Olson as oracle: ‘Projective Verse’ thirty years on

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XV, Issue 1, 1 May 1982, Page 31

Olson as oracle: ‘Projective Verse’ thirty years on

ALLEN CURNOW

It was quite a surprise to me, not very long ago, to find a few of my recent poems featured in a rather special anthology called 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets. I should explain that the surprise wasn’t that the poems were included —I had been asked for them, everything had been done properly—it was to discover that this anthology, with its preface, was designed as a kind of manifesto for a poetic theory called ‘open form poetry’. I might have been prepared for it, perhaps, by C. K. Stead’s illuminating discussion of the whole subject in his lecture to the 1979 literary conference in Wellington. 1 But surprised I was; a bit like the surprise of Moli'ere’s bourgeois gentilhomme on discovering that he had been talking prose all his life.

Of course one doesn’t dispute the existence of a widespread and highly fashionable movement in poetry; there’s an immense quantity of spirited new writing which, if it isn’t all directly derived from ‘open form’ theory, may be supposed to be a product of the same influences. It’s a movement (perhaps a piece of literary history in the making), one more movement —it has its name, ‘open form’, the way past movements have had their names: Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist, Imagist, Surrealist, and so on. The best of the poetry lives after them; the theories, the manifestoes survive as intellectual or academic fossils —don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean the study of fossils isn’t important, simply that it hasn’t much to do with the enjoyment of a living art. The difference with ‘open form’ is that it’s not yet fossilised. The theory of it may be closer to that condition than some of its exponents realise. But it is new enough, present enough, to be a matter of lively interest to some of the poets and their readers too. Which means that it is also debatable.

Let’s be clear about this. A literary movement, of itself, achieves nothing; and it carries the good and the bad along with it, quite indifferently. A major movement changes a great many things, but never so many, or so completely, as its leaders and its followers think it does. And the relation between the theory (I mean the theory of poetry in particular) and the new poems that actually get written can be a lot more complex and obscure than it looks at first

sight. A movement and the theory of a movement are two different and distinct kinds of literary activity. I could illustrate this in any number of ways, but it would take too much of our time. A general statement will have to do; I hope you will take it on trust. Simply, that the theory, any theory of poetry, is always a secondary manifestation: poetics follow poems, not the other way round. In the case of‘open form’ poetry, I think we have seen a peculiar tendency to put theory first and poetic practice second. In order to write ‘open form’, the poet is assumed first to have read and mastered the principles of‘projective verse’, in particular as these are expounded by the late Charles Olson, by Robert Creeley, and other American poets associated with them. Besides this, the movement, and some aspects of the theory as well, have combined (and confused) poetic revolution with social revolution, more consciously and obviously than any such movement since the Romantics nearly two centuries ago. Of course I’m thinking of the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies; the years when poetry in more or less ‘open’ form began to be epidemic—and the San Francisco years, in the fifties, when Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg gave such a big impetus to the movement.

In one sense the theory did come first; Charles Olson’s essay called ‘Projective Verse’ appeared as early as 1950. But it didn’t produce the new movement. I think it would be a wild guess that Ginsberg, for instance —whom I consider the one poet of unusual genius among them all —owed his highly individual style to the theorising of Olson and Creeley. Rather, it seems to me that the movement —the Beat generation and their successors—picked up the theory and swept it along, till today we find it on our own doorstep, alive and kicking or, shall we say, twitching? The theory was something the movement wanted, and there it was: a poetic, a mystique, a doctrine, an ideology of sorts.

All the same, however it looks to us now, Charles Olson, in 1950, did announce what he conceived to be a new poetic, a new programme for poetry. In doing this, he invoked the authority, and the example, of major American poets of an earlier generation: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings. Pound and Williams in particular interested him; but they were the forerunners, the beginners; what Olson proposed was a more advanced theory than theirs, and (at least by implication) a superior poetic practice.

