan, both arrogance and fear lead man to ig
nore the divine power of nature, and to attempt to assign it
i
to the same lower powers to which the Protestant churches
assigned image-worship. Particularly, Olson accuses sci
ence of treating nature as nothing more than material for
exploitation and her power as nothing more than man's
skill. To be sure, he feels, science has once again made
nature important, but in the image of man's slave rather
than man's mother.
Tapping her power, fingering her like a child, giving her
again her place, but without somehow, remembering what
truth there was in man's, centering the use of anything,
god, devil, or holy ghost, in himself, science has upset
all balance and blown value, man's particular responsi
bility, to the winds. ("Human Universe," p. 9)
i
Clearly, Olson believes there to be little "truth" in such
I arrogance which science assumes.
Nature, in Olson's view, is such a powerful and mag-
nanimous force that man must avoid allowing his ego to fal-
!
jsify his particular relationship to her, if he wishes to
prosper. Nature requires of man that he recognize himself
ias an object within her— as one with no more rights than
any other natural object. Olson calls this view of man
"objectism."
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 inter
posed 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 man is himself am object, . . .7
Nature and her objects deserve respect, feels Olson, for
"objects create what we know as the world" ("Projective
Verse," p. 56). Nature has great energy, but not energy
that is to be used for man's selfish ends. It is energy
that is to be used, but only as it is found within man's
"inner nature" itself.
The proposition is a simple one (and the more easily un
derstood now that we have been shocked at what we did not
know nature's energies capable of, generally): energy is
larger than man, but therefore, if he taps it as it is in
himself, his uses of himself are EXTENSIBLE in human
7"Projective Verse," Human Universe, pp. 59-60.
directions & degree not recently granted.8
Always Olson believes that nature's power will only
i
give man its maximum nourishment if he recognizes that this
jpower is the same that is within himself and if he thus
I
japproaches nature as if it were a "human universe" with the
jsame rights and integrity as any human being. If he ap-
j
proaches this energy as if it were neutral or hostile, it
!
will ignore or destroy him. But if he approaches it as if
it were benevolent or nourishing, as it is within himself
; i
iand must be for him to be living, it will aid and enlarge
i
his life.
However, a man can be a tyrant both to his fellow ob
jects in nature and to his fellow man, and thus usurp their |
right to personal integrity. Olson recounts the myth of
Gilgamesh, "King 14 and founder of the sea-dynasty of Su-
meria." Apparently, Gilgamesh destroyed an era in which
"the powerful and the humble lay down, side by side," and
became "a burden, in his lust to his city's people." He be
came such a burden, in fact, that he "was sent the rude
fellow Enkidu to correct him." Olson comments on the
story:
As I read it, it is an incredibly accurate myth of what
happens to the best of men when they lose touch with the
primordial & phallic energies & methodologies which, said
this predecessor people of ours, make it possible for
man, that participant thing, to take up, straight, na
ture's force. ("The Gate and the Center," p. 23)
8"The Gate and the Center," Human Universe, p. 22.
There is nothing in the world which to Olson requires i
more care and respect theui these raw, nourishing, and pri-
i
j
mordial energies of nature.
! For the truth is, that the management of external nature
| so that none of its virtu is lost, in vegetables or in
| art, is as much a delicate juggling of her content as is
the same juggling by any one of us of our own. And when
j men are not such jugglers, are not able to manage a means
j of expression the equal of their own or nature's intri
cacy, the flesh does choke.9
|So important is the right approach to nature, that if man
does not treat her as being process very much like his own,
then his own humanity— his own sharing of nature's proc
esses— will become unbearable to him. Scorn for the powers
of nature can only mean embarrassment at being a member of
! mankind which is a part of nature. Wisdom, he quotes
Apollonius of Tyana as saying, is "the recognition of the
daemonial nature in anything, including ourselves, and onlyj
I
these guileless paths give health."10
Recognizing the "daemonial nature in anything" means
that the integrity of each object— its right to be itself—
should be respected. Natural objects reveal truth, feels
Olson, not through man's subjecting them to any classifying
or comparing process, but through their own identity.
"That which exists through itself is what is called mean
ing," he announced to his audience at the Berkeley Poetry
9"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 8.
10"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, p. 41.
Conference.11 To pay attention to similarities and differ
ences between objects is to slight their right to individu-
!
ality.
. . . a thing, any thing, impinges on us by a more impor
tant fact, its self-existence, without reference to any
other thing, in short the very character of it which calls
our attention to it, which wants us to know more about it,
its particularity. This is what we are confronted by, not
I the thing's "class," any hierarchy, of quality or quea-
i tity, but the thing itself, and its relevance to ourselves
who are the experience of it (whatever it may mean to
someone else, or whatever other relations it may have).12
And every man is responsible, contends Olson, for defending
i
nature, the earth, and the integrity of its contents. "The
earth is conceivably a knowable, a seizable, and single and
your thing, and yours as a single thing and person your-
iself, not something that's distributed simply because we are
so many and the population is growing, or that the exploita
tion of the earth itself is increasing.m13 Olson returns to
ancient Sumerian texts to warn man that "'arms' are allow-
i
able only as PROTECTION OF THE EARTH" and that "THE GUARDI- !
ANSHIP OF THE EARTH IS THE RULER'S SPECIAL PROVINCE."14
This natural universe, so alive, so nourishing, so
filled with equally significant forms, and so worthy of
llwThe Causal Mythology," tape-recorded lecture deliv
ered at the University of California, Berkeley, July 20,
1965.
12"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 6.
13«The Causal Mythology."
14«The Gate and the Center," Human Universe, p. 22.
man's care and protection, is the totality of existent sig- !
nificance to Olson, and he has taken great pains to describe!
i !
jit. To Olson it is a thing with many dimensions, existing j
I !
Ithrough time, in process, in vast quantity, and (in man's j
■
case) to the eyes and situation of each individual human
being. Particularly, Olson, like Duncan, is struck by the
i
universe as process: "process as the most interesting fact
j
of fact (the overwhelming one, how it works, not what, in
I
that what is always different if the thing or person or ;
event under review is a live one, and is different because |
adverbially it is changing)."15 Process, to Olson, involv- j
!
ing time, involves "millenia." And comprehension and mas- i
tery of this process, he says in one place, is an extremely |
difficult task.
i
I don't know that any one of us yet knows how to do it.j
Or rather, has yet done it. That is, it is clear how much
has to be mastered, that in fact, it is all of it, that
only the millenia will do. The single event or person
won't, white stripes crosswise on the face or even, say,
if it is as apparently large and unrelenting as the Civil
War, even that dense. Not any single place or time: they
yield, our places and our times are unfixed, no thing more
than a realism or localism drily their own, lean enough,
because they go it alone, charqued, because they have to
last, we have to go so far on so little, cannot, in fact,
afford too much. But nothing more. And that is not
enough.16
Nature is too vast and complex to yield her secret in the
unique and static "single place or time." These things may
Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn (San Francis
co, 1964), p. 37
16"Billy the Kid," Human Universe, p. 138.
be caused by her processes but they do not contain much of
i j
these processes. Single places or times are not in the
i
least "all of it"; they lack, in particular, that all-
l
important dimension of millenia.
To Olson, reality is "without interruption"17 and can
^nly be apprehended in its whole. Nature is only to be un-
derstood by pushing on to all of her boundaries, through all
her dimensions. The following passage, in which Olson
i
describes what he feels was a growing awareness of this
: ' j
point of view, perhaps makes his theory more clear. j
i j
All things did come again, in the 19th century. An
idea shook loose, and energy and motion became as impor
tant a structure of things as that they are plural, and,
by matter, mass. It was even shown that in the infinitely
small the older concepts of space ceased to be valid at
all. Quantity— the measurable and numerable— was suddenly
shafted in, to anything, as it was also, as had been obvi-j
ous, the striking characteristic of the external world, |
that all things do extend out. Nothing was now inert
fact, all things were there for feeling, to promote it,
and be felt; and roan, in the midst of it, knowing well how
he was folded in, as well as how suddenly and strikingly
he could extend himself, spring or, without even moving,
go, to far, the farthest— he was suddenly possessed or re
possessed of a character of being, a thing among things,
which I shall call his physicality. It made a reentry of
or to the universe. Reality was without interruption, and
we are still in the business of finding out how all
action, and thought, have to be re-founded. ("Equal
. . .," pp. 118-119)
The universe is flowing and multifarious, and man is inex
tricably caught up in its number and its process. And,
since the processes of nature are continuous rather than
17"Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself," Human Universe,
p. 119.
L .................................................. . . . 1
fragmented, any method which would bring nature to account
bust be "free . . . of the rigidities of the discrete." All
bf man's relationships with nature are made suddenly com
plex. Olson asks, "What is measure when the universe flips
;and no part is discrete from another part except by the flow
|
of creation itself, in and out, intensive where it seemed
before qualitative, and the extensive exactly the widest,
I
which we also have the powers to include?" ("Equal . . .,"
pp. 117, 119).
The easiest way for a man to apprehend the universe is
by attention to the present moment, that moving point at j
which the four dimensions of the universe intersect. As |
i
i
Olson graphs it:
person
quantity process
Here, in the objects of nature as they participate in na
tural process, the "human universe" is revealed. Olson says
that one must believe not only "that things, and present
ones, are the absolute conditions; but that they are so be
cause the structures of the real are flexible, quanta do
dissolve in vibrations, all does flow."-*-9 However, "things"
^ Bibliography on America, p. 4.
19"Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself," Human Universe,
p. 122.
must never be detached from their context of time, space,
and process. The end of any investigation, says Olson, "is
i
!
bever more than this instant, than you, figuring it out, and
jacting so. If there is any absolute, it is never more than
this one, you, this instant, in action."20 Whenever the ab
solute is to be observed, then, it is to be observed in
rbhings at this moment of one's observation. Man can observe
I
nature only at the intersection of time, place, process, and
person in which his own life is occurring. From a particu-
i
lar intersection a man may be able to read back into time or
millenia through the particular influences apparent to him
in his onward-rolling instant. If a man is really to get
into the universe, Olson advises, this reading back is best |
accomplished by total immersion in what is known about one
thing, place, or man— by saturating oneself in all its di
mensions. Olson tells Edward Dorn:
Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until
you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any
other man. It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed Wire or
Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate
it. Beat it.
And then U KNOW everything else very fast:
one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you're
in, forever.21
By this method a man's subject becomes almost all of his own
instant in time, and, by being totally immersed in his sub
ject or instant, he can become immersed in the universe.
20«Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 5.
2lBibliography on America, p. 13.
The most important thing thait Olson attempts to do in j
his theory of the "human universe" is to teach man "how to !
lextricate what he wants from the mess he is surrounded by,
i
i
how to manage to locate what he himself feels: that life as
spirit is in the thing, in the instant, in this man."22 He
!
attempts this by proclaiming that the universe is as human
!
i
as man, that it contains man's processes and develops vary
ing individualities throughout time much as any man does.
And especially he teaches man to have a respect for the par-j
i ;
jticularity of any existent thing, whether it be the uni-
]
verse, man's fellow-objects in the universe, or man himself,
for the instant of time in which man must live is made up of
: I
i
particulars, not of types, generalizations, or categories, j
I believe there's simply ourselves, and where we are has a|
particularity which we'd better use, because that's about !
all we've got. I mean otherwise we're running around
looking for somebody else's stuff. But that particularity;
is as great as numbers are in arithmetic— the literal is
the same as the numeral to me. I mean the literal is an
invention of language and power the same as numbers. And
so there is no other culture, there is simply the literal
essence and exactitude of your own. I mean the street you
live on or the clothes you wear or the color of your hair
is no different from the ability of Giovanni di Paulo to
cut the legs off Santa Clara. I mean truth lies solely in
what you do with it. And that means you— I don't think
there's any such thing as a creature of culture.22
Much like Duncan, Olson believes that man can deal only
with what he is given, and that he has been given a place in
a dynamic and evolving universe. Also like Duncan, he
22"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, p. 35
22"The Causal Mythology."
stresses the things of the instant as indicators of the
real, and discounts the validity of man-made forms and cate
gories. Whether or not the "human universe" is divine, is
i
perhaps left open to question, although a universe as auton-
i
omous, powerful, and potentially benevolent as that envi-
i
sioned by Olson certainly has all the qualities that are
jusually attributed to divinity. Also suggestive of divinity
jis the fact that Olson, again like Duncan, recommends a pro-
i
found respect and obedience toward this universe to which
ban owes "his somewhat small existence." j
i
i
; I
Discourse and Ego j
I
Olson, as much as Duncan, feels that the concept of a j
vital and autonomous universe which deserves the respect of j
man does not sit well with present-day society. However, itj
is not specifically Duncan's Protestants and academicians
which Olson sees as the enemies of the universe. To Olson
an entire Western mode of thought is the antagonist: the
entire Western picture of the universe in which man is seen
as its most important occupant, and in which class, genus,
and species are seen as its basic structural elements. In
short, it is the humanist and the rationalist which to Olson
are the true enemies.
We have already seen one of Olson's principal attacks
on the human ego and on the way it prevents man from having
the humility to admit that he is merely an object in nature
; .' ......' * . " " " " 75 I
i '
I j
with no more and no less importance than any other object in;
nature. Here Olson recommended "objectism" as a new and j
more accurate "stance toward reality." "Objectism" was "the .
getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as
ego," an interference which Olson feels prevents man from
jrecognizing the equality of all other natural objects to
i
himself. "For man is himself an object," Olson stressed,
and should have little enough vanity to be able to admit
this.24 To Olson, as we have seen, man is not "the center
I
Of phenomenon by fiat" or "god's chief reflection,"25 and
;any egotistical conviction that he is either of these can
only cause him to misconceive of his relationship to that i
; |
"fire" which is nature. i
! !
One of the most important areas in which man has, in |
Olson's view, arrogated himself over the universe and as- !
' I
serted his "private-soul-at-any-public-wall"25 has been lan
guage. Since 450 B.C. and the Greek philosophers, western
man, he feels, has been far too willing to substitute a
"universe of discourse" for the real world. This "universe
of discourse" has actually consisted, he says, of two sepa
rate means of discourse, logic and classification.
We stay unaware how two means of discourse the Greeks ap
pear to have invented hugely intermit our participation in
24«projective Verse," Human Universe, pp. 59-60.
25"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 8.
25"Projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 51.
our experience, and so prevent discovery. They are what
followed from Socrates readiness to generalize, his will- :
ingness (from his own bias) to make a "universe" out of
discourse instead of letting it rest in a more serviceable!
| place. |
bison adds that Plato's world of ideas is an "equally
j |
treacherous concept," because
I |
j idealisms of any sort, like logic and like classification,;
intervene just at the moment they become more than the
means they are, are allowed to become ways as end instead >
of ways to end.
| i
j The Greek philosophers, who substituted the less accu
rate "language as the act of thought about the instant" for
"language as the act of the instant," have taken their toll
I |
on western thought, Olson declares. For, to him, anything j
! j
Which draws man's attention even slightly from the instant, t
from that intersection of process, time, person, and place,
impairs the accuracy of man's view of the universe.
We have lived long in a generalizing time, at least
since 450 B.C. And it has had its effects on the best of
men, on the best of things. Logos, or discourse, for ex- i
ample, has in that time, so worked its abstractions into |
our concept and use of language, that language's other
| function, speech, seems so in need of restoration that
several of us got back to hieroglyphs or to ideograms to
right the balance. (The distinction here is between lan
guage as the act of the instant and language as the act of
thought about the instant.)
The purveyors of logic and of the "universe of discourse"
have caused man to live in an artificial world of false !
1 I
;order. For, says Olson, "the harmony of the universe, and i j
i :
iinclude man, is not logical, or better, is post-logical, as j
!
is the order of any created thing."
Particularly, Olson finds, do these logicians who seek
"to partition reality" have their followers today in writersj
who would rather talk around and about something than speak |
the thing itself or who would rather select an aspect of j
something for their art than treat the thing itself in its
full identity. Such writers, says Olson, are avoiding real-
}
ity through the "dodges of discourse."
What makes most acts— of living and of writing— unsatis
factory, is that the person and/or the writer satisfy
themselves that they can only make a form (what they say
or do, or a story, a poem, whatever) by selecting from the
full content some face of it, or plane, some part. And at
just this point, by just this act, they fall back on the
dodges of discourse, and immediately, they lose me, I am
no longer engaged, this is not what I know is the going-on
(and of which going-on I, as well as they, want some il
lumination, and so, some pleasure). It comes out a demon
stration, a separating out, an act of classification, and
so, a stopping, and all that I know is, it is not there,
it has turned false.
!
To Olson these writers are ignoring the magic fire of real- j
I
ity, the fullness of the moving instant, and substituting j
for it the pallid and arbitrary selections of their own
minds. "Unselectedness" is the condition of the universe;
selections simply lie outside its ken.2/7
The writer can also avoid reality, contends Olson,
through description, for description is purely "thought
about the instant" and not the instant itself. Asks Olson,
"Is it not, suddenly, slow things, similes, say, adjectives,
or such, that we are bored by?" He continues,
For there is a whole flock of rhetorical devices which
have now to be brought under a new bead, now that we sight
2<7"Human Universe," Human Universe, pp. 4-9.
r ' ' ' ■ " . . . . . ' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 8 1
I i
I i
with the line. Simile is only one bird who comes down,
too easily. The descriptive functions generally have to
be watched .... j
| I
jAnything which takes the writer's attention off the instant
i
Of his writing is a "dodge of discourse" to Olson and thus
I
an avoidance of the universe.
Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing,
from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand
at the moment, under the reader's eye, in his moment. Ob-
! servation of any kind is, like argument in prose, properly
{ previous to the act of the poem . . . .2®
In another place Olson says of comparison in the poetry of
Burns and Frost,
Thus representation was never off the dead-spot of de
scription. Nothing was happening as of the poem itself—
ding and zing or something. It was referential to real
ity. And that a p. poor crawling actuarial "real"— good
enough to keep banks and insurance companies, plus medi
ocre governments etc. But not Poetry's Truth . . . . 2 9 j
This passage pinpoints why, in Olson's view, the "dodges of |
discourse" are so heretical in terms of the real universe.
They are "referential to reality," or tangential to it, but :
not das Ding selbst. They are man-made constructs that have
little relevance, in Duncan's phrase, to "What Is."
Another follower of the devisers of the "universe of
discourse," and thus enemy of the true universe, feels
Olson, is frequently the critic. He becomes so when he is
more interested in comparing one piece of literature to
28nprojective Verse," Human Universe, p. 55.
29"Letter to Elaine Feinstein," Human Universe, pp. 96-
97.
another than in paying attention to "the fact of them
selves." Says Olson, j
Who cares for likeness? A likeness recognized is only
something to move in form, until difference, which is
identity, is found. To stop at any likeness is to stay in
the bath. Equilibrium is laodicean. One must disturb it.
It is a lie. It ain't true, at least it ain't good
enough. Or it is a truth for those who sleep.30
The mistake of both such a critic and the selective writer
is that he seeks to make language replace reality rather
than to let it exist as a part of it. Says Robert Creeley,
"Olson would insist that language be returned to its place
in experience, neither more nor less than any other act."^^
But in Olson's view the purveyors of the "dodges of
discourse" and the enemies of reality are not just the writ-t
ers who love description and the critics who love to com- j
|
pare. Instead, they are intellectuals generally, for the
intellect is only intellect when it is analyzing into partsJ
For Olson, only the imagination can accept things as being-
in-themselves and take satisfaction in their individuality
and integrity. He quotes from R. G. Collingwood's The Prin
ciples of Art.
The general distinction between the imagination and in
tellect is that imagination presents to itself an object
which it experiences as one and indivisible: whereas in
tellect goes beyond that single object and presents to it-
30"Homer and Bible," Human Universe, pp. 150-151.
^ Selected Writings of Charles Olson, ed. Robert
Creeley (New York, 1966), p. Tl
j 80
i j
self a world of many such with relations of determinate
kinds between them.32
Olson accuses intellectuals from Socrates to the present of
l
i
having altered society by taking its attention off the uni-
I
verse and placing it on the social. They have done this, he
jsays, by elevating dialectic, that process that is based on
mind encountering mind and person encountering person rather
!
than on person encountering universe. To Olson, the empha-
|
sis on dialectic and thus on discourse has made man's con
cerns petty instead of real. He says:
It would seem to me that this is because the most miss
ing understanding of what they [the Greek philosophers]
did do is dialexis, at whatever date that word even come
to have the meaning of an actual action of dialogue: di
alectical does mean one to one, and an immediate discharge
| of mental engagement in which the will and the mind are
; like aggressive motor actions, and are complimentary in
that they do compliment the other person engaged, as j
though there was a one-to-one possible, as though the
conversation was between us and a meeting of minds was
possible. It is socializing, and relational.
One wants therefore to enter this ring on a different
footing: it isn't true, and has left the universe out,
substituting for if a prune or wrinkled grape, the social.
(Rev. of Havelock, p. 43)
Says Olson in another context, "I find the contemporary sub
stitution of society for the cosmos captive and deathly."23
Both Charles Olson and Robert Duncan feel that man, in
his pride, wishes to see himself as more important than the
universe which allows him to live. Both believe that man's
32"Review of Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato,"
Niagara Frontier Review, Summer, 196 T ~ , p"I 43.
33«Letter to Elaine Feinstein," Human Universe, p. 97.
' 81 |
i j
faith in his own rational powers is man's, largest danger. ;
i ;
Duncan sees this faith as leading man to prefer making his
|
own unnatural forms to allowing the forms of the universe to
I
come into being. Olson sees this faith as shutting man in
!
his own social community and blinding his eyes to the heav
ens. Both believe that thought can kill both essential
humanity and its guardian, natural process. Asks Olson,
"Was it not Heraclitus who said that to take thought is to
; i
{thicken the blood around the heart?"34
I
The Role of Man
To recapitulate briefly, we have seen that to Olson man
is "a participant thing," totally immersed and involved in
the workings of nature. He is "a creature of nature (with
]
certain instructions to carry out)" who owes his "somewhat i
small existence" to this "larger force." Within nature man
is merely another "object" with no more rights or privi
leges than "those other creations of nature which we may,
with no derogation, call objects." Hence man must not use
nature of his fellow-objects for his own "arbitrary and
willful purposes," but instead act toward these with rever
ence. He must, as does Olson's Apollonius of Tyana, "pay
his respects . . . to the sun, to source."
Although man is no more important than any other object
of the universe, he does, in Olson's eyes, have his own
34"David Young, David Old," Human Universe, p. 108.
J. _____ 8 2 I
I
particularity. And, contrary to most western assumptions, j
this particularity is not found in his rationality, for this
Rationality is an enemy of the kinetics of life— "to take
'thought is to thicken the blood around the heart." It is
]
found not in "the act of thought about the instant" but in
i
language, that "act of the instant."35 Says Olson:
Breath is man's special qualification as animal. Sound is
j a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his
proudest acts.36
i
If he uses language as it should be used, not as an expres-
i
i
jsion of rationality but as an "act of the instant," he will
be obeying, believes Olson, all of the processes of the uni
verse of which he is a part.
These processes especially require man to accept his ;
i
[own "physicality,"37 his own being both "object" and "ani
mal" in the universe. He must never feel embarrassment that
!
he lives only through a continual process of procreation,
gestation, digestion, elimination, and decay; he must not,
as Duncan says, wish to deny the fertility of the excrement
that is one of the fundamental conditions of his existence.
Olson declares:
It is his body that is his answer, his body intact and
fought for, the absolute of his organism in its simplest
terms, this structure evolved by nature, repeated in each
35”Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 4.
36”projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 60.
37"Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself," Human Universe,
p. 118.
act of birth, the animal man; the house he is, this house j
that moves, breathes, acts, this house where his life is, j
where he dwells against the enemy, against the beast.38
i
Of all contemporary men Olson has found only the Maya Indi-
jans of Central America entirely reconciled to being process,
|flesh, and blood. Jostled against their fellow man on a
bus, they do not draw away, ashamed of their own physical-
i
|ity, notes Olson. They do not purport to be superior to
l
Jtheir elemental being.
. . . they wear their flesh with that difference which the
| understanding that it is common leads to. When I am j
rocked by the roads against any of them— kids, women, men
— their flesh is most gentle, is granted, touch is in no
sense anything but the natural law of flesh, there is none:
of that pull-away which, in the States, causes a man for
all the years of his life the deepest sort of questioning
of the rights of himself to the wild reachings of his own
organism. The admission these people give me and one
another is direct, and the individual who peers out from :
that flesh is precisely himself, is a curious wandering
animal like me— it is so very beautiful how animal human
eyes are when the flesh is not worn so close it chokes,
how human and individuated the look comes out of a human
eye when the house of it is not exaggerated.39
Olson, like Duncan, feels that man can only live in health
by accepting "What Is" without vanity and without exaggera
tion. Man or universe, both are organs and human in their
processes. Says Olson, "Really, being an organ simply be
cause we're born. That's all we are, you know. The total
is an organ."40
38"The Resistance," Human Universe, p. 47.
"Human Universe," Human Universe, pp. 6-7.
40Reading at Berkeley, p. 39.
H ' ' ~ 84
I
!
Further, accepting "What Is" involves accepting that
multifarious world of objects or organs which makes up the
i j
total. Man must prefer the multi-dimensionality of the uni
verse in which he lives to any of the "inherited formula-
I
tions" which would teach him to experience only single as
pects. Says Olson,
For any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any expe
rience, even an overwhelming single one, on several more
planes than the arbitrary and discursive which we inherit
can declare.^1
The key term of Olson's account of how man participates
in an on-going universe of number and energy is the term
"field." Man, Olson declares, is both a force and an "ob
ject in field of force," who acts, not in a man-centered j
: i
universe, but in one which centers only in the totality of i
| i
its contents. I
. . . man as object in field of force declaring self as
force because is force in exactly such relation & can ac
complish expression of self as force by conjecture, & dis
placement in a context best, now, seen as space more than ■
a time such;
which, I take it, is precisely contrary to, what we
have had, as "humanism," with, man, out of-all proportion
of, relations, thus, so mis-centered, becomes, dependent
on, only, as whole series of "human" references which, so
made, make only anthropomorphism, and thus, make mush of,
any reality, conspicuously, his own, not to speak of, how
all other forces (ticks, water-lilies, or snails) become
only descriptive objects in what used to go with anti
macassars, those, planetariums (ancestors of gold-fish
bowls) etc.42
41"Human Universe," Human Universe, pp. 8, 5. (Ital
ics mine.)
42"Mayan Letters," Selected Writings of Charles Olson,
p. 112.
Struggling through Olson's own "language as act of the in
stant," we see that he feels that any conceited belief in a j
reality ordered specifically for man can make a "mush" out
jof one's view of life. The only viable view of reality is
as a field of force in which man is merely another partici
pant.
For in reality, believes Olson, man gains all of "his
&reams, ... his thoughts, ... his desires, sins, hopes,
jfear, faiths, loves" from the "phenomenal field" in which he
jlives. Says Olson,
1 am not able to satisfy myself that these so-called inner
things are so separable from the objects, persons, events
which are the context of them and by which man represents
or reenacts them despite the suck of symbol which has in
creased and increased since the great Greeks first pro
moted the idea of a transcendent world of forms. What I
do see is that each man does make his own special selec
tion from the phenomenal field . . ..43 |
I
Being an inhabitant of a multi-dimensional field of events, I
rather than occupying any orderly or linear world, places
certain requirements of action on man, Olson feels. Since
he himself is not in control of the field, he must, if he
wishes to have knowledge, immerse himself in it and keep his
senses open to its occurrences.
There is one requirement, only one requirement, anywhere
. . .— the clue: open, stay OPEN, hear it, anything,
really HEAR it. And you are IN.44
"Total intelligence," declares Olson, is never more
43"Human Universe," Human universe, p. 10.
44"The Escaped Cock," Human Universe, p. 125.
than the given man's act in the presence of his multi
ples."^ And so he must pay close attention to those multi
ples, those numerous objects, which happen to inhabit his
j
particular field in nature at the present moment. He must
not trust in his own conception of his field, but must watch
I
and listen for what is actually happening, and learn "se
crets objects share." Olson explains:
It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and
thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to
nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small
existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but
himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways,
by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he
stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature
as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able
to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him
secrets objects share.4®
Thus the best indicators of the identity of one's fellow-
objects in the field of nature is oneself, for each man |
shares his own secret of life, in Olson's view, with that
larger version of himself, the "human universe."
If Olson seems paradoxical here, asking that accurate
perception of the external be found by examination of the
internal, it is not really because he, like nature, has
"paradoxical ways." He certainly does insist on such a
method of learning. "I don't think you can get your recpg-
nitions by going out; I think they come from within," he
45"The Materials and Weights of Herman Melville," Human
Universe, p. 112.
46"projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 60.
told his lecture audience in Berkeley in 1965. But recogni
tions come from within simply because the particular field j
in which a man lives changes him, causing the characteristic
i
influences of that field to take up existence within him.
|
Thus Olson can also insist that man, although he is such an
i
[accurate mirror of the human universe and of his own field
jof events, indeed receives a definite identity from the
junique complexes of processes which he lives through. He
l
told that same audience, "I don't believe that every one of
i
jus isn't absolutely specific and has specificity."47 The
i
answer is not that man is general in kind and specific in
I
|event. Rather it is that his specificity is a direct result
!of the particularity of the unique field in which he has j
j I
taken part.
i
Men, therefore, in Olson's view, learn of their uni
verse and of their environment by analysis of themselves and
of their fellow man. Like Duncan's theory of human life,
Olson's "field theory" is an ecological one. And, as in
ecology, the nature of the field can be determined just as
much by examination of an object which has evolved there as
it can by direct examination of the field itself. The field
in which it was formed may have determined the nature of
Duncan's illustrative bit of excrement, but that excrement
was still able to reverse the process and serve Carl Sauer
47Lecture, "The Causal Mytholpgy."
as an indicator of that field. Says Olson in the guise of
Tyana:
. . . let me remind you that men, first, deal with their j
lives, their discoveries therein— in their own and other
lives— and that they seek by their actions, if they are
serious men, to concentrate their own and others' atten
tions to the closer intervals, not of any removed place
but of the intervals which surround us here, here in the
distraction of the present and the obvious, in short, that
which surrounds us, what we make, what we live in and by
and (not so often) for ....
t
The human universe is within because it is without; the
t
field of his existence enters the man and exists equally
around and inside. Olson says himself of Apollonius: "Now
he took it that man and his world too were a sheaf at the
i
harvest, just as seed and the earth were blackly joined in j
the growing."48
Self and life, then, if examined closely and truth
fully, can reveal the secrets of the universe. But man will
never learn these secrets unless he lets his self and life
develop naturally, unhindered, as Duncan would say, into
their true forms. Any interference with their processes by
the man himself destroys their validity as indicators of the
real. Olson forever insists that man is a listener and a
watcher, and must not, at penalty of self-expulsion from the
universe, arrogate himself or his own artifacts— such as
thought-over the natural world. Man must accept the uni
verse totally, and recognize the integrity of all its
48"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, pp. 26, 37.
contents. He has no right to exploit any of his fellow mem
bers of creation, just as they have no right to exploit him.j
; ' i
If he is to be served by them, he must himse'lf serve them
i
with justice. As Olson's Tyana tells us of Apollonius:
i
"His feeling was, that man has no right to use anything but
what, like a crop or the wool of a sheep, can grow again—
like trees can grow, if top'soil is not the price paid for
cutting a stand off, as war cuts off men after their mothers
lean bear again" ("Apollonius . . .," p. 30). Olson himself
I
says the following of Apollonius of Tyana and of his fight
i
for the recognition of the integrity of all things.
He brings his vision to bear in two ways: (1) he wars
against Caesarism (and the "universals" which lead to it
and which it promotes) by working every way to affect and
change emperors and kings, all ruling forces; and (2) he
strikes at unity (and the immortalism he takes it such
doctrine leads to) by teaching man everywhere, that what
is nature to themselves, even the places, heroes, and gods|
local to their neighborhoods, is worth all the state or
world religions they are being offered on every hand. Anc(
the clue to both attacks is his prime conviction, that no j
man should impose his mode of life on others. ("Apolloni
us I . ," p. 40) !
Like Olson himself, Apollonius is convinced that "par
ticularism has to be fought for anew."49 once again Olson
finds the "dodges of discourse," especially generalization,
classification, and comparison, unfair to the particularity
of the objects which they include. Generalization usurps
the right of any object to be itself, and thus is a funda
mental affront to the integrity of any thing. It is a
4901son, "Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 4.
pallid man-made replacement for the vital uniqueness of the j
natural world.
i . >
To Olson, the ideal society would be one in which all |
men and all things are free to realize their own being in
interaction with their field of existence. It is a social
vision very similar to Duncan's "kept-by-itself" garden. To
iboth Olson and Duncan, the universe is a communal system,
jcontaining all things equally and awarding no privileges,
i
iand structured only by the laws that permit evolving life.
Olson gives us, through Apollonius of Tyana's lips, the fol
lowing vision of a world in which, by arrogating himself
over nothing, every man possesses all:
j
. . . men dwelling on the earth, and yet not slaves of itj
but lovers? I saw them defended on all sides and yet with-j
out any defence, I saw men possessed of nothing but what j
all possess.50 !
i
i
As Duncan has said of the world-views of Milton and Blake,
Olson's is "a vision of the individual freedom and the com-|
munal commitment of man." It is a vision of man totally at
home in his universe, a vision which Duncan says "I still
seek and believe I ever shall seek."51
The Poet and the Poem
The chief thing which Olson requires of the poet is
that he take the same stance toward reality that Olson feels
50"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, p. 39.
^ The Years of Catches (Berkeley: Oyez, 1966), p.
viii.
essential for all men. He must view himself as a "partici- j
pant" in the universe. He must submit to the processes of j
this "human universe" and absorb its laws and the immediate
events of the moment. By doing so, he will be able to find
the processes of that universe, his own humanity, within
him. Always he must see that man does not dominate or
center the world, that, in fact, man's own humanity is a
f
condition of the universe rather than his own unique posses-
sion.
The poet, to Olson, is like other men in being as much
passive as active. He receives at least as many influences
as he gives; he listens at least as much as he speaks. Like
Duncan, Olson also is impressed by Keats' comments on nega
tive capability. Olson gives the following account of Keatsj
and this theory, an account which demonstrates how much he !
i
believes Keats to agree with him.
i
Two years before Melville was born John Keats, walking
home from the mummers' play at Christmas, 1817, and after
wards, he'd had to listen to Coleridge again, thought to
himself all that irritable reaching after fact and reason,
it won't do. I don't believe in it. I do better to stay 1
in the condition of things. No matter what it amounts to,
mystery confusion doubt, it has a power, it is what I mean
by Negative Capability.52
"To stay in the condition of things" is precisely what Olson
recommends when he says that man should be "contained within
52i»gqUai# That Is, to the Real Itself," Human Universe,
p. 117. ;
his nature as he is participant in the larger force."53
: ' t
It is perhaps useful to remember here that Keats' com- j
Intents on negative capability were closely associated with j
I
his contrasting of the "Man of Power" and the "Man of Geni-
j
|US."54 His "Man of Power," who has ego and prejudice, "a
proper self," and who, like Keats' acquaintance Dilke, "can
not feel he has a personal identity until he has made up his
mind about every thing," sounds suspiciously like one of
Olson's inhabitants of the "universe of discourse," while
his "Man of Genius" who gains a self out of "submission," byj
i . I
determining "to make up one's mind about nothing— to let thej
i I
mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts,"55 sounds very much!
; l
like Olson's participatory man. At a poetry reading in j
jBerkeley, Olson declared: "Listen to negative capability
! I
i I
talking. I can't sing. If I can sing it's only because !
i . . . .
other men have said I could. Not from my point of view, God
help me."55 What Olson seems to be trying to communicate
here are Duncan's ideas that the poet is not "specifically
S3"projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 60.
54Letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817, The Letters
of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958),
I, 184.----------
55Letter to the George Keats, Sept. 24, 1819, Letters,
II, 213.
56Reading at Berkeley, p. 44.
gifted or talented"57 ("I can't sing.") and that the poems
i
he writes are not his ("Not from m^. point of view, God help I
! !
me."). Olson even said a moment later, "I ain't got any
!
books."58 To both Olson and Duncan the poet's capability is
Iso negative that both his self and his poems are received
jthings, with the poems, particularly, always being "beings-
jin-themselves" rather than the poet's own.
i The function which Olson sees for the poet is also sim-i
I j
ilar to the one which we have seen Duncan give him. This |
! ' I
function is the protection of the universe and the protec- |
tion of man— j
; ♦ |
the allaying of any doubt in a man that he belongs, the j
restoration to him of the sense that everything belongs tq
him to the degree that he makes himself responsible for it
as well as for himself.58
; j
The poet is to restore man to acceptance of his flesh and
bone reality and to give him back the sense of the universe
as his companion and his home. To do this, and to restore
the universe in man's mind as a living, mighty, and reverent
thing, the poet must declare war on the "universe of dis
course." He must vow to destroy all the distortions of gen
eralization ("a greased slide," Olson terms it60) and all
57"Prom the Day Book," Origin, No. 10 (July, 1963),
p. 35.
58Readinq at Berkeley, p. 44.
58"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, p. 37.
60"Mayan Letters," Selected Writings, p. 94.
the falsehoods that classification, logic, and division havej
imposed upon the world. He must destroy the fabric of west-j
I '
fern society. "The reason we are all here to care and |
i
Write," he told his lecture audience at Berkeley,
i
is to end the whole thing— to put an end to nation, put an
end to culture, put an end to divisions of all sorts, and
to do this you have to put establishment out of busi
ness. 61
To Olson, "nation" as a generalization is not only an impo
sition on the individuality and integrity of people, linking
i
all to policies and emotions too gross for any individual
itruly to feel (and to false ones on many occasions), but
also an affront to the integrity of the place which the |
nation occupies. To Olson, the true reality in North AmeriH
; ■ i
'ca is the continent North America itself; the term "United !
i :
: i
States" will pass the way of all those other meaningless
things, generalizations: oblivion. The poet must war with
such falsenesses and uphold the true universe, and to Olson
this means revolutionizing and re-building all of western
thought and society.
The poet is to keep close to "What Is," especially to
that intersection of time, place, person, and process, the
instant. This means that in Olson's theory the poem too
will be re-defined, like language, as an "act of the in
stant." Olson says the following about the poet and the
poem and their necessary loyalty to the instant.
61Lecture, "The Causal Mythology."
I I fall back on a difference I am certain that the poet at
least has to be fierce about: that he is not free to be
a part of, or to be any, sect; that there are no symbols
to him, there are only his own composed forms; and each
one solely the issue of the time of the moment of its
creation, not any ultimate except what he in his heat and
that instant in its solidity yield.62
j
For Olson there are no ultimates, no generalizations, and
i
no symbols. There is only the evolving and "human" uni-
i
! verse of process in which no event or thing ever duplicates
|
I another event or thing, or, for that matter, ever dupli
cates its own self of the moment before. And each man and
| I
object has only the never-the-same field of his existence
in which to absorb through unique particulars the kinds of
processes which give him his humanity. Duncan too sees such
a universe evolving continually away from what it was and
toward what it will be, and is willing to call it or its j
i ’ j
processes god or gods. But to Olson even such a carefully |
defined "god" is too close to generalization to be accept
able. For "God" and religion traditionally in western cul
ture have simply been generalizations by which man has
transformed the mysterious and upsetting into the vague and
dismissible; Thus Olson prohibits religion to the poet,
saying
that the poet cannot afford to traffick in any other
"sign" than his one, his self, the man or woman he is.
Otherwise God does rush in. And art is washed away,
turned into that second force, religion. ("Against Wis
dom . . .," p. 69)
62"Against Wisdom as Such," Human Universe, pp. 68-69.!
! Olson believes that art, to bq art, can only be partic-'
ular, so particular, in fact, that it is strictly "the issue
jof the time of the moment of its creation.” The poem must
I
be of the instant, must be "the issue of two factors,
i
(1) heat, and (2) time" ("Against Wisdom . . p. 70). It
jshould consist solely of the energy of the moment.
. j
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it
(he will have some several causations), by way of the poem
I itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then
| the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-
| construct, and, at all points, an energy-discharge.
"The kinetics of the thing"is what is essential, stresses!
i " j
Olson. And these "kinetics" can only be preserved if the
t
1
poem is a re-enactment of the instant which gave it birth.
"There is only one thing you can do about the kinetic, re
enact it." For Olson, the universe is the only "real," the
present instant is the only existent time of the universe, j
|
and enactment is the only way in which to capture the
instant. Thus, for him, "Art does not seek to describe but
to e n a c t ."64 jn Olson's view there must be a one-to-one
correspondence between reality (as revealed in the moment)
and the poem, or else it ceases to be relevant to the human
situation.
. . . every element in an open poem (the syllable, the
line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be
taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just
as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call
63"projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 52.
64"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 10.
objects of reality; and . . . these elements are to be
seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as
! do those other objects create what we know as the world. “
I
| The terms here, of course, are much different from
! j
those of Duncan, yet once again the poem lies chiefly out- j
tide the poet and is revealed to him. Duncan holds that the
i"numinous" powers of the universe descend with the poem;
plson claims that the universe indirectly creates the poem
I
by producing the moving instant of time of which the poem is
1
jthe enactment. Both men feel that the poet listens and by
i
his labors permits the poem to be. Both men also feel that,
though the poem is not the poet's ("I ain't got any books,"
jsaid Olson), the poet participates in the poem: Duncan that
he participates in making a "way" for it, and Olson that he
jparticipates by being inevitably a part of every instant j
that he experiences. |
The poem, to Olson, is indeed very much a thing-in-
i
itself. By accurately enacting an instant of a part of the
universe, it can itself "take its place alongside the things
of nature." Being a thing of nature, it can have "dimen
sions larger than the man" who wrote it ("Projective Verse,"
p. 60). Says Robert Creeley of Olson's conception of the
poem, "This means, very literally, that a poem is some
thing, a structure possessed of its own organization in turn
65"projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 56.
derived from the circumstances of its making."6® Whatever
"content" it contains, whatever "wisdom" it possesses, is
I
strictly derived from the "wisdom" that happened to be in
i
its originating circumstance. As Olson puts it, "Any wisdom
I
which gets into any poem is solely a quality of the moment
of time in which there might happen to be wisdoms."6^ The
jpoem's rhythm, also derived from the instant, is literally
i
j"a pumping of the real,"68 and, when accurately set down by
i ■
|the poet, contributes greatly to the poem's taking up
! existence as an independent object. Olson sums up his view
i
of the independent and natural poem thus:
What's,
a poem?
It ain't dreamt until it walks It talks It spreads
its green barrazza
Listen closely, folks, this poem comes to you by its |
own Irish bazoo. You take it, from here.68 I
i
Clearly, Olson will have a conception of form very sim-r
ilar to that of Duncan. Like Duncan, he believes that a
poem arises on its own out of the "ecology" of its place in;
space and time. Like Duncan, he believes in the universe as
an "ill-kept garden," and actually says, "the harmony of the
66Selected Writings of Charles Olson, p. 7.
67"Against Wisdom as Such," Human Universe, p. 71.
68«Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself," Human Universe;
p. 119. |
69"A Foot Is to Kick With," Human Universe, p. 79.
universe/ and I include man, is not logical, or better, is j
I
post-logical, as is the order of any created thing."70 And
also like Duncan, he believes that the form of a thing comes
out of what it is, "what it is" being controlled by the con-
I
'text of its occurrence. He too feels that things are not
what they are because of the form that they have been given,
but that they possess this form only because of what they
'are.
Olson makes clear his disapproval of form's being made
j
more important than the object which possesses it when he
tells of Apollonius of Tyana's attack on unity and univer-
sals. To Apollonius, when unity is "crowding out diversity"
land "empire" is held more real than people, form is suddenly
: j
being made into a mirage to distract man from reality. Says!
l
Olson, "Form (which from the first cities, had stuck by the |
glue of content to particulars) was suddenly swollen, was
being taken as a thing larger a thing outside a thing above I
any particular, even any given man. And the whole business
squatted on Apollonius as a wrong, somehow."71
To Olson, form grows out of function and particularity.
And if it comes in any other way it is an affront to the
universe, a falsehood. He repeats Robert Creeley's phrasing
of the idea.
It is thiss FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF
70"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 4.
71"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, p. 37.
100
CONTENT. (or so it got phrased by one, R. Creeley, and it
makes absolute sense to me, with this possible corollary,
that right form, in any given poem, is the only and ex
clusively possible extension under hand.)72
Olson would throw all standard literary forms, sonnets,
villanelles, blank verse, or whatever, into that great pile
of other "inherited formulations" which he has so contemptu
ously dismissed as generalization. These forms, he would
feel, are insults to the integrity of the natural object,
to its right to its oiwn being. They are presumptions, false
and egotistical impositions on the real. They are another
instance of man's conceited preference for his unreal uni
verse of discourse over that human universe of his birth.
Olson believes that in the act of poetry attention to
form means that the elements of a poem be allowed "to keep,
as those other objects do, their proper confusions" ("Pro
jective Verse," p. 56). To him there is a law to be ob
served in all acts of creation, and "we are ultimate when we
do bend to the law."
And the law is:
/whatever is born or done this moment of time, has
the qualities of
this moment of
time/7- *
Composition by Field
The process of composition for Olson is very similar to
j
j _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
72"projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 52.
73"Against Wisdom as Such," Human Universe, p. 70.
that process believed in by Duncan. Both men see the poet
! i
! |
as the recipient of natural forces; both see him working j
under a law. This law, for both poets, requires obedience j
! !
to the poem, since for Duncan the poem is an occasion of thej
i i
!
divine and for Olson it is an instant in the life of the
S !
I j
universe. Olson firmly believes that this instant must be
i
{respected, and further that it can only be regarded by the
| j
poet as the multi-dimensional thing that it is— a field that
{exists at the intersection of space, time, person, and proc-
i i
{ess. Hence he recommends a process of composition that
I I
'takes into account the entire complexion of this field: {
! I
{"COMPOSITION BY FIELD." And he asks that the poet engaged |
! I
in "field composition" callow every element of the field to
assert itself at its will. He declares,
From the moment he [the poet] ventures into FIELD COMPO
SITION— he puts himself in the open— he can go by no track;
other than the one the poem under hand declares, for it- !
self. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, \
aware of some several forces just now beginning to be
examined.?4
{ For Olson, the poem forces itself into being, and the
poet cannot alter any part of it during or after the time
that it is doing so.
The objects which occur at every given moment of i
composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be,
must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not
by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must
be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way
that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made
to hold, and to hold exactly inside the content and the
74"projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 52.
j - - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ 102
| context of the poem which has forced itself, through the 1
j poet and them, into being. ("Projective Verse," p. 56)
•The poet in composition is little more than the agent of the
j
poem. He always must avoid the temptation to be "writing
the poem instead of doing it,"76 for the writing or compos- j
* i
ing of the poem is done by itself. All that the poet must
do (although, as Olson reminds us, this is quite a large '
1 I
"all") is "follow" the poem. "You follow it. With a dog at;
j
iyour heels, a crocodile about to eat you at the end, and you
with your pack on your back trying to catch a butterfly."76
| i
In such a consecutive process of composition, says
i !
|
Olson, "a syntax of apposition is 'true' to the 'order' j
which does obtain."77 This is the syntax, he claims, of the
i
Beowulf poet, and of Hesiod and Homer, all poets whom he
i !
I # |
sincerely admires. In such composition words and occur
rences happen "in the order of their occurrence in nature."
| . . . (the poetry of Homer and Hesiod was based on) a
I wholly different syntax, to which Notopoulos (1949) has |
applied the word parataxis in which the words and actions !
reported are set down side by side in the order of their j
! occurrence in nature, instead of by an order of discourse,!
or "grammar," as we have called it, the prior an actual
resting on vulgar experience and event; . . .
Once again Olson is at war with the artificialities of the
"dodges of discourse," here with their enforcing of unna
tural sequence. He continues:
i
75Reading at Berkeley, p. 20.
76"A Foot Is to Kick With," Human Nature, p. 79. j
I ^"7 " R e v i e w Qf Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato.1 1 p.
42....... J
103
Zielinsky (1901) . . . was saying that "time" in such
poets as Homer and Hesiod cannot admit intervals where !
nothing happens, that there is no such thing as nothing,
and that therefore you cannot leap over, you do therefore
necessarily traverse, in writing, and any one event series
; once narrated fills up the available time space. There
is no while back at the farm sequence possible. (Rev. of
Havelock, p. 41)
it is a common sense aesthetic which Olson is attempting to
proclaim, an aesthetic which is to provide
j a way which bears in instead of away, which meets head on I
what goes on in eacIT split second, a way which does not— j
in order to define— prevent, deter, distract, and so
cease the act of, discovering.78 I
It is an aesthetic designed to permit reality to occur in 1
j
art in the way it actually does occur in nature, and thus toj
preserve for art the vitality of the universe. '
The precise method of composition which Olson recom
mends is governed by the fact that the universe, and thus
life, is a mass of on-going kinetic energy. Says Olson,
There is only one thing you can do about the kinetic, re
enact it. Which is why the man said, he who possesses
rhythm possesses the universe. And why art is the only
twin life has— its only valid metaphysic. Art does not
seek to describe but to enact. And if a man is once more
to possess intent in his life, and to take up the respon- :
sibility implicit in his life, he has to comprehend his
own process as intact, from outside, by way of his skin,
in, and by his own powers of conversion, out again.
("Human Universe," p. 10)
Olson indeed believes that the artist's only viable way
of composition is enactment of his own moments in the field
of events in which he lives, that he can only enact his own
sense of participation in the human universe. He gives the
78"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 6.
104 !
i
following contrast of how the fact of kinetics can influence!
a writer in dealing with such a construct as America. It
can, if he is not careful, cause him simply to ignore proc- |
|
ess and concentrate on size and energy. The writer will
thus kill the instant, freeze it, and wander through its
vast spaces.
You can approach BIG America and spread yourself like a
pancake, sing her stretch like Whitman did, be puffed up
; as we are over PRODUCTION. It's easy. THE AMERICAN WAY.
Soft. Turns out paper cups, lies flat on the brush. N.G.
However, if the artist does not wish to produce works of the
value of paper cups, the fact of the kinetic can cause him
to take into account that nothing can be grasped unless both
its size and motion are apprehended together. J
Or you can take an attitude, the creative vantage. See;
her as OBJECT in MOTION, something to be shaped, for use. |
It involves a first act of physics.
i
Olson then explains this problem in physics:
You can observe POTENTIAL and VELOCITY separately, have
to, to measure THE THING. You get approximate results.
They are usable enough if you include the Uncertainty
Principle, Heisenberg's law that you learn the speed at
the cost of exact knowledge of the energy and the energy
at the loss of exact knowledge of the speed.79
This is the physicist's predicament. But the artist, as
Olson has said, has the "creative vantage" over the physi
cist in that through re-enactment he can, unlike the scien
tist, preserve both the energy and the speed of a thing.
Thus the artist can preserve the total kinetics of the
^Olson, Call Me Ishmael (New York, 1958), p. 69.
105
moment— as Olson after the above passage from Call Me Tsh-
"
mael asserts that Melville did for America in Moby Dick.
I ' i
Within the composition process of discovering and re- j
I
enacting the kinetic, the poet must observe particular |
! |
rules, feels Olson, in order to allow the instant to be
realized in its poem. Above all, he must be faithful to the
jinstant as it moves, and be faithful to all its dimensions.
|He can allow himself absolutely no gaps in perception if the
{kinetic is to be preserved. Olson goes on to declare:
ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A j
FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a
matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our man
agement of dailyreality as of the daily work) get on with
it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, i
the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts,
the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can,
citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE
the process at all points, in any given poem always, al
ways one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON
ANOTHER.80 ,
Reality is kinetic, and, if the poem is to be of the real,
the poet must pay exact, scrupulous attention to what is
"going on." In another place Olson declares, in fact, that
the poet must fight for his perceptions, that composition is
"the writer's contesting with reality, to see it, to SEE."
The issue is what causes CHANGE, the struggle inside,
the contest there, exhibited.
At root (or stump) what Is, is no longer THINGS but
what happens between things, these are the terms of the
reality contemporary to us— and the terms of what we are.
If form is never more than an extension of content then
the proposition reads thus: content (contest leading to
80«projective Verse," Human Universe, pp. 52-53.
r ' . . . . . . . . . . ~ ~ 1 0 6 ]
i i
issue arriving at change equals) form. 81
! I
The moving interactions of "what is"— "what happens between |
things"— must be maintained at all times in the poem, and ;
i
therefore, Olson is saying, the writer must make sure by his
struggling that the energies he discovers are the genuine
!
land most powerful ones at work in his field. He must at
times make the threshold of discovery so high that only the
essential energies of the field can enter, and he must do
this simply so that he does not lose the essential amid the j
! j
jfrequently available mass of untruths and frivolities. This
i
is, of course, not an act of selection or exclusion; what
! I
reaches the poet will still depend solely on the structure j
land motion of the field which he is in. That is, the true |
• i
poem, because it is the true poem, will still force its way j
into existence over any threshold the poet may raise— pro- j
vided, of course, that he continues to listen.
As well as seeking the instantaneous and real in the
field around and within him, the poet must also in composi
tion pay exact attention to the syllables he is using, for
these govern the sound that his poem is to have. The poet
must be obedient, Olson says, to the sounds of the poem.
"In any given instance, because there is a choice of words,
the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously,
the obedience of his ear to the syllables." Much like
81"The Escaped Cock," Human Universe, p. 123.
; ".". 107
Duncan, Olson believes that composition is very much a
i
process of listening. "It would do no harm," he says, j
j as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now
written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quality
S words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of
‘ the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine
creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on.
But to Olson, this aspect of his way of composition is any
thing but easy.
j
i Listening for the syllables must be so constant and so
scrupulous, the exaction must be so complete, that the
assurance of the ear is purchased at the highest— 40 hours
a day— price.82
This part of composition is, in Olson's view, the most |
'conscious of its processes. The poet must be aware of the !
sounds of his poem, but react to them instantaneously. |
I |
I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this;
way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has
listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it j
has the mind's speed . . . it is from the union of the |
mind and the ear that the syllable is born.
But to Olson having the right sounds of the poem is not
enough; there is yet another aspect of "composition by
field." This aspect is the line, and, says Olson, "that's
the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the atten
tion, the control" ("Projective Verse," pp. 54-55).
Olson's concern with the line would have been called,
in other times, a concern with rhythm. For Olson feels that
the line is to correspond to the breathing of the poet at
the time of writing, and hence accurately reflect the
82"projective Verse," Human Universe, pp. 53-54.
108 I
rhythms of his life at the moving instant of the poem. Says
Olson,
i
i i
j And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the
breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he
writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the
WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can de-
| clare, at every moment, the line its metric and its end
ing— where its breathing, shall come to, termination.
(“Projective Verse," p. 54)
|Once again the principle is from ecology. To preserve the
kinetics of the field in which the poet is immersed at the
]
time of writing, the only possible rhythm for the poem can
j
i
be the poet's breathing: for only this rhythm can be his
jsymptomatic reaction to the events in the field around him,
lonly it is the rhythmic indicator of his field. i
: I
Olson sums up his view of the composition of the line j
and the syllable thus:
Let me put it baldly. The two halves are: |
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
And he continues:
I am dogmatic, that the head shows in the syllable.
The dance of the intellect is there, among them, prose or
verse. Consider the best minds you know in this here
business: where does the head show, is it not, precise,
here, in the swift currents of the syllable? can't you
tell a brain when you see what it does, just there? It is
true, what the master says he picked up from Confusion
[sic]: all the thots men are capable of can be entered on
the back of a postage stamp. So is it not the PLAY of a
mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind
is there at all?
And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything
but the LINE? And when the line, has, is, a deadness, is>
it not a heart which has gone lazy, is it not, suddenly, ,
slow things, similes, say, adjectives, or such, that we.
are bored by? ("Projective Verse," p. 55)
1
"" ..' ' 109 !
"A heart which has gone lazy” is clearly one which has {
abandoned the kinetics of the human universe for the static |
generalizations of the "universe of discourse.” As we
i
should have expected, poor principles of composition will be
I
to Olson simply a reliance on those old "dodges of dis-
i
course." To Olson, reality is "without interruption," and
if the artist can capture it "without interruption," without
{stopping its motion, he must. The writer's equivalents of
t
the physicist's stopping of the motion of an object in order
i
{to measure its energy are to Olson those generalizing habits
yrhich take the writer's attention away from the necessary j
t i
instant-by-instant development of line and syllable. Log-
j
ic's bogie of the "complete sentence" prevents the real sen-j
j
tence from existing as "an exchange of force."83 Descrip- j
I
tion prevents anything from "happening" in the poem. Simile
and comparison distract from what is really at hand. j
These are the false faces, too much seen, which hide and
keep from us the active intellectual states, metaphor and
performance. All that comparison ever does is set up a
series of reference points: to compare is to take one
thing and try to understand it by marking its similarities
to or differences from another thing. Right here is the
trouble, that each thing is not so much like or differ
ent from another thing (these likenesses and differences
are apparent) but that such analysis only accomplishes a
description, does not come to grips with what really mat
ters: that a thing, any thing, impinges on us by a more
important fact, its self-existence, without reference to
any other thing, . . .84
B3«Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself," Human Universe,
p. 119. !
84"Human Universe," Human Universe, pp. 5-6.
So convinced is Olson that generalization, description, and
:other inexactitudes of discourse are fatal to good writing, |
I - !
I i
healthy existence, and respect for the universe, that he j
! i
would even advise silence as the price of avoiding them. He!
jsays of Apollonius:
He craved to talk, as any man does, to get at things by
talking about them. In fact, he was one of those who
talked to live. But he came quickly on a danger: that it
| is not easy to keep talk from sliding into small talk and
| at the same time it is not easy to avoid (in order to
| avoid small talk) parables, anecdotes, all those easy
stoppages of conversation which pass themselves off as
wisdom sayings and are nothing more than schmerz, than, |
ah, how large life is and how long, which doesn't matter a
breath to any live man, how his predecessors were eternal j
about it, it does not matter, he only wants to be sharp
about it, to stay on its point, to hold all that it con
tains, not dissipate an ounce of it by such generaliza
tions, however couched in humor or weh. So Apollonius
took a vow of silence for five years. He put this burden
on himself, this bit. He said not one thing for five
years. He listened, instead. He found out how to hear, i
He stripped himself of the heartiest thing of all, next tcf
passion: he stopped the lively little animal, his tongue.;
He made his breath stay home.85
In all his writings Charles Olson can find no substitute for
the kinetics of the living universe. Anything which does
not reflect this universe or participate in it is human
vanity, is generalization, is "schmerz." Like Duncan, Olson
is a dedicated man, dedicated literally to the service of
silence if he cannot serve, in both his life and art, what
he sees as the real world.
85"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, pp. 31-32.
Summary j
!
Olson's speculations and injunctions assume that it is j
i
jalways the present moment which is the most significant as- |
pect of any man's life. Hence he believes that in every
endeavor a man should be free to act spontaneously. For if
a man be deprived of such a freedom or refuse to accept it,
he will never be able to act in a manner consistent with the
Ireality of the evolving universe.
All of life, to Olson, is a field of unceasing re-ad-
justments between individuals and their environments. In
this field generalization has no place, for generalization
prefers past experience to present and blinds the individ
ual's eyes to the specifics of the ever-changing instant.
Just as the tree changes its life to suit the soil and <
weather conditions of its place, so must a man react care
fully and wisely to his own environment— or else he may
perish. Especially must he sharpen his eyes to perceive
quickly the changing reality of his life so that he will
never have to rely on received knowledge rather than on the
personally known.
The poem, to be faithful to reality and thus be signif
icant to man, must reflect accurately the poet's continually
altering field of awareness at the time of composition.
Thus, for the poet, Olson's view of life means that the
poem can change radically during every second of its compo
sition. If the poem itself does not contain the kinetics o^
the living universe, it can contain only something dead, and;
|
to Olson to create something dead is the most spurious task |
on which a man can embark.
CHAPTER III
THE THEORIES OF ROBERT CREELEY
The Limited and Derivative View of the World j
In both Charles Olson and Robert Duncan we have en- j
countered men vigorously engaged in asserting the validity j
! . . . • :
of their views of the world and in explaining and defending j
i I
their assumptions of what their world-views mean for art.
i
To both men any distinction between writing and writing-
I j
theory is meaningless. They find the two inextricably in- j
; j
terwoven and involve themselves with equal conviction and
1 i
i I
energy in each. In almost all of Olson's theoretical writ- ;
ings and in much of Duncan's, such as in Writing Writing, we
find structure and texture that a conventional mind would
think belonged to poetry. And in the actual poems of both
men we shall find their world-views and writing principles
as overtly asserted as they are anywhere in their criticism.
To Olson and Duncan there is no way of compartmentalizing
one's concerns so that they occur only in assigned forms or
on permissible occasions. Such arbitrary divisions, Olson
would say, occur only in the "universe of discourse." In
real life a man's commitment can only be total and ever-
l.
113
J
r ".. ........ . ~ ' _ 114 1
present.
Robert Creeley, the third major Black Mountain poet, is
ho less committed to both life and writing than are Olson
and Duncan. And yet, unlike his two fellow poets, the place
of his commitment is much more in poetry and in fiction than
it is in criticism, or literary theory. He has advanced no
developed view of the universe. He has written no detailed
defences of his own poetic theory and practice. And he has
i
definitely not attempted to convert others to his way of
[writing through the kind of declamatory writing that Olson
practices. His one important essay is an explanation of
i
Olson: "Olson and Others: Some Orts for the Sports."! His]
i
explanations of his own writing exist only in the prefaces j
i
and notes to various of his publications. And his only
lengthy general statements of theory and belief exist in a
9 . !
published interview by Charles Tomlinson^ and in the tape
recordings of several lectures which he delivered in Van
couver, B.C., in 1962 and in Berkeley in 1965.
These facts do not mean, however, that Creeley does
not, like Duncan and Olson, base his writing and writing
principles completely on a general concept of life.
Creeley's picture of the universe and his way of writing are
^Biq Table 4, 1960, reprinted in The New American Po-
etry 1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York, 1960), pp.
408-411.----------
2"Robert Creeley in Conversation with Charles Tomlin
son," The Review, No. 10 (1964), 24-35.
i -.... }
jas inextricably bound together as are those of any of the
Black Mountain poets. The underlying reason for Creeley's
i :
jobvious failure to write criticism and to propound a world- j
{view is not that he lacks such a world-view; it would simplyi
i j
seem to be that he does not see deeply into the universe. j
Both his theoretical utterances and his poetry, as we shall ,
i j
see, reveal him as basically a hesitant and apprehensive man
extremely unsure of the precise structure of the reality I
j
around him. A world-view is put forward by a man— like Dun-{
jean or Olson— who believes he has seen the orders of the
universe. Poetry and fiction too can be written by such a |
| i
man, but, for the man with the relatively short outlook, {
poetry and fiction can be also means of slowly extending
! i
one's understanding of reality. And this is how Creeley
i ' 1
i
juses his arts as a "way" into more than he knows. Indeed,
Creeley's view of the world is best described as being a
conviction of the world's fundamental impenetrability and
l i
mystery. And thus what Creeley can personally say that he
"knows" about the world is extremely limited. However, what
makes sense to him in the theoretical writings of Olson,
Duncan, and others, he has not been hesitant about accept
ing, for he still has a need of assumptions to start from,
of points with which to probe his enigmatic world.
A brief survey of his lectures and other utterances can
show us immediately not only where Creeley's indebtednesses
j I
{lie but what his basic beliefs are. From Valery, he tells
I i
L-. ....... - . . . J
us, he learned of the inseparability of form and content.
From William Carlos Williams, he admits, he learned that j
I |
language is a "collective work of the human spirit," and
jfrom Williams' "The Desert Music" that nature is not to be
jcopied but emulated or "danced" with. Louis Zukofsky has
been quite an important source to him, Creeley says, teach
ing him not only Duncan's idea that "the poet is . . . in
strument in the sense that it is through him that the lan
guage finds issue in the poem" but also that the poet must
not show himself in the poem: that in fact the poem "can of
itself speak to all men."3 Duncan has shown Creeley that
unintentional puns can be messengers to the poet from the
language.^ But it is from Olson that Creeley acknowledges
receipt of the greatest number of his beliefs.
Creeley seems actually to take from Olson the bulk of
his thinking on the universe and the poem. First, he ac
cepts completely Olson's concept of field and of how a man
must be true to the reality of the events in this field.
Creeley remarks that a man, "as Olson says . . . pays atten
tion to what is given him" (Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962). At
another point he acknowledges that Olson "showed me how the
whole way of [my] speech was not true to the way I was
3Tape-recorded lecture at home of Warren Tallman, Van
couver, B.C., Aug. 28, 1962.
^Tape-recorded lecture at home of Warren Tallman, Van
couver, B.C., Aug. 29, 1962.
! - — — - - - - 1 1 ? ]
thinking."5 Creeley also takes from Olson the notion that . |
I . . . .... |
|the ego, man's "lyric soul," must not be allowed to inter-
i i
fere with his view of reality, and in poetry he accepts
Olson's definition of a poem as a "transfer of energy."5
Creeley is, in fact, so much at home in Olson's thinking
that at times Olson's terms and phrases can fall readily
into his sentences as if both poets formed one man.
A poetry can act on this: "A poem is energy trans
ferred from where the poet got it (he will have some sev
eral causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the
way over to, the reader." One breaks the line of aesthe
tics, or that outcrop of a general division of knowledge.
A sense of the KINETIC impels recognition of force. Force:
is and therefore stays.?
Independence and Magnanimity
Since the amount of theorizing Creeley has done is
extremely small and frequently derivative, we can quickly
establish what is individual or characteristic about it.
The most obvious fact about Creeley's theoretical comments
is that their tone is far less dogmatic than that of either
Olson's or Duncan's. This is a fact of some importance, as
we shall see, and one that seems very closely connected to
his hesitance and to his limited vision. But first we shal].
look at the two specific points of doctrine on which Creeley
5"Robert Creeley in Conversation with Charles Tomlin
son," p. 30.
6Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962.
^Creeley, "To Define," The New American Poetry, p. 408
[ ’ 118 ]
j
| i
takes a somewhat unique stand.
: i
The first of these involves his view of language.
Olson has said that language is strictly a dimension and
action of man and that it must correspond precisely to the |
happenings of the instant both within and without the man j
i
i
using the language. Duncan has said that language is a sys
tem of its own possessing the same laws as the universe.
Creeley tends to unite both these views in seeing language
as an instrument of magic. It need not, he feels, corre
spond to phenomenal reality. It can give instead "a magic
turn to reality.” What language posits need not be actual.
He tells us,
I want to say that perhaps the route back to magic senses
was that in language one can possess or state or define
relationships which otherwise can only be experienced:
you know, I can say I'm going to hit you, and propose all
the activity of that, you know, relationship, before I've
even got out of a chair.8
In such usage language is still a human action— "the beauti
ful act of conjecture” Creeley terms it— and it is still
true to the instant in that it corresponds to a psychical
reality if not to a phenomenal one. But it also, by its
metaphoric translation of a substantive occasion into a
hypothetical one, constructs a realm similar to Duncan's in
being independent of the external world. To Creeley, lan
guage is more than a human act and more than an autonomous
®Tape-recorded lecture at home of Warren Tallman, Van
couver, B.C., Aug. 26, 1962. The awkward syntax here is
accurately transcribed.
119
natural creation: it is a natural creation whose "primary
iaction is metaphoric" and which allows the writer an "extra-
i
ordinary control" over his references (Lecture, Aug. 28,
|
11962) .
j
| The second theoretical area in which Creeley goes be
yond Duncan or Olson is that involving the relationship be
tween form and content. Both Duncan and Olson base their
opinions about this subject on their convictions that all
objects grow, if not meddled with, into their true forms.
Hence they see form as the result of interaction between
individuality and context— as being, in other words, the
end of a process rather than the determiner of that proc
ess. "Form is never more than an extension of content,"
they say, and these words, as Olson indicates, are Robert
Creeley's. In Olson's view, these words mean that the form
of any poem will be determined precisely by what happens in
the instant in Which the poem occurs.
Creeley does not disagree with Duncan or Olson here.
He is, however, eager that his maxim not become a means of
re-introducing the ego to poetry by the placing of too
heavy an emphasis on "message" or "content." As we have
seen, Olson's entire process of composition involves appre
hending and recording the form of the present instant, and,
indeed, pays no attention to "message." While the form of
the instant is governed by what occurs within it, the poet
can only preserve these occurrences by preserving in his
. . . . 120 1
j |
poem that unique form of the instant. Hence Olson consid- j
ers syllable and breath as linguistic determiners of the !
poem/ and not, despite Creeley's maxim, in content. This, |
of course, is to Creeley the correct procedure, but hardly
one that finds explicit explanation in Olson's "language as
jact of the instant." And Duncan too listens to the form of
jthe poem as it comes to him, to its rhythms and its sounds,
rather than to any overt "content."
But of the three poets Creeley is the only one to ex
plain carefully exactly what the fact that form extends
content means to the poet. "Form is never more than an
extension of content" must not be taken to mean that any
thing one says falls automatically into admirable form.
Says Creeley, "The problem of poetry is articulation, not
getting something 'good' or 'interesting' to write about."
Further, the maxim does not mean that a poem can be judged
on its overt content; on the contrary, a poem's true con
tent should not be visible until the reader has attended to
all aspects of its form. Creeley tells us, "A poem is not
judged on its content because that content is only as it
appears because of the form which it has been given." He
adds,
The problem of poetry is stylistic and linguistic, in
other words, the form you give the thing and the means
whereby you gain that form are the problems of poetry and
not specifically what you have to say. (Lecture, Aug.
26, 1962)
Thus the "following" of the poem which we have seen
stressed by both. Olson and Duncan is shown to us by Creeley
to be clearly a following of its form— whether this form be
: ' |
that given to it by the "instant" or that given by the
Jnuminous powers. To Creeley, attention to form provides
!
the only access the poet has to content, much as the form
of the fossilized excrement provided the only access Carl
Sauer had to the eating habits of man's ancestors. If the
poet pays no attention to form, he will not realize the in
exhaustible content of the instant. "It cannot be simply
what a man proposes to talk about in a poem that's interest
ing," Creeley says. "In other words, after we've read a
play by Shakespeare, let's say, we don't throw away the
play. We continue to define what is said/happening in how
it is said" (Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962).
These two points on language and form are Creeley's
two chief specific contributions to Black Mountain theory.
But there is another dimension to Creeley's few critical
comments that gives Creeley perhaps his greatest signifi
cance within the Black Mountain movement. This, as we
mentioned before, is his criticism's complete lack of a
dogmatic or crusading tone. While Olson talks about
"humilitas" making man of use,9 Creeley is the one who puts
his advice into practice. Unlike Olson, he has scorn for
nobody, patience for all. When he discusses Olson's
9"Projective Verse," Human Universe and Other Essays,
ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco, 1965), p. 60.
I 122 I
! I
i !
declarations in "Projective Verse" and even accepts them !
without reservation, he can still say that these are merely j
i !
"proposals" and not really the elements of a final solu
tion. He says of Olson, in fact, and particularly of
jOlson's opposition to the simile,
There are no rules. There is no prescription. There is
no reason why you can't do anything you can do. If you
can inform a simile so that it is restored the force it
once had, then you should.
