Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson 0826358926, 9780826358929

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Imagining Persons

RECENCIES SERIES: RESEARCH AND RECOVERY IN T WENT IE TH-CENTURY AMERICAN POE T ICS M AT T HE W HOF ER , S ER IE S EDI T OR RECENCIES

This series stands at the intersection of critical investigation, historical documentation, and the preservation of cultural heritage. The series exists to illuminate the innovative poetics achievements of the recent past that remain relevant to the present. In addition to publishing monographs and edited volumes, it is also a venue for previously unpublished manuscripts, expanded reprints, and collections of major essays, letters, and interviews. Also available in the Recencies Series: An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne edited by Ryan Dobran The Olson Codex: Projective Verse and the Problem of Mayan Glyphs by Dennis Tedlock The Birth of the Imagination: William Carlos Williams on Form by Bruce Holsapple The Maltese Falcon to Body of Lies: Spies, Noirs, and Trust by Robert von Hallberg The Oppens Remembered: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis How Long Is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin edited by Stephen Fredman Loose Cannons: Selected Prose by Christopher Middleton Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters edited by Claudia Moreno Pisano The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau, Expanded Edition by Edward Dorn and Leroy Lucas For additional titles in the Recencies Series, please visit unmpress.com.

Imagining Persons Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson

EDITED BY

ROBERT J. BERTHOLF AND DALE M. SMITH

University of New Mexico Press

•

Albuquerque

© 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duncan, Robert, 1919–1988, author. | Bertholf, Robert J., editor. | Smith, Dale, 1967– editor. Title: Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson / edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith. Description: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. | Series: Recencies series: Research and recovery in twentieth-century American poetics | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017011123 (print) | LCCN 2017028533 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826358929 (E-book) | ISBN 9780826358912 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Olson, Charles, 1910–1970—Criticism and interpretation. | Poetry, Modern—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | American poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | Modernism (Literature)—United States. | Poetics—History—20th century. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. Classification: LCC PS3529.L655 (ebook) | LCC PS3529.L655 Z64 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.54-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011123

Designed by Felicia Cedillos

Contents

Preface vii Dale M. Smith Acknowledgments Note on the Text

ix xi

Introduction Advocating Projective Verse Aesthetics 1 Dale M. Smith Vancouver Lecture 19 Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson’s Work

51

Timing and the Creation of Time in Charles Olson’s Maximus The Power of Imagining Persons The Poem as an Interior Play 85 The Fatefulness of Ongoing Identifications The Poem as the Recall and Adventure of Self in Projection 103 “Forth on the godly sea” The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry 123 The World Felt as Presence

v

141

69

vi Contents

Projective Project Charles Olson 157 On Projective Verse 175 Notes

193

Glossary

211

Bibliography Index 241

227

Preface Dale M. Smith

Robert J. Bertholf (1940–2016) served as the curator of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, from 1979 until 2005, when he was named the Charles D. Abbott Scholar of Poetry and the Arts. Fortunately for me, upon his retirement in 2007, he moved to Austin, Texas, where I was then completing my doctoral work at the University of Texas. Robert had extended family in the region, and he quickly settled into the laid-back pace of life in the South. He soon invited me to lunch (many lunches, actually); he attended poetry readings and events I hosted with my wife, the poet Hoa Nguyen; and he provided insights and invaluable conversation regarding the poets I most admire—Duncan, Olson, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Joanne Kyger, Susan Howe, and many others. Robert and his wife, Anne, hosted many dinners and offered their time and generosity in innumerable ways, and I remember Robert as a dear friend whose bright eyes, quick laughter, and “jovial hectoring” (as his family-written obituary so perfectly described him) challenged me to speak freely and thoughtfully. I quickly learned to meet his interests directly from my own forming perspectives. In 2011, as I was leaving with my family for Toronto, Ontario, to take a position at Ryerson University, Robert added a large cardboard box to my moving load. It wasn’t until a few months later that I examined the contents and was surprised to discover the manuscripts of Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (which became the current volume) and An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (which is a separate volume also published by the University of New Mexico Press). I immediately suggested that we finish both projects, and so began our formal obligation to these important documents of mid-century poetics. Before Robert died suddenly in February 2016, he knew that the texts would be published, and he was thrilled that his many years of work would find a home at the University of New Mexico Press. vii

viii Preface

Robert Bertholf never approached small tasks: his scholarly publications reflect a devotion to American open-form poetry, with special emphasis on the work of Robert Duncan and his partner, the visual artist and collagist Jess Collins. Robert’s many publications are testaments to his devotion to art and poetry, with a special emphasis on postwar American writing. His publications include Robert Duncan: Scales of the Marvelous (with Ian Reid) (1979), William Blake and the Moderns (1982), Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography (1986), A Great Admiration: H.D./Robert Duncan Correspondence, 1950–1961 (1991), Jess: A Grand Collage, 1951–1993 (with Michael Auping and Michael Palmer) (1993), Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems (1993) and A Selected Prose (1995), and The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (with Albert Gelpi) (2004). As the coeditor of Imagining Persons, I compared Robert’s transcripts to the original audio recordings, and I updated the notes and glossary wherever necessary. Robert believed firmly that my training in rhetorical theory would help situate the lectures as performative documents that show not only Duncan’s talent for extemporaneous and improvisational speech, but also his ongoing advocacy on behalf of open-form poetry and especially the work of Charles Olson. But the vision and energy to gather the material began with Robert’s unflagging admiration for Robert Duncan. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work on these important projects, though I am aware more keenly of the loss of Robert’s friendship. His kindness and insight are sustained indefinitely by way of rich passage in the heart and by the legacy of his work: what we love well, Ezra Pound once said, remains.

Acknowledgments

The tapes from which these lectures were transcribed are housed in the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York. The editors are grateful to James Maynard, the curator of the Poetry Collection, for help with the material in this volume and for permission to publish our transcriptions of the lectures. A note of gratitude also goes to the staff of the Poetry Collection, and especially Roumiana Velikova for assistance in preparing the final typescript. The editors wish to thank Christopher Wagstaff and Mary Margaret Sloan, the co-trustees of the Jess Collins Trust, for their support of this project and for permission to publish Robert Duncan’s lectures, and we thank Christopher Wagstaff for his generous contributions to this volume. Additionally, work on this project could not have been completed without the financial support of the Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University. We offer grateful acknowledgment to Lisa Moore for her close reading of the introductory material, and we extend appreciation to the Ryerson University Literatures of Modernity graduate program—especially the directors, Dennis Denisoff and Sophie Thomas—for generous financial support and to the research assistants and scholars who contributed their time and attention at various stages of the project: David Peter Clark, Basit Iqbal, Adam Katz, Cira Nickel, Robert di Pardo, Carlos Tuason, and Kyle Waugh. The manuscript reviewers for the University of New Mexico Press, Ammiel Alcalay and Peter O’Leary, deserve abundant thanks for their thoughtful comments on the material, and we extend our gratitude to University of New Mexico Press editor Elise McHugh for her generosity and insight throughout the publication process. We are indebted especially to Merryl A. Sloane for her careful editing of the final manuscript. This work could not have appeared without Anne Bertholf ’s faith and generosity, and to her we owe our deepest thanks. ix

Note on the Text

Duncan lectured with just a few notes and often without any. He talked fast and with great enthusiasm. He used the lecture as a means of exploring subjects without predeterminations, so he was actually discovering what he thought about a given topic as he spoke. He often began a sentence and then abandoned it as he discovered what he wanted to say. We have deleted these false starts when they hinder the advance of the theme of the lecture, but we have also tried to retain the structure of his spoken presentation even while defining the texts for reading. Duncan punctuated his talks with pauses and shifts in cadence, which at times conflict with the punctuation of the written language. We have retained the structure of the spoken punctuation when it maintains the idea under discussion. Like any impromptu lecturer, Duncan repeatedly used transitional words like “well” and “and.” Relative clauses with “that” and dependent clauses beginning with “because” often obscure the meaning of a sentence when rendered in print. We’ve retained these only when they sustain the development of an idea. He also liked to attach phrases on the ends of sentences, afterthoughts. We’ve retained these only when they are woven back into the themes of the lecture. He often digressed into lateral subjects that in a lecture were appealing but in a written text are digressions that hinder comprehension. When we assessed that they do hinder, they have been removed. Duncan also often mentioned authors and historical figures, works, and occurrences without explanation. The notes and glossary identify some of the specific people, publications, and other references mentioned in the lectures.

xi

Introduction Advocating Projective Verse Aesthetics Dale M. Smith I’m not lecturing literature. —Robert Duncan, Buffalo lecture, March 22, 1979

I

n Robert Duncan’s lectures on Charles Olson, given occasionally from 1961 to 1983, there is a full-throated challenge to the hegemony of New Criticism as an aesthetic and critical practice. Each lecture addresses Olson’s notion of “projective verse” (for Duncan, “field poetics”), a method of composition that encourages the variables of personal creative practice to interact within a larger historical process of cultural realization. While Olson, who died in 1970, is the topic of these lectures, it’s Duncan’s extraordinary reach into his own poetic faculties that sustains the energy of the nine documents presented here. What emerges in them pays tribute to the marvelous creative energies of the Gloucester poet and expands with great detail the strategies of projective verse and its place in Duncan’s vision of modernist writing.1 Only the first lecture was delivered during Olson’s lifetime, when both poets situated themselves in opposition to the New Critical aesthetic paradigm of the period. It’s important to recall how at mid-century John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate revised and expanded on modernist practices that gave the poet-critic authority over a domain of literary texts. As a method of close textual analysis, Ransom’s The New Criticism provided a critical and pedagogical platform of investigation that looked at literary texts, in Terry Eagleton’s words, as “a structure of complex tensions cut loose from the flux of history and authorial intention, autotelic and unparaphrasable.” 2 By contrast, the more democratic inheritance of modernism described in Charles Olson’s statement on poetics in “Projective Verse” (1950) brought the creative and critical process-based pursuit of writing to individuals concerned with collapsing, not instituting, the boundaries between the author and her content. From the beginning of these lectures, Duncan announces the singular 1

2 Introduction

importance of projective verse as a way into the complex exchanges that define human experience, and he locates the origin of this confrontational challenge to New Criticism in Charles Olson’s strategies of composition. While later lectures acknowledge Olson’s legacy and achievement, Duncan continues to reflect on the meaning of “Projective Verse” and its importance to him as a writer fully invested in the field poetics he helped invent. The rich context of Duncan’s creative practice was identified strongly with Olson, who helped articulate a new basis for poetics; their shared goal was to create poetry beyond the domain of literature to confront a larger cultural and historical frame of action. Given extemporaneously, Duncan’s lectures before live audiences at the Vancouver home of Ellen and Warren Tallman (1961), the University of Iowa (1978), the University at Buffalo (1979), and the New College of California (1982, 1983) reveal a personal stance within the enlarged features of Olson’s extraordinary cultural range of reference. Together, they brought to poetry the urgency of a cultural encounter that pressed against the domain of New Critical literary institutions, and they both expanded the range of their poetics to include history, occult literature, and other extraliterary frames of investigation. A relativist, provisory understanding of knowledge meant that the composition of poetry led one to investigate the world, and to form judgments of it, in writing that sustained the poem “INSTANTER,” as Olson phrased it in the “Projective Verse” essay. The text then became the material document of the poet’s tireless cultural encounter. While the history of their personal and public relationship is described in the letters published as a separate volume,3 their encounter with the particulars of poetic strategies of composition in a modernist tradition are fully illustrated by Duncan’s intense and deeply penetrating lectures. During the course of more than two decades Duncan returned to key themes, establishing periodic and thematic affinities with modernists like Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and H.D. The map he laid out not only is designed to illumine the social and personal realities behind artistic movements, it also reinforces the aims and objectives of “Projective Verse.” Duncan’s lectures illustrate the social and cultural context from which that influential essay sprang, and he provides the philosophical and textual backgrounds behind Olson’s emphasis on energy and space as primary domains of mid-century American writing. Significantly, literature is not the topic of Duncan’s lectures. Instead, he describes the stylistic force of the projective impulse in cultural and historical terms, engaging a material and social process of the imagination in postwar American culture. In ways that are similar to the theoretical assumptions behind modern rhetorical studies, Duncan’s extemporaneous articulations of projective

Introduction 3

verse assign a communicative function to poetry. He identifies the poem as an event in consciousness uniquely capable of crossing disciplinary boundaries to create new encounters between the poet and the world. Duncan’s Rhetorical “Presence” and Performance

The rhetorical structure of these lectures correlates with Duncan’s notion of a field poetics insofar as they reveal how both Duncan and Olson were concerned with the motives and energies that shaped their investigative poetry. Although rhetoric is often understood as a study of figures and tropes, modern and contemporary rhetorical scholarship explores the persuasive dynamics of critical inquiry and judgment, with a focus directed to the ways poetry and art reinforce or challenge culturally held beliefs.4 Duncan, by advocating for Olson, does not describe a literary community of poets orbiting around a great figure; instead he attests to a community of ideas, beliefs, practices, and conversations about strategies to access imagination and register experience in modes of written discourse. The vocalization of these lectures, moreover, performs a uniquely rhetorical act that is shaped by the expectations of his auditors. Duncan’s matter-of-fact speaking style and folksy cadences are often self-interrupted mid-thought in an improvised expansion of topical investigation. While there is certainly a dizzying range of references to historical and cultural circumstances, modernist literary schools and traditions, and hermetic doctrines, Duncan’s performances in these lectures invited his audiences to participate in his projective accounts of poetry by adhering to a sense of wonder and by expressing an improvised verbal agility. His friendliness and humor offset the seriousness of his intent, and even when one thought pressed him quickly toward another, often leading him to switch topics abruptly, his auditors remained close to the movement of ideas because Duncan was such a personable and welcoming speaker despite his erudition and at times occult terminology. While Duncan’s speaking did not conform to standard stylistic expectations for academic lecturers, the digressive features of his speech created what Chaïm Perelman calls “presence” by “act[ing] directly upon our sensibility.” Duncan was extraordinary as a speaker for “evoking realities that are distant in time and space,” and his capacity to engage his listeners transited “between rhetoric as the art of persuasion and as the technique of literary expression.” 5 In the 1961 Vancouver lecture, for example, Duncan describes his first meeting with Charles Olson not in terms of personal affection, but through the expansion of stylistic presence via storytelling:

4 Introduction

We talked about cities and farms. And how this was a subject I was filled with at the time. It seemed to me a vital thing that had happened in history. In the Middle Ages as the cities grew they had nothing to offer in return to the farmlands around them, and they had to be fed from the farmlands. And of course, even a vague impression of the Middle Ages gives you the picture of what happened. The image of the medieval farm focuses the audience’s attention and establishes narrative presence through the details of the story Duncan shares about his first meeting with Olson. It also signals to his listeners that the lectures, while focusing on personal matters, will continue an exploration of concerns essential to Duncan’s investigation of a field poetics. Indeed, the projective nature of the lectures assembles literary, historical, philosophical, personal, geographic, and political details that contribute presence to the spoken delivery. We know that Duncan’s speech was effective because throughout the audio recordings we can hear questions from his auditors, listen to their laughter, and confirm their applause. While the written texts do not always convey the responses of the audiences, it should be remembered that Duncan’s encounter with poetry in these lectures always considered the occasion and the reception of his speech. Although Duncan and Olson were often skeptical of rhetoric, associating it with a kind of nineteenth-century linguistic ornamentation (the proverbial “flowers” of discourse), Olson’s experience as the captain of Classical High School’s debating team in 1920s Worcester, Massachusetts, and Duncan’s secondary education at Bakersfield High School in the 1930s would have prepared them for a grammatical and strategic understanding of rhetoric’s function in speaking and writing. Indeed, Olson’s creation of Maximus in The Maximus Poems (1983) reveals an orator whose letters to the city of Gloucester frequently advocate for new cultural perspectives and political possibilities. His advocacy is seen moreover in the poems and letters he contributed throughout the 1960s to the Gloucester Daily Times, whose editors helped shape Olson’s arguments for a civic audience.6 Similarly, Duncan’s view of poetry as “communication” insists on the importance of the common and the communal. The civic and the mythic are not separate for him; instead, they are both illustrated by events that disclose new possibilities for knowledge and action in the public sphere. Poetry prepares the civic groundwork by incorporating the mundane and everyday experiences of the polis within a cosmic frame of reference that includes myth, spirituality, history, and science. The poet, for Duncan, explores the ethical stakes for the community and resolves to confront the common problems of civic discourse by constantly framing and reframing attention within the ever-widening field

Introduction 5

of poetic investigation. By taking on such a task he hoped to restore a vision of civic actions apprehended within an increasingly expanding shared knowledge. All nine lectures present information useful to literary scholars and to enthusiasts of modernism, but the texts here also should be understood in relation to their rhetorical and performative contexts. Each presented document expands the occasion of Duncan’s performances, given in speech-based environments, through archived audio recordings and then through being transcribed into printed form. The complexities of mediatization are immense and challenging. Duncan’s printed lectures arrive in this book as artifacts that extend the original vocal presentation into a new medium of written discourse. The lectures as they are offered in their printed form only resemble the initial performances on which they are based. The introduction of first audio recording and then print transcription has inherently altered the performative medium of Duncan’s original lectures. The technological diffusion of his performances through audio and print contexts complicates how we imagine those media in the ongoing construction and reception of Duncan’s speech. What emerges in these lectures, then, is an edited account, however faithful, of what took place on separate dates over a twenty-year period of Duncan’s life. Published versions exist of two of the lectures presented here, but the documents in this book are not verbatim transcriptions of the audio recordings (our rationale is explained in “Note on the Text”).7 Instead, we have acknowledged Duncan’s wish to provide a document useful as a written text, and we also recognize the complexity of accurately rendering live performances that have taken on new lives as recorded artifacts, in this case located on the now-outdated technology of audio cassettes. The transient nature of performance is always altered by the tools of documentation, thus creating a very new type of document through the transcription process. The tools of documentation inevitably efface the live performance and introduce problems of perception despite technological interfaces that are supposed to render an actual representation—a sense of liveness. While performance studies scholars distinguish the ephemerality of performances from more permanent forms of citation, artifacts project an afterlife too, and subjectivity, in perceptive and productive relations to the artifact, is caught in a constant flux of expression and self-reflexivity, objectified and limited by the mechanics of physical reality.8 A ghostlike quality disrupts the imagined experience of the performance in the afterlife of the recorded document.9 That is, the voice haunts the technological circulation, which can unsettle both how we receive and how we write recorded sounds. The voice conveys feelings and causes strange stirrings and reactions even as its original performed context is disrupted and extended through technological devices. These difficulties challenge the perceptions of

6 Introduction

the transcriber, and even with the greatest of care, decisions regarding lexical and syntactic meanings are often tested by phonetic disturbances in the audio recording. Attempts to create an exact transcription, moreover, are challenged by conventions of punctuation and style, which can conflict with the fluidity of the spoken word. This book therefore recognizes a distinction of experiencing “something that ‘is’ a performance from reading something ‘as’ a performance.” 10 The documents offered here acknowledge the challenges of transcription and also participate in the afterlife of Duncan’s lectures insofar as the voice and speech reconstructed in these texts attempt to faithfully carry forward the recorded material into a print medium. This literary format additionally enables a thorough work of scholarship to take place, which justifies the labor and difficulties of transcription by enhancing the textual atmosphere of the lectures with notations that clarify the original performances for a contemporary audience of new readers. The following summary of the lectures situates Duncan’s main concerns in a progression of arguments about projective verse. They are offered to guide readers through Duncan’s primary rhetorical objectives as a lecturer since he often brilliantly digresses. Another goal of the summary is to point out some sustaining features of Duncan’s understanding of the New American reception of modernist writing practices. Preparing each lecture with minimal—if any— notes, Duncan often extemporaneously enacted the tenets of discovery associated with projective verse. The overview below attempts to draw attention to those moments of discovery through improvisation and association, which so marvelously shape the discursive force of Duncan’s performances. The history of Duncan and Olson’s friendship and literary contexts is provided in our companion volume, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson; additional information relating to the lectures can be found in the notes and glossary, which also includes brief biographies of some of the people mentioned by Duncan. Vancouver Lecture (1961)

The first lecture was presented in the Vancouver home of University of British Columbia professors Ellen and Warren Tallman on July 23, 1961. It recalls the personal nature of Duncan’s friendship with Charles Olson and describes their first meetings in Berkeley, California, in 1947. But Duncan soon digresses to discuss the early modernists Pound, Aldington, and others in an attempt to address the poetic affinities and relationships in his and Olson’s writing. In many ways, this is a promotional lecture, enacting the literary nexus brought

Introduction 7

forth in Donald Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poetry (1960). That same year, Duncan’s groundbreaking The Opening of the Field (1960) and Olson’s The Distances (1960) appeared, showing both authors’ inheritance of a modernist literary heritage transformed by their dynamic conceptualization of poetic composition in a specifically postwar American context. The literary genealogy Duncan invokes lays claim to a particular tribe of modernist authors from whom he sees himself and Olson in poetic descent. Duncan’s digressions from the topic of himself and Olson are marvelous and are informed, in all the lectures, by an erudite mind that establishes relationships across time. The community he fosters in these lectures, therefore, is not one of literary initiation, but one disposed toward a poetics of historical lineage and creative discovery. Part of Duncan’s concern throughout is to restore an understanding of poetry’s value prior to the establishment of Enlightenment philosophical assumptions. The digressive history of imagism and vorticism Duncan gives in the Vancouver lecture both situates the work he, Olson, and other New Americans have done within a certain paradigm of literary history and attests to a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment cultural practices theorized by Rudolf Otto, Sir James Frazer, Jessie Weston, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others. He outlines this historical and anthropological recovery of myth and spirituality against the cultural narratives imposed by the materialist Enlightenment. Duncan observes: Frazer had made it real that in ancient Greek those gods were not some kind of mistake or some kind of an allegory or some metaphor: they were a real term of living, just as in other realms people were beginning to see that those people on South Sea islands, and those people in Africa, and those people in Australia, were really living. This “real term of living,” Duncan argues, is what the modernists, and their legacies, have brought forth in himself and Olson. Such terms convey procedures of becoming aware of one’s place in the cosmos, and he connects these strategies to Olson’s epic The Maximus Poems (1983) and to the essay that explains field poetics most crucially, Olson’s “Projective Verse” (1950). The projective writing Duncan asserts was a practice that went far beyond the boundaries of the page. By establishing the relations among history, religion, science, psychology, and more in his and Olson’s writing, Duncan argues for a poetics directed by the full disclosure of one’s abilities to proceed according to the rigorous understanding of poetry as a field of expanding consciousness. The emotional realities of the poetic investment of one’s life in the forms of the

8 Introduction

poem require a method of acknowledgment, a tense concern for limits in terms of the self and the motivations leading to the documentation of one’s experience. Duncan says: You can’t read “Projective Verse” without realizing that when he talks about a field or something, and he’s thinking of process then, he tries to picture head and heart as operative. Whether he decides he’s going to do the measuring and the heart’s going to do something, he’s already beginning to do what I was doing when I was walking back and forth. And he’s already beginning to be magically involved. This magical involvement for Duncan is central to projective poetics. It produces, for him, “the possibility of an aesthetic and a poetics,” by which he means “a coherent and cohesive structure within which you can make something.” This differs from Olson’s more inchoate intensification of personal energy within the compositional field of the poem, and the difference provides a unique insight into the field poetics Duncan advocates. Olson’s sense of projection desired to “force a crisis in things.” He reached for “the thing that is in back of knowing to get the language in tune with your movement and get it so that if you really got through the reading that is indicated by those commas, by those short phrases, in some terms, you would get into the rhythm.” The stylistic force of rhythm and rhyme, for Duncan, similarly acknowledges the place of “your own vitality” in composition. Duncan’s high regard for the hermetic imagination, however, adds another dimension to his reception of projective verse. One’s energies are always mediated through the interface of ideas, events, individuals, texts, words, spiritual apprehensions, and dreams. These powers—in both the figurative and literal senses— give an added dimension to Olson’s projective stance and help us understand the hermetic value of Duncan’s arguments as inventive terms in the poetic process. Iowa Lectures (1978)

“Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson’s Work,” the first of two lectures delivered by Duncan at the University of Iowa in November 1978, returns to the theme of projective verse, though, as usual, Duncan brings his own interests and values to that provocative and influential term. He begins by rehearsing Olson’s “titanic” interests, his ability to retain and live through so much of poetry, beginning with Hesiod all the way to Melville and Pound. But Olson is unsatisfied with the domain of literary tradition and seeks instead to obtain perspective within a larger geopolitical reality, a reality in process and transformation.

Introduction 9

Duncan’s concern for geographic space bonds him to Olson. Speaking of his book Heavenly City, Earthly City (1947), Duncan says, “I was entirely concerned about what cities do to rip off the countryside. A city has to eat and so it has to make up something to compel the countryside to feed it.” Olson’s own concerns for space and the resources that sustain human actions in it are announced in Call Me Ishmael (1947). Both men came to similar criticisms of the epic “cycle” as practiced in Western culture. “What you miss,” Duncan says, “is that the initial must always be initiated. You are not making a cycle when you initiate something. And you can’t institute something and then go back to it because there is no such movement.” In other words, the process of beginnings, openings— apertures—problematizes how an epic poetry may proceed. Duncan says: Part of the drama of Maximus, part of the drama in trying to find another order of time, trying to find definition of the primordial, is that you’re trying to undo the widely preached feeling that time was cyclic. You’d get back to it, that you’d go around and so you go through all the ages. This dissolved the real meaning of action, which is to get with it where you are, and that you are always in any act, including ending, beginning. The shift away from literary tradition, and the implied critique such a turning away creates, distinguishes Black Mountain from other modernist movements and, in some ways, makes it threatening to disciplinary orders in the humanities as they have been conceived. There is an extraliterary, or even antiliterary, compulsion behind projective poetics that helps you “get . . . where you are.” “I wanted to have information that would be convincing to you and locate for you this thing,” Duncan says of Olson’s notion of primordial time. Information alone is not enough. Literary representations of the mythic, or even the scientific domains of experience, do not alone constitute a poetics capable of enacting the potential for self-knowledge and the motives that carry one toward it. For Duncan, as for Olson, the information of the poem has to be made persuasive for others, a community through which that knowledge can be transformed and brought forward diversely into the world. This is the truly exciting dimension of Olson’s project for Duncan: the abandonment of literature, at least as it had been imagined since the Enlightenment, makes space for a revision and new poetic terms. These strategies enable a range of creative actions that can lead one to enter the dynamic field of the poem—and lead to connections with the audience beyond. The following day’s lecture, “Timing and the Creation of Time in Charles Olson’s Maximus,” illustrates the “merciless” nature of Charles Olson the poet,

10 Introduction

and Duncan identifies with the intense direction he admires in Olson. “That’s what you hear in me this afternoon,” he tells his audience, “and that’s the only way to come in here, not through taming myself down.” While much of the lecture rehearses Duncan’s ongoing concerns about the religious and spiritual antecedents to modernist writing, he brings his focus to the Christian notion of redemption in Olson’s work and to the key significance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy. As usual, Duncan complicates any easily received notion of religious orientation: Haunting Olson were the figures of a time of redemption. They’re the conscience. Redemption is the admitting of the actual. That by the way is you cannot redeem before you have confessed. You cannot confess that you have not actually, and admit that you have actually, been around. Facts are the same way. For Duncan, Olson’s insistence on redemption leads to an equally merciless and intense demand in “this actuality and this present” that we must, following Whitehead, depart from the illusion of unidirectional time: Is the past vivid and can I get there? Can I walk back there any more than I walk over here? This moment isn’t any directional—no direction at all. We advance into the past. Time psychology enters our present picture and opens it up in another way. These distinctions are important for Duncan because, like Olson, he insists on an understanding of the past as part of the composition of any present moment. With this understanding, he accelerates his writing into participation with the establishment of the fact, the redemptive occurrence, found in the figurative stance of Charles Olson. The Maximus Poems enacts this primordial sense of time as always occurring. Another important distinction Duncan makes is that Olson insists on “stance,” what Duncan calls Olson’s “presence” or “the duration of this presence, presentation.” Unlike the psychological time represented in some modern and contemporary writing (he turns to Proust as an example), Duncan argues that Olson chose to work in “his own apprehension of mode.” For Duncan, the acceptance of time as actual, multilayered, nonprogressive, and redemptive separates Black Mountain poetry from other movements of the period. The acceptance of modes of experience over psychological determinations gives shape to the poetics first described in Olson’s “Projective Verse.”