I have been rereading Pound’s famous ‘A Few Don’ts’ of the year 1913, and his poeticcredo, written in 1911. With Olson’s‘Projective Verse’ and a few other revered scriptures of the movement fresh in my mind, I find myself wondering, a little, how much has been

added; indeed, whether something has not been subtracted in the transition —it has been a transition, one can’t deny that —from the master’s principles and practice to those so much in favour with a later generation. I think there has been a narrowing of the vision, accompanied by a good deal of mystification, a tendency to doctrinaire attitudinising, and in some of the poetry a peculiar rigidity or inertness—all of this totally at odds with Pound’s thinking and his art, and equally at odds with the language of liberation and renewal affected by some of our born-again young poets.

There is another tendency or disposition (I shall merely notice it in passing) which appears in the critical polemics of‘projectivism’; something like a nervous nose for heresy. Olson himself, 30 years ago, declared T. S. Eliot (he nicknames him O. M. Eliot) to be ‘not projective’—and he adds, ‘having considered how each of us must save himself after his own fashion and how much, for that matter, each of us owes to the non-projective, and continue to owe, as both go alongside each other’. That expression ‘save himself betrays the tendency, doesn’t it? Only the other day, in a similar vein, I see that Mr Alan Loney, writing in Islands, warns C. K. Stead that he will not achieve ‘truly open form’ if he doesn’t mend his ways. Loney proceeds to advise Stead what he must do to become ‘projective’; the way of salvation has been pointed out to him. At least, that seems to be the drift; for my own part, I have to confess that the ghostly counsel offered would give me small comfort, because I find it unintelligible.

Still, as I keep on reminding myself, ‘projectivism’ is with us. So are Olson and his school. So are a host of younger poets, good and bad, one way or another affected by the movement, whether or not they happen to have studied its definitive writings. Having done a little study myself, I have to ask again, as I did a moment ago: what was added to Pound, or Williams for that matter, in the late fifties and the sixties, by Olson, Creeley and the movement we associate with Black Mountain College. Was anything of major worth or meaning added, for instance, to the ‘three principles’ which Pound and Richard Aldington and ‘H.D.’ agreed upon 70 years ago? Those three principles have been familiar ground for some of us for a very long time. They will bear repeating here:

1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

We are in the year 1912, about the time Pound first used the term ‘imagiste’. This was Imagism: first principle, ‘direct treatment of “the thing” ’. Pound goes on to explain what he means by an ‘lmage’—it is ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. This, he argues, ‘instantaneously . . . gives that sense of sudden liberation . . . of freedom from time and space limits . . . which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art’. It’s worth noticing that Pound does not pretend to offer a brand-new system for producing a brand-new kind of art. He is describing, in his own terms, a process by which ‘the greatest works of art’ have already been achieved, and by implication, the way towards all new achievement in art. And he is deducing theory from art, not art from theory; the right way round, as it seems to me.

Pound’s rules may sound a bit obvious and truistic to some of us, now. It was the prevailing taste, in the poetry and criticism of the time, that made them new, and challenging. In 1912, Hopkins was almost unknown —Bridges’s edition of the poems appeared in 1918 —otherwise his theory of inscape and instress might have been seen to anticipate Pound’s insistence on ‘the thing’ and his demand for the ‘image’ presented in an ‘instant of time’. Grierson’s famous anthology of the metaphysical poets had barely appeared. Yet, as things stood at the time, it was Pound who set things going—‘out of key with his time’, as he put it in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’, he tried ‘to resuscitate the dead art/of poetry’.

Forty years later, in 1950, Charles Olson announced the arrival of projective verse, and took up what the lawyers call an ‘adversary situation’ towards what he calls The Non-Projective. Beneath the title he printed three ingeniously-chosen etymological siblings of the word ‘projective’: spaced out across the page, each with an unclosed parenthesis mark, we read the words ‘projectile’, ‘percussive’, ‘prospective’. Projectile —it goes off like a shell or a rocket —Okay, citizen? Percussive —it beats and it strikes. Prospective —it looks, ahead, it’s the poetry of the future. Opposed to all this —so to speak, in the enemy camp—was the Non-Projective. This was of course where T. S. Eliot remained, and the cause of what Olson judged to be his failure as a dramatist. About the Non-Projective we are told three things:

First, it is ‘what a French critic calls “closed” verse’. Second, it is ‘that verse which print bred’ (which means, I take it, something that happened after the invention of movable printing type in the fifteenth century, or the emergence of a printed book audience for poetry in the sixteenth century.)