Always one is aware of a great over-riding magnanimity
in Creeley, an applied willingness to give things a chance—
a willingness that ideally should be active in all Black
Mountain writing. There is a basic hesitance in all of his
utterances, as if the man were forever recoiling from the
possibility of being unfair to some person or event. His
speech is never possessed of Duncan's oracular assurance,
but is instead riddled with qualifiers— I'd like to say,
that is, so to speak, in a sense, let's say, at least
partly, in effect— as if he were embarrassed ever to propose
himself as absolutely worthy of his subject. Creeley pos
sesses all the respect which Olson recommends toward the
integrity of other objects, even toward those closed liter
ary forms which are to Olson mere "generalizations."
Creeley will not say that these forms prohibit the "follow
ing" or recognition of what is. He remarks with character
istic hesitance,
•^Lecture, Aug. 29, 19 62.
And I'm not so sure that in a closed order, that is in the;
forms shaped for us by an accumulation of traditional |
habits, I'm not so sure that in these poems equally the ;
opportunity for such choice or such recognition can't
exist. (Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962) i
: . i
His wish to avoid absolute declaration brings him to a
heavy reliance on the word "sense"— as in his Berkeley lec-
ture "A Sense of Measure": "I have a trust now in the way
things are feeling, so if I say a 'sense' of measure that's
really what I do mean," he told his audience on that occa
sion. "I don't mean a description of measure or a law of
measure— I mean a sense of it: I have a 'sense' of meas
ure." And this thoroughly humble man concluded that lec
ture as follows:
[I have] finally discarded all assumptions that there is
any— you know— that there's any thing or set of instruc
tions that can be offered as absolute possibilities. You
know, like if you go to, if I tell you to go to the store
and buy a loaf of bread, I can tell you with some assur
ance that the loaf of bread will be there to be bought,
you know; there are other things I can say in that way.
I have nothing further to say apropos poetry. I think
that's a good place to end. 13-
No other Black Mountain poet would have written this pas
sage. The gentleness, the lack of arrogance, is unmistake-
ably Creeley's.
Creeley and the Field
Of all the various concepts of Olson and Duncan the
one which Creeley chooses to stress most heavily is Olson's
H"A Sense of Measure," tape-recorded lecture, Univer
sity of California, Berkeley, July 21, 1965.
concept of the field. Very much does he seem taken by the
idea of immersion in the field and by a submission to it in ;
which the poet's ego is surrendered in deference to the ob
jects around him. Creeley sincerely believes that a poet
!
can use words only "in the complex of his own occasion" and
i
that for linguistic materials he can use only "what is pe
culiar to the nature of the language."^*2 In all respects,
he feels, a man, in order to have a significant life, must
accept completely the world which surrounds him. "As soon
as a man . . . loves himself to be in the world as he is in
it, and not insists on what he thinks he is in it," Creeley
tells us, "then things will begin to happen to him that are
interesting."^
In Creeley we do not have an elaborate theory of ex
istence or any mystical sense of the divine: we have simply
a sincerely felt belief that a man is inevitably a part of
his world. It is a belief, of course, which he holds in
common with Duncan and Olson, but whereas for them it is a
corollary of other and larger beliefs and insights, for
Creeley it is the keystone of his poetics. For Creeley, as
for the other poets, the field of the world is an unforeseen
process slowly evolving to new possibilities. Therefore, he
tells us, "we live as we can, each day another." Man can
l2Lecture, Aug. 26, 1962.
13Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962.
! ~... 125
i
only "stumble" on, evolving in action as the world evolves j
in process. "Wherever it is one stumbles (to get to wherev
er) Creeley observes, "at least some way will exist, so to
speak, as and when a man takes this or that step— for which,;
;god bless him. ;
Amid such uncertainty, many men will wish to shut off
the flow of the field and by their own will create a pre- j
1
dictable reality. Creeley is characteristically sympathetic]
toward the yearnings of such men, for he too has experienced!
!
such yearnings. And yet, as he tells us, the fact remains j
J I
; that the field of reality cannot be circumscribed. j
A suspiciously simple sense of life is that it is, in any j
one man, conclusive. Oh for him— of course; but for this
| world, I wonder, or rather think it is only in the rela- j
i tionships men manage, that they live at all. People try j
j with an increasing despair to live, and to come to some
thing, some place, or person. They want an island in
| which the world will be at last a place circumscribed by
! visible horizons. They want to live free of a continuity
i of roads, and other places. The island is, finally, not
real, however tangible it once seemed to me. I have found
that time, even if it will not offer much more than a !
place to die in, nonetheless carries one on, away from '
this or any other island. The people, too, are gone.15 ,
The searchers for a circumscribed universe may be Olson's
i
humanists or Duncan's rationalists, but to Creeley they are |
simply pathetic examples of men who want more than they can j
have. He does not rail at them, but merely offers advice: !
i
"I'm sentimental enough," he explains, "to believe that one j
14preface, For Love, Poems 1950-1960 (New York, 1962), !
[p. i].
15preface, The Island (New York, 1963), n.p.
: ~ “ 126"!
proceeds from the immediate and particular— this is where
the universal is to be embodied, if anywhere."16
To Creeley one's field controls nearly everything in
; |
life: "we make with what we have." Tradition itself*be-
i
comes meaningless unless it is an active agent of the pres
ent context. "Tradition is an aspect of what anyone is now
thinking," he says, "— not what someone once thought.n1^ He
believes that all any man can do within the human situation
to act meaningfully is observe a "scrupulous localism." If
a man purports to be a writer, he will be qualified to deal
only with that place that he is "intimate with," and he will
inevitably use the words and rhythms that are his own. "You
will write a poetry local to your own speech," Creeley as
serts, "whether you like it or not." In Creeley's view the
dense and mysterious field of existence everywhere insists
that men and "poets have to deal with the question of re
sponsibility to their own states."18 A man cannot propose
for himself states or conditions other than the ones into
which he has been born. He can only swim with events in the
hope that the field will somehow continue to sustain him.
In both life and poetry Creeley sees the only ways as being
through "what is."
16"Robert Creeley in Conversation with Charles Tomlin
son," p. 26.
17«to Define," The New American Poetry, p. .408.
18Lecture, Aug. 28, 1962.
I • - - - 127 I
' i
! }
The Way to Composition
i
It should be apparent that "what is" to Robert Creeley |
is a very limited, local, and inhibiting thing. His sense
I
of "field" is so strong and immediate to him that he cannot |
I !
Over see through the surrounding flux of fact and event to
{the sort of all-controlling universal pattern that both Dun
can and Olson see. While Duncan and Olson seem to gaze
through creation like colossuses, Creeley is a man lost in a
jungle and doomed never to know what lurks behind the next
tree. To him the immediate field is the overwhelming real
ity, the entire extent of his world-view. But it is his
world-view, and he is willing to base all his poetics upon
it.
In Creeley's view the poet, completely lost in his
field of events, is very much the instrument of what happens
around him. His own voice escapes his control.
I have lost women, so to speak, and perhaps the children
which were theirs also. I have rarely lost my voice, how
ever; but it has been much altered by circumstance, from
time to time, like the donkey braying in the woods.
Because he is indeed lost in the woods, he must use all
means available to him to find or make a way, even though he
knows that this way can never really lead him out of all
confusion. The poet must "be responsible for what he both
can see, as an intellective or intellectual sense— what he
19"preface," A Form of Women (New York: Jargon Books,
1959), [p. i].
can see as an intelligence--and he's equally trying to be
awake to what he can feel, and what he feels is working in
him." In actual composition he is so much at the mercy of
his field, Creeley tells us, that he is actually "the means
ay which language writes the poem . . . he writes the poem,
taking as the language moves in him."20
Because of Creeley's rather oppressive view of reality
in which the poet, like every man, is enclosed in what he
Icnows not, the poem becomes his attempt to define or dis
cover at least some portion of what is occurring around him
— "the process of definition is the intent of the poem."2!
Duncan and Olson also see the poem's purpose as definition,
but as definition on a larger and less detailed scale, and
with less portentous personal implications for the poet. To
define accurately, Creeley tells us in For Love, the poem
must be close to the fact that "we live as we can, each day
another" as the poet can bring it: in Creeley's words, "as
close . . . as I can bring it; or it, me."22 Through defin
ition the poem helps save the poet from being over-powered
by reality by showing him a way, perhaps a short one,
through the events immediately ahead. Creeley says,
Again and again I find myself saved in words, held to love
20Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962.
21"To Define," The New American Poetry, p. 408.
22"Preface," For Love [p. i].
! 129 !
i i
I . . . . !
or returned to possibility and hope; in the dilemma of I
some literal context a way is found in the words in which j
one may speak of it.23 j
i !
| Being a way shown to him by reality rather than some
thing of his own doing, Creeley's poem, just like the ones
of Olson and Duncan, is not the poet's own. "The poem means
what it means; it has nothing to do with the man that wrote
it."24 The poem is merely a way that the poet has stumbled
into in a momentary instant of good fortune. "1 am not the
poem," Creeley said at the Berkeley conference, and stressed
that he did not wish to be personally praised for a thing
that was its own creation and not his. Because the poem is
something which comes to the poet rather than a thing formed
by him, the poet dare not seek the poem's measures other
than through his unconscious mind. He dare not seek them
through consciousness and pre-meditation. Creeley tells of
f t
his "uneasiness confronting verse that is measured to an
assumption of coherence." He says, "They [such verses] have
a crudity that's really crude. It's really gross behavior
to try to impose that aspect of any man's or any woman's
personality upon the poem."25
In the actual process of composition the poet, says
Creeley, will be first moved by a pressure from without.
23Lecture, Aug. 26, 1962.
24Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962.
2^Lecture, "A Sense of Measure."
r “ ' ' ' ' ' 130 i
i .... i
’ ’Even a man doing, in effect, a journeyman-like job, that
i i
is, a job for an order, will be moved by something to be
| j
more than he would, than he himself is, in his art." A way
will suddenly begin to appear to the poet within the confu
sion of his context, and he will be moved to explore it.
den in this circumstance become, says Creeley, "aware of
things that they could not otherwise state as knowledge."
However, at this point composition can occur and continue
only if the poet can "feel it possible to let things hap
pen."26 Much like Duncan, Creeley believes that the poet
must be willing to submit to the poem and follow the way
which it opens to him.
Throughout the "happening” of the poem, according to
Creeley, the poet should be both conscious and unconscious
of particular aspects of the composition. He must be con
scious of the facts that no intrusion can be permitted into
the poem, and, further, that the poem itself is to receive
all of his attention. Says Creeley,
He . . . has to be conscious of what he1s doing in order
not to mar it, not to object, or not to go to sleep at
some point when all his intelligence is needed, you know,
for a recognition of what he's doing to allow more to
occur.
He must be conscious of being permissive— conscious, in
fact, of being unconscious. He must "stay awake to all that
is happening as it is happening" in order not to miss any of
26Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962.
131 1
i
|
it, and yet he must not be conscious of the actual process
of its articulation. Says Creeley, "Men become tongue-tied
! ' I
I
when they think overtly about the problems of speech" (Lec
ture, Aug. 29, 1962).
In Creeley's view of composition, then, the poet's con
sciousness must be given strictly to the way that is appear
ing in the field of life and language. Consciousness must
only be acute perceptual awareness; it must never become
self-consciousness about what one "ought" to be writing. In
Creeley's words,
There must be a constant activity of a perceptual nature
in the poem; you must be constantly aware of what you are
saying as you are saying it, not only as you think you are
saying or as you hope you are saying it or as you intend
to say it. (Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962)
But such awareness is not to be confused with deliberation
or intention. It is observation or discovery only.
Creeley offers a number of metaphors to illustrate how
a poet must be extremely conscious of what is occurring
without being in any way in control of the occurrence, of
how he must be aware of what is happening without being even
slightly aware of what is going to happen. In some sense,
Creeley suggests, the poet in composition is like a jazz
musician in concert.
. . . You can tell when a poet, so to speak, is "swinging"
in a jazz sense— [it] is very often when there is a break
in the semantic control, because he's using less semantic
132 |
i
control for this, he's raging, he's possessed by in no
stupid sense by the aspect of the language he is using.27
Like the jazz musician, the poet is "used by what exists,"2®
and can be conscious of the experience of being used. The
poet is also, says Creeley, simultaneously in the position
of both doctor and mother to the poem. Like the mother, the
poet finds the birth happening to him with or without his
consent, and he can watch the actual happening if he wishes.
Like the doctor, he must observe and aid, but cannot in the
least alter the character of that which is being born. Says
Creeley,
He is called upon to attend . . . as though one were asked
to be both doctor and mother . . . that which is observing
. . . and providing for a successful completion . . . but
equally that which is giving birth, so that the poet is
placed in a curiously double position to his own activ
ity . 29
In that same lecture Creeley compares the poet's ex
ploring of the opening in his field that the poem provides
to the action of a swimmer in water. If the swimmer is too
conscious, too "calculating," or in the least way tries to
dominate the water, he will sink. But if he just relaxes,
lets "himself be in the water," and becomes conscious of
only how it supports him, a way through the water will
become apparent to him. To Creeley, the field of existence
2?Lecture, Aug. 26, 1962.
28creeley, "A Note on Writing," New American Story, ed.
Donald Allen and Robert Creeley (New York, 1$65), p. 264.
29Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962.
133
iis indeed every bit as dangerous as the sea, and the process
i
Of composition every bit as uncertain as a swimmer's fate.
Zreeley comments on this uncertainty and in so doing offers
a fourth metaphor.
It's an awful precarious situation to be in, because you
can obliterate everything in one instant. You've got to
be utterly awake to recognize what is happening, and to be
responsible for all the things you must do before you can
even recognize what their full significance is. It's like
going into a spin in a car— you use all the technical in
formation you have about how to get that car back on the
road, but you're not thinking "i must bring the car back
on the road," you are bringing the car back on the road or
else you're over the cliff.30
This final image epitomizes the fearful tone that runs
through nearly all of Robert Creeley's comments on life and
writing.
Summary
The insistent note throughout Creeley's theoretical
utterances is that man and poet live in a hostile, or at
best neutral, universe. This is a note that is utterly
lacking in the writings of both Olson and Duncan, to both of
whom the world is nourishing as long as one is willing to be
fed by it. To Creeley, however, opportunities for nourish
ment or escape are so rare and ephemeral that they must be
seized without consideration. The poet, Creeley believes,
can be "saved in words"; words can reveal a way to discovery
and relief once the poet has begun to be used by them. "I
30"Robert Creeley in Conversation with Charles Tomlin
son," p. 34.
I 134
have no sense of subject," Creeley says. "I have, in fact,
not the least sense of what I would 'say'— were that choice
ever to be given me.”31 However, he says in another place,
"if you once say something, it will lead you to say more
than you had meant to."32 To Creeley, the poet must rely on
this possibility. He must never, when he uses words, be
like the egoist and insist that "by god they mean precisely
what he wants them' to mean and nothing more." He must al
ways trust that a way will be shown to him through the
dilemma that is his life, that in the words he uses "he will
find things occurring beyond his intention." Says Creeley,
with gratitude, "I've found this personally . . . at
times."33
I
!
31"A Note on Writing," New American Story, p. 264.
32«prefacef" The Gold Diggers (New York: Scribner's,
1965), p. 8. ”
33Lecture, Aug. 29, 1962.
PART II
BLACK MOUNTAIN POETRY
135
CHAPTER IV
ROBERT DUNCAN AS POET: SERVANT OF THE STARS
Like both the other major Black Mountain poets, Robert
Duncan believes that a man is formed by the ecolpgy of his
existence. Hence he feels that there will always be a cer
tain coherence and identity evident in any group of a man's
acts, especially in those performed at closely adjacent
moments of time. In such a view no part of a man's belief
can be compartmentalized so that it does not bring influence
to seemingly unrelated beliefs and actions. A man and all
that he does forms one whole which, although it may contain
apparent contradictions or contrasts, possesses a basic har
mony. Thus, as we have seen, one's view of man will be
intimately related to one's view of the universe, and, if
one is a poet, one's view of both these things will be
nearly determining factors of one's poetics.
|
A basic measure of Duncan's sincerity in expressing
these beliefs will therefore be the amount of continuity and
similarity that can be found to exist in his theoretical
utterances and his poetic practice. Not only should the
form and techniques of his poetry be found to conform to the
136
137
implications of his theoretical statements about form and
compositions, but the content of his poetry should reveal a
certain constancy of concern within the poet that asserts
itself no matter what he is writing. We should find Duncan
involved in his poetry, just as he is in his theoretical
prose, with such subjects as the immanence of the "numinous
powers," the nourishment that is provided by the divine, the
reverence that is due to the elemental and spontaneous, and
the great danger that is risked by attackers of the numen.
We should find him both expressing and illustrating his con
cept of the poet as listener and prophet, and continually
presenting the world as process evolving toward new pattern.
In technique his poems, according to his theories,
should appear to have been written as adventures into the
unknown. Their final lines should not be apparent at the
beginning; surprises both to reader and to poet should occur
throughout. Gaps in the poems should appear as the poet
proposes they should: unfilled. There should be evidence
that any assertive thing in the field of the poet at the
time of composition has been admitted into the poem. There
should also be evidence that the poet has become at times
absorbed into the excitement of the patterns of the poem,
that the poem has led him on, even that he has been changed
in some way by the poem while he was writing it. The poet
should frequently, if not always, appear as a participant in
the cosmos, as a man fulfilling his own form by obedience tc
138
the forces that control him.
Certainly these characteristics should only be expected
of Duncan's poems written roughly contemporaneously to the
bulk of Duncan's criticism/ for only they will have been
produced in the context which for Duncan governed that
i
criticism. Thus our investigation must be limited chiefly
to his poems written during or after the Black Mountain Col
lege period: to these contained in Duncan's books A Book of
Resemblances: Poems 1950-1953/1 Letters: Poems 1953-1956,^
The Opening of the Field: Poems 1956-1959/3 Roots and
Branches: Poems 1959-1963,^ Six Prose Pieces/5 and Of the
War.6 Poems of earlier volumes will be referred to only
when particularly relevant.
The Concerns of Duncan's Poems
The titles of Duncan's volumes of poetry since 1950 in
themselves indicate that his areas of engagement in poetry
have been very similar to those areas we saw him engaged
with in his theoretical and critical prose. A Book of Re
semblances: Poems 1950-1953 deals with his observances of
pattern, rhyme, recurrence, and harmony within the actual
world. Letters: Poems 1953-1956 has as its title a func
tional pun, for the poems within it are both epistles to j
^New Haven, 1966. ^Highlands, N.C., 1958.
3New York, 1960. *jjew York, 1964.
^Rochester, Mich., 1966. ^Berkeley, 1966.
139
Duncan's friends and investigations about the world of let-
i
ters and language. Here we find Duncan's earlier insights
into the actual world extended and reflected in further in
sights into the world of language. The Opening of the
Field: Poems 1956-1959 is a direct result of Duncan's con
tact with Olson and with Olson's term "field." Here we see
Duncan reaching further discoveries about the field around
him which is now simultaneously the real universe and the
realm of autonomous language. Here we find not only poems
i
entitled "Four Pictures of the Real Universe" but also an
entire series of poems, "The Structure of Rime," which re
veal that the patterns and harmonies of the universe and the
patterns and harmonies of language are obedient to the same
law. In this book, in poems such as "Often I Am Permitted
to Return to a Meadow" or "Keeping the Rime," we also find
Duncan's sense of man as being duty-bound to obey the dic
tates of an all-mothering universe. In Roots and Branches:
Poems 1959-1963 Duncan further explores "an inner view of
things" (p. 3) and presents deeper insights into the "roots
land branches" of the living universe. And in Of the War he
|
applies to the present civil war in Vietnam all his insights
into both the respect owed to life-processes and the rights
i
of all beings to live their own lives.
A brief examination of Duncan's subjects can demon- j
strate that they all are so closely related to one another I
that they can indeed be regarded as the roots and branches
140
of a single tree. The concern which provides the seed from i
which the entire tree of his poems grows, is his intense
sense of the immanence of the numinous powers. This sense
is so fundamental to Duncan's work that it finds expression
in nearly every thing that he writes and is so important to
any critical description of his work that we shall be forced
to examine it in detail later. Duncan reveals in a poem in
Roots and Branches that there came in his "twenties" a sense
of the distinction between the real and the actual,
a storm in the branches of what I was, shaking
till all the rising music fell thru its melodies
to rest in the bed of an abiding earth,
and that he was led to the following recognition which was
to become basic to all his thought.
There were actual orchards. There were actual men.
I knew the actual ache of my arms reaching
in the work of pruning, thinning the crop,
picking the ripe fruit,
was empty— -for these were not the trees,
this was not the ground, the primordial
dirt and seed
where the form of my tree slept.
Ever since this time Duncan's concerns have been for the
forms behind the actual. "'I was led down the garden path',
I was carried away," Duncan reveals, "by a rhetoric, all the
sweet sap / of the trees singing, . . ."
My yearning was of the ground. J
My yearning was of the seed.
Hidden wherein
the workings of ecstatic form.
("Returning to the Rhetoric of
an Early Mode," pp. 89-90)
141
Ranking high among Duncan's subjects, therefore, is the
"law" which governs occurrences in the workings of form. To
Duncan law is the syntax of the universe. "The law I love
is major mover," Duncan declares, and it is responsible for
all the processes in the real and actual worlds.
Lookl the Angel that made a man of Jacob
made Israel in His embrace
was the Law, was Syntax.?
The law permits the disorders of the universe to unfold in
harmony, and gives variety and individuality to all living
things.
There are no
final orders. But the Law
constantly destroys the law, . . .8
The law permits all beings to achieve their real form, and
to Duncan the liberty to achieve one's own form is the true
and only meaning of the word "freedom." Hence the law para
doxically allows anyone who obeys it absolute freedom. De
clares Duncan,
That Freedom and the Law are identical
and are the nature of Man— Paradise.
The seed I am knows only the green law of the tree into
[which
it sends out its roots, life and branches
unhinderd, . . .9
! |
! 7"The Law I Love Is Major Mover," The Opening of the
jField, p. 11.
8 "The Law," Roots and Branches, p. 26.
9"In the Place of a Passage 22,” Of the War, [p. 1].
142
In Duncan's mind a synonym for the word "law" is
"rime," for he seems to believe that the law operates in "an
absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance" which "es
tablishes measures that are music in the actual world."1°
"Rime," to Duncan, is not just the near tonal identicality
denoted by the word "rhyme." "Rime" is his term for any
sort of rhythm, recurrence, correlation, or resemblance that
permits comparison or measurement. "Rimes" can be of vari
ous positive and negative degrees, and these "rimes” define
for him the patterns of the law in both the real and the
actual worlds. A valid measure of Duncan's concern with the
freedom-giving law in his poetry is the attention he has
given to an open-ended series of poems, "The Structure of
Rime." These poems begin in The Opening of the Field, con
tinue through Roots and Branches, and by the end of Six
Prose Pieces have grown to be twenty-six in number. These
are poems not confined to the explanation of "rime" in lan
guage but, on the contrary, are given to the revealing of
the principles of the pattern that Duncan believes informs
every occasion of the universe.
In these and in other poems we find Duncan attempting
to discover the relationships between the actual and the
divine and hence between man and the powers of the universe.
Just as he posited in his criticism, he writes in his poems
10"The Structure of Rime II," The Opening of the Field,
143
as a theologian attempting to decipher the laws of God for
man. Indeed, Duncan does aim all his work ultimately toward
"the study and imagination of what man is."11 Very fre
quently in Duncan's work we see poems that attempt to define
more closely how the universe operates and especially to
reconcile apparent contradictions within its elements. For
example, in the poem "Out of the Black" he has discovered
how despair and evil ire integral parts of the ultimate un
folding of "what is": that "your huge self / . . . from the
black pit underlies belief / and to and fro upon the earth
In "Bone Dance" Duncan has seen how fear is intimately re
lated to reverence, how fear can motivate the potentially
The Day is my Lord, the Night is my Lord.
It's fear of the Lord that informs
courage
to dance. Have you? 0 have you?
the old capering papa sxngs,
root to the true corybantic.
Fear of the Day, Fear of the Night?
T** 3 ‘ of the Field,
11,1 A Projection for 1963: in Applying for A Guggenheim
Fellowship in Creative Writing in Poetry," quoted in Pauline
Wah, "Robert Duncan: The Poem as Process" (unpublished Mas
ter's thesis, Dept, of English, University of British Co
lumbia, 1966), p. 70.
goes."
For Judas Iscariot
prepares Christ's passion and Brutus
against the thought of tyranny stands.
(The Opening of the Field, p. 76)
irreverent to participate in the dance of life
And in "Under Ground" Duncan finds further order and unity
in the apparent diversity of the actual world. This poem is
a direct confrontation with decay. At the beginning of the
poem members of the actual world are literally falling
apart. Here the human dead appear "first more-than-fire,
then liquid stone, then stone," as they move from active
rot, to mere mush, and finally to dust. Struck by man's im
permanence, Duncan asks, "Where there do the dead go?" But
as the poem moves on he finds signs of permanence— "there's
a great clock upon which the pole star will / return, turn,
/ and return" and Swift, he remembers, in attempting suicide
"shrugged his shoulders and said: / I am what I am." By the
poem's end Duncan has been moved to speak of Jeff Rail, a
friend whom he assumes died at Dunkirk, as "a hidden liason
with springtime, / an allegiance to the unmentiond."12 The
horrors of life have once again been found a part of the
over-all benevolence of the universe.
In fact, the dominant concern in Duncan's poetry is the
reconciliation of the real and the actual universes. Con
tradictions are shown to be contrasts or hidden harmonies;
every element of our world where, in Yeats' words, all "is
begotten, born, and dies" is shown as undeniably linked to a
greater world of eternal process. In particular, such
things as decay, despair, fear, and sensuality— all the
12The Opening of the Field, pp. 79-80.
145
usual arguments for life in this world as man's "fallen"
state— Duncan is eager to demonstrate as being not only re
sults of divine will but actual expressions or occasions of
divinity. He wishes to show that without these allegedly
"fallen" characteristics of the world no universe of any
sort could exist. He declares,
Divine Being shows itself
not in the rising above,
but embodied, out of
deliberate committed lines of stone or flesh
flashings of suffering shared.
In this poem he ridicules an old lady who accepts "the doc
trine out of Carpenter and Whitman, / that He [Christ] was
the Spiritual Man freed from the bondage of old ways." Dun
can finds the woman's sentimentalism extremely ironic con
sidering the indisputable and obvious flesh and blood condi
tion of her own existence.
. . . I see something childlike in her pose,
her keen eye,
her handkerchief stuffd
between halves of her bosom.13
Duncan underlines his feeling that the divine is in no
way either separate or separable from the earthly in a poem
written in response to a request that he write on the Kab
balah (a thirteenth-century Jewish book of mystical inter
pretations of the scriptures) for a magazine. What he can
see in the Kabbalah is not its unearthly doctrine but its
13"Another Animadversion," The Opening of the Field,
pp. 84-85.
146
apparent physicality, he tells us.
What do I know of the left and the right, of the Shekinah,
[of the
Metatron?
It is an old book lying on the velvet cloth, the color of
[olive
under-leaf and plumstain in the velvet; . . .
The Kabbalah may indeed contain true doctrine, he suggests
later in the poem, but such is extracted doctrine and not an
accurate account of divinity's force within the actual
world.
for the Kabbalah does not praise artichokes,
nor the emerald of lettuce that has a light.
True doctrine, Duncan contends, can be read in the actual
living and sensual reality around us. The real and the
actual form one immense and kinetic whole. To Duncan, the
Kabbalah need never be laboriously scrutinized for doctrine;
even the rabbis, he suggests as he concludes the poem, can
read its doctrine in the things of this world.
The Rabbis stop under the lemon tree
rejoicing in the cool of its leaves
which They say is the cool of the leaves of
[that Tree of Trees.
Look, Rabbi Eleazer says,
the Glory of the Shekinah shines from lettuces
in the Name of that Gardenl^4
Duncan is especially concerned in his poetry to sub
stantiate his claim in his criticism that each man too, like
all other things from artichokes to lettuces, is a sign or
14"What Do I Know of the Old Lore," Roots and Branches,
pp. 3, 5.
147
occasion of the divine. "The skull of the old man wears a /
face that's a rose from the renewd Adam thrown," he declares
in "Bone Dance." "He's no more than a figure / cast away
into an everlasting cartoon of father."15 jn the field of
life, Duncan indicates in his verse, men live and act at the
grace and mercy of the universe, so that everything they do
is done "under the Permission" and is hence an action of the
The handsome builder, under the Permission, has cleard the
lower garden. He has cut the yellow trees down. That we
could not name, that were in their youth. He has heapd up
their swart branches, their gold foliage.
i To Duncan, we find in A Book of Resemblances, because
man is an expression of the divine, the word "nation" is
meaningless: the divine knows no divisions. And further, a
story with an "end" is equally meaningless, since the divine
also knows no end but only "a constantly moving." All
things at all times are no more than themselves in process,
than eternal portents of themselves who are evolving partic
ipants in the real.
There could be a book without nations in its chapters.
This would be portents that were portents of themselves.
A constantly moving. This is as we ourselves are moving
in coming and going, in sitting positions, knees crosst
lsThe Opening of the Field, p. 77.
16"The structure of Rime XII," The Opening of the
Field, p. 82.
divine
148
now, then legs wide apart planting their feet as our feet
under standing.
There could be a story without its end in its unfolding.17
Here again, as in Duncan's criticism, man's immortality is
to be found in the immortality of the universe, in the im
mortality of the energy of which he is constituted--an ener
gy which, as physicists have told, can be neither created
nor destroyed.
Another subject of Duncan's verse that is closely re
lated to his concern to see man as an integral part of the
universe is his attempt to establish his own relation to his
context. This subject finds its simplest expression in Dun
can's attempts to define his exact relation to his own
source. Duncan's actual mother died at his birth, and be
cause of his father's poverty he was given in adoption to a
couple surnamed Symmes. In "A Sequence of Poems for H.D.'s
Birthday" a dream Duncan has of a mother and of her homosex-
ually enamoured son catapults him into a series of poems in
which the Virgin, the muse, his real mother, his adopted
mother, and H.D. (whose poetry he has always taken as a
guide) become so blended as to be indistinguishable. All in
their own way have fed him, have performed as Mother. In
|
this poem Duncan searches for both father and mother but his
search for the father is more readily resolved: he sees his
father clearly as universe.
"A Book of Resemblances," pp. 68-69.
149
Father who is architect of the eternal city,
help me to deliver my share of your image.
Father who grows in the plant,
Father who moves the animal,
Father whose anguish is because of our suffering,
Father whose presence means there is joy even in
[hell,
Father who must find His face in a mirror of me,
Father uncreated, Father evolving,
Father whose signature is in the chemical bond,
how long you have searcht for me;
1 am your son.
Not only is the nature of the father clear here but also the
inextricability of the sublime and the sublunary. But even
by the end of the series of poems the mother has not been
defined; she remains a blend: "First Mother. Second
Mother." No face appears. "It was a divine womanly radi
ance that came."1® The same blend of mothers involves Dun
can in "Two Presentations" in another search for relation
ship and origin. First a dream arouses within him the en
tire problem, and then, while he is riding a busline called
"Howard" (the same name as a Christian one Duncan lost in
his adoption), a schoolgirl's chatter, he tells us in the
poem, indirectly comes to him as information from his
mother. But unfortunately it is information which he cannot
decipher.
Presentiments of various sorts frequently return Duncan
to examining his own relationship to the universe, if not
specifically his relationship to his several "mothers." In
18Roots and Branches, pp. 12, 16.
150
one poem, "Two Dicta of William Blake," he finds himself in
capable both of moving his hand to reconcile a quarrel and j
I
i
of speaking the words of atonement.
Why could I not move my hand?
Why can I not move my hand?
waiting, a word in a moving sentence,
just at the point where j
the authors reveal (but their revelation
is everywhere) the book. (Roots, p. 49)
Here it appears clear to him at least that the power over
his own actions does reside entirely in himself. In anothex
and longer poem, "Apprehensions," a vision he has of an ex-j
cavation sets him to months of investigation through writing
in an attempt to uncover the meaning of the image. All
through these poems Duncan works very much in terms of his
theory that close attention to what is going on will reveal
the truth about things. Only careful observation of events
in both "A Sequence of Poems for H.D.'s Birthday" and "Ap
prehensions" brings Duncan to any greater understanding
than he had previously. And while the method is hardly
successful in "Two Presentations," studied attention to
what is occurring around him certainly yields in that poem
all the information he is able to gather.
Very much on Duncan's mind in his poetry, just as it
is in his criticism, is his own relationship as a poet to
the powers of the universe. His investigations of this re
lationship involve Duncan in examining the nature of the
poem, the role of the poet, and the process of composition
j . -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - ---------- 1S1
i
j
■ — in short, in dealing with the identical questions of poet-
ics which he deals with in his prose. Here especially we j
I '
see the inseparability of Duncan's concerns into particular |
I i
linguistic forms. If something is of concern to him, he is j
moved to speak of it just as much in poetry as in prose. Ini
j |
fact, one might say that anything important enough to engage;
Duncan's attention in prose seems inevitably to find expres-j
! i
ision in his poetry.
I i
His statements in his poetry about the poem, the poet,
i i
and composition, are very similar to those in his theoreti- j
i j
ical prose work. In "An Essay at War" Duncan declares of the|
t
poem:
The design of a poem
! constantly
under reconstruction,
{ changing, pusht forward;
alternations of sound, sensations; !
: the mind dance j
wherein thot shows its pattern:
a proposition
in movement.
i
| :
; Further on in the same poem he is moved to comment in more
detail on the individuality, otherness, and vitality of the !
i
poem.
i
In a poem. Its contractions and relaxations, pulse
beats of largest language. Each cell of the structure
showing its blood type. Measure. The passion of this
speech repeats in imitation the passion of a daily
living, a cosmic more-than-we-are. (Resemblances, pp. 23,
31}
In letter six of the book Letters it is the prophetic and
j
numinous quality of a poem which is given praise in Duncan'si
152
verse:
Then: and this is for me the full splendor of poetry
in which we blindly see— the fallen light is renewd and
the universe of Otherness is entire. Earth rises out of
Earth, an angelic personification, a being of light.
("Figures of Speech," n.p.)
And in the same prose poem Duncan presents the poet in
the familiar pose of the listener: "the Bard is the Voice
of the listener, who hears, sees, the ancient trees, the
Holy Word walking there, crying." But Duncan elsewhere in
his poems shows that this task of listening or "following"
is nearly as difficult as Robert Creeley finds it.
The poet's art is one of tact and guile,
[its boundary
limitless only when it's done;
elsewhere seeming almost to flounder
helpless into meaning, by rime
restricted. How are we to follow?19
Just as in his prose theory, Duncan declares that the poet
is to bind himself to being obedient to the dictates of the
universe and to submit at all times to the rhythms of the
living world— however recalcitrant they may be. Always he
must see himself as a natural object and must act loyally tc
his fellow-participants in creation. Duncan exclaims:
0 poetl if you would share my way,
come in under the Law, the great Longing.
Dwell, as the guardian plant does, by appetite
at the shores of the Sun, come i
under the Moon, keep
secret allegiance to the out-pouring stars
19"After Reading Barely and Widely," The Opening of the
Field, p. 91.
in Night’s courts,
move into the Dance Whose bonds men hold
holy : the Light
life lights in like eyes.
("The Propositions," The Opening, p. 37)
Composition appears in Duncan's poems as a process of
absorption and reception. One's speech must be left free.
"Only the free / medium, the speech, rings / . . . / rings
true." The poet is to a great extent purposely passive:
"Breaks in the discourse disclose / rifts of determination,
/ an effort of mind" ("True to Life," Letters, n.p.). Again
as in Duncan's prose theory, the poet must obey the forces
that control him and therefore must prevent his own "deter
mination" from interfering in the process of the poem. The
strong influence on Duncan of Olson's theories can also be
seen here in the conceptions of the poet as an object in
nature and of "effort of mind" as an anti-numinous ploy.