Introduction 11

Buffalo Lectures (1979)

The next series of talks took place a year later at the University at Buffalo. Sponsored by Robert Creeley, who then was the Gray Chair of Poetics, Duncan was invited to give four talks as part of the annual Charles Olson Memorial Lectures, March 20–29, 1979. The topic of these lectures was reduced to what Duncan calls a simple proposition: “the idea of a serious poetry.” In the first lecture, “The Power of Imagining Persons: The Poem as an Interior Play,” Duncan begins by arguing for the serious nature of poetry as he and Olson conceive it. Duncan is concerned about “the seriousness of our human existence and being, and that would be of any- and everything we do, and poetry is something we do.” Poetry, for Duncan, leads to an encounter of ourselves in relation to the limits of our imaginings. In “awaken[ing] our coexistence with [the universe] . . . we rhyme,” Duncan observes. “I will be advancing,” he continues, “not the sense of a universe, but the sense of how primary that poetry is as a serious pursuit of the universe.” Rhyme, as the establishment of a pattern that correlates subjectivity, poetry, and the eventful circumstances that incorporate one’s life into a larger social and cosmic body, provides “a lure for feeling.” And this lure, activated in the body, leads to the connecting signatures, “rhymes” in language that become the work of the poet. Such seriousness comes down to the kinds of choices an author makes in language, choosing rhymes from all the possible sounds in a vocabulary. While the 1961 Vancouver lecture advocates a place for Olson’s poetics, and hence Duncan’s, in the traditions of modernism, the first Buffalo lecture spends more time sounding what Duncan perceives as the depths, or roots, of poetic experience as revealed in field poetics. He is particularly concerned with differentiating his and Olson’s writing from Enlightenment thought, which he sees as the moment when rational, scientific discourse overtook mythical perception. That split was not only spiritual, but also reached into the sense of language and its ability to transmit the terms of reality as we inherit it. Olson, as Duncan sees him, wants to restore a position for our human relationships in the events composing our various places in the world and to clarify our senses of experience without the weight of psychological confirmations or doubts. In this lecture, Duncan refers to himself as a derivative poet, which he explains, in part: “the power of texts is that it leaves you vulnerable to the invasion” of words and events that affect your own sense of where and who you are. “And I really had the feeling again,” he continues, that poets have had a primordial voice they could go into in the

12 Introduction

elements—the wind, the sea. You get their voice, wind and sea, and from the elemental chatter of birds—it’s not the same as hearing the individual birds, but the elemental chatter of birds. The “elemental chatter,” like Edward Dorn’s sense of poetry existing “on the air,” retains, for Duncan, aspects of the mythic.11 That is, our stories, the languages of our poetics, are shared in the landscapes of our uses. More than our bodies are at stake in some projective sense; our relationships to the world around us inform how we take speech and give it shape. Duncan states this in clarifying terms: I’m talking about experiences of mystery that involve a counterpart in poetry of what’s in a mystery cult, because it’s cultivated. Our poetry is obscure. But the instinct to study it may be our only lasting mystery cult. This obscurity results from eighteenth-century discursive practices, which Duncan puts down early in the lecture. Myth, or cult, activates a way of seeing, enabling particular attitudes that carry forth from event to event in the “elemental chatter” that is identified, too, as the serious nature of writing a poem. But the obscurity, the potential remove of this kind of poetry from everyday life, is not the point: the investment in mythic terms underwrites, Duncan says, a larger “drama that flows throughout the human, and vivifies our human community.” When he speaks of “communion, commons of language, and communicant,” he puts forward a clarification of poetry’s contribution to larger human disciplines and institutions: “nonsense is part of the adventure of sense.” Moreover, “when we turn seriously to think of the people who try to deprive language, we see them in a human drama of deprivation.” The ethical stakes are important for Duncan, and poetry’s ethical wager, its tarrying with “nonsense” and the remainder of human psychic experience alienated by Enlightenment discourse, restores or maintains our primordial relationships, the elemental realities of our experience in language. “So poetry,” Duncan says, “is communication and the universe . . . it is in communication throughout.” The second Buffalo lecture, aptly titled “The Fatefulness of Ongoing Identifications: The Poem as the Recall and Adventure of Self in Projection,” took place on March 22, 1979. While the first Buffalo lecture presented “excursions,” “going out, through the poem,” Duncan continues by discussing “the possibility that there is an outside the poem and an inside the poem, and that there’s an outside our human domain.” He’s particularly interested in describing how energy, one’s personal resources or anxieties before language, is intimately involved in the poetic process. Such a process, or recognition of a practice, is “a situation in

Introduction 13

which things are held at a very high tension.” Duncan again stresses rhyme as a way to situate oneself in writing in order to receive what is “outside” the poem. Particularly, he cites Ezra Pound’s “first instructions,” arguing that rhyming is actually a very high experience, is a very high and demanding spiritual protection going out. And Pound said, go by the biggest field, in which you still have to deal with the whole world, which is “the tone leading of vowels.” By situating a transfer—a charge—of energy in vowels, language becomes, for Duncan, embodied. This leads him to argue for a notion of creative composition that relies on what he describes as an “interface,” an awareness of the boundaries between two systems. The poet, for Duncan, negotiates that which comes into the body of the poet, as well as that which moves out from within. Rhyme—the vowels sounded in language—negotiates, in part, the interface by depriving the poet of the command over her meaning: the poem is negotiated through an exchange of sound and intelligence. The localized psychic perspectives of the poet come face to face with realities outside the self, which can take the form of gods or angelic beings for Duncan, and these systems—those native to the poet and those that circulate outside her domain—interact through poetry to uncover what had previously been unobtainable for the poet. Unlike Jack Spicer, another West Coast author whose theory of an outside corresponds in ways with his own, Duncan focuses on the negotiation of an interface. The poet, for Duncan, is not strictly a vessel that absorbs information from beyond: she is in constant motion, motivated by what must be said and by making herself available to alteration in an encounter with forces exterior to the poet. The author must risk dynamic transformation, welcoming an exchange of personal with impersonal meanings. While the first Buffalo lecture opens with a statement on the serious nature of poetry, in the second one Duncan furthers Olson’s description of projective verse by orienting readers to “disorders that give rise to a real urgency to generate order.” The urgency for the poet is to apprehend an order, to find coherence between systems of thought and feeling, and to discover what’s apparent through movements of doubt and realization. Reinforcing the aims of the interface in this lecture, Duncan says, “Poets do not just sing the song you heard; creative energies enter and the song changes.” Duncan’s third lecture in the Buffalo series, “‘Forth on the godly sea’: The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry,” took place on March 27 and addresses the theme of the gods in twentieth-century poetry. Poignantly, he asks, “What is the need of god in a realm of poetry?” One answer for Duncan is to define the

14 Introduction

uses of the gods in modernist poetry in the terms presented by the secular insights of Sir James Frazer and Sigmund Freud, among others. “In the 1920s masses of people began to have such a sense of the reality of Christ, of the reality of Attis,” he says, “of the reality of any god they met. We fail to apprehend the major forces of our time if we do not see that for or against Freud, or for or against Jung, we are immersed in their figures.” The ceremonial and sacred “replacement of the old king, and the killing of the old king” in Frazer corresponds for Duncan with Freud’s description of the Oedipus complex in Civilization and Its Discontents. The mergers, for Duncan, among religion, spirituality, psychoanalysis, physics, biology, and poetry explain psychic dispositions as inner worlds oriented through the various interfaces of human symbolic terms. Unlike the disciplines of history or science, however, poetry’s particular contribution is through synthesis, play, lore, and rhyme. Pound’s Cantos opens with Poseidon and tumultuous seas, and similarly Olson enacts the conception of such a god in The Maximus Poems, where Gloucester, a fishing village on the edge of the Atlantic, provides source material for that epic text. The gods, for Duncan, are enacted, not invoked, by Olson’s “soundings”: “to hear the bottom of sea and also know the depths.” These soundings take place in language, that metaphoric sea for Duncan, whose theory of words resists a model of language as a surface string of syntactic signs; instead Duncan argues for the etymological “undercurrents” that give rise to linguistic use. He says, “The American English language distinguishes what happens in the surf, or what happens when you’re in an undertow, whether it’s a backwash or an undertow, a tidal wave.” The gods, then, reside as a psychic residue that bestows meaning and restores the complexity of our images and metaphors by orienting attention to human uses. “The most important thing about gods to me,” Duncan says, “is that their cult rises and finds new terms.” Also, a god is not necessarily some classical entity with a beard and trident: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams created new gods in their Enlightenment conceptions of democracy. For Duncan, “atheism is one of the highest cults of god,” and what he’s getting at is a sense of how we orient our values and determine the meaning of our actions in the world. He is talking about belief or faith not in some divine order, but in the recurring struggle of certain ideas and images to overtake our sense of order. We are not searching for gods, Duncan says, we are not discovering their teleological truth, but “are uncovering their presence in the language, not in some unconscious.” Duncan thinks that “we have a creative life” where the “events of consciousness” are godlike insofar as they enlarge the poet’s capacities to participate in the life-form of the poem. “The World Felt as Presence” was Duncan’s final Charles Olson Memorial

Introduction 15

Lecture on March 29. In it, Duncan “want[s] to go forward to how much poetry has to do with exciting a level in which we feel a presence.” He makes this a creative searching, not one of religion, because “the presence is felt in the poem, and then felt and recognized throughout the language.” The spiritual urgency Duncan feels should not be associated, then, with any conventional religious pattern. He is instead most concerned with indicating the variations in our orientations to reality. If the Middle Ages was oriented toward religious action, then for Duncan, a scientific orientation has informed our era “from the Darwinian point forward,” demanding new understandings of the terms of our experience in the language of poetry. “Poetry,” he says, poignantly, is not anthropology and poetry is not philosophy and poetry is not logic. It may ransack any of their occasions. It spreads a ground of possible engendering of meanings of creation—of a creation itself in a language that we use in most of its occasions and under a whole set of other disciplines. And in its main drive it makes us feel presences because typically it follows rhythm and it follows sound. The extraordinary push in the four Buffalo lectures to apprehend Olson’s work in relation to creative energies culminates in the final one with a statement of poetics that weds Duncan’s theory of sound and language (a “tone leading of vowels”) to projective energy as argued by Olson. Duncan says: My point would be that poetry certainly is what we feel, and then how we think, and then how we even philosophize, when the primary ground of it must be the changes taking place in our own bodies when we are moved out of the rhythms of our speech and excited by music moving through the language. The music is there moving in the poem. By placing poetry as a kind of grounding practice that precedes other disciplinary modes of writing and thinking, Duncan distinguishes poetry’s potential, its value in the humanities and beyond. Seeing poetry as a speculative practice based in the rhythmic pulse and soundings of the body, Duncan argues for the necessary value and function of poetry as a vital process of “go[ing] into the unknown and to know something.” Additionally, the notion of temenos, a cultivated locality or “precinct” (for Olson, it’s Gloucester), is important for Duncan because there is an immediacy and a history to place, a personal connection steeped in mythos. For Olson, it is the presence of Okeanos behind the city of Gloucester that must be reckoned

16 Introduction

with. Poetry brings out “transmissions,” for Duncan, and “fundamental things come forward” that are “different than their previous announcements.” He says, “There is no boundary to the knowable,” and “we go into the unknown through the knowable.” Olson’s great achievement was to make a return to his roots in place, and he expanded and complicated the realities of precinct and self in relation to the larger cosmos, making an expansion from the known into the unknown. Place has a national heritage. It has, too, a geological reality, and it persists as an order of human cognition and experience prior to and, in Olson’s case, beyond the nationalist reception of order passed down since the arrival of Europeans to the North American continent. New College of California Lectures (1982, 1983)

Two final lectures, both dealing again with projective verse, were delivered in October 1982 and 1983 (the latter with poet Michael Palmer) to a class at the New College of California in San Francisco. While these lectures reinforce many of the themes established in the earlier lectures (the development of a projective poetics by the modernist authors Pound, Williams, H.D., and others), Duncan also reveals personal tastes and histories that inform his commitments as a writer. “I used to dream Oz books,” he says early in the first New College lecture, expressing his affection for the series of books by L. Frank Baum. He also associates his early boyhood love of those books with his enthusiasm for William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. In these final lectures there is a persistent recognition of one’s affinities across the time span of one’s life. This suggests that projective verse or field poetics is not just a program by which to derive an aesthetic experience in writing; it is also built on personal affinities across the complexity of lived time and the interior realities of individual experience—the entire creative trajectory from childhood to the present. The first of the New College lectures describes the “polemical terms” of the essay “Projective Verse” and how it was received in Berkeley in 1950. Duncan regards the poetry communities of the Bay Area at that time as dynamic cultural establishments where new writing was frequently read aloud and where audiences gathered for its performance. “It was an arena with a game going on,” Duncan says, suggesting that the idea of projective verse in some way came to Olson after he visited Duncan in Berkeley in 1947 and saw the dynamic complex of motivations that drew that scene together. The community-based aspect of writing, for Duncan, is essential, and Olson theorized a projective poetics based on the actual conditions in poetry coteries at the time. Duncan also returns to Olson’s advancement of poetry in “Projective Verse”

Introduction 17

by looking at what happens “when things are charged with meaning.” Such a charge, for Olson, “involves the projective” and deals in terms of emotion. For Duncan, “the charge comes from the community of meaning that I see language as being.” So the physical community of poets in California that Duncan sees as inspiring projective verse grows, in Olson, to achieve a “community of meaning” residing in language. Such communities cohere, for Duncan, through the rich etymological history of words and in the ways poets participate in the discovery and clarification of language by recontextualizing its uses in new situations of discourse. Projection is not theorized in the Freudian sense of “negative emotions” that are “projected on the world.” Instead, for Duncan, the syllable “is a germinal sound of a multitude of possible words.” The projective lies in a force of language that can elaborate an experience beyond the limited domain of the author, though the writer’s presence in composition is essential, germinal in the process of writing. The preparation of the poet to be accountable to the process of writing provides the essential projective tracings, the push forward through the sounds of language in search of a coherent contrast, a poetics of adhering parts within the unknown frame offered by field poetics. For Olson, Duncan says, “the presence of breath in the vowel is where it all moves from. And the mind must be obedient to that, not only obedient but already hearing deep into that sound.” The practical result of such attention to breath and vowel, for Olson, is more simply to stress the poet’s awareness of a larger sensual environment, which leads to an adaptation of speech as it is spoken; the poet, therefore, should refrain from using metrical patterns that are no longer indicative of a modern American vernacular. Much of the final New College lecture is a discussion with students, which focuses on the notion of process in “Projective Verse” and particularly brings up the work of pattern recognition described in the context of psychology by Gestalt theory, a metaphor for Olson’s thinking about process. “You’re following what is emerging in the work,” Duncan says. “Now we’re not in memory at all. We’re working with what’s present.” Especially important, for Duncan, is that “you’re following what the poem indicates and so you correct out your own intrusion.” Michael Palmer’s insightful contribution likewise illustrates the profound creativity that operates in field poetics: The thing that does come into question in the theory of field is, what is the nature of the boundedness, since it’s not going down a one-way street where you have a beginning and you have an end. What does come into play is, how is it bounded? How do the boundaries function, if they are not simply to close the thing off, if it’s to remain, for example?