Third, it is ‘pretty much what we have had, in English and American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound and Williams’.

From the start, it’s clear that we are in for something more radical than Pound ever dreamt of; we are in another world, if not another planet, from Pound. Pound, whatever we choose to make of his political aberrations, took poetry with an immense and, for his time, extraordinary seriousness. He was, I believe, humble before it and its history. I’m not sure that he didn’t say the last word —in English anyway, and if there can be a last word —on the subject of vers libre, and a few other problems of diction and versification which have confronted poets in our century. He affirmed his belief that poets should try to know, and learn from, all poetry, of all possible ages and languages, and to master all systems of metre. A poet could not have too many masters or too many languages. Whatever Pound was, he was not, and here’s the contrast I wish to point out, a poetic Messiah, whose mission and message was to correct the errors of centuries past. The errors which concerned him were ‘modern’ errors. His ‘modernism’ was grounded on a profound sense of tradition, not merely classical and Renaissance, but more recent and Romantic. Not many of us may be able to follow Pound’s advice, for instance, ‘to dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values’, but it is within anybody’s means to ‘read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too unutterably dull’. In all this, Pound seems to me to be in a true line of descent from the great innovators and reformers of poetry; in contrast to the kind of extravagant syncretist and philosophical dilettante whom I find addressing me in Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ essay.

More specifically, one or two examples of the kind of thing I mean. I read about composition by field —Olson’s field is much talked about: often by people who, I suspect, understand it no better than I do. It is something ‘opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective’. Yes, we can see what it is opposed to\ and it looks very much like the old (and exhausted) debate between vers libre and regular verse, between ‘imagism’ and what Pound called ‘perdamnable rhetoric’ in English poetry. There is, besides, a whole paragraph of Olson which — effectively and poetically —contains nothing more than Eliot’s last paragraphs in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: for Eliot’s word ‘emotion’ you only have to read Olson’s word ‘energy’; and you can, if you like, prefer a pseudo-scientific and quantitative metaphor to an old-style psychological one: but whether you do or not, the Olson version contains nothing new whatsoever.

Where I suppose Olson can be said to have gone further than Pound —or rather, turned the argument about poetics in a new direction altogether—was in his attempt to provide poets with a method, a kit of practical rules for the composition of ‘projective verse’. Where Pound and Aldington offered a few general guidelines for poets, Olson offered, or seemed to offer, a set of compositional rules, both complete and specific; as he presented them, these appeared to be grounded on scientific or quasi-scientific notions. I say quasi-scientific, because the connexions between the arguments and the poetic subject depend so much on one’s willingness to accept that they exist. They are not all so simple as, for instance, his analogy between physics and poetry, by which the poem is called ‘a high energy-construct ... an energy-discharge’. Of course, it is easy to think of a poem in terms like these, if one chooses to do so. It is not so easy, for me, at all events, to conceive this ‘energy-discharge’, what Olson calls ‘the poem itself as an autonomous process. We all understand, in our experience of writing, how from time to time the work seems to ‘take over’, how it seems ‘of itself to determine what the author must do; but it seems to me a false emphasis, simplistic and misleading, when autonomy is transferred like this from the poet to ‘the poem itself’.

What I am calling Olson’s rules, along with the style of discourse characteristic of the author, have continued to fascinate younger poets —the more talented and more experienced may have gained something, I don’t know; many have gained little but the feeling of being in the trend —where they would have been, whatever the trend was. I shall try to summarise these rules, as well as I can make them out. I shall mix in a good deal of comment of my own, for what interest it may have.