The other subjects of Duncan's verse are just as
closely related to his world-view as are his opinions on
poetry and composition. A subject, in fact, seems espe
cially likely to enter Duncan's poetry when its fate in
volves all that Duncan holds sacred in this universe.. A
good example of such a subject is the controversy in Los i
Angeles some years ago over whether or not the Watts Towers
of Simon Rodilla constituted an eyesore and safety hazard
and were therefore to be demolished. To Duncan these towers;
are a divine work executed through the individual inspira-
154
tion of their builder, and any attack upon them is an attack
upon the numen.
three spires
rising 104 feet, bejewelId with glass,
shells, fragments of tile, scavenged
from the city dump, from sea-wrack,
taller than the Holy Roman Catholic church
steeples, and, moreover,
inspired; built up from bits of beauty
sorted out— thirty-three years of it—
the great mitred structure rising
out of squalid suburbs where the
mind is beaten back to the traffic, ground
down to the drugstore, the mean regular
[houses
straggling out of downtown sections
of imagination defeated.2®
In Duncan's view these towers epitomize what Olson declared
all human action should be in "Against Wisdom as Such,"2!
and he quotes Olson at length within his poem.
"There are only his own
composed forms, and each one
the issue of the time of the moment of its creation,
not any ultimate except what he in his heat
and that instant in its solidity yield"
("Nel Mezzo Del Cammin," p. 23)
His defence of Rodilla's towers is, then, built squarely on
the ecological principles of art which he and Olson share.
Another subject which Duncan's world-view leads him to
is war, especially the three recent American wars against
communism in Korea, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic.
2®"Nel Mezzo Del Cammin di Nostra Vita," The Opening of
the Field, pp. 21-22.
2*Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen
(San Francisco: The Auerhahn Society, 1965), pp. 67-71.
155
Duncan everywhere views man as a participant in divine proc
ess and as a cooperator with "what is." He is particularly
opposed to the kinds of compartmentalization of morals and
men and to the kinds of arrogation over living things that
the western industrial and capitalist cultures are built on.
He looks toward a cooperating world community of all living
things— "a vision of the individual freedom and communal
commitment of man."22 The peasants struggling toward new
goals under Communist leadership seem to him fired by such a
vision, even if their organizers are somewhat less ideal
istic. And United States intervention frequently seems to
Duncan sheer arrogation over both the individual rights of
others and the inevitable processes of the universe.
From house to house the armd men go
in Santo Domingo hired and conscripted killers
against the power of an idea, against
Gassire's lute, the song
of Wagadu, household of the folk,
commune of communes
hidden seed in the hearts of men
and in each woman's womb hidden.22
Says Duncan of the Korean war in another poem, "We are
fighting over there. Without a plan." He continues, "Only
a plan, a unanimous war, can win. / An inspiration / not to
be corrupted, not to be turnd."2* Duncan feels that not in
the Korean War, the Vietnamese war, nor the Dominican
22The Years as Catches (Berkeley, 1966), p. viii.
23"Passages 24," Of the War, [p. 3].
24"An Essay at War," A Book of Resemblances, pp. 35-36.
156
Republic civil war did the United States have a plan or in
spiration. Least of all, in Duncan's view, has it been led
on these occasions by a vision of the equality of all men.
And for these reasons, he believes, the United States has
never truly succeeded in such conflicts; the universe will
always refuse to feed a man or a nation that opposes its
laws.
There is no
good a man has in his own
things but in the community of every thing;
no nature he has
but in his nature hidden in the heart of the living,
in the great household.
The cosmos will not
dissolve its orders at man's e v i l .25
Duncan is most convinced that Western individualism and ra
tionalism has caused a selfishness within Western Man which
is causing him to over-estimate both his own powers and the
value of material possessions and to underestimate the
power of the cosmos which makes all things possible. Dun
can would never have us forget that each Korean, Vietnam
ese, and Dominican is as much an "occasion of the divine"
as ourselves and as worthy of being given freedom to obey
the divine law of the community of all beings as is any
other living thing.
Certainly the subjects of Duncan's verse show him to
possess consistently the same concerns that he gave expres
sion to in his theoretical and critical writings. We find
25"passages 24," Of the War, [p. 4].
157
an unmistakable unity to Duncan's. concerns, thoroughly in
accord with his theory that at all times a man should write
simply as the various determiners of his life guide his
voice. We find no arbitrary compartmentalization of belief
in Duncan's poetry. Everywhere the implications of believ
ing in a divine and evolving universe and of believing in
all living things being occasions of the divine are com
pletely observed and held to, even if they bring Duncan to
oppose categorically the national policies and philosophies
of his own country. Throughout his treatment of his range
of subjects in his poems, then, he indeed appears to serve
as the very listener to the numinous powers that he in his
prose writings declared a poet should be.
The Quest for Revelation
Our brief survey of Duncan's concerns in his verse has
clearly underlined the major role that his belief in the
existence of numinous powers plays in his verse. Both his
range of subject and his attitudes toward his subjects are
governed by this belief. So important is this belief to his
verse, that unless we understand the poems in which Duncan's
sense of the numinous vigorously asserts itself, almost
I
everything he has written can seem strange and incomprehen
sible. For, while his theoretical expositions in prose of
his belief can indeed aid us in gaining some understanding
of all his poems, these expositions are still mere descrip-
158
tlons after the fact. They scarcely possess the clarity and
sheer reality that are present In Duncan's poems In which
the numinous seems literally be visible In action. More
over, many of these poems are the source of Duncan's the
ories. Seldom have his theories arisen purely In his the
oretical prose. Duncan Is not a poet who works only from
theory Into practice; In Duncan, theory and practice are so
Interwoven that not only Is his method of writing based on
his theories but his theories are themselves derived from
insights he has gained in the process of his writing of his
poems. This inter-dependence of theory and practice makes
it, in fact, almost inevitable that the two will be consist-'
ent with each other. Each one is an expression of the
other, and both are simultaneous expressions of the man who
views himself and all men as occasions of the divine.
Duncan's sense of a shared identity with the universe
is immediately apparent in his poems. The title poem of
Roots and Branches, ostensibly written out of an experience
of the immanence of divine presence, vividly illustrates
the extent of Duncan's dependence on participation in the
divine, on interaction with the "Monarchs" of the universe.
! Sail, Monarchs, rising and falling
orange merchants in spring's flowery markets!
messengers of March in warm currents of news floating,
flitting into areas of aroma,
tracing out of air unseen roots and branches of sense
I share in thought,
159
filaments woven and broken where the world might light
casual certainties of me. There are
echoes of what I am in what you perform
this morning. How you perfect my spirit1
almost restore
an imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines
by fluttering about,
intent and easy as you are, the profusion of youl
awakening transports of an inner view of things.
("Roots and Branches," p. 3)
Throughout his poetry we find Duncan constantly either aware
or in search of "echoes" of what he is, of "warm currents of
news," or of "transports of an inner view of things." He is
always sure that there "is another world sleeping or an
otherness awake in which 1 am a sleeper," and he always
knows that "the reveald things of this order appear as
omens." And he tells us of the route to insight into this
order, "I tremble lest the door be locked or open, for the
door is an ununderstandable joy."26
At times when the door will not open, we find Duncan
writing in poems, "My spirit is like a reservoir that cannot
draw up its knees. I crave for the visible disturbers—
lightning, the naked gods, the falling of buildings." At
such times, says Duncan, "My spirit is like a mountain de
prived of the sky."2? He then appears in his poems spiritu
ally desolate, and writes these poems strictly in the hopes
that they and the language will somehow relieve his desola
26"Correspondences," Letters, n.p.
27"The Structure of Rime IX," The Opening of the Field,
p. 71.
tion.
As I came needing wonder as the new shoots need water
to the letter A that sound its mystery in wave and in
[wain,
trembling I bent as if there were a weight in words
like that old man bends under his age towards Death— 28
At much different times in Duncan's experience in
writing poetry, amid the sounds of the poem voipes will
begin to speak to him. In "The Structure of Rime VIII,"
Choirs of the Undone come up from the new mathematics.
Let the ten billion years that are likenesses of God be
done! they cry. In the orders of the Impossible there
are already roseate effluvia of the first sound, fluid
mountains. Of and Or are snails, reyeat vegetable les
sons, roaring a new will that li^ts its horns into the
heart of Man. (The Opening, pi 7TF5
Prophetic messages come to Duncan with information about the
structure and process of the universe. And they can come
from any occasion of the divine, from a school girl's
chatter, a dream, or a statue of an African god. In "The
Structure of Rime VII" the wood of such a statue brings to
Duncan's listening mind intimations of man's best stance to
ward the universe.
These are the counsels of the Wood:
Lie down, Man, under Love. The streams of the
Earth seek passage thru you, tree that you are,
toward a foliage that breaks at the boundaries of
known things. The measures of Man are outfoldings
| of Chaos. In the Dance you turn from your steps
\ cross visibly thru the original mess— messages of
! created music, imprints, notes, chosen scales, lives,
gestures. (The Opening, p. 20)
28"The Natural Doctrine," The Opening of the Field, p
j
81.
161
The parallels between this passage and Duncan's theoretical j
i
utterances in his prose writings about man's immersion in
the processes of the universe are unmistakable. Such a
revelation as this advice from "the Wood" could obviously be
the source of much of Duncan's theory.
Almost all of Duncan's poems can be termed a search for
recognitions or revelations of the type that form the bases
for all his theoretical propositions. In nearly all his
poems Duncan regards a poem itself as a received thing and
himself, the poet, as being fed by the stars. The prose
poem "With Bells Shaking" provides a telling illustration.
The image of what I am talking about begins to come:
it is a fair land, a life, a language. And we, poets, are
made up by it— it is a maker— and we in turn making our
selves up are of it. It is a poem, a Lady, it is Poetry.
How are we to judge her? we are in love and we seek her
everywhere. Where we find her we are, like lovers, trans
formed and exclaim— hear how the bell notes of her pres
ence sound herel see where the words dance as she passes!
(Letters, n.p.)
The poet typically in a Duncan poem does not know his sub
ject even as he begins to write. He writes into recognition
and revelation. Here the revelation is about a frequent
concern, poetry, and as usual the content of the revelation
!
is about "otherness"— the "otherness" of a Poetry who ani
mates both poet and language as she passes like a spirit
through the air.
In "Passages 22" of Of the War the poet discovers him
self as one "gathering / animal and mammal, drawing such
milk / from the mothering of stars." In "Passages 27" of Of
162
the War Duncan's recognition is that "my thoughts are ser
vants of the stars, and my words / (all parentheses opening
into / come from a mouth that is the universe la bouche
d'ombre." And in another poem Duncan explains how the poet
comes to be in such a relation to his world: "There is a
woman who resembles the sentence," he tells us. "She has a
place in memory that moves language. Her voice comes across
the waters from a shore I don't know to a shore 1 know, and
is translated into words belonging to the poem. "29 And yet
even though Duncan here is ostensibly telling this to his
reader, the sentence, we must remember, is by implication
delivering this information to Duncan himself. In all his
poems Duncan poses as a medium, receiving his words and
recognitions from a shore he does not know and realizing
them on the shore he does.
To Duncan, the poet lives, like all men, under the
"Law," and his "sentence" is that he must by care and guile
deliver the "sentences" that are given him. As he is ap
parently driven to write in "An Owl Is an Only Bird of
Poetry," language is always the most direct route to the
real.
The vowels are physical
corridors of the imagination
emitting passionately |
breaths of flame. In a poem i
the vowels appear like j
29"The Structure of Rime I," The Opening of the Field,
p. 12.
163
the flutterings of an owl
caught in a web and give
aweful intimations of
eternal life.
The consonants are a church of
hands interlocking, stops
and measures of fingerings
that confine the spirit to
articulations of space and time.
(Letters, n.p.)
In many of Duncan's poems the exact process of reception by
which Duncan claims to gain all his words and lines is not
entirely evident. Once any poem is written it is extremely
difficult to tell whether its author was in eternity or
merely here on earth. However, there are some poems by
Duncan in which the details of his search for recognitions
are most apparent, and there are a few of these where the
presence of an unearthly guide could possibly be inferred.
Such a poem is "For a Muse Meant," the opening poem of
the book Letters. Here Duncan begins with only a single
word and with no idea of content outside of this word. He
moves forward into the poem strictly by the sound, meaning,
connotation, and etymolpgy of that single word. As the poenit
unfolds, he discovers it to be "about" poetry and composi
tion itself.
in
!
spired/ the aspirate |
the aspirant almost
without breath
At this point Duncan is literally without breath; a false
164
start with "aspirate" has left him with only his being
"without breath" as a reality to work from. And so with the
word "breath" he begins again.
it is a breath out
breathed— an aspiration
pictured as the familiar spirit
hoverer
above
each loved each
a word giving up its ghost
memorized as the flavor
from the vowels (the bowels)
of meaning
(BE STILL THY BRATHE AND HEAR THEM SPEAK:)
Now, by careful attention to the language as a messenger of j
the divine, by attention to what the language by its puns j
and associations is saying to him, Duncan has brought the
poem into a sudden richness. "Aspirate" has led to "aspi
ration" as ambition, and etymologically has given the pro
tective "spirit"; thus the language has literally given up a
"ghost."
As the poem continues, its lessons become more and more
apparent to Duncan.
Better to stum-
| b'l to it. You cld have
knockd me over with a feather weight
of words. The sense
sleight but absolute.
nock.nock.nock sum sense into me head.
0 K
Better awake to it.
A growing sense of the magic of language and of the con
trasting stupidity of himself comes to Duncan. He grows
ashamed of his own inability to read the signs he has been
165
given.
I was completely lost and saw the sign
without meaning to.
That was not the design.
It is Duncan's lack of skill in reading the signs of this
poem that probably makes his use of the "following" tech
nique so apparent. "The poet as maker frees things from
the prophets," Duncan writes in a footnote to the poem,
but when the poet frees things smoothly and easily the "pro
phets '" original ownership of these things becomes very dif
ficult to detect.
Perhaps because a lack of assurance in the poet is
needed for the action of the numinous to be overt, in many |
of Duncan's poems the presence of the numinous is expressed
much more clearly than it is demonstrated. Duncan may well
have been moved to write these poems by some signs he had
observed, but these signs themselves are frequently not ap
parent in the verse. For example, after having been some
how brought to write of the Osiris and Set legend, perhaps
by having just read of it, Duncan exclaims:
We are
ourselves tears and gestures of Isis
as she searches for what we are ourselves,
Osiris-Kadmon into many men shatterd,
torn by passion. She-That-Is,
our Mother, revives ever His legend.
She remembers. She puts it all together.
So that, in rapture, there is no longer
the sensory-motor homunculus
subduing the forces of nature, Horus contending
[with Set,
166 |
but the sistrum
sounds through us.
The Will wherein the gods ride
goes forward.30
This is definitely a valid recognition to receive from the
Osiris and Set legend, and one quite consistent with what we
know of Duncan's world-view, but evidence that this recogni-
tion came from elsewhere than Duncan's own mind is not pres
ent in the poem. Even what specific event prompted him to
think of Osiris and Set is not revealed to the reader. Here
Duncan's assumption, then, that man is an occasion of the
divine, that the sacred music of the sistrum indeed resounds
through us, is made by him invisibly either during or prior
to the poem. Certainly a poet who is a voice of the uni
verse could have the knowledge on which to make such an as-
sumption, but the poem itself never once suggests that Dun
can is such a poet. To receive full understanding and
agreement from the reader, this poem can be read only in the
full context of Duncan's work, so that the sense of the
poem's being a message of the universe can be allowed to
pervade its every line. Such a limitation on his verse is
one of the inevitable penalties a poet pays for having a
i
poetry based so thoroughly on an harmonious and unified
world-view and poetics. The various parts of Duncan's the-
30"Osiris and Set," Roots and Branches, pp. 68-69.
167
ories and poetry are so inter-dependent that any one in
stance of them can seem insufficient when left to stand
alone.
The most successful Duncan poems do not necessarily
show the numen as having descended, but do at least indicate
the signs from which the recognitions of the poem have been
made. "For a Muse Meant," referred to earlier, shows the
signs of the language as they gave directions to the stum
bling poet. But a sign to Duncan need not necessarily be a
voice or a word. It can be a group of words or phrases from
the past. That "God is a Oneness" Duncan suddenly realizes
in the poem "Another Animadversion" simply because certain
enduring words that refer to enduring things have appeared
to his eyes as signs of the elemental continuity of the
human race.
Feld, graes or gaers, hus, daeg, dung
in field, grass, house, day ana dung we share
with those that in the forests went,
singers and dancers out of the dream.
For cradles, goods and hallows came
long before Christendom,
wars and the warblers-of-the-word ....
(The Opening, p. 87)
The messengers from "what is" can also be the inanimate ob
jects that surround us in daily living, as Duncan tells us
in the following prose poem:
Since we have had the telephone removed, the inter
rupted spirits of the household have begun again, or we
hear again their story telling. In these counsels of ob
jects, animals and ourselves, these concentrations and
exfoliations of language, we have our source. When
silence blooms in the house, all the paraphernalia of our
| 168
|
| existence shed the twitterings of value and reappear as
heraldic devices. ("At Home," Letters, n.p.)
It is Duncan's prose poem "Salvages, an Evening Piece"
that is one of the most clear examples of how things can
speak to him. In this poem Duncan is seated at evening amid
the disarranged objects of the day when these objects begin
to intrude on his consciousness.
A plate in light upon a table is not a plate of hunger.
Coins on the table have their own innocent glimmer. Ev
erything about coins we obliterate in use and urgency.
How lovely the silver dull disk glimmer is. Shells with
out remorse. The rubd antique nickle dated 1939 Liberty
portrait relief of Jefferson and, beyond, darkend with
use, a grimy patina beautiful 1929 buffalo Indian head
nickle.
In the leisure of the evening Duncan discovers that the in
dividualities of these objects can assert themselves now
that the objects' utilitarian applications no longer inter
fere. All the litter of the table, the coins, a key, "a
coin silver spoon, a chipped cheap cup-shaped cup with a
grey glaze without the imperfections of beauty beautiful be
cause it is a cup," can now speak with their own voices.
Says Duncan as the poem concludes:
Beautiful litter with thy gleam and glimmers, thy wastes
and remains! The tide of our purpose has gone back into
itself, into its own counsels. And it is the beauty of
where we have been living that is the poetry of the
hour.31
i
In yet other poems we find events speaking to Duncan
and moving him to action in verse. In the composition of
33-A Book of Resemblances, pp. 72, 79.
169
one poem Duncan suddenly finds it unwilling to unfold fur
ther; for some reason there must be an intrusion into the
poem for it to continue. Some occurrence in his house is
impinging upon the poem's process, preventing its proper
completion. Says Duncan,
In the field of the poem the unexpected
must come.
We wait.
It does not come.
There is a disturbance in the House.
I had forgotten its orders. The plants
ask to be waterd.
If we have not set things to rights,
the indwelling
is not with us, there are no instructions.32
Duncan finds that he has not obeyed the "orders" of the
house; he has, in effect, committed disobedience to the uni
verse. For a moment, until he has watered the plants, he is
like Erysichthon and thus cut off from the nourishment of
the divine.
In a similar poem we find Duncan all at once moved by
events to praise of Kore, the goddess of the earth's fertil
ity. These events are the simultaneous coming of All Hal
low's Eve, his thinking of Kore, and the occurrence of an
earthquake.
The Earth^shakes. Kore! Kore! (for
I was thinking of her— She
who shakes the stores of ancestral grain)
The Earth does not shake again. Troubled,
32"The Propositions," The Opening of the Field, pp. 35-
36.
the heart recovers. But is moved.
At the dance of the Hallows I will tell my love
To Duncan, listening closely to the events around him as he
in theory believes he should, and eager to give these events
tiis obedience, this coinciding of events is more than mere
coincidence. It is a message from Kore, "Earth-mover,
tender Thresher, / Queen of our dance-floor,"33 and designed
to move him to praise, loyalty, and song.
When the process of the poem is apparent, we find Dun
can greatly dependent on voices, guides, omens, portents,
and signs for the full development of his verse. Always in
these poems we find him hopeful of receiving revelations,
and willing to accept as signs of "what is" anything that
impinges upon him. And whenever these signs appear in his
poetry, we indeed find him obedient to them. Certainly we
also find Duncan's poetry to be at all times written in the
service of the real. The numinous world, its applications
for man and poetry, and its signs in our actual world are
the dominant if not exclusive concerns of his work. Poem
after poem tells of the patterns imprinted on our world by
the divine.
The structure of rime is in the rigorous trees repeated
that take on the swirl visible of the coast winds and the
33«EVOCation," The Opening of the Field, p. 40.
171
outcroppings, the upraised and bared granites that define
sentences of force and instrument.34
i
I
Poem after poem tells of the universe of process and of its j
giving ever-changing signs for man's reading. |
j
Language' obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter. j
i
I
We trace faces in clouds: they drift apart,
palaces of air — the sun dying down j
sets them on fire; j
descry shadows on the flood from its dazzling mood, j
or at its shores read runes upon the sand
from sea-spume.35
And poem after poem expresses man's dependence on this nour
ishing universe.
— a man shaped to the world's fate
stretches upon his face
I
i
to wear the given m a s k .36
Duncan finds corruption the place of the numen ("Nor Is the
Past Pure," The Opening of the Field, pp. 41-43), gold when
it is allowed to go free the place of the numen ("The Ques
tion," The Opening of the Field, pp. 54-55), and day and
night places of the numen ("Four Songs the Night Nurse
Sang," Roots and Branches, pp. 59-63). "The performance we
wait for defines us its attendants,"37 he declares, and
34«The Structure of Rime XIII," The Opening of the
Field, p. 83. -------
35"Food for Fire, Food for Thought," The Opening of the
Field, p. 95.
36«upon Taking Hold," Letters, n.p.
37"The Performance We Wait For," The Opening of the
Field, p. 55.
172
^ruly the performance attended to in his poetry by Robert
Duncan defines him as a loyal servant of the numinous powers
in which he believes.
Duncan's own role in his poetry, then, is very much
that of prophet: the man who speaks the words of the divine
and works out their implications for all important parts of
life. He is a man dedicated to a single idea— that the uni-j
iverse is a vast and single power worthy of reverence— and j
organizes around this idea every activity of his life. In
concerning himself with the Vietnamese war, he does not see
himself as abandoning his art, for his art is the voice of
the cosmos. "I will still tell the beads, in the fearsome /
streets I see glimpses of,1138 he says of his war poems. He
is always to himself a servant of this universe, defending
it at all costs from the scorn and violence of those who
have no respect for the miracle of life.
the ominous roar in the air,
the omnipotent wings, the all-American boy in the cockpit
loosing his flow of napalm, below in jungles
"any life at all or sign of life" his target, . . .
I ("Passages 25," [p. 5])
i
jTo Duncan as prophet, the irreverence for life shown by the
'managers of the American war plan in Vietnam, however, is no
|
greater heresy than the similar irreverence for life shown
£>y the television society of America. In Duncan's eyes the
!
only deity of this civilization is the false god of evil,
38 n
Passages 24," Of the War, [p. 3].
173
Ahriman, and, much like a Biblical prophet, he speaks out
violently against this false god.
The prime Evil is that which has power over you.
Coercion, this is Ahriman.
In the Endless Dark the T.V. screen
the lying speech and pictures selling its
[time and produce
corpses of its victims burnd black by napalm
Ahriman, the inner need for the salesman's
[pitch,
the image of the mannequin, smoking, driving its car at
[high speed,
elegantly dresst, perfumed, seducing, without
man-odor or odor of sanctity
in the place of the Imago Xristi
robot service in place of divine service
the Good Word and Work subverted by the Advertiser
He-Who-would-avert-our-eyes-from-the-Truth
Habit, this is Ahriman.
The prime Evil is that which conscripts you,
spreading his "goods" over Asia. ("Passages 26," [p. 9])
Duncan even presents his poems as if they were liter
ally the sentences of the divine which he has carried to
their fulness.
I ask the unyielding Sentence that shows Itself forth
in the language as I make it,
Speak! For I name myself your master, who come to
serve.
Writing is first a search in obedience.39
His poems themselves state that they are "unyielding," ab
solute, and completely independent of their writer.
The force that words obey in song
the rose and the artichoke obey
in the unfolding towards their form.
Much like a prophet also, Duncan declares in his poems that
39"The Structure of Rime I," The Opening of the Field,
p. 12.
174
his true intention is conversion: "to win particular
hearts, / to stir an abiding affection for this music, / as
if a host of readers will join the Beloved."40 He would
convert the exploiting capitalist, the callous militarist,
the vain model, and the arrogant salesman all to a thor
oughly felt and acted-upon respect for the powers that per
mit life. Throughout all Duncan's subjects for poetry, from
his own personal life to the universe itself, his message is
always essentially the same.
There is only the one time.
There is only the one god.
There's only the one promise
and from its flame
and margins of the page flare forth.
There1s only the one page,
the rest remains
in ashes. There is only
the one continent, the one sea—
moving in rifts, churning, enjambing,
drifting feature from feature.41
And every man, to Duncan, is a bound participant in this
promise, this vast sea of fertile and continuing event.
I The Poet at Work
i
From Duncan's theoretical pronouncements we should ex-
i
jpect his actual process of composition in his poems to be an
activity of exploration— a "coming into the consciousness of
40"Yes, As a Look Springs to Its Face," The Opening of
the Field, pp. 60, 61.
41"The Continent," Roots and Branches, p. 176.
175
things as potentials for making a universe real."42 We
should expect to find evidence that the poem has not been
directed by the poet but rather has been permitted "to re
veal itself"42 and "to work out its own boundaries.1,44 The
poet we should see in the poem "discovering the line of
melodic coherence,1,42 locating within the words the sounds
that truly belong to the poem.
Certainly we do find these same theories of composition
expressed in Duncan's poems, and thus again we are given
i
evidence of the consistency and unity of Duncan's writings. |
In a prose poem entitled "Source" Duncan comes clearly once
more to the sense of composition as a natural and spontane
ous action, and even gives what is perhaps the source of his
theory that as "Maker" he is only "maker of a way." "I work
at the language as a spring of water works at the rock, to
find a course, and so, blindly," he tells us. "In this I am
not a maker of things, but, if maker, a maker of a way. For
the way in itself." Later in this poem he is moved to ex
press even more clearly his characteristic sense of the
spontaneity and independence of language.
42"From the Day Book," Origin, No. 10 (July, 1963), p.
; 10.
j
42Tape-recorded lecture, University of British Columbia
Poetry Conference, Vancouver, B.C., July, 1963.
44A Book of Resemblances, p. viii.
45"From the Day Book," p. 12.
176
I write this only to explain some of the old ache of long
ing that revives when I apprehend again the currents of
language— rushing upon their way, or in pools, vacant
energies below meaning,^nidden to our purposes. Often,
reading or writing, the fullest pain returns, and I see or
hear or almost know a pure element of clearness, an utter
movement, an absolute rush along its own way, that makes
of even the words under my pen a foreign element that I
may crave— as for kingdom or salvation or freedom— but
never know. (Letters, n.p.)
In another prose poem it is the "otherness" of the poem
that finds its way into Duncan's verse, its coming to both
poet and reader from some realm they know not. Says Duncan,
An imaginary woman reads by her lamplight, inclining her
head slightly, listening to the words as I write them: we
are there as the poem comes into existence— she and I— -
losing ourselves in the otherness of what is written.
The poem is equally separate from both poet and reader: it
"reaches out to her— just so it reachd out to me,"46 Duncan
continues. The poem goes on existing completely unadulter
ated by all whom it contacts.
The process of how the poem composes itself becomes the
subject of his poem "Poetry, A Natural Thing." Here poetry
feeds on the poet and his psyche, not becoming them but ab
sorbing and exploiting them to further its own life.
The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.
And his poem "Keeping the Rhyme" deals with the necessary
permissiveness the poet must hold toward the poem so that
its individuality is not impaired by his making a way for it
46,1 At the End of a Period," Letters, n.p.
177
into our actual world. In this poem, as in Duncan's theory,
it is the linguistic cues of the poem which offer much of
the information the poet can get about its real shape.
By stress and syllable
by change-rhyme and contour
we let the long line pace even awkward to its period.
(The Opening . . . , pp. 50, 51)
Perhaps more useful to any investigation of the rela
tionship between Duncan's theory and practice are those pas
sages in his verse which are, like the last line quoted, at
the same time both expressions and illustrations of the the
ories which he espouses. A very simple example of such a
poem is "Riding," a prose poem of which the subject is es
sentially its own composition. This poem is composed in a
comfortably furnished room, it seems, but in one which like
all rooms is moving onward through time and event at a
steady and unchangeable rate. To Duncan the room's onward
movement through time is like an automobile's onward prog
ress through time and space, and the occupants of the room
are as much at the mercy of motion as are the riders in a
car. The poem that corresponds to the room's onward move
ment is here in Duncan's mind a "conversation" among the
events of the room. Everything that occurs in this "conver
sation" or poem is determined by the happenings within the
room. "This conversation is an automobile, as we in company
ride thru the dark or in the floods of afternoon thru the
countryside or the streets of a city," Duncan begins. But
r ■ .. 178 •
i i
i !
lit is the central passage of the poem that gives the true
|picture of how Duncan literally allows immediate object and j
event to compose the lines.
! I cannot describe this country beyond this country ;
without explaining, if we are to understand, that the con-!
versation unrolls beneath my pen in a silence as the road j
unrolls beneath the car; the dark is the dark at the win- i
dow, the blank check of ones wonder, and the light cer
tainly like the light of the lamp with'in the other light
! of the room. Four cats curId in margins of sleep, and my j
companion reading, ride with me. Mr Pumpkin mews, rises, j
shakes himself down again into his slumber, stretching out
into it. The poem I have been thinking of is all of this
! hour, a wholeness of the room, its furnitures, paintings
| in which a host moves — not only of story people, but be- j
cause there are portraits, my self and my companion and
I the cats reappear there in their eternal, our eternal, j
| story guise; and a host of other beings: a coffee pot, a i
loaf of bread, a flat iron, a chair, a lake; and a vaster j
host of times and areas, of shadows and solidities in
i themselves. Then other beings in stone. (Letters, n.p.) |
i !
Everything in the room, the people, the furnishings, and the
mewing of a pet cat, comes into the poem to govern its con
tents and direction. j
l j
i i
A more complex example of a Duncan poem that both j
expresses and illustrates his thesis that composition is a
process of aiding the poem to achieve its own form is the j
• I
poem "Light.Song." In this poem Duncan realizes that the |
role of the poet is much the same as that of a husband who
I !
works so that both the marriage and the bride realize their
potential beauties. Further, he finds that both poet and
|husband are similar in role to composer whose duty it is in
I i
his music "to seize from the air its forms." In style the |
| |
poem consists of a series of appositional progressions that j
[seem to follow the mind of the poet as it works with the j
| " " 179
poem's words. The rhythms of the poem give no impression
that anything in the poem has been digested by the poet.
The phrases that come blurted or stumbling one after the
other seem very close to what Olson calls "language as the
act of the instant" and the antithesis of "language as the
act of thought about the i n s t a n t ."47 Even the semicolon at
the poem's beginning shows that the poem is in no way an
artificial construct with an absolute beginning— a beginning
impossible in this unending universe— but is rather an in-
sight into an already progressing reality.
; husbands the hand the keys a free imp
rovisation keeping the constant vow,
a music,
with set conjugations, notes, the light
est estimations of ravishd ear
naturally contrived. The contrivance
vanishes into itself.
The images throughout this passage on the husband have been
those of music, and so the movement of the poem onward to
the subject of the condition of the composer seems natural,
if not inevitable.
Thus law:
It is this music that the composer dares,
plays, percussively,
the state I love. A
i volition.
To seize from the air its forms.
The pun on "air" ("ayre," an Elizabethan art song) has by
i
this point permitted the poem to go deeper into the subject
of composition. Duncan's next transition will be based both
47"Human Universe," Human Universe, p. 4.
180
on the linguistic features of the last word ("forms") and on
bhe poem's "subject" as it has progressed. The listening
and watching poet follows the poem both where its sounds and
*
where its concerns lead him.
This longing informs. A declaration—
Lawrence: LOOK WE HAVE COME THRU
Pound: IT ALL COHERES. A SPLENDOUR,
where the spirit of the act appears eve-
n ruthless. This
is the inevitable beauty.
; husbands by hand upon the keys unlock
from all compulsions— a mode. (Letters, n.p.)
And by here Duncan himself has "come thru." His poem has
cohered and reached its "inevitable beauty." The amount of
difficulty he has had in following the poem is shown not
only in some of the hesitant rhythms but also in the several
words in which he could locate immediately only the first
syllable and which he could therefore complete only in the
subsequent line. The contrast in assurance between the
final lines quoted and those that opened the poem reveals
the extent to which Duncan has discovered in the process of
composition the purpose of his initial interest in "hus
bands." And he has reached this realization simply by fol
lowing the concerns and sounds that the poem itself pro
posed.
A poem we looked at earlier for its indications of Dun
can's use of portents and signs, "For a Muse Meant," also
shows Duncan's compositional technique of working from ig
norance into knowledge. In this poem Duncan, beginning with
181
one word, followed its semantic and linguistic features and
those of subsequent words until they brought him to that
which the poem wished to speak. Again the punctuation mark
at the poem's beginning indicates the necessary eternal
continuity of all things.
: in
spired/ the aspirate
the aspirant almost
without breath
it is a breath out
breathed— an aspiration
pictured as the familiar spirit
hoverer
above
each loved each
a word giving up its ghost (Letters, n.p.)
There are many other poems not directly about composi
tion that similarly indicate that Duncan was sincere in pro
posing a following of event both within and without the poem
as the best way of writing. An excellent example of Dun
can's "composition by instant" is his poem "After Reading
H.D.'s Hermetic Definitions." This poem is truly what in
another context Duncan's fellow San Francisco poet Philip
Whalen has called "a graph of a mind m o v i n g " 4 8— a mind mov
ing as events, questions, facts, and objects impinge upon
it.
48The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, ed. Donald M.
Allen (New York, 19<>0) , p. 42o.
182
1 '
What time of day is it?
What day of the month?
H.D. read quatrieme for quantieme
in Perse. Today
the sky is overcast— dove's
(that may be her nun1s) grey—
the light diffuse.
His reading and the weather set Duncan to ruminating, and,
finally, to searching for a book that may answer a newly
arisen question.
The light's everywhere diffused
yet
we must take our direction
from the sun's quarter,
as if accurately, obey.
I cant remember, are the bees confused?
(I cant find the bee book
— the way books can get out of handl)
His companion grows angry with him as he searches the house
for the missing book and disturbs the preparations for
lunch, but Duncan can not get himself released from the con
cerns that have gripped him: H.D.'s losing track of the
Perse poem, his own having lost track of the bee book, and
the bees' likelihood of getting lost in the cloud-shattered
sunlight.
— Would they lose their way,
the sun-track
under cloud-ceiling of grey,
the quatrieme, as we might
lose the day of the month. . . .
H.D.'s translation of Perse and his problem with the bees
begin to merge in his mind and cause his thoughts to move to
183
new ideas and insights.
3
In the poem there is
I "--Are ou dead in the darkness?"
Who sleeps in the hive
where the Queen's honey is mixt?
Which they prepare
by what we call instinct,
as if they were sure,
nursing their own
Isis— "generateur, generant" the poem calls her
— drones and that other
Dreamer or Mother of them all
"who orderd, ordaind or controlld this"
the goddess or nurse commands
"Write, write or die".
We too write instinctively, like bees,
serve the Life of the Hive,
coverd with pollens out of time,
gold of the hour, tumble,
fly under maps of the sun's measure
on wings (words) that are winds
The poem continues, and finally, after Duncan's companion
has accused him of having hidden the bee book so as to force
the poem to continue on its own, Duncan is able to recon
sider all that has happened to him in the poem and realize
that the bee book was essentially irrelevant to the problems
that had confronted him. Only the poem itself could truly
reveal the orders of nature; revelation only could come,
says Duncan,
when I remembered not where the book was
but their song in the sun.