18 Introduction

We are back to Duncan’s earlier notion of an interface, where the function of boundaries remains under constant negotiation. For Duncan, composition by field requires attention to how energies are transacted in writing. He argues that Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) is “charged in relation to its quartet form, sonata form,” but it does not “propel.” Once a poet like Eliot adheres to a formal constraint, then the poem’s energy comes prefabbed. The author, Duncan suggests, is then obliged to negotiate the preestablished form rather than to experience an act—an event—under the terms of its own making, where the poet discovers constantly, through the energetic charge of her own investigation, an energetic application to the unknown.

Vancouver Lecture

I

am going to tell the story of Charles Olson’s background. If I began at the very beginning it would be when I first met Charles Olson, which was in 1947.1 We had two or three afternoons in Berkeley. He had looked me up because he had read “Medieval Scenes”—that had just been written. I did not know that this man wanted to be a poet. At that time he had written poems, but they weren’t the kind that Charles Olson approved. One of them even got into Atlantic Monthly, a place I have never been caught in my life.2 And he had written Call Me Ishmael, and he was at work on a second book. He was going to write a book on the Donner Party. But all I knew when this giant—he was six foot eight—descended upon me was, well, a poet feels good when someone is interested in your poetry. But then we talked about ecology. Actually we talked about cities and farms. And how this was a subject I was filled with at the time. It seemed to me a vital thing that had happened in history. In the Middle Ages as the cities grew they had nothing to offer in return to the farmlands around them, and they had to be fed from the farmlands. And of course, even a vague impression of the Middle Ages gives you the picture of what happened. One thing they could do was protect the farmlands around them. It was the same method of protection and threats that holds our states together today. It was never very clear to a farmer in the Middle Ages whether he was threatened or protected by the immediate barons. If the barons were very happily at war someplace else, the farmer got along all right. But then he always had to supply the food for all this. And no one was returning him anything but protection. Then the main thing that came up with the capitalist system is the lovely combination of commodity and advertising. The farmer was convinced that he really needed a refrigerator so badly that 19

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life was not fit to live without one or an automobile, and so he started working that long working day, producing more food than the whole farm world had produced ever before to feed those cities and the people who were making these automobiles. This was the talk we had. Later on in the evening we may circle around to make the talk have something to do with poetry. Then an article appeared in a magazine. As a matter of fact, my impressions are so terrific of this man, but I didn’t connect it to his being in poetry directly. We didn’t talk about poetry at all in 1947. But in 1950 when “Projective Verse” appeared, I did not really recognize that this Charles Olson was this Charles Olson that I had a wonderful time with three years before. I had seen nothing of him; he was off someplace in Gloucester. But the “Projective Verse” we read avidly, and we totally misunderstood it. Now, all you have been reading “Projective Verse.” I thought you might like to know what I thought in 1950 “Projective Verse” was about. We read poems aloud everywhere. We were beginning to have audiences for reading poetry aloud. I read “Projective Verse.” I felt very enthusiastic about it. I thought it said that if you’re reading poems aloud to people, you’re right in on the ground floor. Perhaps I thought the field was all of you out there and you project poems. I’ve always found keeping the ideas of that essay alive nudged over into the view of saying, “What did I make out of it last time and how come I had that view?” The misinformation about an essay like “Projective Verse” or the misinformation about an essay like the “Human Universe”—I myself have to sit in on my department of misinformation every time I read them, because I can hardly get to page two before I’ve left the essay and gone off to make up something from the very first section. Let’s go back to some history. Olson is ten years or so older than I am.3 What makes a generation in writing is not how old you are—this seems to be a universal misunderstanding about a generation of writing—but when you begin to write. You can go back to 1912, and you go to the ones Pound named imagists. Pound lists Aldington and H.D. and himself as the ones who sat down one evening in 1912 and made a little credo. That credo actually is in back of what we are to come to later.4 The first of the three points was that they were going to compose by the musical phrase—all of these things seemed so ludicrous at the time and are still attacked. You only have to read a book like Elizabeth Drew’s to find that present in the current scene.5 They were going to compose by musical phrase and they were to use no word that did not contribute to the meaning of the poem. They were going to be centered as far as the use of words goes. There was direct treatment of the thing they called the image. All of these things had room for misunderstanding at the time. People said there is no relationship between music and poetry. Or Pound must have been

Vancouver Lecture

making up a connection. That objection is always made by people who are ignorant of Pound’s work actually, because back of that musical phrase are Pound’s papers on music in which he claims that poetry and music are both time arts.6 That is, they extend in time, and they’re different in that way from painting and sculpture. Later you come to a schism of form of sculpture in studying art in the 1930s and 1940s—and also psychologists are beginning to discover that our eyes have composed a painting in order to see it, so there is a way of making painting into a time art. A painting has to take place in time because a painter literally does. It takes a duration of time to compose a canvas, and the eye is seeing it, not just taking it at the level of an advertisement. Music and language were literally time arts. The misleading thing was that everyone thought they could read. That’s a very unfortunate thing. Because when they thought they had been taught to read, they looked at this notation and thought: “this isn’t notation—it’s things on a page and that’s the poem.” That’s all those people who say that a poem begins with capital letters and it all begins at this margin, and it has certain sounds at the end that sound the same. And it’s in lines not in prose. The other thing that was really a sticker at this time was this idea of image. If you’ve sampled this anthology, for instance—it’s the only anthology I know of after the “Objectivists” Anthology of the 1930s that stands for a group.7 This anthology was not composed by the editor’s taste. He asked all the poets, “who are the poets you read?” So you actually have a network that all do relate in one way or another. It’s an historical anthology, just as the first imagist anthologies were historical anthologies.8 Well within this group something happened by 1915. The poetry was somewhat like the poetry of Lawrence. Lawrence was really brought in by H.D. There’s a real distinction between Aldington and H.D. Lawrence belongs to this area, because these people meant the image has to do with the real world. It meant that you did not take for granted the thing you were looking at—the tree and so forth—there must be a reciprocal experience. The tree must be so immediate. Well, you know the poem of Pound’s before 1912, before this business called imagism, in which Pound is being a tree, this is what people were also doing in dance and drama at the time.9 Think of van Gogh—where the intensity of painting, the one that we now see as divorced and abstract, but you find the strokes are there as well as the other parts of the visual impact. Van Gogh was really entering into the rhythms of the trees. In that stage they were just beginning to observe that what they before saw as savages, the primitive man had been trying a kind of exchange with nature. They were just beginning to be able to read. The civilization of the European men became involved with the civilization of Asia, of the Samoan islands, the civilization of the Indians, the civilizations of all the conquered people. Let’s say that by

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the twentieth century Europe had so successfully dominated all the other areas of the world. As Malraux said, the world came into contact with the peoples of Asia or Africa or India, the kitsch conquered all minds. What Malraux doesn’t observe is that kitsch conquers almost all minds.10 For instance, the first effect of capitalism is that it’s taken over and becomes part of our advertising world almost immediately. The other part of the exchange though was that people like Picasso were beginning to draw not only from what had been called their own tradition, but they were beginning to draw from Africa, from Asia, and from the cultures that at the end of the century were thought of as primitive. Now we still use the term “primitive.” But if you look at anthropology, instead of talking about “primitive,” they talk about ways of being men. This is now a very current picture of what it means. In other words, by the ’20s and ’30s the idea is not that you’re on the wrong path—that as long as Western culture is on the wrong path the Indian way will save us. You’re rejecting the idea that you are one of the ways of being a man, that New York is one of the ways of being a man. They had to overcome even the desirability of an Indian culture to see that these were civilizations in contact and exchange. Now think of the imagists, and why people opposed imagism. The Muslims opposed images absolutely. The Catholic Church in the breakdown of Christendom was uneasy about the image. Were they image worshippers? At the heart of Christendom they worshipped images, and they had miracles of images and they had a magic synthesis. They began making very careful distinctions at the breakdown of the middle of the thirteenth century. They tried to take away the numinous quality of the image. As a matter of fact, people like Aquinas were successful in destroying Christendom because they rationalized, in other words, they drew off from this image what it was and what it wasn’t. And of course what it wasn’t is what they had to divide. And what it was they thought belonged to heathendom. Because what it was, was exactly like the images that the Africans worshipped—and, of course, beyond that you might think there were trees and real angels. So Aquinas begins to make distinctions about what kind of an experience you are having. And our present period is always changing, because that is what is always happening in the image, the return of this concept of what things mean, the things that are supposed to be outside you, now. The Protestant world—that whole side has been against this image, and the image that belongs to the world of the devil, and the world of Catholic idolatry. Actually there is another group. For this group the image is numinous and that’s why Lawrence could belong to it. And then there was Amy Lowell for whom it was not numinous at all but for whom it was sensory. What had happened because the numinous had become increasingly important is that most

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people now think of Amy Lowell as a sort of no-good poet, but actually she did very important things. Look at her imitations of Stravinsky, for instance.11 For her the image was an impression. There are a whole group of people. Flint is another one who is related to Amy Lowell. And Amy Lowell takes on a little tinge of symbolism, but it actually was an appreciation of things. And sensitivity is very important here, whereas here [for the imagists] it’s all energy, and dynamics is the important thing—and the psychological interchange. This group was the one that went in and got into the imagist anthologies, although both were combined. Aldington actually belongs here, he doesn’t have that magical numinous quality. Let’s say [Carl] Sandburg is also involved in this. In my generation we were already beginning to throw these people out. Why? Simply because we were disappointed with them. We weren’t throwing them out so much as we were going toward the numinous. You might find it in Amy Lowell, but it would be your private hunt and would hardly be leading you along that road. For anybody present who finds it absolutely obnoxious and would like to increase their sensitivity to color and the sensory world, look along this line of the imagist. And now you will find the same thing happening in this group, because when you had in “Projective Verse” an idea of a structure of a field and a projection, you will find much more in Olson. He was dynamic and gave certain forms in which you could write, and also along this line a great many disparate moods and disparate objects could be brought into a single poem. The task here was to focus on an immediate image. In the early Cantos, for instance, although you have lots of shifts and lots of changes, in any section you are registering an image. Now later Pound comes into this aura of the conglomerate, and that’s where you can no longer keep that track of the Cantos. But I think you can, you can find where you are. You sometimes wonder why the shift has taken place. But within any area its criterion is exactly—you get this: The numinous is thought of here then as a single experience. Pound says there should be direct treatment of the image. Now that’s 1912.12 That generation by 1915 had quarreled so that they were no longer cohesive at all, although all of them can be held in our own study as having their roots in this period. The war coming in 1914 was crucial. H.D., Lawrence, Aldington were all involved in a group that were pacifist and quite opposed to the war. The whole numinous experience increased there. Pound was opposed to the war, but if you look at Mauberley, you suddenly find that his position was rationalist. People killed for a few dozen battered books.13 It’s very close to this, but Pound has already migrated to another group. He’s always in a new movement or something. This idea of vorticism was how to get a force from two things that had not really been together at all before. In the same period, a philosopher, Whitehead,

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was developing a very different concept of the role of the mind in establishing the maximum of the energetic relations to the world. He said that role was to transform what looked like conflict and then find terms in which they appear as contrasts. This eliminates entirely the person, for example, whose world fits together because there are no contrasts and everything else which might conflict is ruled out. Whitehead pictures a world in which these conflicts in the higher order became contrasts of another level. He also saw the physical world as doing this. The stage of conflict would be like the explosion of something. The contrasts are the order which precedes. So the conflict is a failure to perceive order in Whitehead. The whole goal of the mind is not to throw out one of those elements that conflict, or to find another term in which they wouldn’t conflict. But it would hold them in contrast. The will enters in here [writes on the blackboard]. Vorticism was this. Symbolism preceded vorticism. Yeats had tried to put things together in vast schemes, at times with the theosophy of the late nineteenth century, the only religious movement which had a source in evolution, in Darwin’s ideas. The crisis of evolution was between a sincere and outspoken Christianity, and an ameliorating Christianity which had utterly failed to cope with ideas because the implication in Darwin was that there was a spiritual evolution. Then the meaning of Christ and the meaning of almost anything else changes. Theosophy actually has an effort to have a spiritual evolutionism, and it also combined with that a mixture of the cultures. The regular Christian churches were incapable of incorporating in any terms . . . all those African idols, which in our modern period, we have come to think of not as primitive but as parts of men’s religious experience. In this period a thing called “man’s religious experience” was beginning to return to our concept. Psychoanalysis, for instance, was one of the terms which made it possible to say that people weren’t strange, or strange and primitive, or next to monkeys, but were actually having a spiritual experience which was vital. Vorticism was centered in sculpture. Pound was centered in the ideas of a young sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska, and he was trying to put together ancient Chinese sculpture, Egyptian sculpture, and the Greek of the archaic period into the Western world.14 We need these things, and only when we find the secret of these things will we find the new art. That young man was killed in 1915, and it’s one of the changes in Pound. These people actually saw members of their generation in these three years die in the war. Between 1911 and Gaudier-Brzeska’s death in 1915, in those three years, he had given something that was going to appear in poetry and appear in sculpture. Where it does appear in sculpture it is very different from [Constantin] Brancusi or some of his contemporaries. Vorticism was then conceived of as a violent bringing together of things.