I’ve mentioned what Olson calls the Field. This is where the poet is said to find himself when he abandons ‘closed form’. In this Field he finds all the objects or images; all the perceptions which he will assemble into an ‘open form’ poem. He also finds himself, as an object among all these objects: ‘objectism’ is in fact another word for the theory of‘open form’ or ‘projective’ verse. It is not clear (I think it is not meant to be clear) to what extent the objects in the Field spontaneously assemble themselves, so that the poem, so to speak, makes itself, while the poet submits himself and follows the track (Olson’s word) and the track can only be (Olson’s words again) ‘the one the poem under hand declares, for itself ’ (my italics). The role of the poet as agent is referred to very guardedly. Olson’s grammar at this point is peculiar, and his terms have a kind of oracular ambiguity. He tells us that the poet ‘has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined’. But the emphasis is fairly clear; it is on the poet

regarded as an instrument, regarding himself as an instrument played upon by his poem, rather than as a conceiving and executing agent, making his poem. All this answers well enough, I suppose, to some part, but by no means the whole, of what poets have always experienced in the act of composing a poem. Some centuries ago Spenser might have covered it all by an invocation to the Muses —calling on ‘ye learned sisters’ to help him with his poem —and his readers would have understood. Are we really much wiser, if we substitute Olson’s Field, with its beguilingly pseudo-scientific package of terms out of the higher journalism of pyschology, for the old classical conventions? Nobody had to believe in the heavenly Muses, but everybody knew what was meant; simply that half the poet’s art was his sense of a power, a source in his own being, beyond ideas, beyond any mere skills with language. What I am suggesting is, of course, that Olson’s Field is a truism disguised as a discovery. I think Coleridge’s remarks on this kind of thing fit the case rather well:

There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature, of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken for flames of fire. 2

Like ‘projective’ itself, this word ‘Field’ finds its place in a vocabulary of mystification. (In passing, we may note the affinity of ‘Projective’ with some usages of psychiatry, from which it borrows a bit of its magic.) ‘Field’ has an intriguing variety of connotations, more than enough to account for its cultish popularity. It connotes natural, spontaneous growth (‘field mushrooms’, uncultivated); magnetic attraction; ‘field of vision’; ‘field-work’, viz. fact-finding, with a happy suggestion of scientific rectitude; ‘open country’; ‘in the field’, viz. ‘out where the real fighting is’; ‘my field’, my specialty; any number of‘happy fields’, sporting or Elysian. It is indeed a highly suggestive term, but I don’t imagine it is more than just that. I confess that Olson’s use of it adds nothing to the little I have learned from the experience—the strange experience that it always is—of composing poems. It shrinks into a truism, or swells into a solipsism. It may for all I know have helped some poets to write more poems, longer poems, or even better ones; but I am sure they are mistaken if they make a verbal talisman of it, or some kind of hierophantic password into the house of poetry.

Once the aspiring ‘projective’ poet has mastered, or thinks he has mastered, the mystery of the field, he can then try to grasp what Olson calls the principle —the law which ‘presides conspicuously over such composition, and, when obeyed , is the reason why a

projective poem can come into being’. This law or principle, was formulated by Robert Creeley, Olson’s Black Mountain friend and fellow poet. Here it is. Form is never more than an extension of content. I don’t want to waste too much time over this. Once upon a time, a good many critics were happy to speak about the ‘organic form’ of a poem; I suppose they meant that the shape and the movement of a poem were analagous to those of a living creature, one of a kind but unique in itself. They weren’t thinking of sonnets, villanelles, ballads, ballades, or whether the metre and the stanzas were more or less regular; they were thinking of the poem’s unique and original character and not, as it were, classifying it by formal attributes which it could share with any number of other poems. I frankly don’t see that Olson’s ‘extension of content’ adds anything significant to this idea. Possibly some people can feel a bit happier, a bit more cosy , if they think of something inert being extended, rather than something alive which grows. Perhaps it sounds more philosophical. The trouble is that the formula leaves the terms ‘form’, ‘extension’ and ‘content’ as ambiguous, as unspecific and unhelpful as they ever were: on examination, the so-called principle collapses into its ambiguities; as a dogma—‘dogma’ is a favourite word of Olson’s —no doubt it is not meant to be examined.

Having presented us with the principle —‘There it is, brothers, sitting there, for use’ —Olson goes on to instruct us in how to apply it; his language now has the beguiling tones of physical science and engineering technology: ‘(3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished.’ One wakes up hopefully; if the principle makes no sense of itself, perhaps the process, about to be described, will help to make sense of it. In a way, it does. At least we begin to see what it is that Creeley/Olson wish us to understand by the term ‘content’. Perceptions —the poet’s perceptions, that is. Olson says it ‘can be boiled down to one statement’. Here is the statement: ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.