(Roots and Branches, pp. 81-84)
184
Composition in Two Major Poems
In "After Reading H.D.'s Hermetic Definitions" Duncan's
method of composition indeed appeared everywhere to be a
following of exactly what impinged upon him; he seemed to
follow for a short period of time the moment as it unfolded.
But Duncan is unique among Black Mountain poets in having
followed not just the events of the moment but also the
events of several hours, days, and at one time months, and
having found within these events lengthy poems. In addi
tion, for several of these poems he has provided fairly
detailed descriptions of his sense of the process of their
composition. These descriptions can provide quite illumi
nating guides for inspecting the poems' structures. Two of
these poems, "Medieval Scenes" and "A Poem Beginning with a
Line by Pindar," we shall examine here.
The earlier of these poems, "Medieval Scenes," is ac
tually a sequence of poems written in 1947, well before the
Black Mountain College period. This poem, unfortunately, is
not one in which the structure reveals in any overt way its
method of composition. It is in fact an extremely smoothly
written poem, whose surface suggests little in the poet but
assurance and mastery of craft. However, the poem does sub
stantiate much of what Duncan himself claims in the tape
recording of his July 24, 1961, lecture at Warren Tallman's
about its composition, and, accompanied by his comments, can
give us some valuable hints about his writing methods.
185
At the particular time of writing "Medieval Scenes"
Duncan had just moved into a communal house inhabited by an
assortment of poets and students of both sexes. On his
arrival he had found the house tense with variously frus-
I
I
trating interpersonal relationships; it was, says Duncan, "a
snakepit of trying to get something to happen." At the cen
ter of the tension of the house, Duncan tells us, was a
"young wife who was pregnant with a baby she didn't want,
and this whole household had actually become acutely con
scious that the husband was going to leave her before the
baby was born." "There was absolutely no love in that
house," he says. "It was operating entirely on a sexual
level" (Lecture, July 24, 1961).
Soon Duncan discovered that he had really been "im
ported" into this house in an experiment by a somewhat
devilish fellow-poet who wished to see what would happen to
Duncan's verse when its poet was immersed in such a scene.
But Duncan was told nothing of what the situation was be
tween the house's inhabitants; communication was as lacking
in the house as love. "No one would say what was going on,"
Duncan recalls. "It was not only not looking and not
touching, it was not talking, not telling." However, says
Duncan, "I announced that I was going to write a poem every
night for ten nights, and in the midst of all these people I
sat down and in a sense performd the poem every night."
The poem he agreed to write was to come only from what
186
impinged upon Duncan in that house; he was in effect chal
lenging the reality of that house to reveal itself to him.
Says Duncan, "I was really working to force a context that
no one was going to reveal to me in the process of writing
the poem." "As a matter of fact," he continues, "I had an
entirely different picture, as one often does, going into a
household where there is a young pregnant wife and a rather
worried husband."
As the first section of "Medieval Scenes" opened, how
ever, the household found Duncan already somewhat aware of
the selfishness, self-deception, and isolation of each of
its members.
The magic in convolutions of our company
winks its lights. Its touch is slight
and vital. But we are bearish magickers,
makers of lightnings in a half-sleep of furry storm.
It is the magic of not-touching,
not-looking sharpenings of the eye,
dim thunders of imaginings. Half-loves
kept short of love's redeeming fire,
temperd to fear and sharpend to a knife-edge cut.
It flashes in the air.
Yet we are bear-like
dreamers in a lifetime's hibernation,
seven sleepers of romance's mountain magic.49
The people of the house, perhaps in their own subjective
views as removed from the reality of the house as Duncan
was initially, began to regard these poems as "the place
where you looked for what it was that was happening." Dun
can remarks in his lecture that they found themselves "a
49Selected Poems (San Francisco, 1959), p. 16.
187
cast for a play" and by constant examination and analysis of
the poems became "scholars of the life we were in." After
Duncan had written a poem, bcth they and he would begin to
search for the events and objects that had given rise to it.
After the following passage, for instance, a search was be
gun for its key objects.
The lion in the loin that slumbers
shakes the sheath of sleep back from his claws,
and stretches. The poets
weave upon that tapestry a spell
of flowering, gold-threaded tendrils of a vine;
make animate each animal form
with conceit of loving. There,
as if washd up upon a wave of violet,
of blue, vermilion and clear yellow,
the poets animate a unicorn
animalization of the beckoning swan. (p. 19)
The source of the tapestry was found to be a reproduction of
a tapestry that hung on one of the walls of the house and
within its design were found a lion and a unicorn. But even
Duncan himself could not discover from where the swan had
entered the poem. It was three days later, Duncan tells us,
that Jack Spicer, the poet who had lured Duncan to the
house, suddenly perceived thousands of minute swans embossed
on the wallpaper of the bathroom, and triumphantly rushed
out with the news.
As the parts of the poem proceeded, the horror it con
tained toward the flesh grew and grew. Not only was there
the young wife who would have gladly surrendered the flesh
that had become pregnant, but there was an older woman in
the house who began to cause Duncan himself to become
188
personally involved. "There was an old woman, an absolute
old witch," Duncan tells us, "who at the time of 'Medieval
Scenes' . . . found me extremely fascinating." Under the
influences of these two women the section of the poem en
titled "The Mirror" apparently came into being. Says Dun
can in his lecture:
"The Mirror" is the first passage in a poem that I have
ever written where I myself was terrified by what happened,
in the course of the writing the poem and where also I
was dismayed. Something in me in a sense did not want to
be the poet of the poem that was writing the poem. It
seemed to be a revelation that was painful to have hap-
pend, in my own terms.
A short look at this section of "Medieval Scenes"
shows us why. In looking at this section now we have the
benefit of Duncan's own insights into the poem after compo
sition. In his room, a short time before moving to this
house, Duncan had had a reproduction of a painting showing
the daughters of Danaus murdering their husbands, and on
the back of this reproduction had been one of another
Renaissance painting that showed Dido, Cleopatra, and Mary
Magdalene as hags. The old woman of the house, Duncan as-
t
sumes, had called forth in his mind this seldom seen re
verse of the picture of the daughters of Danaus and had
finally caused the daughters themselves to enter the poem.
Both the mirror and the orange tree, he feels, probably
came from another painting he had been fond of, Van Eyck's
portrayal of Jan Arnolfini and his pregnant bride.
Two women stroll among the orange trees.
189
Reflected in the glass their nakedness
is like a feud of brilliancies. j
One woman's hair is of a lewd gold,
red as man's first thought of sin.
It falls across the heavy indolence of her thighs
and barely sweeps the ground with gold.
The second woman has grown old.
Her naked body sags and wrinkles in its lust.
It speaks cavernous wastages of a despair.
She grins and shows her broken teeth.
The glass is like a rose of broken teeth.
It trembles with the waverings of the air.
The mirror does not ask if they are witches.
It watches. There is a naked man
between them. He twists between two fingers
one nipple of the woman with the hair of gold.
She stands like an unknowing Eve,
radiant with evil, and waits. He holds
the nipple like a blood-red cherry there
between his curious extended fingers.
The daughters of Danaus lead their naked husbands,
each her naked husband to the naked bed.
There is a carnal burning in the air. (pp. 23-24)
The two women of the poem are clearly the two women of the
house: the young pregnant wife the one with the gold hair,
and the "absolute old witch" the old one with the broken
teeth. Duncan himself seems the man between them, trapped
by their lust and sensuality into the writing of the poem.
Both are evil, the old one in intention and the young one in
effect. Both, like the daughters of Danaus, either have
trapped or wish to trap a man in their own carnality.
In his lecture Duncan indicates that he indeed had felt
trapped in this exceedingly unpleasant situation, that he
had felt as if his body "was being played upon" by the poem
— "as if my body was a lyre." He appeals in the seventh
poem:
190
Sweep not the strings of my dark lyre,
my body, music. Make mute
the tree within the heart, for I desire
to come unto my Lord unsung. (p. 25)
But the poem continued to carry him onward, moving, he tells
as, in "a relentless drive toward an Albigensian horror of
the body." In the eighth poem, the final one to which he
has allowed publication, the voice of Tamburlaine's queen
begins to intrude on the poem as the voice of the young girl
who did not wish her baby. Both the voice of the poem and
the voice of the queen or wife wish desperately to get away
from the body.
The poet-lovers in copulation know
the emergence of the dragon from all things.
They burn in the wrath of the wrathful God.
Black is the beauty of the brightest day.
O let me die, but if you love me, let me die.
Your grief and fury hurts my second life. fp. 27)
Throughout his explanation of the composition of "Me
dieval Scenes" Duncan insists upon the unconsciousness of
its writing. Always he was writing more than he actually
knew, he believes; his sense of things such as the lack of
love in the house and the old woman1s attraction towards him
occurred in the poem much before it occurred in his own
actual awareness. Although this claim of unconsciousness
does tend to illuminate some of the characteristics of the
poem such as the fairy-tale mood of "The Mirror," it cannot
properly be substantiated from the evidence the poem offers.
What the poem does bear out, however, is that Duncan indeed
191
seems to have followed exactly the materials which the con
text he was in caused to impinge upon him. From the "poets"
of the house to the Van Eyck painting evoked in his memory
by the pregnant girl, all Duncan's materials in "Medieval
Scenes" do appear governed by that "snake pit" in which he
lived. Throughout the actual days of the poem Duncan seems
to have been thoroughly faithful to the life he was given to
live.
Another major poem for which Duncan has offered some
description of its composition is his "A Poem Beginning with
a Line by Pindar," a poem out of The Opening of the Field of
his 1956-1959 period. In this poem, unlike "Medieval
Scenes," the actual words and rhythms show the poet grap
pling with his own ignorance and blindness in order to make
the poem come forth. Says Duncan,
The poem began because while reading I couldn't understand
a line I was reading [in Pindar's "First Pythian Ode"] and
yet I'd read it many times before and really knew the
poem.
He remarks that he then became aware that the confusion he
was having was "because the words were starting to oper
ate."50
At the very beginning of "A Poem Beginning with a Line
by Pindar," the reader may well feel that the poet has ab
solutely no idea of where the poem will lead, or even of the
50«The Psyche-Myth and the Moment of Truth," tape-
recorded lecture delivered at the University of California,
Berkeley, July 13, 1965.
192
number of lines that are likely to unfold. The poet indi
cates that he is desperately in need of recognitions.
The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
god-step at the margins of thought,
quick adulterous tread at the heart.
Who is it that goes there? (p. 62)
Momentarily bewildered by the double meanings of "light" as
both "of little weight" and "bright" and of "foot" as both a
measure of verse and the body part, the poet all at once
sees his bewilderment itself as a "god-step at the margins
of thought," as a visitation of the divine. "Who is it that
goes there?" But the "light foot" is not only a "god-step,"
he sees, but also an "adulterous tread": for with the very
step the meanings of Pindar's poem had become adulterated
through the instrument of Duncan as poet. Something magical
now appears to Duncan to be in Pindar's old line, something
"adulterous" that went into it those centuries ago unnoticed
even by Pindar.
Where 1 see your quick face
notes of an old music pace the air,
torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre.
But now, as the second stanza begins, the poem takes an ap
parently abrupt movement into the subject of Cupid and
Psyche.
In Goya's canvas Cupid and Psyche
have a hurt voluptuous grace
bruised by redemption. The copper light
falling on the brown boy's slight body
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing
up from blind innocence, ensnared
by dimness
into the deprivations of desiring sight. (p. 62)
193
What has brought the poem to this subject? Duncan remarks
in his lecture, "When I began it, let's say I already had a
lead it was going to be Grecian because I had started from
Pindar." But perhaps pointing more specifically to the
Psyche myth is one phrase of Pindar's line, "the brightness
begins," which seems most definitely related to Psyche's
being brought in the myth to "desiring sight" and conscious
ness .
At any rate, Duncan from this point in the poem seems
to work strictly with those implications of the Pindar line
that concern sight, insight, and knowledge. He begins to
concentrate on the Psyche myth, exploring it in no synthe
sized fashion but stumbling forward into recognitions,
finding a way. He turns first, perhaps significantly, to
the couple's eyes.
But the eyes in Goya's painting are soft,
diffuse with rapture absorb the flame.
Their bodies yield out of strength.
Waves of visual pleasure
wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience.
As Duncan follows his perceptions, the happily human quali
ties of the "fallen" pair of lovers begin to come clear to
him, especially their willing acceptance of the human condi
tion because of the joys that it can deliver.
A bronze tip of yearning, a rose that burns
the tips of their bodies, lips,
ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd.
His thighs are flesh, . . .
Further, he realizes, they too have stumbled into their joy
194
only because of the precise nature of the field or context
with which they cooperated. Their path to happiness has
been of the same type as Duncan's path into the poem.
The wind spreading the sail serves them.
The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin
serve them.
That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be,
serves them.
The dark serves them.
The oil scalding his shoulder serves them,
serves their story. Fate, spinning,
knots the threads for Love.
Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt . . . serve them.
(pp. 61-62)
Continually in this poem we find Duncan observing
Olson's rule that "one perception must immediately and di
rectly lead to a further perception"51 and his own rule that
the poem must be followed wherever it leads. His next
important insight is a realization of the significance of
what has happened so far in the poem. From confusion— "Who
is it that goes there?"— he has been delivered by the poem
and by Pindar's line to the heart of the Psyche myth. He
has come to see the truth that was waiting for him in
Pindar's line.
It is toward the old poets
we go, to their faltering,
their unaltering wrongness that has style,
their variable truth,
the old faces,
words shed like tears from
a plenitude of powers time stores.
But immediately he finds that the poem wishes to proceed
51"Projective Verse," Human Universe, p. 52.
195
further. The falterings of the old poets themselves enter
the poem.
A stroke. These little strokes. A chill.
The old man, feeble, does not recoil.
Recall. A phrase so minute,
only a part of the word in- jerrd.
Duncan claims that here the poem is entirely out of his
control. Something even now is descending upon him from
the "plenitude of powers time stores."
The Thundermakers descend,
damerging a nuv. A nerb.
The present dented of the U
nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod?
Even the words of the poem are not clear to Duncan here;
the poem's music is faltering, but, as he has said in his
theory, he "cannot afford to 'fill a gap'."52 He can only
let the hints of the poem grow. He gradually appears to
come to the awareness that it is the current illness of
President Eisenhower, "The present dented of the U /
nighted stayd" of the time of the poem, that is impinging
upon him.
Cloud. Invades the brain. What
if lilacs last in this dooryard bloomd?
The poem once again takes on assurance as the poet's recog
nitions become clearer. The humanizing dedication to the
value of life that possessed Cupid and Psyche, the same
dedication to the value of life that moved the falterings
52"From the Day Book," p. 4.
196
of "the old poets," all at once appears to Duncan as in
tensely relevant if not intrinsically a part of this new
subject— for it is the same dedication that Whitman expected
of American presidents and for which he praised Lincoln so
highly. In this context the full meaning of the words
"dented" and "clod" as applied to Eisenhower and of the word
"nighted" as applied to the United States under his leader
ship also becomes apparent.
Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower—
where among these did the power reside
that moves the heart? What flower of the nation
bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture? (p. 63)
The "power that moves the heart" seems here very similar to
the "god-step" that moved Duncan as well as to that force
which moved the "bride-sweet" Psyche. Duncan finds himself
embarked on a long survey of presidents who seem now to have
lacked this inspired dedication to humanity. The verse in
its assurance and inevitability speaks clearly of its own
content and process.
Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson
hear the factories of human misery turning out
[commodities.
For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing?
Noble men in the quiet of morning hear
Indians singing the continent's violent requiem.
Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt,
idiots fumbling at the bride's door,
hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war.
Where among these did the spirit reside
that restores the land to productive order?
McKinley, Cleveland, Harrison, Arthur,
Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Johnson,
dwell in the roots of the heart's rancor.
How sad "amid lanes and through old woods"
echoes Whitman's love for Lincoln1
197
Duncan continues to examine the implications of what he has
said, to move on to new recognitions.
There is no continuity then. Only a few
posts of the good remain. I too
that am a nation sustain the damage
where smokes of continual ravage
obscure the flame.
It is across great scars of
[wrong
I reach toward the song of kindred men
and strike again the naked string
old Whitman sang from.
Pindar, Goya, Whitman: these kindred men whom Duncan
has reached through his attention to the god-step of confu
sion that had broken into his reading of Pindar have brought
him to a complete insight into the divisions of people in
this world. There are those who give themselves to exploi
tation, materialism, and self-aggrandisement, the presidents
Duncan listed, and there are those who give themselves to
the life processes of the universe, Cupid, Psyche, Pindar,
and Lincoln—
From which up break
lilac blossoms of courage in daily act
striving to meet a natural measure. (p. 64)
Such is the process of the first two parts of "A Poem
Beginning with a Line by Pindar." These are really the most
interesting parts of the poem, for it is in them that the
poem passes its most crucial stages in getting under way and
in which the most vital of the poet's recognitions occur.
Duncan, of course, does find that the poem would go farther.
The details of the Psyche story wish to be told in the third
198
section, and here Duncan is particularly impressed with the
obedience and cooperation required of Psyche— the obedience
which we have seen in his theory he feels is especially the
duty of the poet.
Psyche
must despair, be brought to her
insect instructor;
must obey the counsels of the green reed;
saved from suicide by a tower speaking,
must follow to the letter
freakish instructions. (p. 65)
Hers is the human predicament, Duncan appears to feel, but
with determination she continues onward, like the early
Americans who settled the West to "let light into the dark."
The light that is Love
rushes on toward passion. It verges upon dark.
Roses and blood flood the clouds.
Solitary first riders advance into legend.
(p. 66)
In the fourth and final section of the poem Duncan re-
turns to that "god-step" that started him upon the poem,
that "power that moves the heart" that can move poet, lover,
administrator, or explorer onward to knowledge, joy, and
wisdom. He would bless "that foot informd / by the weight
of all things," "the catalyst force renders clear / the days
of a life from the surrounding medium!"
Who is there? 0 light the light!
The Indians give way, the clearing falls.
Great Death gives way and unprepares us.
Lust gives way. The Moon gives way.
Might gives way. Minutely, the Day gains.
All of Duncan's questions and insights in the poem begin to
blend and form a harmonious vision of man participating in
199
the cosmic processes, coming into knowledge and happiness
through participation in the dance of the orders of the uni
verse.
On the hill before the wind came
the grass moved toward the one sea,
blade after blade dancing in waves.
There the children turn the ring to the left.
There the children turn the ring to the right.
Dancing . . . Dancing . . .
And the lonely psyche goes up thru the boy to
[the king
that in the caves of history dreams.
Round and round the children turn.
And the poem ends: "rise to adore the mystery of Love!"
(p. 68).
Ever since the "brightness begins" of the opening line,
Duncan has been working both with growing recognitions in
himself and with dedication and service to light and life in
others. Just as Psyche pursued both love and the sight of
her lover, Duncan has pursued his poem, and in so doing has
illustrated both "the power that moves the heart” and the
obedience to events which the poem tells both poet and
reader is so valuable for happiness and good government.
Summary
There is certainly much evidence in Duncan's verse not
only that composition as discovery is a constant subject of
his poems but also that he himself follows a process of
progressive discovery in the writing of his poems. There
are some poems in his work, such as "For a Muse Meant,"
200
which seem built strictly on a series of perceptions about
the linguistic features of the words of the poem. There are
others, such as "After Reading H.D.'s Hermetic Definitions,"
that seem a following of the exact events of the time of
composition. In still another poem, "Apprehensions," which
we have not examined, Duncan indicates that he analyzed
events for over a month to find the meaning of a fleeting
image of an excavation— an image which he experienced while
reading of Renaissance cosmologies. It is a cave-in of "an
abandond cess-pool" in the garden of his house that here
finally acts as the answer from the numinous: "a verifica
tion of the caves seen in actual life after they had
appeard in the life of the poem." "Wherever we watch," Dun
can comments in this poem, "concordances appear."
There is no life that does not rise
melodic from scales of the marvelous.
(Roots and Branches, pp. 30-43)
In the early poem "Medieval Scenes" we find much evi
dence of Duncan's composing by the following of current
events and present objects. And in his comments about the
poem we find some indication that here he indeed submitted
to the writing of verse that he would rather not have writ
ten. In the poem itself the passages expressing his obses
sive and somewhat embarrassing fear of being amorously
attacked by the "absolute old witch" could certainly be
repugnant to their poet. "Medieval Scenes" is also appar
ently an example of the poem which actually alters the
201
poet's life. "After 'Medieval Scenes,'" Duncan tells us,
as a matter of fact I had been so drawn into this, where
before I had been neutral— before the "Medieval Scenes"—
that I promised her [the pregnant girl] that I would stay
at least until after the baby was born, which was a seri
ous change in my life at that time, actually.53
Considering Duncan's account of this girl in "The Mirror" as
"radiant with evil," this must have indeed been a profound
change.
Duncan's "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar" gives
us what is perhaps the most vivid example of his "following"
of a poem through obedience to the images, thoughts, and
associations that it itself throws forth. From his opening
mystification Duncan appears to work only with what comes to
him from out of the materials in the poem. How much this
method of composition is merely "stream of consciousness" or
"free association" is not really of concern to us here.
While Olson would argue that an "association" cannot be free
because it is always governed by the context of one's
existence, Duncan would claim that any "association" is
really "out there" in the poem rather than in the poet him
self. To him the poet is "possessed" by events. It should
be obvious that the scholar can hardly establish the exact
locus of the association pattern of a poem by analysis of
the poem itself. By the time the poem can be read, its
events are present only in the poem; all that the scholar
53Tape-recorded lecture at home of Warren Tallman,
July 24, 1961.
202
can know is that they must have been once present in the
poet for him to have been the instrument that recorded the
poem, and that, depending on the kind of event, they could
also have once had existence outside the poet. But whether
these events impinged upon the poet by his own activity or
by their activity seems doomed to remain an academic or per
haps philosophic question. It must suffice for this study
to have established that many of Duncan's poems indeed
appear to have followed the actual sequence of events that
seem to have occurred in his field of existence— whatever
might have been the activity by which he became aware of
these events.
Further, Duncan's poems, in addition to appearing to
conform in their structure and composition to Duncan's the
oretical propositions, also demonstrate in their concerns a
complete unity with his critical and theoretical utterances.
There is indeed in all his writing a consistency which his
belief in the all-pervading influence of the numinous powers
necessarily entails. In fact, close examination of Duncan's
early work would probably establish that Duncan was attempt
ing to write in accord with Olson's "field” theory long be
fore Olson had given the term "field" to him. His earliest
published poems, those of the book The Years as Catches:
First Poems (1939-1946),54 show him already regarding things
54Berkeley, 1966.
r ■ ". 203
j
and events as mere chance "catches," as unpredictable gifts
|
from the universe. It does not seem demonstrable that Dun-
can is in his poems a voice of the cosmos, but there is
i
present in all his work a reverence for the vital and spon
taneous— a reverence of which the cosmos could not possibly
be ashamed.
CHAPTER V
CHARLES OLSON AS POET: TEACHER OF A CITY
In examining the poetry of Charles Olson we shall once
again try to determine how far the concerns and techniques
in the poems themselves are consistent with the theoretical
declarations by the poet in his prose. Olson emphasizes as
much as Duncan that every thing, event, and action within
the cosmos is absolutely contingent upon the great processes
which uniquely order every segment and moment of this cos
mos . And therefore Olson, just as much as Duncan, should be
found to write a poetry so specific to the particularity of
his own self and context that it appears as no more than a
corollary to his other actions. When a man envisions a uni
verse as all-pervasive and all-controlling as that envi
sioned by Duncan or Olson, and expects others to accept his
vision as both valid and sincerely held, the totality of
that man's actions should necessarily appear to have re
ceived this pervasive force and thus show everywhere a
recognizable harmony and consistency.
Olson has written several books of poems, including In
204
205
Co ld He ll / In Thicket , O'Ryan,^ The Dis tances,3 The: Maximus
Poems , 4 and Maximus from Dogtown 1.5 The most important of
these are The Maximus Poems and Maximus from Dogtown I,
which are not only the latest in composition but also are,
in fact, the beginnings of sequences of poems at which Olson
is still working. These two books, then, seem to mark the
farthest point in poetry which Olson has reached as a result
of his theoretical speculations— and also a point which his
continuing attention to the Maximus sequences indicates he
is still basically satisfied with. These books would thus
appear to be the logical ones on which to center any inves
tigation of the nature of Olson's poetic practices.
Olson's Persona: Maximus of Tyre
In both The Maximus Poems and Maximus from Dogtown I,
Olson employs a persona throughout. The name of this per
sona, "Maximus," immediately calls to mind the "great man,"
the homo maximus of the Renaissance, the Da Vinci capable
and authoritative in every field. The homo maximus happened
also to be Robert Duncan's first idea of who Olson's Maximus
was, but fortunately Duncan wrote to Olson for verification.
Olson's reply was that "he hadn't thought of it," Duncan
^Mallorca, 1953.
2San Francisco, 1965 (written ca. 1953-54).
3New York, 1960. 4New York, 1960.
5San Francisco, 1961.
206
tells us. "Olson had in mind Maximus of Tyre."6 Since the
actual overt references to Tyre within The Maximus Poems are
limited to the titles of two poems, "Tyrian Businesses" and
"Maximus, at Tyre and Boston," and to a single line in "Let
ter 3," without Olson's comment to Duncan the identity of
Maximus could have remained vague or ambiguous for a long
time. The original Maximus of Tyre was a Greek rhetorician
and philosopher who flourished in the second century A.D.
about the time of the Antonines and Commodus. His full name
was Cassius Maximus Tyrius, and his complete writings con
sist of forty-one philosophical dissertations. According to
one of his commentators, Ben Shahn, Maximus was properly a
non-Christian eclectic Platonist.7
Any reading of the dissertations of Maximus of Tyre can
immediately confirm the likelihood of his being the Maximus
of Olson's The Maximus Poems. In nearly every dissertation
we find a strong echo of Olson's own theoretical writings.
The concerns of Maximus of Tyre are essentially the same as
those of Olson in his prose theories. And usually, in fact,
Maximus not only takes the same view toward these concerns
as Olson, but also expresses this view in even stronger and
more categorical terms than Olson.
^Tape-recorded lecture at home of Warren Tallman, Van
couver, B.C., July 23, 1961.
7Maximus of Tyre on the Dispute about Images (New York,
1964), n.p.
207
For example, whereas Olson asserts that the Universe is
vital and evolving and that its processes govern the fates
of all its inhabitants, including man, he hesitates to term
this universe "divine"; Maximus agrees completely concerning
the evolving process and then continues to the assumption of
divinity Olson would not venture to make.
What is this. The eye says it is the sun. What is that.
The ear says it is thunder. What are these things thus
flourishing and beautiful, these revolutions and muta
tions, the various temperament of the air, the generations
of animals, and the nature of fruits? The soul says, that
all these are the works of divinity; it desires the arti
ficer and predicts his art.8
Asks Maximus, "How can anything be established unless divin
ity supports its Nature?" (1, 10). And in another place he
asserts that all of creation, the earth, the sea, the air,
heaven, and all their contents are nothing but "the works of
the nods of Jupiter" (I, 50).
Much like both Olson and Duncan, Maximus believes that
goodness and correctness lie strictly in a thing's partici
pating in the divine. He says of divinity, "So far as ev
erything participates of this, it is beautiful, stable, and
safe; and so far as it falls off from this, it is base, dis
sipated, and corrupted" (I, 15). Further, he believes that
the universe possesses a harmony that over-rides all appar
ent divisions and contradictions. Like Olson, he believes
that categorization and anatomization are not processes of
8The Dissertations of Maximus Tyrius, trans. Thomas
Taylor (London, 1804), I, 6-7.
208
the cosmos. Says Maximus,
Consider all this as a certain harmony of a musical in
strument, and that the artist is divinity, from whom the
harmony originates, and proceeding through the air, the
earth, and the sea, through animals and plants, and after
this descending into many and dissimilar natures, composes
the war which they wage with each other; just as a Cory-
phaean harmony descending into the garrulity of a choir
composes its tumult. (I, 33)
Olson, we have seen, firmly believes that reality is
best apprehended from within, that it can be intuited or
experienced through awareness of one's own processes. Maxi
mus also believes in such a mental action, in "divination,1 1
as a viable way to knowledge and terms it a valid extension
of intellect (I, 35-36). And Maximus, like Olson, believes
that man owes obedience to the divine, that he should "be
obedient to the beautiful in conduct" and oppose whatever is
unnatural or base (II, 2).
To Maximus, mem was born into a state of obedience in
which nature gladly fed him. The first men found the uni
verse everywhere as bountiful and nourishing as Olson has
ever suggested it can be.
. . . they, after their birth, lived without difficulty;
for the earth supplied them with aliment, rich meadows,
long-haired mountains, and abundance of fruits, such as
she is accustomed to bear when undisturbed by husbandmen.
The nymphs also supplied them with pure fountains, pel
lucid rivers, and easily-pervious and copious sources of
other streams. To these things also was added a bland
heat from the sun, which afforded a solace to bodies by
its circumfluent symmetry; and cooling breezes from the
rivers refreshed them in the summer. To the inhabitants
of the earth, thus living in an abundant supply of spon
taneous good# hostility was unknown. (I, 197-198)
Maximus, like Olson, believes that in all times cooperation
209
with this "abundant supply of spontaneous good" provided by
the cosmos is all that a man needs perform. To him there is
absolutely no need for man to be greedy or exploiting toward
nature. Nature supplies everything that man needs, and be
yond this he should wish nothing.
. . . the indigence of >the body may without difficulty
satisfy the desires of the body. Is anyone thirsty?
there are fountains everywhere. This sun is hotter than a
military cloak; these meadows are the most variegated of
all spectacles: these flowers are natural fragrancies.
(II, 149)
The proper behavior toward nature and the universe Max
imus believes to be epitomized in the life of Diogenes, who
"travelled round the earth without restraint, . . . neither
oppressed by the education of children . . . nor driven from
place to place by merchandise." He wanted no more than the
earth would readily give, and thus, by obeying the nature of
the universe, enjoyed complete freedom and the fullest of
wealth. "His kingdoms were temples, and gymnasia, and sa
cred groves," declares Maximus,
and his wealth was the most abundant, the most secure; for
it consisted of the whole earth and its fruits, together
with fountains, the off-spring of the earth, more copious
than all the Lesbian and Chian wine.
At all times he obeyed the divinity of the universe: "nor
did he withdraw himself from the seasons appointed by Jupi-
!
ter, nor attempt to oppose him by contriving bland heat in
winter and refrigeration in summer." Just as Olson recom
mends, Diogenes did not seek to substitute his own universe
for that of the gods. And he therefore prospered, says
210
Maximus: "he was so accustomed to the nature of the uni
verse that from this mode of life he became healthy and
strong" (I, 203-204). He continually lived as if life on
sarth was already that communal sharing of natural process
so clearly hop'd for by both Duncan and Olson.
In Maximus's view, much as in Olson's, greed, pride,
and ambition in man can stop the feeding processes in na
ture. Olson remarks that man can thus turn nature against
tierself, and Maximus's parable about Midas seems to illus
trate exactly this point. In Maximus's version of the Midas
story, Midas traps a satyr and forces him to make the very
land and its contents turn to gold. And so the land is
turned against itself; instead of its former nourishment it
can now provide only famine. Midas is reduced to desperate
prayers "that his ancient poverty, fertile, all-producing,
and abounding with fruits, might return to him," but, says
Maximus, "he prayed in vain" (II, 107-108).
Greed and pride, feels Maximus, have always been the
cause of man's cutting off the earth's fertility, like
Midas, by attempting to exploit her. The very first men
abandoned their god-given ease and began to enclose "them
selves with fortifications and walls," to defend "their feet
with skins," their bodies with "bandages” and ornament, and
everywhere to "molest the earth by digging into it for
metals." Maximus, like Olson's Apollonius, objects to the
cutting from the earth of that which will not grow again.
211
He accuses these first men of slaughtering innocent animals
for "the gratification of their belly," and of plundering
flocks of birds from the air. "They aspired after wealth,"
he remarks, "but always considered that portion of it which
was present as indigence, when compared with that which was
absent, and what they possessed as less than what they ex
pected." And in their growing arrogance and greed, Maximus
tells us, these men began to despise even the gods who would
not always yield to their demands, and, finally, to act "as
if the gods had no existence" (I, 199-200).
Unwillingness to cooperate with the universe, to accept
what it gives, leads to greed, and greed leads to implicit
or explicit impiety. Declares Maximus, "Desire is the
greatest evil to man" (I, 143). Just as much as Olson,
Maximus feels any exploitation of the earth is a deliberate
affront to its benevolence. "Just as, if you take away the
soul from the body, you render the body fixed," he tells us,
"if you take away the fruits from the earth, you cut off its
fertility" (II, 118-119). Maximus is against any improper
use of a horse or an ox and against any domestication of a
lion for use as a pack animal, simply because these actions
do not show a sufficient respect either for nature or for
the integrity of the animals involved. Again like Olson, he
seems to feel that these animals have just as much right to
their being as man has to his. Further, and this shall be
very important in Olson's The Maximus Poems, Maximus opposes
212
categorically any activity done for gain. Whether it be
fanning or fighting, personal need is the only justification
for any activity. Desire for any profit over and above what
one really needs for existence Maximus feels completely
unworthy in a man. To him, no man has a right to any more
things of this world than has any other man; every man has a
right to an equal share in all. To Maximus, the only bound
ary of pleasures is "indigence itself" (II, 149).
In Maximus's view, as in Olson's, man must never place
his own inventions and standards above those of the uni
verse; he must never make that preference of society to cos-
mos which Olson tells Elaine Feinstein he finds "deathly."^
Maximus gives an extended example of how greed, pride, defi
ance of nature, and the will to exploitation can bring
disaster to a man. His example is a barbarian king who
"knew not the sea" but who determined to build a floating
city in which to sail from Egypt to Troy. The king deter
mined, in effect, to plant society on one of the most naked
faces of the cosmos:
. . . for one part of it was a most beautiful palace, in
which there were bed-chambers, couches, and thrones:
'Close to the gates a spacious garden lay.'
In this trees flourished, pomegranates, pears, apples, and
vines. In other parts of it were a bath and gymnasium, a
place for cooks, bed-chambers for harlots, a banquetting-
room, and everything else belonging to a luxurious city.
The ship too, was invested with a variety of colours most
beautiful to the view, and abounded with silver and gold;
. . . (II, 122-123)
9"Letter to Elaine Feinstein," Human Universe, p. 97.
213
The King's end, of course, was inevitable. While other
ships, £itted to the universe in which they were to sail,
"braved the wind," the pretentious vessel of "this impious
king" was driven helplessly to shore and the destruction of
both its "stupid master" and its "unseasonable luxury" (II,
124) .
Maximus would feel that such is a suitable end for any
one who so attempts to arrogate himself over both his fel-
low-man and his mother-universe. To him, men and things can
co-exist only if they cooperate with one another in a state
where "each performs its proper office" and none attempts to
control or exploit another. Says Maximus,
A city is a thing mingled from the cooperation of all:
just as the necessity of the body, which is manifold, and
is indigent of many things, is preserved by the parts con
tributing to the good of the whole: the feet support, the
hands operate, the eyes see, the ears hear; and . . . each
performs its proper office. (I, 54)
Maximus would be in complete agreement with Olson's Apollo
nius that every man should be free to fulfill his own life
but that "no man should impose his mode of life on
others."10 Maximus looks eagerly back to a situation where
"things existed in common, and most abundant, through the
rarity of possessions" (II, 181-182). His is a vision of
communal life nearly identical to that which Olson expresses
through his Apollonius of Tyana:
^"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, ed. Donald
Allen (San Francisco, 1965), pi 40.