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All you have to do is read, let’s say, Malraux now, who brings a great many things together. He’s one of the first really great imaginations about what man’s spirit is in a long time—since the beginning of the century probably, since William James and Frazer. This almost looks like a nadir because they were barely bearing the impact. Now Frazer made an impact here. Frazer’s The Golden Bough begins to appear in 1890, and these people were absolutely hit by it, and they had begun to go back to the religious thing. They had taken over then completely what he had made real, that is, their own European gods. The gods of the old order, the gods of the locus, the gods of the immediate place. And they ceased to be what they were for a long time in literature, interesting decorations or traditional reference that would give a literary background. Read Jane Harrison, or Jessie Weston—From Ritual to Romance. These were people not connected to the poets, but both of them refer to the fact that in the classical circles around Gilbert Murray, the result of Frazer was that they began no longer to read the classical texts as if they were ancient Greek. They began to form little cults and societies, and came into the mélange of the previous theosophical groups who also had gods, and worshipped gods. Only Pound through Yeats would know of these other connections. Eliot did not. H.D. did not. The same thing that was going on in poetry was going on in Greek studies. Frazer had made it real that in ancient Greece those gods were not some kind of mistake or some kind of an allegory or some metaphor: they were a real term of living, just as in other realms people were beginning to see that those people on South Sea islands, and those people in Africa, and those people in Australia, were really living. We can skip some in-between because I do want to get down to Olson. But I want you to see how much there is in between. Outside of this generation, early Williams develops another kind of thing in the Egoist. All these people appeared in the Egoist. They found a focus, just as we all appeared in a magazine called Origin and then in the Black Mountain Review in a concentrated period. After that you have a critical reaction that sets in. My whole life in writing has been in a period of critical reactions. It had thoroughly set in by the time I was sixteen and seventeen in 1936. I’d been preceded by the Depression years. The Depression began killing off nineteenth-century socialist ideas. They were almost dead by 1936. They’d turned into those things called communism and Trotskyism and Stalinism. You couldn’t find a shred of real socialist concern. They had all gone to graduate school and they were editing a thing called Partisan Review, preparing to become the faculty of NYU and Columbia. They were a little party that had not come from socialist ideas, but they were also part of a critical reaction. This group in large [part] represents Jewish, nonreligious groups, what you call freethinkers, but they remain very conscious of being Jewish. For instance, Partisan

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Review has many autobiographies of what it’s like to be a young Jew casting off your religion in New York, and how you get from the Bronx to almost being an American in one generation. It didn’t have quite the pathos it had earlier because there were so many Jews by this time making it by not going through Partisan Review pages. Only something happened in history to make it real. Just here Hitler came. And this struggle to become a man and not a Jew became much greater. So many people who would never have even thought of being a Jew suddenly felt it was necessary to be one. It was also necessary to remind people they were not a man but something else, and here the small-town Protestant mind entered. Now, the small-town Protestant mind of Ransom, of Tate, let’s say high toned of the Episcopalian faith. It can migrate into Catholicism, but it can leave it. It does have an absolute abhorrence of the numinous and the image tree, of image worship—it has its troubles. It will not tell a story. A metaphysics appears, a great skilled machinery, and logic appears all over again. And you find your neo-Thomas who then goes back to the point at which Aquinas destroyed Christendom. They have to go back and do it all over again because Christendom is reemerging. The scandals of the Virgin in the present Catholic Church have many aspects that are beginning to take on something like the earlier Christendom. Question: Williams, when he appears with “no ideas but in things,” does he consider things numinous? Duncan: No, I said a change took place. I’m talking about Williams in the Egoist period, and there you have the gods. Just like Malraux, only the poets are much earlier; Malraux doesn’t start his work until 1933 or ’34. But just like Malraux, Williams goes to the Metropolitan [Museum of Art] and he sees those vast Assyrian rooms, and he sees a god that is present in New York City. It really is. It’s sitting there in the Metropolitan. But he doesn’t see a picture of a god. He means there is a god at the Metropolitan, and that becomes the epistolary god of a poem called “March.” That was a crucial poem in the Egoist days.15 So these people are exchanging all the time. Williams was considerably bolder than H.D. at this time. H.D., in order to get into the presence of the numinous, had to have a very particular scene, a locus of countryside, a wilderness or a seashore. She had to go to the pagan world, the countryside, where the gods survive. Williams was to call, in 1935, his first novel Pagany.16 And if you read Pagany you will get a better picture of the real crux of the conflict Williams had in the middle period. You must be aware in this middle period. Williams is always exceedingly close to

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Pound, and exceedingly in rebellion all the time, and he makes all sorts of rejections and objections. You will find that these people had to carry on their work until another experience came that would rerelease the numinous. Let’s go back to what I said happened in 1914, and what was happening toward this numinous that lasts on into the twenties, to 1925 or 1926. And it [the numinous] almost disappears as a way anybody’s gonna be looking at their work. It was the war and it was the return of the war that became the great releasing thing for Williams, and H.D., and Pound, all of whom were [in] a new phase [by the time] of the Second World War. In between, H.D. had combined this pagan image and the search for “pagany” with translations from Euripides, and in the in-between years of the 1920s and the early 1930s she writes a couple of impressionistic novels and tries to explore having a personal ambience in which she can make it real that ancient Greece is present. Whitehead in his essays on education had said the congregation of saints is a great and august body, but it has only one place to meet, and that is in the present moment.17 He is trying to make clear that there is only one place in which anything happens, and that is the place where you are right at the moment. You are a kind of machine of things happening. Now this doesn’t [mean] you are a center at all, it only seems to happen to you, let us say. And otherwise Greece isn’t there. Greece is only there in your devotion. And Greece is only there in the way in which it floods your life. The quality of their work which floods their life is extremely important, and that also divides these people off from those who taught in universities. For Lawrence, for H.D., for Pound, and for Williams, being passionately immersed in life was absolutely essential. Let’s take Williams because he’s the least apparent in this. He was a doctor. He had a profession. One of the central experiences in Williams’s life is an adulterous relationship in which he had a premonition of a heart attack. It intensifies his sense of his wife, of the role of adultery as a kind of magic in marriage. I’m talking about the play A Dream of Love. Over and over again he must give an account of this event. Well, look through the poetry of Mr. Ransom and Tate and Mr. Auden and you will find that there is a certain difficulty about giving any vivid description of any vital, passionate thing because your local board of regents or your local faculty is going to enjoy it in a way that’s going to be different from a reader, and your board of regents might tell you it might go to some other place. They developed an aesthetic and a criticism. It’s the numinous, the gods who might enter the scene, they were afraid of—what if you started speaking in voices in a

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class hour? If you start talking in voices someone in your class is going to run away and say there was a whole class that was not what we were supposed to be studying. Let’s get to Mr. Olson and see if we can refer back to these things. Olson-poet begins with Call Me Ishmael, but he really comes into focus by writing that “Projective Verse” essay. And he’s a man who makes propositions when the poetry begins to be written. The poetry is free to open up all sorts of things that do not appear in the essays. And the essays don’t have to hold together. That’s what he means by the “universe of discourse” when he wrote “Projective Verse.” Then the next step should illustrate that, and the poems should be a fulfillment of the first essay. This is not at all what Olson does. In 1950, Olson wrote “Projective Verse.” Before that he had graduated from Wesleyan, and then he had gotten his PhD at Harvard.18 At Harvard, they proposed the “sciences of man.” It was an experiment toward the possibility of doing away with humanities entirely and having the “sciences of man,” and Charles was the person from the former literature department who went into the “sciences of man.” Now I’ve met quite a few of the men who were in that, and he was the only literary person in that group. The others were in ecology, which gives the real key to why literature suddenly disappeared and the “sciences of man” took its place: ecology had done away with the idea of putting plants in collections. And under Sauer, who is one of Olson’s masters in a way (he met him during the “sciences of man” period at Harvard), Sauer, at the University of California now, says what his whole department does is enormously expensive. It has five men in the field at the present time; one man in the upper Amazon and one in Central Asia. They’re trying to trace in the contemporary scene where rice and maize came from, and they’re also making descriptions of a thing called “ecology.” You’ve got to see what the plant does. They really wanted to find out a question, like where did rice really come from. All the lineagists in the world wouldn’t tell them. Darwin just begins to open up this field, but he still proceeds pretty much like Linnaeus.19 All the changes in evolution took place along the line of developing toward these “sciences of man.” Now certain people took literature seriously. To be a cultured member of the middle class you read the right things, and you eventually learn[ed] what it meant to be cultivated and civilized men. But I’ve already shown you that that idea of a cultivated and civilized man was beginning to break down when they were thinking about the numinous qualities of life, and beginning to see, no, the African is not an uncultivated and uncivilized man. He’s a man with a different civilization, and he has his ways of being human. They had every aspect you could find in every other part of the world, like the Indian, and so forth. The Chinese are now in the whole world of art. They are now on view. The museum

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in Paris, Musée [de] l’Homme, and the British Museum are the only places I know of which show them as if they were facts about strange peoples. So literature now was taken as seriously as even gods. And it didn’t teach literature, of course, because these began to be poetic events, and fictions, and fictions were important in the sciences in the way you deal with man. William James had already in his Psychology at the turn of the century described levels and kinds of reality, and he said the responsibility of the philosopher was—anticipating Whitehead in a way (he didn’t say the church-seeing things in contrast)—he said that the philosophy he was looking for was fullness of life, richness of life, the fullest picture he could think of. And to have that, you had to hold a whole series of pluralities of reality. He found logic an extremely minimal element. It belongs to the world of the hideous and, let’s say, the place of the greatest control. We’re going to be talking about poetry, and we’ve been talking about the numinous and religion. William James said that the world of Christ, and the world of [Edward] Lear, the world of [Dickens’s] Pickwick Papers were one. They were the world of fictive reality.20 The experience of not liking a writer at all is very much like the experience of some other man’s religion. There are people who are not concerned at all with literature. They don’t even read them and most people find it most difficult to cope at all with what you’re faced with today; if what you’re concerned with is religion, they take it as convention. And so you have conventions of religion that are really beginning to lack intensity. The very things that were the most intense in the eighteenth century—the whole age of the rational religion—was not some business of convention. There was no convention, they had to invent it right off the seventeenth century. And only the imagination did it. There was no such a thing called logic or rationality that was going to make the world into reason. They had to invent reason, they had to invent reasonable men. You could have had Buchenwald back then.21 But a convention came off in order not to know all these things that were coming together. So Olson in a way is coming toward poetry; he’s also going to be the man who goes after getting his PhD, and got a Guggenheim to write a book on Melville. He got the book just about written. He got a chapter of the book printed,22 and it suddenly dawned on him that this man Melville had been a very popular and successful novelist and he had almost finished a book called Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. He bought for himself Shakespeare—that was a lucky thing. Charles Olson was the first one who came across volumes of Shakespeare with their notes.23 And as he started putting together the volumes of Shakespeare with their notes, and to think about what does this mean, he suddenly saw that if I am as decent as this man Melville, who absolutely gave up all the possibility of all by writing Moby-Dick—have you ever looked at the sales of the previous novels, and then the sales of Moby-Dick?

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He changed from an author who was almost ready to make it and not have to work any longer in that office because the novels had a real following. And Moby-Dick sold eighty copies in his whole lifetime, and he was damned as far as publishing went. Everything from there on was completely gone. He suddenly discovered something so real, that all those early romances changed [by way of his encounter with] Shakespeare. What could be more arrogant on Melville’s part was Olson’s part with the arrogance of his discovery. If this man Melville was just an honest novelist, who turned into a monster like Shakespeare, and wants to be numinous, and Pierre was the most fantastic gesture toward doing it that you’ve ever seen, okay, [Olson asks], “What am I doing sitting here figuring out the ‘sciences of man’ and writing a book on Melville that’s going to look like everybody’s book on everybody?” Well, other people like Ellmann are charging and eventually they’re going to write huge books on people like James Joyce.24 So you’ve got Melville and Shakespeare, and then something he had from the “sciences of man,” and you’ll find it all through Call Me Ishmael. The “sciences of man” belongs to a period that felt you should be in contact with the immediate economic reality of any situation, so in order to study Melville, your research consisted of looking up all the shipments from all the ports in that year and their actual histories. You study the whaling industry, you study all of the aspects if anyone went on a voyage. You begin to make a great picture of what was actually immediately involved in this, and this reality in place with the “sciences of man” also comes down into Maximus because Maximus has documents. Pound had documents but Pound was a person trained to write a PhD thesis on the Provençal, who wasn’t going to get it. You don’t need to read previous books on the Provençal, or many books on literature, where people give their opinions and no text, although presumably the texts have been the illumination. Pound was interested in the text, bringing texts together. Generalities begin to disappear and particulars become awfully important. And in Maximus, which is actually a sent dream or a rites poem—r-i-t-e—these things are used in different ways. There must be an actual occurrence. This actual occurrence Eliot referred to earlier and called it an “objective correlative,” and he borrowed it from the surrealists, and it has to do with magic. Something being made up, a fantasy, is absolutely important. Not that you make these distinction[s] that Aquinas did. This is an hallucination, this is something else. You’ve got to know what is there, and what is there on the guttural level, you’ve got to know that you don’t just introduce something because it’s kind of nice or poetic or magical, so you have an objective correlative. This only appeared because Charles did find, and he must have just hit the feeling with excitement in his locus, Gloucester, which is a place upon a continent, not in a country, not in America, but on a continent.