Now, if we’re not to get intolerably confused among the ambiguities of this further term perception —if ever a word were slipping and sliding and decaying with imprecision, this one is—we have to assume, I think, that what is meant here is ‘senseperception’, the way colours, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile qualities become recognisable objects for the mind; and we can’t (can we?) separate such perception from cognition, because the mere sensations on their own are simply not news about anything either subjective or objective. When Pound talked about ‘direct treatment of the “Thing” ’, it wasn’t bad advice to a poet —at least, to an

imagist poet. Olson, however, is talking about what he calls a process', not the thing, but the perception of the thing leading ‘to a further perception’. He says it must do this, as if a perception could possibly be followed by anything else. We just don’t stop perceiving, one way or another, one thing or another, so long as we are conscious. Saying a perception must lead to a perception evidently means something quite different from the simple observation that it does. What precisely is Olson up to? Can it be simply said that he is trying to expound a new poetic in the terms of an old pyschology, and producing only a muddle of truisms and tautologies? But perhaps we can find the answers in his own words:

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, 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, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER. 3

You may notice that this author has a message to deliver, which concerns not only the way we write poems, but ‘our management of daily reality’. He urges, he demands, he admonishes —‘USE USE USE’, ‘must must must’. There is a philosophy at work here, and a doctrine. The philosophy may well have something to do with Husserl, the phenomenologist. Not having studied Husserl—but not being ignorant, either, of the phenomenological positions —I recall Camus’s remark about ‘the shimmering of phenomenological thought’. Olson’s perceptions, ‘perceptions’, ‘speed’, ‘as fast as you can’, ‘one after another’, ‘instanter’ —all this takes me back to Camus’s comment that

Husserl and the phenomenologists, by their very extravagances, reinstate the world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason. The spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them. The rose petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as important as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Thinking ceases to be unifying or making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment . . .’ 4

Now, you don’t have to read much about Olson to find that phenomenological thought has a lot to do with his teachings about poetry. There’s an instance that sticks, rather disturbingly, in my memory: somebody writes about poets ‘inhabiting the phenomenal welter making up the world’; Olson is said to have provided ‘techniques . . . [for] making experience direct and unmediated for the poet who plunges fully into the phenomena around him’. Certainly, if we agree to regard the world as ‘a phenomenal welter’,

it is a welter inhabited by poets, along with everybody else. On the other hand, being in it, how can we be said to make use of techniques for plunging into it?

A powerfully persuasive philosophy is one thing. Directives for making poems—call them techniques for plunging or whatever you like —are another thing altogether. Can we agree about that? Pound and Imagism certainly gave a phenomenological twist to poetics in our time. Wallace Stevens thought like a phenomenologist, though it would not have occurred to him that a new poetic system, a once-and-for-all-time doctrine, lay in that direction.

The ‘phenomenal welter’ is of course what Olson means when he demands that ‘in any given poem, always one perception must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON another’. Elsewhere, having summarily dismissed Socrates (for his ‘readiness to generalise’), Aristotle (for his ‘logic and classification’) and Plato (for his ‘forms extricable from content’), he argues that these are ‘habits of thought’ which interfere with action', they get between us and what he calls the end. And what is the end? It is ‘never more than this instant, . . . than you, figuring it out, and acting . . . If there is any absolute it is never more than this one, you, this instant, in action.’

The poem therefore becomes a record of instant, instantaneously experienced, perceptions; Camus’s account of the Husserlian phenomena puts it perfectly: ‘there is no scenario but a successive and incoherent illustration. In that magic lantern all the pictures are privileged.’ It’s easy to account for the fascination it holds, this arbitrary conversion of a philosophical position into a system of poetics! No pauses, no connecting grammar of ideas, no abstractions, no conceptual impurities, above all, no logic; ‘logic’ being a very dirty word indeed, and therefore requiring no definition or explanation. It’s easy, too, to see how some of my younger New Zealand ‘contemporaries’ have caught on. For instance, the anthologist whom I mentioned is happy to find that poetry no longer is required ‘to conform to the dictates of traditional logic’: myself, I never supposed that it was. And Mr Peter Bland, who read Olson’s essay 20 years ago, is happy to find that lan Wedde (and others) ‘seem to be opening up new democracies of feeling’. Am I right in supposing that these ‘new democracies’ have something to do with the perceptions, the phenomena —all the pictures are equally privileged?