214
. . . men dwelling on the earth, and yet not slaves of it,
but lovers; I saw them defended on all sides and yet with
out any defence. I saw men possessed of nothing but what
all possess. (Human Universe, p. 39)
There should be no doubt that Maximus of Tyre is a
thoroughly suitable persona for Olson to employ for the
expression of his own ideas. The two men's views on such
topics as the nature of the universe, man's relationship to
this universe, and the best way to live, are all as close to
coincidence as two men's views can possibly be. Olson's use
of Maximus of Tyre as a persona gives his poems from their
very beginnings a great probability of being entirely con
sistent in their concerns and attitudes with his own the
oretical writings. Even Maximus of Tyre's belief about the
nature of the poet seems exactly what the writing career of
Olson to date indicates he holds the poet to be.
. . . when you speak of a poet you also speak of a philos
opher and when of a philosopher you likewise speak of a
poet. (II, 103)
Such a statement indicates a fundamental assumption of all
Black Mountain poets.
The Maximus Poems: The Natural Unfolding
When a poet has put forth a proposition such as Olson's
- that form is never more than an extension of content, it
would be hazardous for a critic to attempt to consider.the
form of his poems in total isolation. It would be espe
cially hazardous in the present investigation, which is
intended to determine the extent to which such propositions
215
of the Black Mountain poets have been acknowledged in their
irerse and put into practice. However, if we accept Olson's
proposition here for the purposes of our inquiry, we are led
to a critical impasse. The form of his poems can be judged
only in terms of the precise content of which it is pre
sented as the extension, but this content itself can be
inferred only from the form it has been given. The poet
alone has lived through the instant of time and the particu
lar field which the poem has been asked to "enact." And he
alone can know whether the enactment has been performed
faithfully.
Only rarely in poets do we get "background" information
such as Duncan provides about his "Medieval Scenes"— and
even here we are left uncomfortably to trust everything we
are told. And only rarely also do we get poems, such as
Duncan's Pindar poem and "After Reading H.D.'s Hermetic
Definitions" in which most of the initiators of the poem are
plainly implied by the verse. In working with Olson, in
particular, we shall frequently be limited to observing how
natural or true-to-the-usual-order-of-events-in-life the
structure of his poems is, how similar to his theory is the
poet's apparent posture in the poems, and how much his
apparent and expressed intentions in the poems agree with
what his theories state a poet should do. At least, because
Olson like all the Black Mountain poets believes that all of
a man's actions should be governed by one single, all-
216
encompassing, and sincerely held belief about the universe,
we can always seek consistency and harmony within his work.
Olson does make numerous statements within The Maximus
Poems that suggest what he is attempting to accomplish by
the poems. Particularly revealing in this regard is the
opening poem of the book, "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to
5fou." It immediately by its title implies that Olson is
going to deal chiefly with his hometown of Gloucester, Mas
sachusetts. But, more important, its opening lines immedi
ately make clear both how much Olson feels that life is an
adventure or dance constantly unfolding, and the great ex
tent to which the poems are going to deal with the necessity
to let life unfold.
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood
jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance (p. 1)
Dlson's voice, Maximus, is a man, we find, a miracle of na
ture's ever-boiling processes of production as marvelous as
any jewel produced by the earth's weight and fire. From out
of the "boiling water" of the universe, like any natural
thing, he has come to reveal to his fellow men just who is
obedient to the instant— "the present dance." And he has
also come, we discover, to assert that the uncertainties of
the ever-unfolding present can be always as fruitful as they
have been in the past. Man can endure into the future as
long as birds have endured in the past.
217
the thing you're after
may be around the bend
of the next (second, time-slain,
[the birdl the birdl
"Time-slain" or not, the bird endures by riding natural
force, by accepting what lies "around the bend."
And there I (strong) thrust, the mastl
[flight
(of the bird
o Kylix, o
Antony of Padua
sweep low, o bless
the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones
on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they
[depart, . . .
The form of the verse here shows Olson's excitement at
the instant of writing, especially at that instant when he
is moved to call on Saint Antony of Padua (another respecter
of natural process who caused the very fish to worship) to
bless the old roofs from which the gulls continue their
ever-fruitful cooperation with nature. Here we see Olson
working at the intersection of person, time, process, and
place, as the instant of intersection between him, Glouces
ter's roofs, and Western history produces the unique excla
mation quoted. He is clearly participating with reality to
produce these lines: without the birds' building of their
nests, Antony of Padua's being canonized and having entered
Olson's field of awareness, and the roofs the birds perch on
having been erected, the lines would be certainly impossi
ble. The excitement of Olson presented by the unusual form
of the verse seems very much an enactment of the kinetic: a
218
enactment of the wandering passion of his own mind as the
true importance of the birds' fidelity to form occurs to
him.
In this opening poem or "letter" of The Maximus Poems
natural force and its unerring success in moving toward
forms is announced as one of the keystones of the book.
"Love is form," Olson announces.
feather to feather added
(and what is mineral, what
is curling hair, the string
you carry in you nervous beak, these
make bulk, these, in the end, are
the sum. (p. 1)
And the enemies of true unfolding form are announced as the
book's targets. For the true processes of the world have in
many cases been submerged, Olson as Maximus tells us; "ci
vilization" has been imposed by man over cosmos. The bird
may continue building its nest and providing an object
lesson for man, but it does so ignored. To modern man there
is no immediate profit to be gained in watching this bird,
or in any other kind of attention to the real.
But that which matters, that which insists, that which
[will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how where,
[where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence,
[is spray-gunned?
when even our bird, my roofs,
cannot be heard
when even you, when sound itself is neoned in? (p. 2)
A rebellion is needed, Olson declares:
219
o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out) (p. 4)
For the essential reality and process which is being hidden
from man must be attended to, must be heard. Even though
civilization has made this reality now the "underpart" of
life, it is still of elemental importance.
the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain
is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts 1
facts, to be dealt with, as the sea is, the
[demand
that they be played by, that they only can
[be, that they must
be played by, said he, coldly, the
ear! (p. 2)
There is only one way the real can be attended to— "by ear,
he sd [sic]"— and this is precisely what Maximus, that
"metal hot from boiling water," is going to do in The Maxi
mus Poems: listen to the real. He is going to listen to
"the law of object,' strut after strut, what you are, what
you must be, what / the force can throw up, can, right now
hereinafter erect.” And, informed by his hearing, he is
going to bring to Olson's fellow men news of what natural
process can accomplish, of things that are more "than that
which you / can do."
The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say
under the hand, as I see it, over the waters
from this place where I am, where I hear,
can still hear
From here I carry you a feather
as though, sharp, I picked up,
in the afternoon delivered you
a jewel,
__________________it flashing more than a wing, ____________
220
than any old romantic thing,
than memory, than place,
than anything other than that which you carry
them that which is,
call it a nest, around the head of, call it
the next second
than that which you
ean doI (p. 4)
Thus "Letter 1" of The Maximus Poems concludes, a clear
announcement of what the concern of the subsequent poems
will be and a clear introduction to Maximus, the listener
who is to deliver the real. In content it is certainly in
harmony with Olson's theories: man as "an object in nature"
is plainly what Maximus is going to emphasize in the poems.
Maximus himself, "by islands hidden in the blood," is most
definitely obeying Olson's injunction to "stay in the condi
tion of things."11 In form the poem's adherence to Olson's
theories is not as apparent. Certainly, the poem is an
enactment of the kinetics of Olson's excitements and con
cerns at the time of writing. The logic of the poem seems
far more the logic of natural occurrence than that of expo
sition or narration; the sequence of development in the poen
does seem to involve a syntax of apposition— one perception
follows another as quickly as the poet's mind can make the
association.
love is not easy
but how shall you know,
llHEqual, That Is, to the Real Itself," Human Universe,
p. 117.
221
New England, now
that pejorocracy is here, how
that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter
in the afternoon, offend
a black-gold loin? (p. 3)
Prom New England to Oregon, from bird's song to streetcars'
twitter, the mind moves and the poem follows.
The sense of the lines of this first poem of The Maxi
mus Poems is indeed most clear when a considerable pause is
observed at the end of each line as if each one were a sin
gle unit of breath. This reading technique seems also to
yield the correct tone and rhythm in the poem. A line such
as "the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what
you must be, what" gains a suitable intensity of excitement
by being rushed through in one breath, and the pause after
the final "what" clearly suggests that the poet has ended
the line here only because in his excitement he has run out
of breath. Short lines, on the other hand, gain in deliber
ation and determination by being read as single breath
units.
o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)
At all times these rhythms and the implied kinds of emotion
seem to be in accord with Olson's most likely reaction to
his apparent field of awareness at the instants of composi
tion. That is, at no times do the implied emotions seem in
excess of the visible facts Olson is confronting. Whether
222
or not all the language of the poem is indeed "language as
the act of the instant" cannot be entirely determined. Cer
tainly it seems spontaneous, and even the sequence of the
various sections of the poem seems more spontaneous than
ideal— as our necessity of quoting above out of this se
quence indicates. There is no evidence in "Letter 1"
of any imposed form which would make it anything other than
an instance of the unfolding of natural process which the
poem praises.
That the entire book is intended by Olson as a listen
ing for and a presentation of the real is continually indi
cated throughout its poems. The "listening" image recurs
incessantly in the verse. And the search for the actual and
jelemental is not only carried out, as we shall see, but alsoj
stated directly on several occasions. Says Olson's Maximus
in letter 12, "Maximus, to Himself,"
I have made dialogues,
have discussed ancient texts,
have thrown what light 1 could,
[offered
what pleasures
doceat allows
But the known?
This, I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world. (p. 52)
This search for the known and particular, this attempt to
receive the gift of life, is again given as Olson's purpose j
j
in "Letter 22."
22 3
And what I write
is stopping the battle,
to set down, right in the midst
[of
the deeds, to tell
what this one did, how
in the fray, he made this play,
[did grapple
with that one, how
his eye flashed
to celebrate
(beauty will not wait)
men,
and girls (pp- 97-98)
There have been only two "studies" of The Maximus Poems
made to this date, and only one of these is really illumi-
i ;
jnating about the intentions and techniques of Olson in the
jbook. Neither is a true "study," the first being Ed Dorn's ;
! 1 9
What I See in The Maximus Poems, which is really no more
than an application of Olson1s ecological principles to
Dorn's own context, and the other a short commentary which
Robert Duncan made during his tape-recorded lecture at the
home of Warren Tallman on July 23, 1961. Duncan's comments,
las random as they are, at least have the benefit of being
i 1
informed by his own personal contact with Olson. Duncan
tells us here that Olson's interest in Gloucester stems from
j i
I the fact that "there were certain places . . . that Charles I
! |
|
I
^Ventura, Calif., 1960. j
224
thought Eleusis," and Gloucester appeared to him as one of
these: "Gloucester was one of the holy places of this
world." Gloucester, with its harbor and fish, was one of
the magical places of this world, a place of the numen which
readily fed the men who would cooperate with its orders.
Olson's chief intention, says Duncan in his lecture,
has been to show both the "actuality" of that place and "the
continuity of the kind of excitement and mind" that has
occurred there. Particularly he has been interested in
showing the continual scorn exploitive man has had for the
powers in Gloucester that make life possible. Olson's ap
proach to Gloucester, Duncan implies, has been much like
that in a vision: Maximus is a "dream or rite poem" he
says. And therefore, because "magic's greatest enemy . . .
is fantasy," at all times in Maximus "there must be an
actual occurrence." "You've got to know what is there." In
(
addition, he tells us, "documentation begins to be as it is
in magic." "You have no alternative but to use those
words."
Duncan particularly wishes to stress the fact that
there is no "overstructure" in The Maximus Poems. He com
pares Olson's view of letting reality go its own way in
composition with Joyce's imposing of a structure borrowed
from Vico onto his novel Finnegan's Wake. He says, in his
lecture,
The form has got to be in every single locus of the poem,
225
and the reason it does this is because that form which
Joyce borrowed from Vico, that form of one, two, three, or
one, two, three, four, is a very definite idea about what
the universe is like and a very definite idea about the
meaning of human history. And for Charles, or Whitehead,
he believed, no, that human history is right here,
eternity.
Olson would wish that any definite idea about the universe
Dr history come from the universe itself rather than from
the mind of any human speculator. Hence, says Duncan,
"Charles laid down one law: nothing should be in Maximus
that wasn't in Gloucester— for himself." Each event not
only had to be there but Olson personally had to know it was
there. This particular determination, claims Duncan, ex
plains the presence of the map of Gloucester on the cover of
The Maximus Poems. By this map's insisting on the geo
graphic reality of the place of the city, the map keeps the
poet's attentions on the real. Says Duncan, "Maximus
actually takes this map on the cover because the map is the
actual area in which this thing takes place." He continues,
You can go on making this map in new terms, you can go on
describing this geography in a whole series of subsequent
terms. And more than that, you know that that map extends
in time the same way. That's when you start to dig, and
so you really do have such a stage that is never going to
be taken for granted.
The map keeps the poet working with real things and moving
within a specific reality. For Olson, Duncan says, "the
poem is how you move around in an area," and the map gives
this area both particularity and continuity. It reminds
Olson that he is not working with a place in a "nation,"
I 226
j
that thing of discourse, but with a place on a continent
1
[that has "a continuity he could trace all the way to
Mexico."
I
I
Duncan's comments remind us that Olson in his criticism
was firmly pledged to preserving the particularity of all
things. The lack of overstructure Duncan observes in The
Maximus Poems seems clearly related to Olson's wish that
anything, even the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which
The Maximus Poems are about, be allowed to assert its own
identity without any interference from man. Olson's admis
sion of only actual occurrences into his poems reminds us of
his emphasis on the necessity for real events rather than
for the fabrications of discourse. And his apparent insist
ence on limiting the occurrences of the poems to the immedi
ate area of Gloucester reminds us of his advice to Ed Dorn:
Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until
you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any
other man. It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed Wire or
Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it.13
Whether or not Olson has gained an exhaustive knowledge
jof Gloucester we shall perhaps see later. There does seem
jto be much evidence in The Maximus Poems not only that Dun-
can is definitely correct about Olson's dependence on actual
j
[things and occurrences to gain knowledge, but also that 01-
i
son's own claim in "Letter 1" that natural process leads to
the best conditions is a constant concern of the book. In
■ * - 3A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn (San Francisco,
19-64-,- p.--13-.- ' ____ ________—- _____
227
"Letter 5," for example, Olson argues that vendors of cul
ture should let a man ignore cultural offerings if he so
wishes. Simply by fulfilling his own actuality and by
existing within his own limits any man can be "beautiful"
i
and "infinite."
The habits of newsprint
(plus possibly the National Geographic)
are the limits of
literacy
i
(tho that the many want any more than, who
[died
what scrod brought the Boston market,
what movies, Gorin's sales, the queer
[doings
Rockport— or Squib's coynesses
about the Antigonish man was pulled out,
[3 AM,
from under Chisholm's Wharf, mumbling
I am not at all aware
that anything more than that
is called for. Limits
are what any of us
are inside of
And there is nothing less applicable
than the complaints of the culture mongers
about what the people don't know but ohl
how beautiful they are, how infinite 1
(pp. 17-18)
And Olson himself comes to this observation only because of
the actual publication in Gloucester of a pretentious liter
ary magazine.
| To Olson actuality naturally unfolds toward truth as
things reach for fulfillment of their form. In "Letter 9,"
actual plum trees (he implies) bring him to these lines:
there is no other issue than
the moment of
________________________the pleasure of _ _____________
228
this plum,
j these things
j which don't carry their end any further than
! their reality in
themselves (p. 42)
The truth of the plum is that it is a plum, just as the
truth of any thing is that it is. This principle is really
the root of Olson's dependence on actuality. Like William
Carlos Williams, he feels that there are no ideas but in
things— but he goes beyond Williams in believing that there
are really no ideas except in naturally developing things.
Truth lies in a thing when it exists for itself, fulfilling
its own form as a "self-thing," Olson believes. It lies
more in the private man than it ever does in the public man
who exists not for himself, naturally unfolding, but for his
"nation" and his "people." Olson says,
As of myself
I'd pose it
today
as Alfred at Ashdown, a wild boar
(aprino more, Asser says)
versus
my own wrists and all my joints, versus speech's connec
tives, versus the tasks
I obey to,
not a nation's,
or at all to history,
or to building (p. 43)
And like the private man and the plum are many of Olson's
!
poems, which reach no end and meet no expectation beyond
their own selves. Such a poem is this one, that staggers to
a natural end, its concerns suddenly forgotten as the poet
loses track— much like the lost bee that has all at once
229
distracted him by entering his window. And so actuality,
not the poet, ends the poem just as it caused it to begin.
One perception has led to another until perception itself
has ended.
j i
i ;
I measure my song,
measure the sources of my song,
measure me, measure
my forces
(And I buzz,
| as the bee does,
who's missed
the plum tree,
and gone and got himself caught
in my window
And the whirring of whose wings
blots out the rattle of
my machine) (p. 44)
The Maximus Poems: Eyes and Ears
......... tell you? hal who
can tell another how
to manage the swimming? (p. 5)
So Olson begins "Maximus, to Gloucester," the second
letter of The Maximus Poems. It is not merely an academic
question. The fact that no man can tell another how to lead
his life is clearly a definite corollary of Olson's belief
i
that every man exists in a thoroughly unique field of
forces, objects, and events, and can act only in accord with
his own particularity and that of his context. "It is the
elements men stand in the midst of" that are the important
things in their lives, Olson says later in this poem, and
thus repeats his theoretical claim about the significance of
230
one's fellow-objects in nature (p. 6). But if one man can
not tell another precisely how to live, he can at least
offer some principles for his guidance. And throughout The
Maximus Poems Olson attempts to provide such advice.
His advice is always, however, couched in actuality.
He shows the necessity of cooperating with the elements in
the example of the fisherman, caught alone in his dory in a
blizzard, who "purposely allowed" his hands to freeze to the
oars so that he was forced to keep rowing and finally make
it to the coast and safety (p. 6). He shows the necessity
of participating in the creative processes of nature by the
example of the seventeenth-century carpenter who was, he
says, the first in Gloucester "to make things, / not just
live off nature" (p. 31). And always he teaches that ele
mental reality is worth care, dedication, and attention.
Not that the state of it
needs crying over. The real
is always worth the act of
lifting it, treading it
to be clear, to make it
clear (to clothe honor
anew. (p. 92)
In The Maximus Poems Olson gives particular notice to
those early inhabitants of Gloucester who gave a sincere and
often desperate attention to the physical nature of man's
condition. Particularly heedful of the reality of place
were the fourteen men of the Dorchester Company left at
Stage Head by the ship Fellowship in 1624. Marooned for a
winter in a previously uninhabited wilderness, they took j
: i
great care to harmonize themselves with the actual physical
jfeatures of the landscape.
i
they took their shelter either side of softer Stage Head I
and let Tablet Rock buff for them the weather side: . . . j
Further, despite their "primitive" surroundings, these very I
first dwellers in Gloucester contributed to their surround- J
ings by building a remarkable house whose timbers would
Isurvive for three hundred years.
I
on the lee,
below the ridge which runs from my house straight to Tab-
[let Rock
these Dorset Somerset men built the Company house which
[Endicott
thought grand enough to pull it down and haul it all the
[way
to Salem for his Governor's abode: (p. 106)
Such participation with reality, such care to adapt, strikes
Olson as indisputable proof that most of these fourteen men
were real men with accurate eyes for what is important in
nature.
. . . fourteen men
of whom we know eleven
twenty-two eyes
and the snow flew
where gulls now paper
the skies (p. 108)
But Gloucester was not always to behold only men who
|
believed that "the real is always worth the act of / lifting
it," Olson finds. The realistic sailors and fishermen who
used the geography and resources of the new continent
strictly as means to safety and sustenance, who observed
Maximus of Tyre's rule that "indigence" is the only justifi
cation of human activity, were soon opposed by the power-
seeking theocracy of nearby Plymouth. This theocracy
desired the land and fisheries of Gloucester for its own
profit, was "irked fishermen had come," Olson claims, and
hired Miles Standish as its stooge rather than the more up
right and worthy John Smith.
("vainglorious,"
they put Smith down
as, and hire a Standish
to do corporative
murder: keep things clean
by campaigns
drop bombs. (p. 125)
To Olson, Standish is "the Short Chimney," the "little man
from Plymouth," and the "lousy Christian," while Smith is a
seaman with a keen eye for the real.
. . . Admiral of New England Smith proudly
took himself to be, rightly, who sounded
her bays, ran her coasts and wrote down
Algonquin so scrupulously Massachusetts (p. 49)
The Capteyne
he was, the eye he had
for what New England offered,
what we are other than
theocratic . . .
. . . how we are
| oxyacetylene, we come in that close
when we do come in. (pp. 50-51)
Using Standish with his "coal scuttle on head / silly
pistol" and "slashed trousers / ballooning over bow legs"
(p. 112) as its spokesman, the theocracy began to attempt to
233
drive off those men who came in "that close" to reality. It
refused to share a fishing stage it had built at Gloucester
with a fisherman named Hewes and expelled him and his men
|
from this stage at gunpoint. Not for it was Maximus of
Tyre's ideal of communal existence. This clash between the
theocracy and Hewes, Olson feels, was the beginning of the
struggle in America between individual right to subsist in
one's context and the exploitive ambitions of large institu
tions. Captain Hewes' men were not fighting for that false
thing, "theocracy," out of the universe of discourse, nor
for power over nature's gifts to all men. They were seeking
simply the "real bucks" that would support themselves and
their families.
real bucks not
each man and woman
and child living off
things paid on
33 year schedule
credit out ahead,
each generation
living 33 years
of shoddy &
safety— not at all
living. (p. 113)
Says Olson of Hewes' vain struggle for his communal rights
and for a share of the actuality which was willing to feed
him:
They should raise a monument
to a fisherman crouched down
behind a hogshead, protecting
his dried fish (p. 114)
234
To Olson, the right way to live is to look with care at
your coastlines, to protect one's "dried fish," and to con
tribute toward the self-fulfillment of place and person. A
man must have a clear vision of what is important, like the
Portuguese fishermen have who "pour the money back into
engines; into their ships, . . . put it back in" (p. 28),
thus putting back into actuality what actuality has yielded.
And always in The Maximus Poems a man must have an accurate
notion of what is remarkable, like the fisherman who was
readily impressed by the skill of his competitor.
What struck me was, Dysart's admiration, how the Magellan
had overtaken him, from the speed of her Diesels, and he
saying he was sure Rose had sighted the fish as soon as he
had, aft of him though she was, those island eyes that
very damned good, and he, Dysart, and his ship, witness to
it
At all times, Olson believes, a man should have a respect
for the eyes that allow exact participation with nature, and
must always himself work at seeing what is really there and
at avoiding the obscuring generalities that men create. As
Olson concludes the poem just quoted,
What kills me is, how do these others think
the eyes are
sharp? by gift? bah by love of self? try
[it by god? ask
the bean sandwich
There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as
[mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of (p. 29)
To Olson, a man must be as knowing of his context "as a
halibut knows its grounds (as Olsen knows those grounds)"
235
(p. 19). He must have the sort of eye which can bring a
3hip into port without radar in the midst of a blizzard.
The sort of eye
which later knew the Peak of Brown's
as though it were his own garden (as Bowditch brought the
[Eppie Sawyer
spot to her wharf a Christman morning) (p. 7)
At all times he must have an extremely sharp, an extremely
fine, attention for the field which he is in, for its
motions and its facts.
as fine as fins are
i
as fine as
as firm as a mackerel is
(fresh out of water)
as sure
as sure as no owner is
(or he'd be to sea). (p. 20)
No where in man is there room for carelessness," ex
claims Olson in another poem, "Letter 7." A man's attitude
toward his entire life should be as conscientious as that of
a shipwright toward his craft.
How much the cracks matter, or seams in a ship, the
[absolutes
of swelling (the mother, of weather (as even in machine
[parts,
tolerance
Only: no latitude, any more than any, elite. The exact
ness
caulking, or "play", calls for, those
millimeters (p. 32)
He should forever scorn those falsenesses of generalization
with which man's universe of discourse seeks to hide reality
— those assertions of sweetness, of goodness, that have no
236
precise basis in the real. He should pay attention only to
the actualities and live as close to these and to the neces
sities of his own life as he can. Like Maximus of Tyre's
Diogenes, he should embrace only "the whole earth and its
fruits" and thus live inside "the nature of the universe"
(Dissertations of Maximus Tyrius, I, 203).
"In the midst of plenty, walk
as close to
bare
In the face of sweetness,
piss
In the time of goodness,
go side, go
smashing, beat them, go as
(as near as you can
tear
In the land of plenty, have
nothing to do with it
take the way of
the lowest,
including
your legs, go
contrary, go
sing (p. 14)
In Olson's poems the consistency of his concerns with
those of his theoretical writings and the fidelity of his
poetic techniques to his theories gives his work such a
harmony that any one point in this work can call us to
another. Here the repeated message of The Maximus Poems
that man should give all his awareness to participation with
the actual and elemental calls to mind Olson's instruction
for composition: that one perception be allowed to lead
"immediately and directly" to a further perception. The
237
attention to the actual unfolding particulars of reality
that Olson recommends for fishermen and all others who
should know the real, is exactly the attention to unfolding
perceptions that Olson asks of the poet:. And often in the
composition of The Maximus Poems Olson takes exactly the
same watchful stance toward his world that he praises Dysart
and the Portuguese fishers for taking* and thus illustrates
the giving of attention "as fine as fins are" by his own
coming in "that close." For instance* in the final poem of
the book, "April Today Main Street," Olson does nothing but
swim through particulars, giving them nil notice in turn as
they impinge upon him.
April today Main Street the sun
was warm enough I could stay
out of the mean easterly was coming up
each cross street
from the harbor, talked to the cop
at the head of Duncan, discovered that Joe
the barber, had inherited the Ftedricsons'
shop, that it was Mrs Galler, not: the Weiners
"winers" the cigar woman and the greeting card
clerk in Sterling pronounced it
as I said her husband
they said he died
in front of her here
in the store
the street
was rife
of its hills,
and me going — _
_______with its ____________ __ ___
238
polyconic
character, the slipping
of Main
to Vinson's Cove,
now fill, and parking
with a baker, . . . (pp. 155-156)
So intensive and continual is the perceptual activity of
this poem that there is no real terminus within it at which
a quotation can be ended. Like reality itself, the poem has
no terminus and can "end" only when the poet relaxes his
attention to it. Olson's praise in The Maximus Poems is for
the fishermen and sailors who with their eyes and ears give
reality all their respect. And in "April Today Main Street"
we see Olson himself as a fisher of the real, seeking the
poem not as a means to fame or power, but because poetry and
reality are his life— much as the fisherman seeks fish be
cause these are the only ways in which the earth will feed
him. Says Olson,
A fisherman is not a successful man
he is not a famous man he is not a man
of power, these are the damned by God. (p. 153)
The successful men are at all times to Olson in The Maximus
Poems the ones who have "no eyes or ears left / to do their
own doings" (p. 13). And no man who would live close to the
true universe, who would shun a false life within the "uni
verse of discourse"— no fisherman, sailor, or poet— could
possibly survive in Olson's view without keen and constantly
trusted senses. For men like Olson's fishers, society's
239
definition of success can never be worth its high price of
illusion. Such men know, Olson tells us in The Maximus
Poems, that the field of one's existence can only be com
pletely depended upon to support life by the man who keeps
his eyes on it and who, like Olson himself, crouches down
among actual hogsheads "protecting his dried fish.'1
The Maximus Poems: Mu-sick, Mu-sick, Mu-sick
What makes it especially difficult today to observe the
real carefully and to protect one's "dried fish," feels
Olson in The Maximus Poems, is the veneer of commercialism
that modern life had placed over everything. Not only are
the roads lined with billboards, the air filled with radio
and television commercials, and the newspapers littered with
advertisements, but even the roofs of the buses in which one
rides are lined with placards that hawk someone's wares.
This obscuring of the real is a two-way process; not only is
the world hidden but also the human senses which should per
ceive this world are jammed by the mass of distracting ir-
relevancies. The "Songs of Maximus" spell Olson's position
!
lout in full.
I !
' colored pictures |
of all things to eat: dirty
j postcards
And words, words, words
all over everything
No eyes or ears left
to do their own doings (all
invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses
i includingthe mind, that worker on what is ______
240
To Olson, the "dirty postcards" of the advertising men are
the worst kinds of obscenity there is, because they repre
sent a hideous perversion of the real. And yet such porno-
graphia are unavoidable; even Olson's Maximus, as dedicated
I
I
as he is to the service of the universe, finds himself cov-
I
ered by them. He and all other living men are made by them
i
to lead a living death, hidden from the universe and buried
I
|in "shallow graves" by the perverters of "what is."
i
all
wrong j
And I am asked — ask myself (I, too, covered
with the gurry of it) where i
shall we go from here, what can we do j
when even the public conveyances I
sing? |
how can we go anywhere,
even cross-town
how get out of anywhere (the bodies
all buried
in shallow graves? (p. 13)
The commercial interests of his country, Olson feels,
have caused "wondership" to be "stolen by, ownership" (p.
9). They have placed a layer of excrement over the wonder
of the universe "right in the peoples' faces (and not as the|
gulls do it, / who do it straight, . . ." (p. 11). His j
jchief wish in The Maximus Poems is that the advertisers, thej
capitalists, the exploiters, would leave: "Let those who ;
use words cheap, who use us cheap / take themselves out of
jthe way" (p. 9). They are offensive to the integrity of
i ;
Jpeople and to the integrity of nature, and oison therefore I
I • I
can have no use for them. i
not as localism, not that mu-sick (the trick |
of corporations, newspapers, slick magazines,
I [movie houses,
the ships, even the wharves, absentee-owned (p. 10)
!
| In his view, these men have placed a fabricated and
j
Lllusionary "mu-sick" over the music of the universe. They
lave, as he wrote to Elaine Feinstein, substituted society
j
for cosmos (Human Universe, p. 97). They prefer their own
-------------------------------------------------- I
creation to natural process and coincidence. I
! how shall you strike,
: o swordsman, the blue-red back
j when, last night, your aim
| was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick
j and not the cribbage game? (p. 3)
t
What is worse, these exploiters have set the tone of the
entire American society, infiltrating and corrupting every
bart of it, including its highest offices.
I mean merchandise men,
who get to be President
after winning, age 12,
ceral ad
prizes. (p. 54)
They have made the artificialities of the universe of dis
course triumph over all and turn every citizen into a mock-
i
ery of the real. Says Olson,
Now all lie |
as Miss Harlow
! I
as Sunday supplement mammoths I
in ice, as there used to be
waxworks |
i
as ugly as Jericho's
First Citizens, kept there
as skulls, the pink semblance
painted back on, as though they were once,
and they were, Leaders
of the people j
I
with shells for eyes
| As she lies, all
white (p. 55)
Just as in his criticism, in The Maximus Poems Olson sees a
great need "to put an end to nation, put an end to culture, j
j . . . to put establishment out of business."14 por the com-l
I |
mercially oriented establishment is the enemy of anything
that exists for itself rather than for profit. Thus it is
opposed not only to the independent existence of every man
but especially to art, that thing which can exist for only
itself. The establishment's "mu-sick" is sung for money j
only, and when it sings of art it can only sing to urge it
to venality. To Olson, this is its song:
(o Statue,
o Republic, o
Tell-A-Vision, the best
is soap. The true troubadours |
are CBS. Melopoeia
is for Cokes by Cokes out of
Pause |
i
i
i i v |
i
(o Po-ets, you j
| should getta
! job (p. 71)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ i
I
«The Causal Mythology," tape-recorded lecture deliv- I
ered at the University of California, Berkeley, July 20,
L965________________ ____... _____ -J
243
• Olson's limiting of his "field" in The Maximus Poems to
j
Gloucester leads him to take this city's history as repre
sentative of the process by which this heinous corruption of
hature and humanity has taken place. As he probes into
jGloucester's past, it becomes more and more clear to him j
that ever since the dispute over the fishing stage the city !
I '
! I
has been moving steadily toward completely commercial j
] i
values. In every period he finds men determined "to turn / i
i
Massachussets into / the staple intended" (p. 157). The j
i
Plymouth-Hewes fight in 1624 is the beginning. Olson com-
j
ments in "Letter 23,"
What we have in this field in these scraps among these
fishermen, and the Plymouth men, is more than the fight ofj
one colony with another, it is the whole engagement
against (1) mercantilism (cf. the Westcountry men and Sir
Edward Coke against the Crown, in Commons, these same
years— against Gorges); and (2) against nascent capitalism
except as it stays the individual adventurer and the
worker on share— against all sliding statism, ownership
getting in to, the community as, Chamber of Commerce, or
theocracy; or City Manager (p. 101)
I
By 1630 in Massachusetts, and particularly in Boston,
primary activities by which a man gained from the earth only
j
what he needed were giving way to large commercial enter-
i
prises motivated by desire for great fortune rather than
jsimply for life. Says Olson,
i j
already merchandise, 1
not merely sowing, j
reaping, building j
houses & out houses, . . . (p. 130) !
Men's activities had moved from conversion of resources into
life to conversion of resources into money— "Conversion, /
244
of another sort than / Christ's" (p. 131). Soon Governor
kndicott had caused the house built out of necessity by the
fourteen men from the Fellowship to be moved to Salem to
I
serve his extravagance. Olson declares,
the newness
j the first men knew was almost
from the start dirtied
by second comers. About seven years |
and you can carry cinders
in your hand for what
| America was worth. May she be damned
for what she did so soon
to what was such a newing (pp. 134-135)
In Olson's view, Gloucester, Massachusetts, and America
may not have been subjected to white rule by means of such
open, bloody, and greedy conquests as were Central and South
America, but the motives of the early settlers in New Eng
land were profit and exploitation just the same. There may
have been no gold and silver to steal, and no Inca empire to
overthrow, but still the early traders and governors acted
so as to usurp the right of the land to its wealth and the
right of individuals to freedom of action. Indirectly these
Itraders and governors were motivated by the tempting profits
|
offered by expanding European markets. Indeed, America had
conquistadors, says Olson, although not in Spanish armor.
It was the hat-makers of La Rochelle, the fish-eaters of
Bristol who were the conquistadors of my country, the
dreamless present (p. 58)
And the continuing wish of the powerful in America to make a
fast dollar has meant that the conquistadors have never
really left.Bowditch, for example, an early president of 1
245
of Harvard, Olson tells us, "founded insurance companies,"
in Olson's view a heartless exploitation of the likelihood
I
of calamity befalling others. To Olson,
j
He represents, then, that movement of HE monies
away from primary production & trade
to the several cankers of profit-making
which have, like Agyasta, made America great.
Meantime, of course, swallowing up
the land and labor. And now,
; the world. (p. 72) |
And Stephen Higginson, a professedly loyal Congressman, j
j j
plson notes, sold worthless arms to the state of Virginia,
I
I
hot only thus defrauding the state for his own profit but
feting "against Fed. encroachment" (p. 74). He is, Olson
says, "an example of how wrong you can be and still / run
this country" (p. 75).
In contemporary America Olson finds signs of the "con
quistadors" everywhere around him. Hardly anyone heeds
Maximus of Tyre's warning: "Men apply themselves to the
cultivation of the earth either with justice or without it:
with justice, when they look to the utility resulting from
fruits, and without justice when they look to gain" (Disser-
tations, I, 142). A minister in the poem "Maximus, to
|
Gloucester, Letter 19 (A Pastoral Letter)" cultivates
plson's friendship only, Olson discovers, so he can ask,
I
j"Pardon me, but / what church / do you belong to, / may I
ask?" (p. 87). In another poem we are told that the C & R
Construction Company agreed in contract to hire "local"
246
help,
and fired us, after 12 hours
had tricked the city's lawyers
| had covered, by one day's cash
| the letter of the law (p. 21)
Everywhere Olson discovers that the motives of men are
venal, that kindnesses are usually to be gained only by
contract and seldom by friendship or good-will. A coating
of commercialism covers all of man's activities. Ships be
come built not to sail safely but to look sporty and to sell
quickly. The very few who, like Captain Smith, have the
eyes to see through the veneer catch Olson's attention. One
of these is a young man who can somehow still tell a good
ship from a merely fancy one. The incident is reminiscent
of Maximus of Tyre's story of the barbarian king who fool
ishly went to sea in a palace instead of a ship, but this
young man would not have been lured aboard.
