Book Reviews: Charles Olson, "Collected Prose"

Rel'ista de Estudios Noneamerica11o s, n. º 6 ( 1998 ). pp . 1 33 -J 35 REVIEWS Charles Olson, Collected Prose, Ed. by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U niversity of California Press, 1997 JULJÁN LóPEZ MEDINA Un i ve rsidad de Al icante Once again, the University of California makes access ible che otherwise scattered materials of one of the most importan! creators of mid-century American verse. lf the fifties are to be looked atas the decade thal amounted toan exp losion of new alternatives in American poetry, the editing task will be of extreme imponance to our knowledge and evaluation of those years. Thanks to this Press, indisputable voices like Cree ley, or now Olson, are not on ly present through their remarkable influence on contemporary poets and college syllabi, but also throu gh the continuing dialogue their tcxts establish with the contemporary readcr. Now, for the first time, Olson's criti ca ] voice is al hand, in all its wide-ranging ovenones, from thc most influential essays printed and commented again and again, like the fundamental «Projcclive Verse,» or the illuminating «Ca ll me IshmaeL» to notes, introduction to other poets' works and book reviews. Sorne unpublished writings from Olson's archive have also been rescued by Allen and Friedlandes, who restricted chis novelty of the collection to texts that were prepared for publication by Olson himsclf, though they never actually carne out in print.Thus we have access to the unknown «Mr. Mcyer» « The Post Office,» «GrandPa GoodBye» (on Pound ), «D.H. Lawren ce and th e High Temptation of the Mind,» and «Cy Tombly.» Three of the formcrly unpublished texts are mainly autobiographical, personal notes starting wit h a relativc, a friend or an anecdote and developing sorne kind of bricf abstract rcflection, deeply rooted, obviously, in subjectivity. This is not, however, 134 Juliá11 ú i pe~ Medina exclusive of the, so to speak, autobiographical writings. When he assumes an attitude of scholarship at irs best, Olson is defcnding a fairly per sona l view. no matter how widcly supported. For him, as Edward Halsey Foster accuratcly pointe d ou t. the pe rsonal is « thc on ly sourcc of rcli ab le jud ge ment» (l 2). Besides, th e personal, as Ols on thought of it, necessarily includes the body. Its physics and moveme nt are essential to the thought and pcrceptions produccd through and with them. That is why a «projective» image, a «projcctive» verse ca nn ot be a portrait of lifc but an enac tm ent parallel to life, in which mind ( «head, by way of the ear, to the syllable») and b ody ( «heart , by way of the breath, to thc li ne ») are one single act. one movemcnt. As we can read in « Human Unive rs e,» 1 included in this Coll ec 1ed Prose, «there is only one thing you can do about kinetic. rc-cnacl it. Which is why the man said, he who possesses rhythm possesses the universe. And why art is tlze only twin lije has -its only valid mctaphysic » (p. 1 62) (my bold). For ma ny ye ars, Obon's inhcritance was avantgardc (i n the broadcr sense of the tcnn). Duncan, Crccley, Levertov and rnany others consid er him an inspiring friend, alrnost a master. Later, Barrctt Wattcn and other Language Poets rejccted su ch inheritance strongl y. although its intluence, on e might say. is proveo by the attack itse lf and survived it. To Olson. verse was a brea th unit. form was deter mi ncd by or closely related to the body, as much as cont ent was relatcd to the mo mcnt and act of per ce ption . Ali of the se me an a decisive presence oft he individual writing thc p oem , which was to be repudiated by the Language Pocts' belie fin the dictatorship ofLanguage itself. far from subjectivit y. Ols on 's ideas, at the same ti me. disdain clo seness a nd complcten ess in th e art form. As a transcription of an act, of a movcment, any point of departurc or arrival is arbitrary anda temporary intcrruption of what should go on. since one perception leads to an other with no possiblc break in c ont inuity. As such, later t ende n cies in America n poetry n .: turning to traditional patterns and to forrnalist altitudes disregard «Projectivism» too. Neverthclcss, in present-d ay poets (somc of them pa rt of the La ngu agc group at a certain point of the ir carcer) such as Alice No tlc y. Clark Coolidgc. Nathaniel Makey and especially Susan Howe, Olson's theori cs are still influential and providc a ground in which to root n cw progressive poelics. Fo r Mark Do ty , this influe nce of Olson's ideas happens to be ironic, because Olson's «principies, in th eir vagueness, provided fertile ground upon which y oun ge r po ets might co nstruct their own aesthetic» ( 141). lt might be that their vagueness, which could be understood as opposition to th e neat, clearlydefincd principies of logic (we cannot for ge t the impact of Heisenberg's unccrtainty 1. This texl, ap a rt from being the ma in piecc in thc s ec on d bo ok of Ols on 's Prose. Human U 11 iverse 1111tl Other Essays ( 1965), was well known to a li pocts and sc holars of Am erican poetics duc to its inclusion in T/1e Po etics of the New America 11 Poelly, Grove Press. 19 79. undoubtedly th e mo st inlluential ant ho logy of the sec ond h alf of thc ce ntury. editcd also by Donald Allen. in that case to ge ther with W. Tallman. Charles O/so11. Collcctcd Prosc principie in Olson's cosmology). is precisely thc reason why they provide such a fcrtile ground for younger poet s. This Colletted Pro.\°e represcnts the op portunity of handling in just onc vo lume thc most importan! part (only the tip of thc i cebe rg. as Friedlander says) of Olson's inmcnse production. Thc honest and passionate introduct ion by Robert Creelcy and almost nincty pages of editors' notes complete thc book. indebted. no doubt. to Gcorgc Butterick's sor ti ng ami a nangcment of Olson's papcrs, from 1972, when the University of Connecticut purchased th em, to 1986. The quantity and nature of thc ref eren ce bo oks one wo uld necd to set about the task of reading without the notes (nevcr cnough with Olson) makes th em a necessary aid to thc texts. With those notes. and with a sound compilation ~md ordering of thc texts, Ali en and Fricdlander contributc to the knowlcd gc and appreciati on of th e history of poetry and poetics in the second part of this century. and. what is maybe cven more importan!. to thc continuing dialcctics (wherc Black Mountain poets still have much to say). controvcrsy, and crcative cnergy of poetry am i poctics today. REFERENCES E. HALSEY FOSTER , U11dersta11di11g the Block Mrmntain Po e1s. Co lumbia: South Carolina University Press. 1995. MARK DOTY. «Thc Forbidd en Planet of Character: Th e Rcvol uti on of the l 950's» in A Projile tif'T1r e11li etlz Ce 11twy America11 Poetry. ed. by Jack Mycrs and David Wojahn. Southern Illinois Univ~rsity Press. 1991.