Experience must teach any working poet that Olson’s poetical directive, the one about perceptions, simply won’t do, citizen. It won’t work, either for making poems or the ‘management of daily reality’. That ‘shimmering of phenomenological thought’ is always

disturbed, interrupted, accompanied by conceptions of all sorts; by aberrations, nightmares, daydreams, fantasies; even the phenomena, the perceptions—so far as we can focus and fix them —keep on joining, disjoining, connecting, conflicting, relating, failing to relate. Poetic order is still order of a special kind. Something has to hold the bits and pieces together, they won’t do it of themselves. Even logic and classification are human. An enormous part of language has directly to do with all of this; far too much of it to be disregarded by poets, whose material it is. You can’t escape by arguing, as Olson does, ‘The harmony of the universe, and I include man, is not logical, or better, is post-logical. ’ All that amounts to, is appealing to a superior logic.

There are two other rules for projective or open form verse, for which I can find no ground in common sense or experience; but I’d better mention them because so much of our current new verse looks as if the poets believed in them. One could be called physiological, and the other mechanical, or manual. Briefly, we are reminded that the poet breathes as he composes—okay, citizen. Ergo, he composes as he breathes. Olson reminds us that in Latin the word spiritus means breathing, which I suppose lends a little tone to this notion. Then, by using the keys of his typewriter, he is said to ‘score’ his breathed poem on the paper, like a sheet of music: spaces or diagonals, for instance, give the reader the pauses, the durations equivalent to the poet’s own breath in the act of composition. Of course, it is true that the cadence of a phrase, the accenting and rhythm of a line of verse —or prose for that matter —are governed by the natural stresses of good speech, and one can’t speak without breathing. But it simply does not follow that this ‘breath’ of the line corresponds to the breath I breathe as I write it or compose it by ear. Anyone who was ever taught singing, as I was, knows that the ins-and-outs of the lungs, the suspensions and releases of the breath, have as much, and just as much, to do with the form of the music as the bag of the bagpipe has with the strathspey or the lament which the piper is playing. As for the typewriter; well, it has its conveniences. Does anyone remember Don Marquis’s cockroach, Archy, who could write only by butting his head on the keys, and used no capital letters because he couldn’t use the shift key? More seriously, one thinks of E. E. Cummings, whom Olson mentions in passing, with suitable respect. As long ago as 1923, Cummings had explored almost all the poetic possibilities of the typewriter as a means of engaging the ear and the eye of the reader. Here is a question: does the particular genius of Cummings lend much support to a general principle of poetics, elaborated by Olson and Creeley some 30 years later? I am inclined to think not.

Incidentally, it is ironic, and Olson himself concedes the point, that we should attach the typewriter to poetry, like a prosthetic limb or gland, when we have rejected the ‘closed’ conventions of the printing press. Does this perhaps leave us, not with an ‘open form’, but with a multiplicity of‘closed’ forms; every new poem, in fact, self-enclosed, more tightly straitjacketed than by any of the discarded conventions? Is this perhaps what many of us want? Is it one more aspect of the kind of paradox which Camus found in Husserl: ‘a whole proliferation of phenomena, the wealth of which has about it something inhuman’?

The poetics of‘projective verse’ may have reached this part of the world a little late though, as I’ve mentioned, they have had their followers in New Zealand since the sixties. Of course, there’s no good reason, in history or nature, why a movement in art can’t be fruitful, whatever the date or the place. So much that happens is sheer accident. It seems to me that Olson’s theory, with all its oddities and self-contradictions, with all its appeal to the semi-educated and the half-gifted, owes most of its influence to the historical coincidence, that it came right on time for the American ‘Beat generation’ of the fifties, and the generation which grew up in the sixties. As a poetic, it was neither new nor instructive. But it provided a doctrine, an ideology, a kit of terms, along with an evangelical enthusiasm, all highly seductive to a generation which was forming its ideas of prose from Kerouac and Burroughs and of poetry from Ginsberg and Snyder. It coincided also with the interpenetration of American writing and teaching in American colleges and universities; with the creative writing class and the study of contemporary literature.