He stood with me one Sunday
and eyed (with a like eye) a curious ship
we'd both come on, tied to the Gas Company wharf.
She had raked masts, and they were unstepped,
fitted loose in her deck, like a neck in a collar.
He was looking idly, as I was, saying nothing.
When suddenly, he turned to a Gloucesterman, a big one,
i berthed alongside this queer one, and said:
i "I'll own her, one day" (p. 7)
!
I But usually the actual men Olson encounters around him
Hack such perspicacity. Sometimes he finds the venality of
America extends even to the arts. In "Letter 5,” a remark
able poem, Olson is particularly upset to discover that the
editor of Gloucester's only literary magazine has been edit
ing not out of the particular identity he has received from
247
his unique field within Gloucester but out of consideration
only to the furthering of his literary career. What is i
worse, feels Olson, this editor, Vincent Ferrini, has not
i
only given up his own standards but has even gone beyond the
great enough sin of borrowing someone else's standards— for j
example, the standards of the literary establishment. He
has published poems mostly by people who qualified only by
being magazine editors willing to publish his own work.
Asks Olson, "do you think such scratch-me-back / gets by our
eyes, the few of us there are / who read?" (p. 24).
And Ferrini has compounded his sin in Olson's eyes by
having his magazine purport to reflect the actual context ofi
i
Gloucester. Imprinted boldly on the cover of each issue of
his magazine, Four Winds, is Gloucester's geographic loca- j
tion: "North 42° 37', West 70° 40'" (p. 20). To Olson, a
j
magazine with such pretensions has no place "if it is not as
good as fish is / as knowing as a halibut knows its
grounds." And Ferrini has shown by his own willingness to
exploit his role as editor that he has no such knowledge of
I
Gloucester, that he cannot or will not cooperate with the |
I
place he is in to produce the real form of his magazine. Hei
t . |
is as venal as the farmer who farms for gain instead of for j
need, as unethical and disrespectful toward person and placej
as the conquistadors who robbed the Incas. As a seaman he
shows himself completely incompetent to deal with the par
ticularities of his compass fix. Declares Olson, |
248 1
j
You have had a broken trip, Mr. Ferrini. And you should
[go hide in your cellar
| (as a Portuguese skipper once had to, he'd so scared be-
[fore a storm, and run for it,
| leaving two of his men on the sea in a dory) (p. 20)
i
In Olson's eyes, even the editor of a magazine must
I
show "the old measure of care" (p. 22). Thought must be
| ;
executed as accurately as any physical task of skill. j
The mind, Ferrini,
is as much of a labor
as to lift an arm
flawlessly
Or to read sand in the butter on the end of a lead,
and be precise about what sort of bottom your vessel's
[over
(p. 23)
The pathetic thing about Ferrini is that because of his lack
of care he truly does not know what bottom his vessel is
over. Like most other men, believes Olson, Ferrini has let
that "mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick" of commercialism interpose
itself between himself and reality. Olson can conclude his
poem, "You have left Gloucester. / You are not there, you
are anywhere/ where there are little magazines / will pub
lish you" (p. 23), simply because the temptation of a sudden
| !
gain has lured Ferrini, like it lured Miles Standish and the|
Harvard president Bowditch, away from the chance of doing j
I |
his "own doings" well. ;
In his thirty-seventh dissertation Maximus of Tyre has J
this to say about the worlds I
i
But now all things are full of traffic, merchandise, and
bitter compacts; in the forum, at sea, and on shore, for
eign and in the city, provincial and transmarine. Hence
249 !
|
the sea and the land are turned upwards and downwards,
things uninvestigable are investigated, such as are unap- .
parent are explored, such as are remote pursued, and such
as are rare imported; treasures buried in the earth are
dug up, and chests filled with riches. This, however, is
owing to distrust of friendship, the love of avarice, the
fear of want, the custom of depravity, and the desire of !
pleasure; through which friendship being expelled, and |
profoundly merged in the earth, scarcely preserves an ob- !
scure and imbecile vestige of itself. (Dissertations, II,I
181-182)
It is this same world that trapped Vincent Ferrini into
I
prostitution of his literary values, that produced the
|
rakish ship with the unstepped masts, that produced "Tell-A-j
i
Vision" and "Cokes by Cokes," that brought the minister to
avarice, that reduced "wondership" to ownership, and caused
in Olson's view "mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick" to everywhere
j
cover the real. In The Maximus Poems little has changed j
|
since Maximus of Tyre's first writing and his appearance
here as Olson's persona. To Olson only the "gurry," per- '
haps, has got deeper.
Maximus from Dogtown I j
j
The one poem in which Olson is most successful at ful- j
filling his declared intention of "allaying . . . any doubt j
in a man that he belongs"^5 j.s undoubtedly Maximus from Dog
town I. This is Olson's most "complete" poem, containing
I 1
not only examples of right and wrong ways to live but also
I
that sense of over-powering cosmos that is so often lacking j
in The Maximus Poems. It is this sense of cosmos which in !
l5"Apollonius of Tyana," Human Universe, p. 37.
| - ■ 250
jMaximus from Doqtown I enables Olson really to place man
|
against a natural background which seems indisputably his
I
own. Further, this poem represents Olson's most thorough
carrying out of his principles of composition, his closest
adherence to all the dimensions that an instant possesses.
In Maximus from Dogtown I Olson encounters a place
jwhere the actual primordial roots of creation seem still
| j
'apparent. The fields of Dogtown, just across the harbor j
i I
from Gloucester, appear to him to be oozing the fundamental j
! |
building blocks of life. Here the earth is most obviously j
the mother of living things, that giant sow that feeds every!
|object that acknowledges her power. The "soft soft rock" of
I
Dogtown common, bringing forth quantities of water, is like
a woman's breast, one of those giant teats of this sow-
mother from which life springs.
my soft sow
[the roads
of Dogtown trickling like from
! [underground rock
| springs under an early cold March i
I [moon !
! i
or hot s\immer and my son |
we come around a corner
where a rill t
makes Gee Avenue in a thin
ford
S ;
after we see a black duck
walking across a populated
corner
I |
j * ■ life spills out
| ;
| At the very opening of the poem Dogtown has brought j
! !
Olson into sight of the most elemental parts of creation. j
--: 251
Man has long known how vital water is to life, and even long
suspected, as the Venus myth suggests and modern science
confirms, that life evolved out of the sea. Dogtown, spon-
| i
jtaneously bringing forth life-giving water out of nature's I
rocks, seems to have shown Olson just how much the sea is j
j :
the mother of everything on earth. His vision of creation
! I
iseems to have consequently expanded. The poem's first linesj
! !
show the extent to which Dogtown has already sharpened
|
pison's eyes and made him aware of elemental process.
The sea was born of the earth without sweet union of
[love Hesiod says
But that then she lay for heaven and she bare the thing
[which encloses
j every thing, Okeanos the one which all things are and by
[which nothing
is anything but itself, measured so
Okeanos, the sea, he has realized, is the offspring of
heaven and earth, having been begot by cosmic heat and
evaporation out of the newly cooling earth. Okeanos alone
has made life on earth possible.
Vast earth
[rejoices,
| deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all
[things, I
everything issues from the one, the soul is led from !
[drunkenness |
to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead, j
a man awake lights up from the sleeping i
And Okeanos herself oozes in all her vitality from the rocksj
of Dogtown common. Whether in form of rain, ice, or sub
surface dampness, Okeanos is Okeanos, and is life's first
i
mover. j
subterranean and celestial
I primordial water holds
Dogtown high
| And down j
| the ice holds
Dogtown, . . .
i
i !
Everywhere in Dogtown reality is pervaded by the ele
mental. The very action of the land in Dogtown shows the
power of Okeanos, Olson tells us. And he is right, for the
effects of Okeanos as glacial ice on most of Massachusetts,
including Dogtown, are still very clear. All of the state
was heavily glaciated in the last ice age, as the vast
terminal morraines that form Cape Ann and Cape Cod readily
reveal. But after a glacier recedes the land only slowly
reacts to the decrease in the weight on its surface; the
rocks and soil, long compressed by this weight, gradually
absorb sub-surface water from nearby land and sea and begin
to swell. In effect, Dogtown is indeed, as Olson says, both
held down and held up by Okeanos, for she is yet held down
by Okeanos in the form of that long ago receded glacier but
held up by Okeanos in the form of all the water that she has
jdrawn into herself since the glacier passed. j
! |
j To Olson Dogtown brings the message that fertile Oke-
|
anos is the fundamental reality of the earth. Offshore she j
boils with fish; onshore she runs deep within the earth mak-i
|
ing human habitation possible.
Pisces eternally swimming
| inside her overhead
L ___________ their boots or the horse
! ' “ ~ ~ ' ..'.. ' " 253 1
: I
I j
clashing the sedimentary !
rock tortoise shell |
she sits on the maternal beast [sic] j
of the moon and earth _ j
1 * I
As a place where Okeanos openly informs the earth, Dogtown
jappears to Olson as a point where person (in Olson's own j
j
being), place, millenia, and process can intersect. Millen
nia literally sweep through Dogtown as the water issues from
|
its rocks. Process stares from its glaciated surfaces, its
i
ruined houses, and its wind-swept trees^- And as person
loison has unwittingly entered into this intersection of j
i j
time, place, and process when he let his attention be caughtj
I
by the old Dogtown story of Andrew Merry and his bull.
Andrew Merry was a sailor, and as such owed a direct
allegiance to Okeanos, who gave him his trade. As Olson
says, !
Merry |
had a wife
She is the heavenly mother
the stars are the fish swimming j
j in the heavenly ocean she has j
four hundred breasts
| Merry could have used—
But Merry had sailed to Spain and Mexico, drunk pulque and
octli instead of Okeanos's milk, and become enamoured of
himself as a potential fighter of bulls. He had returned to!
Dogtown, and raised a young bull "to fight / in front of the
jpeople, to show off his / Handsome Sailor ism." Michael
jMcClure outlines the story in his foreword to Olson's book, j
I j
I
John, or was it Andrew, Merry had a bull calf. He ;
......._ . . . . 254 ]
wrestled him on Sunday afternoons for sport & 'entertain
ment. Merry was proud of his body strength. He had a
! sailor's wiry stocky strength. Sunday after Sunday, be- j
j fore the people, as the bull calf grew, Merry wrestled j
| him. At last the bull became large and the sailor taperedj
off and quit the sport. Merry, by his own mind or perhapsj
i by what he heard or saw on the faces or tongues of the !
| Dogtowners became disturbed. Was he, the sailorman, j
afraid or too weak to continue with the bull? He made a
great announcement that Dogtown people should come out on j
Sunday and see him fight again. Saturday night he drank— j
and thought upon Sunday's battle and thought to practice
| with the bull to try his strength and test his ingenuities!
and learn what he might for the spectacle. There must j
| have been some fear . . . |
| I
| To Olson, so versed in mythology that it is an intimate
i
part of his mental field and already intensely aware of the
j
elemental nature of the place of Merry's acts, Merry's con
frontation with the bull apparently seemed of near cosmic
significance. Robert Duncan says of the poem that the fight
with the bull "opens up one of the most ancient areas of
man's experience."16 From India, through Assyria, Crete, to
Ottoman Turkey, the bull has been a sacred being, to many "a
symbol of the Divine matrix of forms and qualities .... j
In the Ottoman Sufi cosmogony a great Bull is one of the
Supporters of heaven and earth."^-^ In Olson's terms, at j
least, the bull is a brother of man and offspring of Oke-j
: i
anos, and, further, an unconscious agent of the cosmos which!
: i
has given him life. And to his persona, Maximus of Tyre,
j l^Tape-recorded lecture at home of Warren Tallman,
[July 23, 1961. j
i i
A. Gaskell, Dictionary of All Scriptures and Myths!
(New York, 1960), pp. 133, 134. I
| ” ” " “." ..... '..." ‘ 255 :
jthe ox was one of the examples of an animal that was not to
be trifled with (Dissertations, II, 130).
j In challenging the bull, Merry himself, in Olson's
eyes, is arrogating himself over nature. He is "showing
pff" merely to assert his own strength and ego in isolation
j
from the universe which makes all things possible. And in |
|
{consequence, much like Erysichthon, Merry finds the cosmos
i
will not longer support him,
in a Saturday night's darkness
drunk trying
to get the young bull down
i to see if Sunday morning again he might
i before the people show off
| once more
his prowess— braggart man to die
| among Dogtown meadow rocks
Like the people Olson warned about in his criticism, Merry
has "sprawled"; he has tried to use nature "for arbitrary
and willful purposes," and she has turned against him.
The bull kills him not maliciously but innocently, "not
!
even knowing / death / was in his power over / this man." j
i
It merely does its "own doings," behaves as a bull will and !
is thus an unconscious agent of offended nature. Merry him
self, as aloof and scornful of nature as he was, preferring
pulque and octli to his mother's milk, in death can slowly
!
return to his source. He lies,
i
: I
| in the Sunday morning sun j
liked smoked fish j
j in the same field j
fly-blown and a colony
| of self-hugging grubs— handsome
j in the sun, the mass
of the dead and the odor
eaten out of the air i
by the grubs sticking
moving by each other
as close as sloths
l
Slowly he is re-integrated into the processes of the uni
verse; the affronted earth is in no hurry to re-admit him asj
her son.
. . . only
after the grubs j
had done him I
did the earth i
let her robe 1
uncover and her part j
take him in
Thus Merry's braggadocio ends and he finds in nature his j
i I
itrue significance. Not willing to be a "participant thing" j
|in life, he becomes one anyway in death. He discovers too |
i ,
1 i
late the truth of Olson's teaching that man is forever "heldj
i
in the hand of nature"— "to his use of himself if he choose/
to his disuse, as he has."l®
Throughout the poem Olson has allowed himself to be j
held in the hand of his own nature. He has made no attempt i
to impose form on his material: on the second page of the !
poem, before we even know who Merry is or why he was strug
gling with the bull/ we find that Merry will "die / among
Dogtown meadow rocks." Olson really makes no attempt to
tell a story; the facts of Merry's tale are so incomplete !
and disorganized within the poem that Michael McClure's
l®"Human Universe/" Human Universe/ p. 11.
r " 257 |
foreword is essential if the "plot" of the bullfight is to |
be understood. In fact, Olson has made no effort to treat
Merry's case directly in any way. The poem is not about
1 i
Merry, not about the bull, and not about Dogtown, that "park
|of eternal events." It is about the instant of Olson's en
counter with both Dogtown and Merry's story. It is about j
bis personal interactions with millenia, process, and place I
I j
as they bring into his field both Dogtown with its cosmic
i
history and Merry with his heretical act.
j
j Olson has got into the reality of Merry in Dogtown and j
jthen followed his own advice: "stay OPEN, hear it, any- !
thing, really HEAR it."19 In the poem he has followed not j
i
the story, not "good" literary form, but strictly the path j
of his own mind as it flew on from one perception to another
in considering that event that occurred in Dogtown so long
iago. The poem becomes, then, a rumination rather than a j
story. Nothing "happens" at the level of Merry's story
! '
after we are told of Merry's death on the second page. For i
I * |
the six succeeding pages all that "happens" is in Olson's
mind as it moves on from recognition to recognition. That j
Merry died at night reminds Olson that this is the time thatj
! !
Okeanos "passes the sun back to the east through her body." j
Thought of Okeanos leads Olson to the recognition that water
' ‘ i
i
surrounds Merry's earthly context.
i _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I
i I
j j
19"The Escaped Cock," Human Universe, p. 125.
j 258
| Nut is water
| above & below, vault I
above and below
watered rock on which
| by which Merry
was so many pieces
Sunday morning
jAn extension of this idea into a reflection on the fertility!
of a land that yields water moves Olson to see that Merry j
died not on ordinary rock but on his mother's breast.
Soft soft rock
Merry died by
in the black night.
Always it is not the story which fulfills Olson's in- |
tention in the poem but the nature of the perceptions which
the poet has. It is these which place Merry firmly in the
context of nature and millenia; it is the way these percep
tions move into each other that gives the reader a sense
that as a man he belongs to the cosmos. It is the way in
which Olson's mind moves from considering the grubs on
Merry's body directly to this statement about Okeanos—
she is the goddess
of the earth, and night
of the earth'and fish
of the little bull
and of Merry
| — as if there were some firm connection between grubs and
the holy, that the unified world-view of the poem is con- !
jtinually conveyed. When one perception is allowed to move j
directly to another perception, as Olson seems to allow it
i
jto move here, a certain inevitability takes up existence in
ithe juxtapositions of the poem. The impression given
! 259
i
throughout Maximus from Dogtown I is that the poem's orders
‘ indeed reflect some cosmic order, that they are outside the
poet's control and are dictated by the power and associa-
i !
jtions of the objects and things which impinge upon him.
! Drink
i had made him
brave j
i !
Only the sun
in the KTorning j
covered him
with flies
j
| Summary
Charles Olson has carried almost all of his theoretical
I
principles into his poetry. His verse is not, like Dun
can's, the place of the discovery of such principles, but it
is a place where actual events yield the same implications
to Olson as they have yielded in all of his life. Captain
John Smith examining a coastline, and the young man on the
wharf rejecting the "queer" ship both give the same accuracy
of vision toward their concerns that the Maya Indians in
Olson's essay "Human Universe" show in their acceptance of
|their physicality. And Olson's verse does seem to be writ-
j ]
ten with sincere and careful regard for the principles of
composition which he has put forward. j
; j
Certainly the "syntax of apposition" which Olson sees |
as true to the order of reality does dominate the structure
of his poems. There are no complicated relationships be
tween the parts of these poems; no elaborate internal
260
structuring such as makes Joyce's novels such fascinating
subjects for explication. In an Olson poem things are given
one after the other in the order in which they enter the
I
poet's mind. The poems often seem disorganized— "language
I
as the act of the instant." And yet the fact that each poem
J
still yields an appreciable content, that it has implica- 1
!
tions and knowledge beyond its own particularity, seems to
confirm Olson's claim that reality does not need the help of
logical structure to be meaningful. j
The "message" of Olson's poems seems anything but hid- j
den by his techniques. His diatribes against commercialism
and his detailed indictments of the exploiters who would de
ceive man about what is real, ring exceedingly true just
because of the firm basis in reality that his method pro
vides. His insistence on "language as the act of the
instant” instead of "language as the act of thought about
the instant" means that real and convincing people and
I |
events enter the poem rather than the writer's subjective I
i
conclusions about such things. And these people and events
lenter the poem with the actual energy and weight with which
i ■
! they struck the poet's mind. They have not been shaped by j
the poet but still carry their true character (or, what is j
to him their true character) within themselves and within ;
the poet's reactions to them. Again, the sound of apparent i
I I
sincerity in Black Mountain poetry is heard in the work of a
particular poet. For when objects and events are allowed to
iexist so ostensibly unaltered in poetry, and when the work- |
! I
ings of the poet's own mind seem so nakedly disclosed, it j
| I
peems impossible that the man himself could deceive.
! Finally, Olson's techniques and concerns in The Maximus
i — — — — — —
i
Poems and Maximus from Dogtown are certainly not limited to
those two particular books. Almost every Olson poem (with
|the exception of one or two of his initial efforts circa
|1945) is written in the same breath-group lines and with the
I
same deference to evolving thought and event that character
ize the poems we have examined here. And in nearly every
Olson poem exactitude, care, and veracity are the dominant i
!
values. In "In Cold Hell, In Thicket" (written 1950?)
Olson's message is to be
precise as hell is, precise
as any words, or wagon
cun be made (The Distances, p. 32)
And in "To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe's Things of Which
I
He Has Written Us in His 'Brief An Creeley Und Olson'" j
I
(written 1951) Olson's point is again the necessity of ;
i
exactitude. !
; <
| The proposition, Gerhardt
| is to get it straight, right
from the start. (The Distances, p. 36) i
1 i
jEver since his first attempts at poetry Olson himself seems j
I ;
;to have been trying to get things "straight," to get this
! ' i
world and its importances recorded in poetry as they really j
CHAPTER VI
j ROBERT CREELEY AS POET: A MAN IN A MAZE
j i
; |
! i
The Overpowering Field |
j I
In Robert Creeley's critical utterances the most char- j
j
acteristic element that we noted was his great awe of the
field of events which he found all around him. This awe
i
made him seem not only fearful of reality but hesitant to I
make any absolute pronouncement which might affront the j
integrity of any natural thing. His own context seemed
continually dangerous to him, his own role full of risk, and
the poem a search for a way through the confusing sea of
events which everywhere pressed upon him. Writing was a
guest to be "saved by words," an attempt to define some por
tion of nearby reality so that a momentary haven could be
I
located. !
i i
In Robert Creeley's poetry we find this sense of im-
; j
pending danger even stronger than it was in his criticism;
| ■ i
from his first published verses written in 1950 to those of j
recent years, his poems are very much guests for safety. !
i i
Again it is the surrounding field of reality that makes life;
so difficult. Especially it is this field's continual un- j
i
j
262 |
' ' “ “ 263 I
I
rolling into new possibilities for which a man may be unpre-J
j !
pared that unsettles Creeley. While for Olson these new !
{possibilities are a cause for rejoicing, for Creeley they !
I i
! ,
{bring with them such a difficulty both of measuring the new J
and of returning to the known that they can move him only to!
j
despair or, at best, complaint.
I i
The grit
of things,
| a measure
! resistant— I
i
I
times walk- !
ing, talk- j
ing, telling {
lies and i
!
all the other
places, no
one ever
quite the same.1
As we know from the poetry readings which Creeley has given,
the lines of this poem and of all his poems are as much
breath-groups as are the lines of Charles Olson's poems.
And so the hesitations which the briefness of the lines j
indicates here are indeed real. , Creeley writes this poem
| f
and most of his others like a man walking a tightrope or a
driver attempting to pull a car out of a spin. Each line is
I
a hazardous venture and requires pause and consideration be-
i i
fore it can be undertaken; and yet it must be undertaken
■^"Song," Poems 1950-1965 (London, 1966), p. 171. This j
collection contains all of Creeley's published poetry writ
ten before 1966. All further references shall be to this
collection.
almost as soon as its moment has come. In a moving field
i
nothing can be gone back to. As Creeley has made clear, a
j
mis-step on the tightrope is irrevocable to him; a mistake
in steering the spinning car or a line unfaithful to the
I
jreality of the moment equally cannot be recalled.2 Once the
{Line has been ventured, the poet can only ride it to what
ever success or catastrophe it will take him. And, in
Creeley's view, if the line has not been faithful to the
jinstant of its creation, it will indeed lead to catastrophe.
All reality, which encompasses everything from the
stars' burning to the poet's writing, is a continual unfold
ing process to Creeley.
It is all a rhythm
to the shutting
door, to the window
opening
the seasons, the sun's
light, the moon,
the oceans, the
growing of things, . . .
But it is a process whose implications are terrifying to
(
man.
The little children
grow only to old men.
The grass dries,
the force goes.
But is met by another
returning, oh not mine,
not mine, and
in turn goes. ("The Rhythm," p. 163)
2"Robert Creeley in Conversation with Charles Tomlin
son, The Review, No. 10 (1965), p. 34.
Nature herself may continue, but the individual perishes.
; i
jThe all-powerful field suffocates the man.
j Everywhere in Creeley's verse we find the same hesi
tant, inhibited rhythms and the same sense of the onward-
!
'rolling fields leaving the helpless man behind. He writes
i
I
!for Charles Olson in "Le Fou":
|
So slowly (they are waving
we are moving
I away from (the trees
! the usual (go by
which is slower than this, is
(we are moving1
j goodbye (p. 17)
Everything deserts man. As Creeley writes in another poem,
"All that was an instant ago / is gone now" ("The Time," p.
131). A man sees glimpses of what he would like, but by the
time he has decided he would like these things it is too
late. The field has changed, and all the man has accom
plished is a further movement toward his own end. Creeley
tells us.
But what we want
i is not what we get.
| What we saw, we think
we will see again?
We will not. Moving j
i we will j
move, and then
stop. ("The Turn," p. 169)
Especially painful because of the implacable movement i
of the field of reality are a man's loves. At some times j
his realization of devotion will come only after the lady
has gone from his life. At other times he will be more !
1 266
I
i
fortunate. He will love at once, and the lady will remain
With him, moving onward with the field. But, as time
I
[passes, his love for her may gradually lose pace, and soon
I
he may find that he has not the lady and love but only lady
i
jand a memory of love. Again, there is no way to return to
i ;
the old happiness.
1
j As I spoke to you
once,
I loved you
J as simply as that.
Now to go back,
I cannot
but going on,
will not forget the first time,
j ("The First Time," p. 146)
In time, Creeley finds, love, lovers, family, and friends
can all be taken away by the ever-moving field. Even one's
self cannot be preserved.
the tangible faces
smile, breaking
into tangible pieces.
I see
i
i
myself an family
j and friends, and
animals attacked,
the house, the road,
i
' ' I
all go forward j
in a huge !
flash, shaken
with that act.
; |
Soon all is gone except the poem with which the poet tried
to capture all that was going.
Goodbye, goodbye.
Nothing left
after the initial
blast bat
some echoes like this.
Only the faded
pieces of paper
etc. ("Some Afternoon," p. 202)
jPor the man or the poet there is "nothing / to turn from /
or to," there is "no / way other / than forward" ("Going,"
j . I
p. 220), there is nothing he can do to slow the field in its
I
jincessant movement. All he can attempt to do is leave a
j
i
mark, some ink on "faded / pieces of paper" or perhaps a
memory on a woman's mind.
In Creeley's view of the world, in both his criticism
and his poetry, man is essentially trapped in a process over
which he has little or no control.
. . . the darkness sur
rounds us, what
can we do against
it,
he asks a friend in "I Know a Man" (p. 38). A man is for
ever in the dark; his vision is limited to the immediate
particulars which he encounters, and, if these yield him no
meaning, he is helpless. At most times all a man can do is
ride the field where it will take him. !
i i
i I
The man sits in a timelessness j
with the horse under him in time |
to a movement of legs and hooves !
| upon a timeless sand. i
But the man and the unique field which he rides are partic
ulars. He and the field exist in an overwhelming vastness
and must fight to live before they are devoured.
268
A wind blows in
and out and all about the man
as the horse ran
and runs to come in time.
!
A house is burning in the sand.
A man and horse are burning.
The wind.is burning.
They are running to arrive.
| ("The Rescue," p. 133)
! Such is Robert Creeley's grim vision of life on earth.
|
It is not surprising that, with this vision, he personally
seems inhibited, cautious, and often frightened in his po-
|ems. The care which the short lines of his poems exhibit
jseems always motivated as much by personal fear of mis
statement as by the respect Olson recommends a man have for
I
the integrity of all things. A sense of caution and frus
tration underlies almost all of his words.
I cannot
move backward
or forward
I am caught
in the time
as measure.
("The Measure," p. 185)
jAlmost anything Creeley personally tries to do appears at
I
times to him to be entirely irrelevant. Whether he fights j
| . ;
ior gives in, whether he says "yes" or "no," the field will I
I ;
roll onward into the form it was going to take anyway. In !
some poems Creeley's personal sense of helplessness and
despair can terrify the reader at least as much as it has
terrified the writer. For example, there are the decep
tively simple concluding lines of "A Reason."
I ' 269 ’
i l
! |
If I look
into the mirror j
I the wall, I '
see myself,
| if I try |
- to do better
and better, I
do the same thing.
Let me hit you. j
| Will it hurt.
| Your face is hurt
i all the same. (p. 223)
At other times, however, Creeley's sense of personal
helplessness proves a relief to him as the responsibility
for his falling out of love or for falling into a new love
is taken away from him. If all one can do is ride events
into the dark to wherever they may lead, then riding events
in this way becomes admirable. Just as in Creeley's theory,
if a "way" opens before one in a poem or in reality, the
best thing one can do is to follow it. For this "way" can-
|not be denied.
j
I cannot stop the weather
| by putting together
j myself and others
to stop those rivers.
Or hold the wind
with my hand from the tree,
the mind from the thing,
1 love from her or me. j
Be natural, while alive.
Dead, we die to that
also, and go another
course, I hope. ("Song," p. 132)
Creeley here, as the last stanza indicates, does not
really believe this condition to be ideal. But he believes
270 j
he has no alternative but to accept it. He must accept the |
form.that the field presents. If events cooperate to pro- j
i
jduce an opportunity for love, then this opportunity should |
i !
be seized.
| Agh, form is what happens?
Form is an accompaniment.
I to love, you to love:
syntactic accident. ("The Place," p. 98)
But if events do not cooperate for love, one man cannot
force them into the form he wishes, as Creeley wryly points
out in the poem "Not Now."
I can see you,
hairy, extended, vulnerable,
but how did you get up there.
Where were you going all alone,
why didn't you wait
for the others to come home
to go too, they would
have gone with you. (p. 130)
Since the field is so all-controlling, a man must be
alert in his watching it so that none of his actions are un
suitable, embarrassing, frustrating, or dangerous. Particu
larly we find expressed in Creeley's poetry a need for signs
l
i
of the "way" he is to take and a dependence on objects to
| ✓
tell him who and where he is. In "I Keep to Such Measures"
ICreeley expresses his attempt to keep a grip on reality in
i |
this way.
i I
I keep to myself such
measures as I care for, j
daily the rocks |
accumulate position.
Objects, he finds here, are much better signs of reality j
than are thoughts.
| i
There is nothing j
but that which makes thinking
less tangible. The mind j
fast as it goes, loses I
| pace, . . . (p. 190)
jThe field proceeds forward faster than the mind can move.
jOnly the objects of that field can act as its measurer. !
i i
jOnly they can provide the signs that may be the map of a
!way. "Oh God, send me an omen," a confused Creeley cries
j
|out in the poem "For the New Year" (p. 100).
And in many of his poems we see him groping through his
field in search of just such a sign. In the poem "One Way"
Creeley speaks of himself in the third person as one left by
his wife. He "cannot see himself," and yet gradually the
objects of the room he has been left in begin to tell him
something about himself. His "way of feeling" slowly comes
clear to him; the sense of his desertion is carried to him
by the disorder and quiet of his surroundings.
! . . . the way of feeling
secured by walls and books,
a picture hanging down,
: j
a center shifter, dust !
on all he puts his hand on,
disorder, papers and letters |
and accumulations of clothing j
and bedclothes, and under his
feet the rug bunches. (pp* 195-196) j
His own identity as a lost object he finds in the things al^
at loose ends around him. In the poem "Some Place" Creeley
we find again as a lost man unable to see himself. j
There is nothing I am
nothing not. !
i
But again also a way is shown in the objects of his field, a
plane of existence where he can say "I am, I am."
|
I resolved it, I
| found in my life a
center and secured it.
It is the house,
trees beyond, a term
a view encasing it. (p. 207)
Throughout the halting lines of Robert Creeley's poet
ry, his sense of the field remains, as in his criticism, th^
dominant presence. It controls his worries, his concerns,
and the way in which he treats them in his poetry. His
sense of the irreversible movement of the field brings him
to both despair at all action and to extreme care in commit
ting himself to the lines of each poem. To Creeley, the man
is at the mercy of the field not because the events of this
field are specifically determined but because they come
about from the interaction of such a myriad of minor forces
that the man cannot possibly foresee even the immediate
future. So complex are the workings of the field that
Creeley finds he must be always a watchful man, eager for
signs of where he is and of where he may be going. In the
following lines he seems to sum up the meaning the field has
for him as a poet.
Riding the horse as was my wont,
there was a bunch of cows in a field.
The horse
chased
them. I likewise, an uneasy
accompanist. ("Don't Sign Anything," p. 36)
But the cows are never caught; the field carries them away.
The Insecure Man
The limitations Creeley feels placed on him by the mys
terious and implacable field seem to lead him into a fairly
limited range of topics. Certainly there is much variety
within these topics, but Creeley does not read the orders of
the universe in both world and sky the way Duncan does, nor
does he possess even Olson's penetrating knowledge of a sin
gle city. We find him writing only of things extremely
close to himself. His vision is too limited for him to ever
take in a block, let alone a city. The best he can do by
i 1
writing of his own sense of helplessness and confusion is to
write of domestic life, but again he seems able to write of
it only as it immediately impinges upon him. His poems
icover the complete range of the possible relationships be
tween a man and a woman. He writes of falling in love, the
"syntactic accident" that the field can bring two people to.
He writes of married happiness, of the tender husband re
spectful of the graces of his new bride and eager to sing
these graces.
i . :
A song.
| i
Which one sings, if he sings it,
i with care. ("A Song," p. 18) j
274
He writes of lovers' quarrels where "laughter releases ran- J
jcor, the quality of mercy is not / strained" ("The Crisis/'
p. 19). And he writes of a collapsing marriage from the
I
wife's symbolic rejection of the husband ("Goodbye," p. 63),
through the actual break-up ("Just Friends," p. 67), to the
husband's restrained letter to his estranged wife:
I loved you as well
even as you might tell
giving evidence
as to how much was penitence.
("The Letter," p. 97)
But seldom can Creeley see farther than his relationship
with some other person. He strikes out exploratively into
his field of awareness but finds at nearly all times his im
mediate situation over-powering to all longer views.
The personality which Creeley projects throughout his
poems is one of an insecure and confused man. Everything is
confusing to him, from life in general to intimate domestic
relations. Even the fact that life goes on bewilders him:
. . . the days extend over
the earth's great cover,
grass, trees, and flower
ing season, for no clear reason. i
("For No Clear Reason," p. 172) j
Whereas Olson sees all-mothering Okeanos beneath all things,
and Duncan finds the universe ordered by "the keeper of the
i
time," Creeley can usually observe no pattern anywhere. The
world seems merely a chaotic mass of "people people people
people"; in any place on earth "elsewhere" seems preferable;
the poem staggers and becomes tired; the poet gets lost.
jCreeley writes:
i
Oh god, let's go.
This is a poem for Kenneth Patchen.
Everywhere they are shooting people.
People people people people.
This is a poem for Allen Ginsberg.
I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere.
This is a poem about a horse that got tired. I
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
I want to go home. j
j I want you to go home.
This is a poem which tells the story, j
which is the story !
j I don't know. I get lost. I
j If only they would stand still and let me. !
Are you happy, sad, not happy, please come. j
This is a poem for everyone. ("Please," p. 60) j
i
Most of this poem is an impatience which gets nowhere. In j
structure it is a series of false starts that can come to
end only when the poet has admitted that he has indeed got
lost. It shows Creeley at his greatest confusion, at a
moment when only the narrowest and shortest "way" will open
in the poem for him.
But even when Creeley is regarding his own local con
text rather than the entire world, confusion can envelop |
i
him. On a New Year's Eve he is moved to the following cry.
House. Your hand is too far from me. Tree, speak. The I
[moon is {
white in the branches, the night is white in the mind
[of it. |
Love, tell me the time. What time is it? The second,
[the moment
moving in the moon? ("New Years," p. 88) j
jSomehow he has once again become lost. The field at this |
j
critical moment in time has refused to yield signs of where !
|
he is. In another poem he exclaims in the middle of i
276
domestic trouble:
!
| Why live
in the middle
; of this
damned muddle?
| Why not—
! lesser thing?
I find out
I what another will bring?
j ("The Plan," p. 114)
But live in this muddle Creeley continues to do, for there
can be no way for a man out of his field but death.