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America is one of those things, like you call it “the universe of.” It could disappear and the continent is still there. It was once a locus on a continent where there was no America, and it was a locus that had a continuity that he could trace that went all the way to Mexico, of people going across that continent. All of those trajectories would lead from an Atlantic coast all the way across the continent. They begin to open a map of the world in which Gloucester exists. He found that a young man who raised a bull in Gloucester, and used to show off tossing the bull, then was killed by the bull.25 This young man with the bull was finally gored by the bull, and played these games that we see in the bullfight days, the games of Crete, in which you walk back with the animal into the cage. He couldn’t go back to the animal in the cage, because this was a magic rite. He could not go back to the animal’s cage until he was given the gonads or the objective correlative. In the third book of Paterson, Williams is being what I would call impressionistic, whereas Olson is not at all. Williams in the third book of Paterson wants to give the idea that language is going to pieces. This is an idea and not a thing of the poem. I’m going to have to get back to Olson after this little exercise into Williams. In the third book of Paterson you have a page where things go like this [writes on the blackboard]. Now that’s not notation, there’s absolutely no way to read it. It is about notation as you would find in [E. E.] Cummings, or what you would find in little pictures in Joyce. Or in Patchen, for instance, where very particularly it’s not notation but pictures of things. It is an impression, and he wants you to say, “Oh the language is falling to pieces.” And that’s what it means on the page. Well, there is something that looks like that. He might have gotten the idea from Williams on the Maximus. But if you look at this thing you will find that it’s a map. This is not notation or anything, it is your impression of it falling to pieces. This odd-looking thing is an actual map and a notation, and you could pace and find a place to go. The ancestor of this is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The whole meaning of this page is that it’s gotten impossible for impressionism to write. There’s not an operating level that you can move on, except seeing the origin of this thing actually is Treasure Island. Once I saw that map and suddenly caught on and looked for a treasure, and maps have a lot to do with the age when you are getting ready to play pirates. This book is filled with pirates and explorers. Actually Maximus shows a continuity from the kind of excitement in mind in the period that opens up and wants adventure and wants exploration and wants finding the tracks of something. And Charles kept it. It’s the underlying thing in The Road to Xanadu.26 We discover in the book that he is absolutely bugged by those explorers and we go on voyages of the soul. But I’m now thinking of the diagrams in The Maximus Poems when

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you’re off—well let’s see, you’ve got a map and you’re coordinating it, and then you go to find a place. He had gone through all the documents of that damn town and he had to start digging and he begins to find Indian relics. Another Gloucester had to appear. He had to play the archaeologist’s role to a degree. He wants to find where the law of property is, and that’s exactly what he’s doing in 1947. And there was a street then; you go 230 pages and so forth, and you get to Kent property and pier, and then you are following the description.27 This is the most interesting because I only really get caught in the Maximus when I can’t understand a goddamn thing about it at all. At the beginning I really was caught. I couldn’t understand what was happening in this stuff. It’s hard for me to see it now, because what I did work on, in 1953, seems so clear to me now that I don’t understand how in the world—I think I must have been blind. I felt a strength moving in the lines, and I had to analyze it to find out where that strength and melody were, and what it was impending toward. Poetry existed long before writing, and when writing first started in Babylonia, it was not poetry at all; they recorded nothing but business language. How much grain was taken in? That conversation Charles and I had in 1947 about cities and the countryside. I was thinking about cities, and the Bolsheviks in Moscow and the Ukraine, and when they requisitioned grain at the point of the revolution and all the people who raised the food that had to feed those cities of the north become reactionary peasants or bourgeois peasants or something. But had they not requisitioned food from those peasants, and the peasants didn’t want to give up the food, those cities would have starved. Food is essential, and consequently the people who raise the food are the most exploited. Now we are coming to the interesting thing. Writing began on the side of the exploiters, and it was the record of those vast grain harvests and fur and other merchants who began to trade. It’s a long time before you have a poem at all. So poets were not really connected with writing in the beginning. At least there is the opportunity before people have decided whether to write this way or whether to write that way. When they simply go to the end of the line and they go back like this on the next line, and this way on the next line. During this period they don’t even pay any attention to words; they simply fill the number of letters and then they start back with the next letter. And the Greeks went quite some time before they divided words at all. The chorus in the plays went this way and then they went that way, and then they went this way. And this led right away to a feeling of the line. One of the distinctions about imagism and then Amy Lowell, between the meaning and the impressionistic use of things, is that one school believes that everything in form is meaningful, and the other thinks this conversation is the

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meaning of it. The only way I can understand men who put capital letters at the beginning of every line is that those men want to write like men wrote before. You turn around like this, and the next turn you are another person. Then the other figure is one you very well know. The man has got a conflict on his mind, and he doesn’t know it because he’s facing this way and then: “No. I absolutely wouldn’t,” “Oh yes, it’s an awfully good opportunity,” “No, I simply can’t.” That’s what these choruses do. I told you that the vital period for the imagists was 1912 to 1915. The vital period for what I’m going to be talking about is 1950 to 1954 and from there on, for instance, I have not had any kind of fundamental change in my own work, although I’ve had other things happen. In this period I come in contact with Olson, with Creeley—I had not met Creeley until 1955. By 1955 Creeley and I were simply verifying what we’d corresponded with and I could, for instance, bring [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge to Creeley, because I’d already seen in Creeley’s work that Creeley related to something I was also relating to that was different from Olson. This conversation. In other words, I could see that Coleridge would be a revelation to Creeley.28 Now that’s not the same as bringing something and having a man change. That was already there. But because he had stemmed as I had, from Pound. For instance, the poet in between, Zukofsky, who was one of the very few people in those years who filled in that whole area of the Pound thing. Zukofsky said, “Well, what’s the good of Coleridge?” Look at Pound’s list of the people you should read. Recently Creeley asked me to find out, because he was reviewing a book of Edith Sitwell on Swinburne, and she had rather carelessly said that Pound was Swinburne’s best critic.29 Well, Creeley didn’t have the book with him and he knew that I was just a bug on Pound, so within about a half an hour I was able to give all the references to Swinburne. I ran across that list that’s in the ABC of Reading of the tradition.30 Pound is my tradition. But taking Ezra Pound’s tradition, I shared only Marlowe and Shakespeare and Whitman. That’s just about it that I shared. The Frenchmen, for instance, that he had are entirely different from the Frenchmen that I would have named to a tradition of poetry. And one of the crucial differences would come in this difference in Coleridge being central to me and not to him at all. There’s not a reference, as far as I know, to Coleridge in Pound. Now I’m not talking about literary connections, but lines that come down. Blake, for instance, is also missing from Pound’s list because Pound thought if he engaged the numinous at this level we’re going to have to talk about something else that happened, something that changed from imagism. But Olson too would ask the question, “Why Coleridge?” Question: Robert, I gather one thing that you’ve been saying is that when

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Olson went to Melville, what he decided to do was to establish the locus of Melville’s work. Duncan: Melville is the man that he discovered himself in. And, of course, he’s not like Melville. Melville took a step that Olson was going to take too—“I shall find myself in Shakespeare.” Consequently Olson, who does find himself in Shakespeare—and this is a constant reference for him—is utterly puzzled when he comes to another poet, [John] Keats, who works day and night with Shakespeare. He hardly wrote a letter in which he didn’t quote from Shakespeare, and who carried him entirely into his poetry. But Olson says, “God, how come that man? The letters are so wonderful, how come he wrote poetry like that?” That’s just off his map. I’m not pointing out that his understanding is going to be the same, nor that it was going to be Melville-like, but Melville was a predecessor in the way in which you would view the meaning of Shakespeare. Question: I mean, why did he go back to the doctrine of Melville’s day? Duncan: He had to. That’s a separate one. That came from the “sciences of man.” That was part of his approach. And he was to go to the documents. The magic comes in later to this idea of Shakespeare. That’s the line of poetry. Now that happened in writing when the poems were recited, they wove. You know what you do in weaving. You shuttle forward and you bring it back, and you weave under and over. There always was that forward-and-back movement, but they were entirely separate in their origins. The writing was not weaving when it was making it forward and back. It was one of those instincts of writing this way, and filling the whole tablet. It was time saving without having to go back and so forth. Although, Olson and I, and Creeley too, constantly read the latest things on the origin of other crafts because we think of them not just as crafts but as art, and as discoveries about form, so that it is very interesting too that the first forms that appear on pottery and on clay tablets are borrowed from weaving. The poets come before the weaving—they have form but they don’t have the decoration. They made the first pots that way, and then they lined them with clay so that they wouldn’t leak, and discovered by accident in firing them that this could be burned away and the clay would remain. They know that, because for a long time they couldn’t figure out how to make pots. They still went through the business of making the weaving and building the clay around them. This was one of the design elements that they cut and you see have real relation to the forms of made objects of weaving.

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I think I’ll start now to give you a picture of the Maximus. The reason that digging took place is in part to feed the poem, yes. Yeats, as you remember, said that he took to the séance table because he was looking for images for poetry.31 People who feel that in back of poetry is some kind of reality are in a sense of digging, trying to find the particulars that are going to give it shape. And they’re all going to have a very great deal of disagreement with those people who talk about poems, as if poems counted and could be judged as interesting, witty and well-made or otherwise, as items all of themselves. You saw where I searched it out in Darwin, and more and more I believe that the world is a process of making. Once you drop the poem is good or bad or something—and the Bible does have one beautiful little hint about how to find the numinous world: “and God said it was good.” There are some pretty terrible things that some included under “good” in the Bible. If you just take a moral attitude you’d get awfully confused. That “good” meant something that’s always held in the world of the numen, and that is the goods, the things that said life was interesting. And you find, for instance, one of the magic keys that was in Christianity was in the Passion on the cross, because that is one of the great central goods of the reality of Christ. He’s usually portrayed today by beatniks as being sort of a victim of a lynching. Christians could have a feeling in suffering. There was a good, and that led through to experience. And so you have Dewey, for instance, where the accent is not Christian, but it’s still in the Christian tradition, as a pragmatist referring to undergoing in suffering something. He almost is not referring to what we call pleasure and pain areas. It means if you suffer you do not block off from yourself the impact of any part of it. The experience on the cross in the religion of Christianity is one of the points in which you have discovered that experience is a paramount value. Otherwise you think that’s a perfectly terrible thing to do to him, or wasn’t it awful, didn’t Judas betray him or something? What happens in the poem when it’s no longer Judas who is vastly mediocre or indifferent? What happens in the poem is the cooperation of things to make an experience. Question: In that connection, I think there are people who are confused about “numinous.” Duncan: I find the word that it comes from is “numen.” And I found my idea of a numen a little confused, to put it mildly. I do not share the relative idea of numen. I thought that the numen was the place or thing where the god was, that had the presence of the god. The numen could possibly be the presence of the spirit itself. The word “numinous” never occurred first. It occurred first in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. And it belongs entirely to our twentieth century. “Numinous” means

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something different from the whole world of the numen. The world of the numen is pre-Christian and the world of the numinous belongs to the Christian world trying to reclaim the quality that was there in these old places and things. It is still Christian because it refers to experience. This refers to a place or thing, and you felt it. I mean it was there, and you recognized there. It was compelling. This refers to a compelling experience, and one thing that you’re going to find that Olson and I have in common—but I think it is really a part of one modern, twentieth-century thought—is this cult of experience. Partisan Review wanted to, and did fight a little war against all of these people, Lawrence particularly, and the people of this first phase of this poetic cult of experience. Barzun and the group of them attacked the cult of experience which they viewed as vividly fascist and opposed to the civilized. That phrase is very good because that phrase was cultist. This is not a cult of the rock, or a cult of the place, or the cult of the fountain. This is the cult of experience. In taking that, it meant that this cult of experience had begun again to be a cult of the place, the cult of the rock, the cult of the fountain, and off from here—via Jung—this is Rudolf Otto. And very soon Jung is using it very happily, and so are his analytic patients or victims, depending on our point of view. I think Rudolf Otto is using it before the First World War, I am not sure, and very soon Jung is using it. In the numinous and from Jung, and from Whitehead, you have the real thing, the Charles Olson locus. He found this as a meadow or field. Of that place where the young man was killed by the bull in Gloucester, Charles said to me, and said in a different way in the poem, when he found out that event had taken place he knew that Gloucester was one of the tits of the earth. The image emerges finally in Maximus of the six hundred who had drunk from the tits of the earth, who is the great mother, or cow mother. There are certain places then where events happened. These tits of the earth would be where this had happened. All the other events of life have just been gathered into this one locus. At the moment of a violent death, this past and the future thing are completely brought into this present moment. Your quality tells you about the quality of a catastrophic death. If it’s passionate, for instance as in the crucifixion, then you have God present in the locus. All the things of what man can be can define that. But then Charles had something else there. He didn’t know the man and the bull acted there. He said he knew there was an earth place. This means that his idea of the numen had increased to such a place that he had been looking for something that would key him that Gloucester was one of the holy places of the world. Now the word

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“numinous” comes because Otto wanted to find the idea of the holy again. And if you’ve read the early Maximus, reread them in this light, because Charles is not thinking of [the numinous] yet, because he thought he found it there, he came in tansy. You’ll find him discovering that tansy in Gloucester means that Gloucester was one of the holy places.32 When the flower lips are not just flower lips, then they belong to the fairy religion as there are many people who think they belong in practice. Tansy is also the tansy of the witches, and the tansy of the magical earth. In the first part I suggested that in the beginning Charles’s interest in particulars and documents was a little like Pound’s, but it had changed because of the whole economic importance of documents. You have him also historically documenting them, not documenting in the sense that you did in a thesis, but showing that such and such really happened. That documentation begins, once he gets the vision of Maximus, to have an entirely different significance, but it’s still there in Pound. The document begins to be like it is in magic. You have no alternative but to use those words. Poetry and religion have also left all impressions. The minute we talk about magic we think of two different things. One is marvelous, quite as marvelous as any poem, or any drama, or anything else, and that’s what those magicians went through with all their rites, and their life around them made life extremely exciting, and made all sorts of things come into relationship, and it gave them a trajectory. Let’s get back to Olson. What was happening in Olson’s mind? It was partly the influence of Jung, it was partly the vision you could have of Whitehead. This is a heady thing, Process and Reality, where you have the picture of a cosmos, and you’ll find it in that letter that follows “Projective Verse,” and then the following “Letter to Elaine Feinstein.” 33 He apposed cosmos to psyche, absolutely for this, absolutely this world of psyche. Now I have ways of reading things so much for my own use. This appears after the Pindar poem was written.34 I didn’t even register cosmos and psyche, because they were so charged with importance for me. I had to finish “The Field” and I did not want to have results happening from the Pindar poem outside the ones in this area of “The Field.” I had to go for a year and a half. At the end of that, I read that letter again and noticed that it was about cosmos and psyche. This is part of the magic operation. You become blind to these two terms because they have gathered some kind of prohibition. So there are laws operating when you are trying to have something happen. Charles begins to have something happen. You can’t read “Projective Verse” without realizing that when he talks about a field or something, and he’s thinking of process then, he tries to picture head and heart as operative. Whether he decides he’s going to do the measuring and the heart’s going to do something,

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he’s already beginning to do what I was doing when I was walking back and forth. And he’s already beginning to be magically involved. Let’s move back to the group at the first part of the century, about the same period as the imagists were studying Greek drama. The real change comes after Frazer [came] into the new thing. Jane Harrison had started to study poetry. She felt there must be something more vital than Euripides. She started on the theory that Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus35 were a revival of a cult life of the old religion, in the terms of stage at the last point, and they would give you a more vital key to what the old religion was than someone like Hesiod, who was sort of designing an argument. Now Hesiod is very devout. Pindar could give even more, because he is a reactionary and reactionaries never notice what it is that they say in between times. Pindar is a solid man, a farmer, so only his devotedness shows what the old religion might have been. Going back to these dramas, she [Harrison] begins to make it clear that the only vital point of poetry was that everything in a life was so involved with it, that it meant motion and doing things. And she talked then that there had been a thing called the dromena, which was what they did, and muthos, which was what they said, or sang. And the two went together. So what they did was not the thing they’re telling about, but what they did. They were both in the same moment. Had they only done that—and that was bible—it meant it would be parallel to a constant reference in modern poetry in an area that was to be more and more misunderstood. When Olson met me, the first poem he was interested in was “Medieval Scenes.” Was there such a thing as dromena and muthos? Those poems had consequences in the life around me. They interfered, let’s say, like opera does, like the chorus does. The nearest to a Greek chorus we have in our contemporary scene is something we all participate in when we gossip. If that girl Medea goes on that way, you know, she’s probably going to kill those children, and a good honest Greek woman wouldn’t be letting this [happen]. Actually this is the thing that still goes on in our day, and it’s a prayer for this marvelous power. The only glory man knows is the glory that gets cured on the psychoanalytic bench. The difference between someone who gets straightened out and Oedipus, who tears his eyes out with his brooch, is that Oedipus stands in the only glory that man knows. Oedipus has put a law over himself and risen in that law to its consequences, and is liberated. He finally comes to epiphany and it’s absolutely shattering. He sees that the consequence of his laws is to tear his eyes out. Everything that happens on the analytic bench is trying to weasel out of the consequences of the law. For the modern sensibility belongs to this world and avoids this. Christ himself is sort of a sick baby on that cross. That boy would never have had to go through such a terrible thing as to cry out on the cross, “Why hast thou