I began by saying that poetics, the theory of the thing, is a secondary product; poets teach their art by example, not theory, and that young poets had better mind their step on the slippery ground of another poet’s theory. The poet as guru is least of all to be trusted.

• How far, or how directly, Olson and his teaching have influenced, or continue to influence, the shape of poetry in this country; this is a matter for speculation. His vocabulary and a few of his ideas do seem to have been adopted by a number of poets like Loney and Michael Harlow and Alistair Paterson; and lan Wedde, gifted and original writer as he is, has been known to borrow an Olson mannerism, like addressing the reader as ‘citizen’. I think there’s enough evidence to justify the trouble I have taken to put a few thoughts together on the subject; if only to clear my own mind and test my prejudices. The reputation of Charles Olson, himself, as a poet is another question altogether. I suppose it rests mainly on the six volumes,

one of them posthumous, of his Maximus poems, which I’m not competent to discuss, not having read them. I cannot pretend to compare them with Pound’s Cantos or Williams’s Paterson, with which I’m pretty familiar; evidently Maximus owes a good deal to those two great works of the modern period, but whether it equals or rivals them remains at least a matter of debate. I have confined myself strictly to the theory of ‘projective’ or ‘open form’ verse. The genius of the poet needn’t, after all, be vitiated by the weakness of his theory—as Coleridge was happy to remark in the case of Wordsworth: ‘And I reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius . . .’ Yet, as I’ve just said, the ‘mere theory’ of a poet can be slippery ground; perhaps safe enough for its author, but full of traps for his disciples.

Afterword Since this lecture was delivered, C. K. Stead has justly remarked to me that perhaps a poetic theory is worth discussing only if one cares for it, and reminded me that no such theory can ever be comprehensive enough. He also wondered if I had done justice to the question of the ‘long poem’. I think I see how intimately this last is related to the whole debate about ‘open form’. My difficulty was, how to stick closely to the terms of Olson’s essay, so far as I follow them, without seeming to forget that the argument is about poetry, not terms. I cannot expect to have been entirely successful. Nor can I hope that others who have indisputably found a good deal of sense —and a positive poetic impetus —in aspects of the theory, will be much troubled by what troubles me most about it: that it does make extraordinarily comprehensive claims, and challenges criticism on grounds far exceeding the bounds (assuming such bounds can exist?) of a poetic. Th epoetic claims for ‘Projective Verse’ are not easily separated from the philosophical claims of, for instance, Olson’s ‘Human Universe’ essay, and from the latter’s questions like, ‘ Wasistder Weg?' and the nature of‘the absolute’. One does not willingly concede that such a separation ought to be easy, or for that matter (ultimately) considered possible. Very likely, in ‘buying’ a poetic, one must be aware that something like a world-view is contained in the package; certainly in Olson’s case it could hardly be spelt out more plainly. With such things on my mind —not to mention a few notions (prejudices, if one likes) about poetry itself —I was hardly likely to do justice to the best parts of the ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto: these are, I believe, a few exceptional insights into the experience of writing poems, precious in

themselves if hardly (as I suppose) sufficient to support the edifice of theory. However obvious its connexions with some of the ‘post-modernist’ changes in the character of poetry —and of its readership!—l cannot see it as the cause of these, nor as ‘ground-breaking’ (Mr Loney’s expression). My attempt to examine a few of its terms can lie on the table where, noticed or not, it should do no harm.

REFERENCES 1 ‘From Wystan to Carlos: Modern and Modernism in Recent New Zealand Poetry’, Islands, 21 (November 1979), 467-486. 2 Biographia Literaria, XVIII. 3 Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York, 1973). 4 Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, tr. by Justin O’Brien (London, 1955).