A man can only use words "in the complex of his own oc
casion," Creeley told us in his prose criticism, and for
Creeley, then, this most often means working in the midst of
a "muddle." And since Creeley does see confusion almost
everywhere he looks, it is not surprising that his verse
shows him as nearly neurotically insecure. For instance, in
"A Form of Women" difficulties in love bring him to the fol
lowing state of fear and self-consciousness:
Moon, moon,
when you leave me alone
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,
i
! a pit of fear, j
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch. i
j
i i
But I love you.
Do you love me.
What to say
! when you see me. (p. 57)
In many poems his insecurity is expressed in extremely vague
contexts, as if it were a generalized fear of failure or
! 277
!
embarrassment. In "The Shame" it is difficult to discern
j |
j
Whether the particulars of the poem are actual or symbolic.
I
i
What is apparent is that the poet at the moment of the poem
is quite paranoid in his insecurity; there is nothing
Visible in the poem to justify his apprehensiveness.
What will
the shame be,
what
I cost to pay.
i We are walking
| in a wood,
wood of stones
| boulders for trees.
i The sky
| is a black
sudden cloud,
a sun.
Speak
to me, say
what things
were forgotten. (p. 224)
This note of despair rings continually throughout Creeley1s
poems. In "For the New Year" he warns himself, "Being un
sure, there is the fate / of doing nothing right" (p. 100).
|But farther on in his work, in a poem written at least two
i
years later, we find him saying this of his love-making; j
j I approach with such |
a careful tremor, always j
I feel the finally foolish j
| question of how it is, j
then, supposed to be felt, I
and by whom. ("Something," p. 176)
Sometimes Creeley himself recognizes the extent to which he
has been unmanned by his trepidation and resolves to "go
back home / by myself again / and try to be a man" ("The
Song," p. 117). But at other times he becomes cynical and
i
anxious to withdraw, as in "The Immoral Proposition" when he
i
says "If you never do anything for anyone else / you are
spared the tragedy of human relation- / ships" (p. 31). Andj
frequently despondency appears almost to paralyze him from j
•action.
i
There will be no simple
way to avoid what
confronts me. Again and
again I know it, but
take heart, hopefully,
in the world unavoidably
j present. ("The Window," p. 226)
Creeley's dilemma in this last poem appears to have
been the result of his indiscreet acceptance of a woman's
love the previous evening. This situation itself, in the
light of his poems, seems not unlikely, for these poems
everywhere reveal him as a man desperate for affection. It
is as if his overwhelming sense of insecurity could only be
allayed by a woman's arms. The desperation comes through
|
readily in this verse:
j
i For love— I would
| split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes. ("The Warning," p. 46)
{And the depth of the yearning can also be apparent:
i i
i
j I will not
j change into any-
i thing you don't
j
J like if
L _ ____ ___ you will stay___
279
with me as you said
you would. Don't
go. Away.
If this is where we are.
("The Dream," p. 194)
i
Sometimes Creeley's yearning for love brings him to the
sense that only sexual union can provide a satisfactory ;
!
"way" through the confusion of the field in which he is liv-j
ing. In the poem "The Rocks" Creeley is in a typical proc
ess of "trying to think of / some way out" of a perplexity, j
"Life is / water," he realizes, as he lies in bed, but it is
a water "God will / not provide." Desperately his mind
seems to search for assurance, for spiritual fulfillment,
for the sort of sign that Olson saw in Dogtown's meadow or
Duncan sees in the forms of the language. And he finds such
a sign, but only extremely close to hand.
it is my
wife, her warmth
lying '
beside me, is
that sense of warm
moistness the condition
in which all grows?
t
And of course the relative unreliability of the human being
i ;
jin comparison to the reliability of Olson's meadow or Dun- !
can's language moves Creeley once again to a sense of the
precariousness of hi3 own position. Unlike Olson or Duncan,;
he has, in his helpless short-sightedness, staked himself tc
a straw, and indeed must pray.
Drop
the rock,
think well, think
well of me. (p. 164)
In other poems Creeley's sense of sexual union as one
of the most dependable instances of an "opening of the
field" seems even more obvious. In "For Helen" he writes
I
particularly of the "way" that love opened:
. . . If I can
remember anything, it
is the way ahead
you made for me, specifically:
wet
ness, . . . (p. 210)
The poem "The Door" seems an extended sexual allegory. At
the poem's beginning the poet is engaged in a both excited
and confused pursuit of the lady.
It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood
But I see the door,
and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,
and would get there if I could
with my feet and hands and mind.
i j
j Lady, do not banish me
| for digressions. My nature j
| is a quagmire of unresolved
| confessions. Lady, I follow. (p. 101)
The "Lady" of the poem may be truth, knowledge, a poem, or a
I
real lady, but whoever she is, it is certain that it is a
|
union with her that the poet desires. "Loneliness" can sub-j
side only when the door has been entered. Creeley tells the
281
"Lady": !
Nothing for You is untoward.
Inside You would also be tall, |
more tall, more beautiful. i
Come toward me from the wall.
[I want to be with You. (p. 102)
And momentarily Creeley does attain union.
I left the room, I found the garden, j
I knew the woman
in it, together we lay down. (p. 101) ;
|
But then he "walked backwards, / stumbled, sat down / hard !
on the floor near the wall." j
t
The poet's longing continues. Through the door in the
wall, Creeley knows, is "the garden in the sunlight" where
"sit / the Graces in long Victorian dresses." And yet the
hesitant poet feels he "will never get there." At the end
of the poem only the image of happiness remains with him to
keep him looking for that ever-illusive "way."
In my mind I see the door,
I see the sunlight before me
[across the floor
beckon to me, as the Lady's skirt j
| moves small beyond it. (p. 103) j
i !
j Creeley's "The Door" does not need to be given any one j
jnarrow interpretation. It contains a variety of meanings j
i
all of which are valid for the man who wrote the poem. It
i >
shows his insecurity— "I will never get there"— and it shows
his need for companionship and love.
How can I die alone.
Where will I be then who am now alone,
what groans so pathetically
in this room where I am alone? (p. 103)
! • j
In its use of the "Lady" to represent everything that is
- — |
desirable "The Door" reveals the great importance women havej
for Creeley in his life. And in its latent sexual overtonesj
the poem succeeds in telling us that for Creeley every ac
tivity in life is as hazardous and significant and dear as
i
is the attaining of a mutually-fulfilling experience of
love. The "door" itself seems indeed a momentary opening
into a "way" through the confusion of the field, an opening
not necessarily to sexual fulfillment but to any temporary
relief from insecurity such as sexual fulfillment can give.
The "door" is very much like Duncan's "opening of the
field," but for the barely successful Creeley it is an open
ing which he can locate far too seldom and in which he can
never remain for long.
The Struggle to Write
The difficulty that Creeley has in seeing into reality
and in finding "ways" to both peace and understanding can
I
obviously have an effect on his work as a poet. For if
reality will often not yield a "way" to him, at such times
j |
Jie can hardly have any path to "follow" as he writes. Par- j
I ' !
ticularly, if reality keeps him in a state of confusion,
will he find difficulty in having "one perception immedi-
I • I
I :
lately and directly lead to a further perception" and espe-
j
cially will he have difficulty in sustaining such a percep- |
t
tual process throughout a long poem. |
_____And in fact Creeley's poems are much shorter than those:
. 283
of either Duncan or Olson. Over ninety per cent of them are
under one page in length, and none of them participate in an
inter-related series such as Duncan's "The Structure of
Rime" poems or Olson's The Maximus Poems. Creeley's poems, |
then, are very much his own: they are as short as their |
writer's vision is limited. Many of these poems, in addi- j
tion, show that whatever length they have reached was forced
by the writer. Such poems contain no evidence of an on
going perceptual process, no indication that their language
is an "act of the instant.” Instead they are unashamedly
]
discursive. Creeley as poet seems to substitute his own ■
voice for that of reality and to indulge openly in "language
as the act of thought about the instant." Such a poem is
"The End."
When I know what people think of me
I am plunged into my loneliness. The grey
hat bought earlier sickens. j
I have no purpose no longer distinguishable. j
A feeling like being choked (
enters my throat. (p. 39) j
l
!
The lines here give no indication that an experience is
being enacted; the lines are, in fact, unusually long for a !
Creeley poem and in their structure give little hint of the !
emotions of the poet at the time of composition. The poem
jis an atypical Black Mountain poem in which the reader is
i
asked unfairly to take the poet entirely at his denotative !
j
meaning. |
i
[ "The End" transgresses against Black Mountain theory ]
284
A
fundamentally because it is description rather than enact
ment. In other poems in which Creeley seems to be encoun
tering difficulty in dealing with reality he also falls back
on what Olson calls the "descriptive functions." In "The j
Memory" it is the simile Creeley is forced to rely on.
Here, whether or not Creeley has indeed "restored" the
j
simile to "the force it once had" by making its occurrence
in the poet's mind, the reality of the poem is debatable.
Like a river she was,
huge roily mass of water
. carrying tree trunks
and divers drunks.
Like a Priscilla, a feminine
[Benjamin,
a whore gone right over
the falls,
she was.
There is perceptual activity in this poem as Creeley*s mind
moves on from one comparison to another. But what Olson
warns about the simile certainly happens here: it takes
attention away from the thing being described. Here the
poet makes his own view of the woman more important than the
I .
woman herself. The reader learns not who the woman really
jis but only what Creeley1s feelings about her are. The
I I
basic issue in assessing this poem is the question of what
I
is its subject: the woman or the poet's mind. In effect,
jits subject is the latter, but in intention the answer is
not as clear. Certainly, however, Creeley's limited vision
seems apparent here; he appears to find the external reality
I
285
of the woman impenetrable and the internal reality of his
mind the only possible subject. As Olson indicates, the
3imile can be very much a sign that the writer has been
unable to deal with the individuality of the object under
his consideration.
Similes are definitely fairly common in Creeley's po
etry , but even more common is a kind of poem in which
Creeley also gives up any attempt to penetrate the reality
of his concern. This is the surrealistic poem, a poem whose
method seems to enable Creeley to write about his confusions
without understanding them, to deal with his field without
finding any sort of "way" through it. One example is his
poem "The Time," in which he attempts to find words for his
sense of the ephemerality of all things.
They walk in and fall into
the large crack in the floor
with the room upended on side
to make the floor a wall.
Upwards or downwards now
they fall into the crack,
having no floor
or ceiling to refer to,
i
| what time comes to,
| the place it all goes into. (p. 131)
bnce again Creeley works by ignoring the actuality of what
!
he is describing and by substituting a figurative descrip-
i
tion which cannot help being at some remove from reality.
This is a much different technique from Olson's utter de
pendence on actual occurrences or even from Creeley's own
suggestion that the poet observe a "scrupulous localism."___
286
In some of Creeley's poems his surrealism is certainly
as intensive as any found in a Dali painting. In the poem
"Hello" he abandons all pretence of following actuality and
creates an entirely, private reconstruction of the event he
wishes to present.
With a quick
jump he caught
the edge of
her eye and
it tore, down,
ripping. She
shuddered,
with the unexpected
assault, but
to his vantage
he held by
what flesh was left. (p. 181)
Again this technique is a kind of discursiveness: it pro
duces a fabrication about reality rather than presenting
reality itself. Possibly this fabrication could be de
fended, like the simile, as expressing a psychological
reality within the poet, but if so it is still a symptom of
jCreeley's limited vision— of his being unable to cope with
Ithe world external to his own mind.
!
| Many other poems show the effects of his limited vision;
j !
by their having contrived endings. Again we can see that |
! !
the poet has likely not "followed" actuality in his composi-j
j
tion of the poem. The poem has too perfect a form to have j
been the product of natural cooperation; its shape is too
symmetrical or its ending too final. "She Went to Stay" not
287
only seems too neat in its contours but is even hurt by the
artificiality of the simile. j
i
Trying to chop mother down is like j
hunting deer inside Russia 1
with phalangists for hat-pins. !
I couldn't. (p. 75) i
|
This poem seems to be more an exhibition of the poet's own |
skill and wit than a following of an experience.
Some poems with apparently contrived endings could be
i
simply direct results of the poet's failure to move ahead j
from his initial perception. These are his "circular" poemsj
whose concluding lines are the same as the opening ones.
"If You," for example, begins,
If you were going to get a pet
what kind of animal would you get. (p. 79)
Creeley then works through twelve lines in which he explores
the possibilities of this question, but by the end of the
i
poem finds he has not moved beyond his initial question.
All he can do is close the poem by repeating that question.
Many more of his poems end just as abruptly but seem to
nave brought about their sudden conclusions by themselves. j
Again Creeley's limited vision seems the cause: the poems j
seem to move ahead briefly and then to stutter to a halt
merely because their poet has failed to perceive any "way"
along which they can travel farther. "Apple Uppfle" is a
most promising poem as it begins; its perceptions evolve
steadily until suddenly it crashes into a dead end. j
Vanity (like a belly '
_______________dancer's romance): just J
288
the hope. The unafraid & naked
wish, helpless. Pushed against a
huge & unending door . . .
And while the mind
a little more tenuous, more
[careful of it,
crabwise, gives in . . . j
To the pleasure of a meal in
[silence. (p. 33)
I
t
For Robert Duncan such a poem might have unfolded for sev
eral pages as the words themselves generated new words or as
the associations of the poem's objects proliferated, or as
fortuitously "riming" thoughts or events came to the poet's
attention. But Creeley's powers of observation here do not
seem capable of such perceptions. For him the poem stumbles
to two ellipses before the "door" slams shut at the end of
the final line.
A similar poem is "The Conspiracy," and again the con
clusion has an inevitability about it that suggests that it
is a valid outcome of the interaction of the given poet and
the given event rather than a result of the poet's personal
contriving. Once more the poet encounters a dead end simply
i j
because of the field's complexity and his own nearly
j i
incapable eyes.
! i
You send me your poems, |
I'll send you mine.
Things tend to awaken i
even through random communication. |
I
Let us suddenly j
289
proclaim spring. And jeer
at the others
at the others.
I will send a picture too
if you will send me one of you. (p. 37)
Here too the poem is promising. It begins by moving ahead
well until in the eighth line the poet finds he has nothing
to write but a repetition of the seventh. And then once
again the "door" closes. The final couplet rings out and
tells Creeley that there is nowhere else to go no matter how
badly he might wish to continue.
There are also a large number of Creeley poems that
accomplish merely one single recognition before they end.
Such a poem has moved "immediately and directly" to a fur
ther perception but has ended right there, as if the poet
were somehow satisfied by even this slight penetration of
reality. In "The Operation" Creeley has certainly come by
the end of the poem to know more than he knew when he began.
But this poem still involves recognition only on a very
|small scale; the poem does not even approach the long series
jof recognitions that Duncan or Olson can accomplish in a
!
'single poem.
i . . . !
! By Saturday I said you would be better
[on Sunday. I
j The insistence was a part of a recon-
| [ciliation.
i '
j Your eyes oulged, the grey ^
light hung on you, you were hideous. |
i i
| My involvement is just an old I
290
1
! habitual relationship.
Cruel, cruel to describe
what there is no reason to describe. (p. 34)
Another example of the poem which brings the poet one step
into new knowledge, but one step only, is "The Token." Once
I
more the poet learns as the poem unfolds. !
My lady
fair with
soft
arms what
can I say to
you— words, words
as if all
worlds were there. (p. 123)
Such poems are certainly closer to what Creeley proposes
poetry should do than are his discursive, surrealistic, or
abruptly terminating poems. Here the poet is genuinely
"saved in words.” In "The Operation" he is brought to a
realization of his own gaucherie and in "The Token" to the
welcome insight that even that he would attempt to speak to
his lady testifies to his devotion. In each case the poem
jhas come to the poet's aid as he helplessly wandered into
jdanger.
j • ;
| In comparison to the poetries of Duncan and Olson the
l ;
poetry of Robert Creeley indeed contains an astonishing
j i
number of poems which either disobey the Black Mountain the-j
ories Creeley claims to believe in or which carry these out |
i
only to a small degree. Ironically enough, the poetry of j
|
Creeley contains these poems simply because Creeley himself
jobeys one of the most important Black Mountain principles:
that a man can live and write only "in the complex of his
own occasion." In this view a man cannot be any other per
son than he is or see the world in any other way--than he
sees it. For Creeley, accepting this view often means being
the fearful, short-sighted, and insecure person that he
i
often is and seeing the world as the confusion of process !
that it most often appears to him to be. And Creeley never
attempts to shirk his responsibility to his own condition;
just as he recommends in theory, he "loves himself to be in
i
the world as he is in it” and writes in the only way such a
man as himself should. Thus his own short-sightedness, con
fusion, and insecurity enter his poetry as often as they
will and frequently cause him to write poems so limited or
contrived as to be little more than testimonials to their
writer's inadequacies.
It is a measure of Creeley's sincerity as a poet that
I
he never attempts to conceal these inadequacies. Instead,
he struggles onward, being absolutely faithful to the poems
that occur to him and working always at achieving a somewhat
deeper vision. And he does achieve such vision, although
: |
unfortunately the poems in which he does so can be easily |
overlooked in the clutter of the less successful works. i
; i
And, what is perhaps more important, he achieves such vision
j i
with an ever-increasing frequency in his later poetry. Some
jof the most outstanding of these poems in which he achieves
j
jsuch vision occur in his work from 1960-1965. Some of
| 292
these, such as "The Dream" (pp. 191-194) and "Anger" (pp.
197-201), are up to four times as long as the longest poems |
tie published before 1960. Unfortunately, these longer poems
are much too long for an analysis of their structures to be
anything but tedious; in addition, these structures are
little different from those which can be found on a smaller
I l
jscale in shorter poems.
The simplest examples of Creeley's successful attempts
at composition by field in which he indeed penetrates some
distance into the field are those where he merely follows
external stimuli. Such a poem is "Some Echoes."
Some echoes
little pieces,
falling, a dust,
sunlight, by
the window, in
the eyes. Your
hair as
you brush
it, the light |
; i
behind |
the eyes I
| what is left of it. (p. 216) |
{Here the stimuli enter the poem in exact chronological or- j
i '
I :
jder, in the precise order in which they impinge on the po-
! ,
et’s mind. "Anger" begins in a similar way.
1.
The time is.
The air seems a cover,
| the room is quiet.
j i
She moves. She i
has moved. He j
293
heard her.
The children
sleep, the dog fed,
the house around them
i i
{ is open, descriptive,
a truck through the walls,
lights bright there,
glaring, the sudden
roar of its motor, all
familiar impact
as it passed
so close. (p. 197)
Here the mind is nearly passive, submitting almost entirely
to the stimuli occurring in its field of awareness. Here
also, as in Olson, nothing can happen in the poem until it
has happened in actuality.
In perhaps more sophisticated instances of Creeley's
composition by field we find his mind following its own
mental events. Instead of passively responding to influ
ences from without, it follows its own thoughts wherever
they will wander. In "Airs Cat Bird Singing" a flow of
memories and associations leads Creeley deep into new aware
nesses once the song of the cat bird has set his mind into
i
motion. j
! i
Cat bird singing
makes music like sounds coming
at night. The trees, goddamn them, j
are huge eyes. They |
! i
I watch, certainly, what
else should they do? My love
| is a person of rare refinement,
.... “ " “ 294 ]
|
and when she speaks,
j
there is another air, i
melody— what Campion spoke of j
i
with his j
follow thy fair sunne unhappie
[shadow . . .
t
j
Catbird, catbird.
0 lady hear me. I have no
i
other |
voice left. j
j
Here the flow of the poem has its own sort of logic: the j
bird's singing leads to the trees it sings from, the trees' j
watching leads to the reason they watch, the lady's voice
‘
leads to Campion's air, and Campion's air leads to the j
i
poet's awareness of his poem's terminating. The poet seems
genuinely to be re-enacting his psychological field at the
moment of the poem's occurrence.
But the most interestingj examples of Creeley's follow
ing a path in his field of awareness are those poems where
j
he most obviously does not know his way. Here we find the j
!
poet extremely self-conscious of his own thoughts and react-|
ing to these as much as to the objects of his external
field. Here also the poem is much less a falling into a
"way" than was "Air: Cat Bird Singing" and much more a
searching for a "way." In such a poem as "The Rain" the
poet's task is much more difficult than in "Air: Cat Bird
Singing," since the flow of the poem is much less certain
and threatens at all times to lead nowhere. Once again it
295
is an external event that gets the poem underway.
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
the quiet persistent rain. j
people hear a "quiet" rain fall "all night" merely
of its sound or persistence. Some inquietude is
present in the poet during this matter-of-fact open-
Creeley himself indicates in the succeeding stanzas.
What son I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Having arrived now at an acute sense of his own helplessness
and insecurity, Creeley almost inevitably will turn to seek
some reassurance or comfort. And yet we must remember that
this turning is simply a result of the unfolding of
jCreeley's thoughts; it is not an intention that was at all
japparent at the start of the poem. As in any genuine exam
ple of composition by field, the poet's final resting place
in the poem appears as a purely spontaneous happening. And,
ideally, it will have been as much a surprise to the poet at
composition as it is to the reader later. j
i
Love, if you love me, !
___________________ lie next to me.________ J
jBut few
because
clearly
ing, as
296 !
Be for me, like rain j
the getting out j
!
of the tiredness, the j
[fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional in-
[difference
Be wet
with a decent happiness. (p. 109) j
Just as in our examination of Olson's verse, however,
we can never be entirely sure that the structure of a par
ticular poem reflects its process of composition. Certainly
the structure of many of Creeley's longer poems leads from
an initial perception through various recognitions and asso
ciations to a final perception much different from the one
which initiated the poem. That is, in the actual structure
of such poems one perception does lead "immediately and di
rectly" to another. But this is not the same thing as say
ing that in composition the poet himself went "immediately
and directly" from one perception to another. This only the
poet can know for certain. There is always the possibility
l
that the poet has contrived his poems so that they appear to
have been composed "by field," and hence that he has not in
I
fact acted in accord with Olson's theories. This possibil- |
ity can never be entirely discounted, although in the case
of Creeley's poetry, with its frequently embarrassing j
fidelity to the details of his own life and with its equallyj
frequent and certainly uncamouflaged failures even to appear!
to follow its writer's theories, such a possibility is i
i
extremely unlikely.
297
Summary
Creeley, as a poet, is so obedient to his theory that a
man can work only with the given facts of his own personal
ity and context that he nearly allows this theory to ruin |
his poetry. He is faithful even to his own limitations, and!
seems to have determined to work through these limitations
rather than to attempt to conceal them by any sort of liter
ary subterfuge. Therefore the sense that he has expressed
in his prose criticism of an overwhelming and confusing
world everywhere permeates his poetry, and reduces his role
as a poet to the searching for "ways” and coherences within
the real.
At times Creeley's own yearning for a circumscribed
world, for that "island" which in his preface to his novel
The Island he saw every man hopeful of finding, overpowers
his respect for the real and moves him to write artificially
crafted and often witty verse. At other times his confu
sions seem to limit him to a surrealism that at best mimics
i
his sense of reality. But at most times, however, he allows
{himself the chance of being "saved in words" and uses a poem
|as a means of inquiry after both self-knowledge and new
| i
j |
possibilities in his own life. The gradually increasing
! i
length of his recent work seems.to indicate that his gamble i
i
in trusting only to the terms of his own life has paid off.
Slowly his mind seems to have been able to continue the per
ceptual process over longer intervals, until some of his
works equal those of Duncan and Olson in the range of per
ceptual activity within them.
FINAL COMMENT
The Black Mountain world-view, that is, the world-view
—
of Robert Duncan, Charles "Olson, and Robert Creeley, espe
cially provides for poets of contrasting poetries to share
the same beliefs. One of the basic Black Mountain tenets is
that each man lives in a unique field of forces, objects,
and events and that each man is so influenced by this field
that he gains an absolutely inimitable particularity. At no
point does Black Mountain poetic theory ever insist that all
poetry should be written in the same manner or that all
poets should have similar styles. On the contrary, Charles
Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley continually insist
that a man's poetry can come only out of his own individual
ity and his own particular adventures in the universe. They
deplore any poetry that is written to a pre-conceived notion
of what a poem should be— even if the model be a poem by
i
Charles Olson himself. The Black Mountain group is a re-
I
i • 1
markable example of how much unity can exist in diversity. !
The beliefs Olson, Duncan, and Creeley have in common about
^>oth life and poetry are many, and yet, when these beliefs
i
have been applied by these poets to their own situations as
men, the resultant poetries are at times so dissimilar that
______________________ 299____ ‘_____ __________
300
Little inter-relationship between the writers seems pos
sible.
The beliefs common to the three poets are easily
enumerated. Perhaps the most important is their belief in
the power of ecology— that field of events unique to every
nan which makes his individuality indisputably his own. Of
almost equal importance is their faith in the natural and
spontaneous energy of the universe, that energy which brings
Okeanos to feed all of earth for Olson, that appears in the
form of the numinous powers to Duncan, and which gives to
Creeley the sense of an implacably onward-moving world. In
addition, the three men share extremely similar views of
man. All see man as necessarily a participant in the uni
verse, as held in the hand of the events in which he takes
part. To Olson man is a "participant thing" immersed in the
"boiling water" of the universe. To Duncan man, like all
other things, is an "occasion of the divine." And to
Creeley man is so trapped "in the complex of his own occa
sion" that he can scarcely see into even the nearby partici
pants in this occasion.
On poetry, also, Duncan, Olson, and Creeley are very
close to total agreement. All believe in the inseparability
of one's poetry and one's world-view, and all strive to
write their poems strictly in accordance with their particu
lar views of the living universe. Further, all also believe
that poems are adventures into the unknown and can be paths
301
to new knowledge. All feel that a poet cannot know, when he
begins to write, exactly what his poem will concern or where
it will lead. And all have written poems that have ended
far from where they began; for examples, Olson "April Today
Main Street," Duncan "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pin
dar," and Creeley "Anger." All have depended very much on
signs and omens to direct them in these adventures into the
unknown. Duncan has heard voices and listened to the sounds
of words, Olson has required news of actual occurrences be
fore his poems can begin, and Creeley has looked continually
for almost any clue within himself or in his context to tell
him who and where he is.
In their poetic practices the three men are paradoxi
cally all alike in their fidelity to their theories but dif
ferent in the ways in which they exhibit this fidelity. The
reason for the paradox is that, while the three share
similar theories and beliefs, they have, like all men, vari
ous and unique concerns. Duncan is concerned mainly with
the receiving of omens from the divine and with the actual
process of writing. Olson is concerned with man's moral |
. . . . . j
conduct within the representative confines of his home city |
j
of Gloucester. And Creeley, not as blessed with confidence |
i
and range of vision as are his two colleagues, is concerned I
i
I
invariably with his personal relationship to the immediate
people, objects, and situations of his life. Whereas Duncan
uses his sense of the divine within nature to investigate
302
everything from the process of composition to the conduct of
war, and whereas Olson uses his sense of the autonomous
vitality of the earth to castigate his fellow-man for at-
i
tempting to arrogate this birth-right of all creatures for
iiis personal use, Creeley uses his sense of a dynamic world
j
to explain the perpetual feeling of confusion and loss that
tie is haunted by.
In style, too, the three men, although they do write in
greatly contrasting styles and rhythms, also obey the rule
they share about observing the uniqueness of one's own cir
cumstances. Duncan, dependent on information from the
divine, writes in flowing periods when divine information is
to be had in plenty, but in irregular and staccato measures
when his sources in the divine become intermittent. Olson,
troubled by a bad heart and by shortness of breath, writes
in frequently brief lines and in lines which gain or lose in
length as the excitement of the verse alters his pulse and
breath. Creeley, however, perplexed with uncertainty,
writes in even shorter lines at most times, since he seems
|
to find he must hesitate frequently in order to guarantee
I
jhimself the strict accuracy of articulation which he be-
llieves so important.
I
In retrospect, the most significant aspects of the
i
three BlacJ' Mountain poets studied here seem undoubtedly the
sincerity, integrity, and consistency which they insist
should be in every part of a man's work. They especially
303
demand a fidelity to the universe, a fidelity to the nature
of man generally, and a fidelity to one's self and to one's
own beliefs. These are certainly large and serious demands
to place on any man, but they are ones which these Black
Mountain poets themselves strive to meet in every part of
their mature poetries.
i
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED
Allen, Donald M., ed. The New American Poetry 1945-1960.
New Yorks Grove, 1^60.
Allen, Donald M., and Creeley, Robert, eds. New American
Story. New Yorks Grove, 1965.
Creeley, Robert. For Loves Poems 1950-1960. New Yorks
Scribner's, l9£2.
________ . A Form of Women. New Yorks Jargon, 1959.
________. The Gold Diggers. New Yorks Scribner's, 1965.
________ . The Island. New Yorks Scribner's, 1965.
________ . "A Note on Writing," New American Story, ed.
Donald M. Allen and Robert Creeley. New Yorks
Grove, 1965. Pp. 263-264.
Poems 1950-1965. Londons Calder and Boyars,
1965:
________ . "Robert Creeley in Conversation with Charles Tom
linson," The Review, No. 10 (1964), pp. 24-35.
______ . "A Sense of Measure," tape-recorded lecture de
livered at the University of California, Berkeley,
July 21, 1965. This recording was made by the Lan
guage Laboratory of the university. Copies are
available for purchase at the laboratory.
________ . Tape-recordings of lectures delivered at home of
Warren Tallroan, Vancouver, B.C., August 26, 28, 29,
1962. These recordings were made by Dr. Tallman. 1
Copies of them are in my possession. j
i i
________ . "To Define," The New American Poetry 1945-1960,
ed. Donald M. Allen. New Yorks Grove, 1960. FT
408.
306
Dorn, Edward. What I See in the Maximus Poems. Ventura,
Calif.: Migrant, 1960.
Duncan, Robert. As Testimony. San Francisco: White Rabbit
Press, 1964.
_. A Book of Resemblances. New Haven, Conn.: Henry
Wenning, 196<>.
_. Caesar’s Gate. Mallorca: Divers Press, 1955.
"From the Day Book," Origin, Not 10 (July, 1963),
pp. 1-47.
"Ideas on the Meaning of Form," Kulchur I, 4
'(1961) , pp. 60-74.
Letters. Highlands, N.C.: Jonathan Williams,
'1958.
"Notes from a Reading at the Poetry Center, San
Francisco, March 1, 1969," The Floating Bear, No. 31
(1965), [pp. 12-13].
Of the War. Berkeley: Oyez, 1966.
The Opening of the Field. New York: Grove,
- 1967: — --------------- -----------------------------------------
"Pages from a Notebook," The New American Poetry
"1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove,
1960. “Pp. 400-407.
"The Psyche-myth and the Moment of Truth," tape-
"recorded lecture delivered at the University of Cal
ifornia, Berkeley, June 13, 1965. This recording
was made by the Language Laboratory of the univer
sity. Copies are available for purchase at the
laboratory.
Roots and Branches. New York: Scribner's, 1964.
Selected Poems. San Francisco: City Lights,
1959.
Six Prose Pieces. Rochester, Mich.: Perishable
Press, 1966.
The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante's Divine
Comedy. San Francisco: Open Space, 1965.
307
Duncan, Robert. Tape-recording of untitled evening lecture,
University of British Columbia Poetry Conference,
August 5, 1963. This recording was made by the
Extension Department of the University and is avail
able from this department for .reference or purchase.
________ . Tape-recordings of lectures delivered at home of
Warren Tallman, Vancouver, B.C., July 23, 24, 25,
1961. These recordings were made by a friend and
are in my private possession.
________ . Unpublished letter to Frank Davey, June 14, 1967.
This letter is in my private possession.
________ . Writing Writing. [Buffalo]: Sumbooks, 1964.
________ . The Years as Catches: First Poems (1939-1946).
Berkeley: Oyez, 1966.
Gaskell, G. A. Dictionary of All Scriptures and Myths. New
York: Julian Press, i960.
Keats, John. Letters, 1814-1821, ed. H. E. Rollins. 2
vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1958.
Maximus Tyrius. Dissertations, tr. Thomas Taylor. 2 vols.
London, ldo4.
Olson, Charles. A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn. San
FranciscoT Four Seasons Foundation, 1964.
________ . Call Me Ishmael. New York: Grove, 1958.
"The Causal Mythology," tape-recorded lecture
delivered at the University of California, Berkeley,
July 20, 1965. This recording was made by the Lan
guage Laboratory of the university. Copies are
available for purchase at the laboratory.
The Distances. New York: Grove, 1960.
Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald j
Allen. San Francisco: Auerhahn Society, 1965.
i
Maximus from Dogtown. San Francisco: Auerhahn j
Press, 1961. I
I
The Maximus Poems. New York: Citadel Press, !
I960. !
308
Olson, Charles. Reading at Berkeley. San Francisco:
Coyote, 1966.
Review of Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato
(Cambridge, Mass., 1963), Niagara Frontier Review
(Summer, 1964), pp. 40-44.
________ . Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley. New York:
New Directions, l9f>6.
Rosenthal, M. L. The Modern Poets. New York: Oxford,
1965.
Wah, Pauline. "Robert Duncan: The Poem as Process," unpub-
lished Master's thesis, Dept, of English, University
of British Columbia, 1966.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOME WORKS CONSULTED
BUT NOT CITED
309
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOME WORKS CONSULTED
BUT NOT CITED
Creeley, Robert. "Olson & Others: Some Orts for the
Sports," The New American Poetry 1945-1960, ed.
Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove, I960. Pp. 408-
411.
Duncan, Robert. The Cat and the Blackbird. San Francisco:
White Rabbit Press, 1967.
________ . Faust Foutu: A Comic Masque. Stinson Beach,
Calif.: Enkidu Surrogate, 1959.
________. Fragments of a Disordered Devotion. San Francis
co: Gnamon Press, !£(>(>.
________ . "Love," Kulchur III, 11 (1963), 20-32.
Medea at Kolchis. Berkeley: Oyez, 1965.
"Narration for a Concert Reading Version of
Adam's Way," Audit IV, 3 (1967), 24-30.
"Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson's 'Maximus,'"
The Review, No. 10 (1964), pp. 36-42.
_. "A Play with Masks," Audit IV, 3 (1967), 2-24.
_. Poems 1948-1949. Berkeley: Berkeley Miscellany
'Editions, [ca. 19491.
"Returning to Les Chimeres of Gerard de Nerval,"
Audit IV, 3 (1967), 42-64. !
I
Unpublished letter to Frank Davey, December 6, j
”1966. This letter is in my private possession.
i
Unpublished letter to Warren and Ellen Tallman, i
'March 22, 1961. A copy of this letter is in my pos
session.
310
311
Olson, Charles. O'Ryan. San Francisco: White Rabbit
Press, 1965.
________. Proprioception. San Francisco: Four Seasons
Foundation, 19(55.
?erry, Samuel. Personal Locus: Maximus of Gloucester from
Dogtown. Vancouver: Tishbooks, [1962].
Tomlinson, Charles. "Black Mountain as Focus," The Review,
No. 10 (1964), 4-5.
Also consulted were twenty-one book reviews of Dun
can's, Olson's, and Creeley's works. None of these reviews,
however, were found to be relevant to the particular subject
of this inquiry. Some examples of such reviews are:
2arruth, Hayden. Review of Robert Duncan, Roots and
Branches (New York: Scribner's, 1964), The Nation, CIC
(December 7, 1964), 442.
Fitts, Dudley. Review of Robert Creeley, For Love: Poems
1950-1960 (New York: Scribner's, 1962), Saturday Re
view, XLV (August 4, 1962), 22.
Kennedy, X. J. Review of Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches
(New York: Scribner's, 1964), New York Times Book Re
view, December 20, 1964, 4.
Ray, David. Review of Charles Olson, Selected Writings (New
York: New Directions, 1966), Book Week, March 1§,
1967, p. 6.

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Creator Davey, Frankland Wilmot (author)

Core Title Theory And Practice In The Black Mountain Poets: Duncan, Olson, And Creeley

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Nichol, John W. (committee chair), Engel, S. Morris (committee member), Templeman, William D. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-607454

Unique identifier UC11360941

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Legacy Identifier 6810225.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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