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forsaken me?” Let the imagination try to imagine this moment. Oedipus really doesn’t know where it is. He needs cooperation. Everybody cooperates, and this cooperation then is part of why things take place in what are called movements. Groups of poets. And they actually answer each other back and forth, and they try to have some crisis. Back of the Maximus Charles was forcing himself to take Melville as a law over him, and said, I will write Moby-Dick. I will live in this dimension. There are numinous angles, because the most terrible thing we can think of is that we only had eighty readers. When I was in college in 1935, we would cut out certain pictures, and they were by Matisse and Picasso. Matisse and Picasso were becoming exciting to us because they had produced these pictures. And we looked at others to see if there would be more like them: one was a woman looking in a mirror. And these were great events. But by the time 1940 came we could look at them and say, that’s a Matisse, that’s a Picasso, that’s a [Joan] Miró. Now you look and say, well that’s probably $10,000. That sold at auction last year for $250,000. This money thing and this audience thing [go] back to one of the awful tragedies in my mind. It could not have been what Olson found in Melville. The Melville that I found was not there that transformed me, that gave me the point that I was going to find out the secret of life. But we do know one thing in Melville: the terror he had when he tried to develop the theme of the Christ in Pierre. And then these two things—the whale and the Christ—[came] to us once we put them together in a long tradition of where they were. In Charles’s work, coming from that, the great difficulty is to find that Christ was accessible to Melville. He had found it in himself. And it can’t be just located at some particular thing. Part of the process, the nearest that Charles comes to anything that is as absolutely mad or lunatic as the reality of the whale. I’m not thinking of Ahab’s idea of the whale, because he’s one of the many people looking at that whale as the reality of that whale. The reality of that thing in Pierre is the many arms of deception of the whole thing that have something to do with real life—that everything is reciprocal for everybody together from one big being in the group that is Pierre. Charles found that these are tits of the earth. Now that certainly is the strength, and yet origins appear in other places in other parts of community experience for the impression that the earth feeds us. And this is not just the food from the farms we talked about originally. I may have been talking about the farms in the Ukraine, and exploiting them when you weren’t really connected with those tits, the actual tits of the earth. I was also talking about the force of something that the earth was. And people felt this. It belongs to the realm that seems, if it is not numinous, it is what is accused of being over here, lunacy around the moon. All poets were of the radical forms.

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Now let’s get back to what happens in the magic operations in witchcraft. There you have to work on formula, and this is what really tied up alchemists. The Curies are used in Paterson for just exactly this feeling about the poem. The Curies knew there was something in the pitchblend. Now they knew it in their own scientific terms—that is, their intention was not just from some other source. Their intuition was chemical, but they did not know what it could possibly be. They did not know in what terms they could find it. Now alchemists did this, and they [got] a lot of things along the way, but they were looking for something else. The Jungian, for instance, stresses that they were looking for something spiritual, that seems to be quite clear. And Jung is very good in that book on Psychology and Alchemy.36 The meaning of the creative act is 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. Charles in Maximus erected major laws. It meant that he was going to use all of Gloucester as experimental terms for a field in which his spirit was going to live, and only live, finally, because the objective correlative, for instance, would be from this place. Why was he looking for proof that it was a place? Almost every item of the holy has an expression in our common speech which means, “oh, that’s just nothing,” and every one of those “that’s just nothings,” every time we say them, will take shit, which is extremely important in the whole magical operation. And we have only to think of our agriculture and the fact that we now increasingly try to use chemicals, fertilizers, and not the actual shit. The actual shit we put into the salt water where we hope it will do nothing. It is the same general feeling about it. The “oh shit” remark is entirely our disappointment that it has not yielded an experience. We know that people of that aberration come into some kind of intense experience in eating shit and covering themselves with it and so forth. And we do kind of know that as compost it works, I guess, but none of us has raised any vegetables. We are the first civilization that has thought the thing to do with it is to put it in a porcelain bowl and then quickly get it out of sight. Scientists, by the way, don’t. One of the wonderful ironies is that at the very period when we are triumphantly living with plumbing, the only way they did find out where that rice came from, by the way, and where the first wheat was grown, is because only five years ago those archaeologists realized that people wanted to know what was in the turds. Suddenly they found a few fossilized. How could you know what the people were eating except from those few fossilized remains? And we have erased, so successfully erased, that they will never know we ate anything in the world. They’ll know nothing about those chocolate-covered bees because we’ve successfully tried to erase history as rapidly as possible.

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Let’s think again of the figure for this Maximus. Those meaningful moments of experience have to be found, and change can be found. And they were all moments with possibilities, confused with the business of suffering and the way that Dewey took and used it, suffering and undergoing an experience. It combines with the idea that the Christians really did have. Before the Christians, the god himself bore all the suffering, and the identification could be intense. But in Christianity you have an interpretation in which Christians could share in this. And this became an experience, not just part of another rite. Charles laid down one law for himself. Nothing could be in Maximus that wasn’t in Gloucester. The comparison of Maximus with Paterson will really reveal something immediately. The first thing you see in Paterson is something that Williams himself had gotten from Joyce, that is, Williams was one of the transition followers, and he read from the very beginning that Joyce’s new work was in four parts and had a series of four that he had taken from Vico—a picture of history that had a childhood, a middle age, a death, and then a recorso to the beginning to the childhood.37 Then he read also in the 1920s that this man in the Joyce, Finnegan himself, was a great giant who spread out along, and that his wife was a river, the Leffe, and he was the city of Dublin also, that his head was here, hands and so forth. So he was a city man. So Williams borrowed, and this is exactly at the level of the total composition, of this level of structure in Paterson. Paterson is thoroughly and absolutely a conventional story, a structure. Finnegan wasn’t. But the thing that’s not conventional is where Joyce is looking. He was so blind he could not handle a larger structure, so he always had to be there in the word, and there you didn’t write a conventional thing. Taking across to the city man, Paterson, to match the city man, Finnegan, in Dublin. Taking across to Paterson where you’re going to have a falls and so forth. And the different stages and the language are going to go dramatically up in pieces, as it does in the divorce section, because what does he get from Joyce? He wanted to have a framework for a large poem. Now that luckily is not what happens in the actual poem, but the total structure, for instance Pound’s total structure, is still in the process stage, still being realized. All the way along the line it’s growing organically. Actually in Joyce, of course, this sort of systematic thing is to make for an entirely playful and conventional level, and it is what the scholars have found. It was entirely in the conventional tradition. And Paterson is entirely sensible to that. What bugged Randall Jarrell, who was reading Paterson marvelously at the level of its conventional structure, were all the elements of the poetry.38 All the elements that were actually a process of making what went on because Williams actually was writing the sort of thing that could go on inside a conventional stanza. Williams takes up the theme from Pound, the theme of the credit of language and

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its meaning, and relates that to money, and our whole total society’s disturbance about credit and circulation and goods. In the third book, Jarrell’s response was that, oh, he’s just taken that dreadful Pound stuff again. But he had not taken a conventional form from Pound—he’d taken a theme, and the [theme] is very different. The themes of poetry are internal, they feed and are real sources. They are part of these instances. These are tits of poetry. And the moon and the pulses and the idea that love, as they flow in, is in a continuous tradition. We need only refer to that tradition that Dante drew on, because he did draw on it as a tradition that went to the Provençal poets, to the Sicilian poets, and [to the] north, [where] Dante drew it in. Suddenly there it was, full with the milk of a whole poetry. And Williams begins to draw from Pound, his contemporary. But it is every poet’s business. 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 Curies did. And maybe you know very well you might not have hints that you’ve got a work to do. At least I am among those who believe there was a work to do in the whole thing of usury and money, and circulation, and exchange. Well, particularly because Maximus is said to be just an aftermath of Williams. “Projective Verse” decides that it is so destructive to have an overstructure and then have moments of poetry and then have discoveries. It is so destructive to have something like three acts. The form has got to be in every single locus of the poem. Joyce borrows from Vico. The form of 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. Charles, out of Whitehead, believes no, human history is right here. Eternity? Eternity cannot really appear in Paterson, and its not being able to appear keeps the poet talking when he talks about the language not being able to come into its own. It’s destroyed in the falls, or in the river below. It’s destroyed in its overimage. There is no such thing as just a convention. The figure I used, or a man uses such convention, puts a fancy set of chains on himself, and then says this is just convention and I’m going to dance! Charles must have charged in there to say that the only thing I want on the cover of that book is this map. The map is the actual area in which this thing is taking place. And that map, of course, can be extended again. You can go on making the map in new terms, describe the geography in a whole series of separate terms. That map extends in time in the same way. That’s when you start to dig. You really do have a state that is never really going to be taken for granted. The map you take for granted because you’ll find that the man in the poem has to take the map, to find out if it describes what is. And there is something it is. The poem is how you move around in the narrative. And Olson’s idea of what it is to be a man, the great man, Maximus by the way, Olson said when I wrote

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him. Well Maximus must be that Maximus that fascinated the Renaissance, the big man on the star map. He said he hadn’t thought of it. I don’t locate that it is a Maximus of Gloucester, and Olson had in mind Maximus of Tyre. I operate just like the cosmos and psyche. I know he associates it with Maximus of Tyre. That’s the one character in history I wouldn’t have to find anything out about. My own work, once I came into contact with Olson, consists of a great many of lines of absolute taboo, about finding out certain things about this poem. When I work on it, I keep hoping that I’m not going to stumble into finding out anything. Gloucester is not only just on a continent. It’s on the edge of the sea. Charles takes some time in this poem to describe Gloucester. In Maximus, [there are] double terms of that city—and one place that city exists is the opening of the continent, at another place that city exists as a locus at the edge of great schools of fish in the North Atlantic. And the men who live on the ocean live entirely on a continent of water. They live between England and the American continents. But for the land men, of course, Gloucester has another meaning. A city like Gloucester opens up levels of meaning. It already has a dual role. The continent we’ve already seen as the mother. This is the source of food, too, and also mother-treacherous, the Atlantic, is in that. A man has got to know his depth. A man’s got to make his soundings. And then in that poem, that one for Ferrini where he’s talking about the editor of a little magazine.39 The really hideous Ferrini is that Ferrini who called the name of his magazine by the names of the latitudes and longitudes of Gloucester. So Ferrini begins to be a dealer of information, or misinformation about a holy place. And more than that, if he had only a little magazine, he’s a member of this place. He’s a member of the secret community because he’s active in the field. And he immediately becomes a person. You don’t have to read Ferrini by the time you’ve read The Cantos. There is real commune and community where we live and every gesture we make that is not devoted to giving them what we know of this holy or this good is a real betrayal, and then the only test in our poems is to know how deep the water is. It’s got to be tested against the real. And that figure is a marvelous one. Let me see if I can give you that. It’s one of the first places where I knew what he was saying was so vivid that I began to unlock for myself. And particularly because at least there’s something to start on, and that’s Whitman. He gives an immediate reality to Whitman’s sense, too, that the community of poetry is not a community of poets. It’s a secret spiritual community within the town. The ones who appear in this canto for instance. Ferrini is not a member of the community, because he has just betrayed it. He delivers this stuff that doesn’t ever see where he is. But there are people even whose eyes have shown that they somehow live in this immediate moment.

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[Reads from “Letter 5” of The Maximus Poems] The key here is sailing this damn ocean, if you’re going to make your business fishing. It is not a field for a careless fisherman. And the man had to know his soundings. All wonderful for a poem. He had to lift him by the ear in order to know the sound. What do we mean when we say a vessel’s sound? That wood is sound [knocks on wood]. And the information went from one to another. Now when Pound came from Europe and was in prison, before he went to St. Elizabeths, Charles Olson came forward in this interim period not yet committed to being a poet, but having made his decision, the one that led him to write Call Me Ishmael, and volunteered to be Pound’s secretary, handling all his mail, before Dorothy Pound came to take over the correspondence, simply because Pound was the man, because you’d learned trade from this man.40 You’d learned your trade because this man had been in the waters where you’re going to be. And this explains another thing about what a movement is—where you recognize the poets are related to you because you’re in the fishing business, and someone else is in some other. Charles has a great deal about sailing vessels in this, too. But there’s going to be all sorts of different men doing different things that are not going to teach you the thing about where the fish are. Now Charles can call on that because he actually fished, as a young man, especially earning his living in the Depression, and before going to Wesleyan, and then on to Harvard. And also because he grew up in this fishing community. So this gives him an immediate community. But it occurs at every level, because that ocean is one that poets know, and sounding and finding the bottom and knowing where you are, and knowing what the depth is, and drowning in it, even, are all terms that are so immediate to the psychic life. The sea and the fish and everything in it is translatable at least, but they are not metaphors because the first thing you get into is this belief that the whole universe is the process of creation. And this is so different from God making his revelation in Christian terms because of Whitehead. In Whitehead’s universe God is a cosmic god, not a human god, and the human beings are cosmic beings, not human. So that one of the funny efforts in the “Human Universe” is really saying that the meaning of your humanity is in no way separated, so that when you so much as change a phrase in a poem, you are as much a cosmic event as when the wind blows dust in an erosion process. Something’s happening there. And your poem has no place to be except in a cosmos. And this is a term he wants. Psyche is a term of our discourse which, taken as being finally true, blinds us to the fact that we are cosmic entities. So we are always in cooperation with those forces. If this is true, then the experience on the sea really can be [related]

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to another part of this experience. We can find ourselves doing, acting wherever we are acting, wherever we take this thing as performing meaningful actions. Language, for instance, which is a correct term in all of this group of poets, changing, transforming the language, or working with the language—now that’s very different from the part about just writing poems. Just as you feel a real milk in the earth, a real food, some vitality of the earthly. The minute I start talking about it, I get excited, but certainly the logical part of my mind gets subjected. That little group around the first war only lasts for three years. They were all independent in a way that they did not [meet] each other any longer or correspond. The correspondences between Creeley and Olson, and Denise Levertov and myself were once intense and becoming much more infrequent, and there is a general feeling of agreeing, which is deceptive because we didn’t agree when we were in the period when we were actually in action. I mean, in the periods when we wrote intensely to each other were periods of how different all this seemed. That’s why I wanted to give a historical picture of the events really that took place back in 1950 and 1954. And our art is going on, and our art draws on it in many ways. But what any new event is, none of us could imagine. Creeley wrote to me just before I came up here. He said that he had spent two days with Charles and it was marvelous because his mind was still working, trying to imagine how any of us possibly now could ever find anything new. We are already antiquated. I have a poetics that works. It completely absorbs me. Only by forcing a crisis within that poetics will a change come. And one of the goals in Maximus, one of the reasons that it’s absolutely excruciating to read—and it is—a man is trying to make his own poetics untenable. He cannot find the place of crisis but you’ll find, if you look through essays and look through poems, you’ll find individual poems, individual Maximus poems, where they touch upon the few places he’s come across this feeling of cosmic presence. They’re beautiful. The real thing, the vision in “Projective Verse,” is not just the field. Contrast “Projective Verse” by Charles, and the use that I make of it in The Opening of the Field. Now I take it over completely as a poetics in The Opening of the Field and use that idea as if “Projective Verse” were describing just, and it does, the possibility of an aesthetic and a poetics. I mean here, by “a poetics,” a coherent and cohesive structure within which you can make something. He keeps trying to force himself into being deeply charged, and that would mean a change in the poem. That has not happened when we look at what is actually going on in the poem. The opening of Maximus, “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” I’m just going to put [in] blocks. Now this is taken over by a convention, and in the back of that book [Allen, New American Poetry], you’ll find people [for whom] the form

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is not significant at all. Does anybody know of any poems in here where this business is carried over? It is in younger poets now frequently. This business of having a block here and a block there is a very distinctive immediate look the notation has.41 It gives one possibility of form in which you have not a sequence. It does not even suggest a sequence. Looking at this page you do see that this block is immediately related to that. It gives you syncopated inner organization. The margin begins to have a meaning. This becomes a margin, and this becomes a margin, and you see that here, and here, one returning to this. Returning to the margin begins to have meaning again. And this makes it possible for you at least to have three large areas, and not [be] thematic. This is what Williams in Paterson tends to do with any such areas, that is, develop them as if they should all have the same margin. Because these are compositional elements in themselves, that is, as you read it aloud, you recognize that this is a return to that, and consequently this doesn’t have to return to a subject matter in order to belong. These areas of composition are like islands of poetic feeling. They permit at least three orders of poetic feeling within a poem, and they permit, for instance, that in one passage you will develop to here, and now your syntax of course can do what it does in a regular poem. The change in movement is quite evident. This shape we already know. The little short lines. If you thought of it as a musical possibility, then you can have long lines and then you can come back to that little [line]. The margins give already a notation that the emotional tone is related here somehow, even if it changed violently. The emotional tones here are related, and the emotional terms here are related in order. Now they don’t have to repeat them. The difference appears when they are in one order. The syntactic order, the change from this over to this, if you carry the sentence over. The disappearance of capitals at the beginning of the line in modern poetry showed syntax was no longer identical with the line. As a place the capital appears making paramount sense where the line and the syntax became as close as possible. Identical. The first place with a difficulty with the capital letter at the beginning of the line occurred in Marianne Moore, because she began to have complicated structures where the sentence carried over. She had other interests. She had sentences in this sense. These capital letters began to interfere and she didn’t know what to do, and she began to write straight through and use the capital letter as it makes sense as the beginning of another sentence. In the modern poetry of this tradition that’s what a capital letter is—it’s significant again, and meaningful— something in relation to syntax. Because Olson’s margins were redundant to do what the margin was already showing. And the margin then became meaningful as a place to return to, and it showed that all of these [lines] belonged to one order and these [lines] belonged to another.

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Now another kind of line you’ve seen, because Williams started trying to work it, was like that, and then goes back. Williams’s line usually represented a relationship of this kind. So it didn’t form vertical orders here. In my poetry I’ve formed vertical orders that are more built on this than that. I don’t deal with large blocks of feeling as Olson does. Williams’s are actually aligned; that makes possible three orders in each line. This is a whole line, and you are returning to the new line here. So there are no margins: they’re descents in orders, these are free members of a single order in the line. And this order of Williams reappears, but it also reappears in Olson, those little phrases, and many commas, short phrases, are part of what’s happening here. That is the articulation of the line. In my poetry you often find a line articulated in two elements. When you find something that even looks like that, it is related to inner orders within a poem. Now this shows what you do when you make a poetics right away. Charles leaves all of this open and it is always in formation. This margin is another feeling reference, this is a feeling reference. In my poetry you’ll find the whole thing organized. Every time I shift into another margin I’m conscious of a vertical movement within the thing moving. So if you were to follow through any of the elements that were on an inner margin, you would find that all those elements were related on a cerebral level, whereas Charles is leaving them all open in order to find the form of them. My form is a beginning of a convention of this because I’m making meaning out of it. The operative meaning comes in and you admit that you do not really know what the consequences are of having these orders. I’m the one person in here [Allen, The New American Poetry] who absolutely refused to be in this anthology until the very last, so I got to design my own section. I gave everybody a little anthology of me. Now take a look at something that is not what you see in Charles, and that’s “An Owl Is an Only Bird of Poetry.” 42 That’s a composition that is related to a suite in music, like Soldat or something like that, where you are capable of having a lot of changing units all along, or those suites of [Arnold] Schönberg, where you change from a waltz.43 That, of course, is not what is going on here. It goes on there in a way, because this is a little lyrical section, and these are long speaking lines. There’s something related in a musical structure. But actually “An Owl Is an Only Bird of Poetry” is not the sort of thing I was trying. The one to look at is “The Dance.” 44 Now writing it “dancers” this “movement / makes ordinate.” Syllabically, measure the lines, and then more than that, “dancers,” coordinates are measures, if you will see, contain a concentrated gist of something moving through the poem, and then all the long lines then are permitted to move out and away from that. So you have an inner message that is concentrated like a message of a kernel in a

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nut. I’m really driving it to be a form, to be just a poetics gathering. The only place where it could happen would be in those long lines. They’re not syllabically measured, and there I actually permit myself to swing out on little impulses where my mind concentrates on the figure of the dance. And the “turn turn turn turn” comes later. Although it’s not in that. When I return to the far left margin of the poem, all of those are open. So you find ideas. Because I can’t actually measure, I don’t have constant measure, without counting it by three or four syllables. The way you find your conscious measure, where your conscious measure and your unconscious measure are identical, is deciding you’re going to write a seven-syllable line. Just write. But you absolutely can’t measure, and then find out, where the conformity comes. And then you know that at a certain level your conscious control is identical with your unconscious intent. You don’t have any conscious control, unless of course, you submit to it. Now I never manipulate. I never operate counting syllables except at the level I can count syllables. Manipulation happens when you can’t count it. You have to stop syllables to make it do things, and that’s very interesting. It only means that you can measure three syllables or four. If you read the De vulgari eloquentia of Dante, you’ll find Dante’s praising a certain poet because he manages a line with thirteen syllables. Now you can only praise him for managing a line of thirteen syllables if there had been a cult in the Provence and that Dante kept finding your conscious control of the syllable if you didn’t count and manufacture. Now obviously anybody can manufacture a thirteen-syllable line, but look at Gerard Manley Hopkins in the sonnet line, its syllabic measures. He always exceeds or is deficient and so forth, but what he keeps are the five beats of the sonnet line, but in syllables he’s initiative and has his own form. There is an actual unconscious measure in Gerard Manley Hopkins, in the numbers of those syllables. But he isn’t counting them. He couldn’t possibly. He’s going on what he can feel. And he’s exceeding his conscious talent. And what happens that disturbs this whole area of poetry against forms like the sonnet is that the majority of them are not written at the level of conscious control, but on the level of your imposing upon and manufacturing the ten-beat line. Now Charles is much closer. By the way that’s not [Anton] Webern but [Erik] Satie who gives the clue to these in the short lines. At Black Mountain College, [John] Cage had given an entire cycle of Satie where everything was played to be performed.45 And that actually registers in the Maximus where he says, Satie is my composer.46 He is also a man who has danced. He danced the Tannhäuser, the giant in the ballet with Salvador Dalí doing the sets.47 He did have to do much dancing but wasn’t able to do more with dance because of this breath condition. When he reads it is a very rhythmical likeness. Stravinsky conducts. The

Vancouver Lecture

same sort of thing is in Charles. And in the same way. When I read tomorrow, my things will find this eminence everywhere the motion is dropped. Not all as high and active a threshold as it is in Olson. And if you miss that threshold you have an awful time reading his stuff. Poetry kept trying to form, you know, recollections in tranquility. Well tranquility can be stretched right out there as dead as it ever got to be, and to phrase this is not very tranquil. We can’t do our recollections any more. For I was developing this picture of the Maximus and the fact that he wanted to make a blockage against things and force a crisis in things. Doesn’t that already all of a sudden tell us how much he’s saying? When you’re having it good, when you can really do it, that’s the time to start making it impossible. This man really could do it. The thing that is in back of knowing to get the language in tune with your movement and get it so that if you really got through the reading that is indicated by those commas, by those short phrases, in some terms, you would get into the rhythm. A younger composer in San Francisco, Pauline Oliveros, set this last song.48 It is a magnificent little song. In the sequence it really does come as a terrific sort of close. And that command—“you sing, you / who also / wants”—is a real command he gave all of us to get it all. The awful music, the “mu-sick,” as he says in the Maximus and the “post-cards” and so forth, has to do on one level of reference with conventional verse. Because by a great deal of antagonism, you [arrive at] mean[ing]. One of the things about poetry is that you are going to live as long as most of us live so that you damn well better find a form of poetics that permits enough development that you’re still doing something interesting to yourself when you’re eighty-two. And that you’re not just going on writing a new volume of the same thing. But Charles means, “Oh, I want to change entirely the very inner shape of what I am.” To praise your own vitality, for instance, is also the preservation of what you are. And everything he’s ever written now will have this stamp.

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Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson’s Work

I

want to begin first to give you—because we’ve got time and we’ve got the proposition of a primordial time—some feeling about an affair about timing, and to place myself then in a time of Olson. Part of a literary world experienced itself as being in an age of [W. H.] Auden, and they deserved to be in that age. I mean, the circles of hell, as Dante observes, are so absolutely discrete. While the poets run up and down through the circles, no one can dream of getting out of their own. There is quite a group in the age of Auden, and with the death of Auden I suppose a slight breeze was noticed of some kind but very much the same state was there. And it was the state of a refusal to move which had set in very early in youth. It was a very specific kind of poetry and it occupies a very specific realm in all things and of all things in America. Anyway, along with that, I experienced really entering something that could be called in my mind the age of Olson. I declared to myself when he died—it ends with his death1—to be released from what were felt as historical duties. So first I would speak of the impact that “Projective Verse” had when one read it in 1950. I didn’t even dream he was a poet at the time I met him in 1947. He was a man filled with the things that had to be done. He sat down right away, [saying], “We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that.” And you hear it at the beginning of Maximus. You hear it absolutely coming forth from something very, very big, coming down on Ferrini. The most awkward pitch is at the beginning of a poem that is going to be involved with an upraising of the titanic powers. This is what he does, [brings up] a subject that had not been brought up at all. The Hesiod that he loved announces those powers.2 But that same poem in its theogony is surrounded with the warning of those powers. If you go into Works and Days you 51

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discover that already every ceremony of earth is in order for man to have an area of the human, and it is held against those powers. The divine gods themselves are an order that somehow stands to rule man so that there’s not a breakthrough, and has bound the early titanic and terrible powers. When I met Charles not only was I into Brooks Adams with a picture of the United States,3 but especially of the Western movement myself, and he was in the middle of still thinking of himself as an historian, and going to do a work on the West. That’s why he was out in Sacramento and around our area. I was doing the thing you’re not supposed to do. My position was heretical immediately because he ran across the poem called “Medieval Scenes.” That would be written in American [English]. You should see the rather angry letter from William Carlos Williams on the subject of anybody writing in such a non-American language.4 I’m so many generations American. If I redesign Venice to prescription it looks pretty American. I mean it looks just about like Hollywood did it. As Charles gets it, it does look as sinister as Ojai. But that’s not “Ohio” by the way. I mean Ojai is real California. And very sinister, very occult and all that stuff. But no matter what you do with that, it isn’t Alexandria. We did the whole thing. I mean the way Americans really take over the show. I wonder if a Duncan influence on Charles may be that while he starts out Maximus with a great resolve that it’s going to be right there, it’s going to be Gloucester, and no kidding, we’ll move out with those fishermen. He knows there’s the Atlantic Ocean. But in his own world, the leakage was already there because Atlantis is into it before you turn around, and that’s pure Ojai. While he’s scolding me in “Against Wisdom as Such,” he just means I got my gold claim here. So what are you doing with your sieve and your bucket? “None of that looking for gold as such, man,” he says, as he’s combing the water as it comes down the drain. One of his key papers is finding one of those Sutter gold claims. He knew how to stake claims. So I always read him that way. As I go on in the Maximus and those titanic powers appear, I’m very much at home, and yet it’s just in these territories where I also hear my experiences very differently—in other words, I come to know my experience. He vivifies my experience and that’s part of what you hear when I’m writing to him that way. He continuously vivifies my experience because he occupies so many of the same areas. In the proposition that I would talk about Charles’s idea of search for, and then his feeling of, a discovery, when he comes upon the definition of primordial time in Whitehead, where at last it’s released in the dimensions that he needs. That really took place, I take it, in 1956, in the fall perhaps, but certainly in the spring [of 1957], because when he arrives in Berkeley that’s the book.5 He has it in hand, and he talks about it as if he were discovering it, but he had a way of coming upon a discovery where he’d been before. Things could burst upon him

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that actually had burst over and over and over again. At Black Mountain in 1956 in the spring and fall, his mind was on Pythagoras. And what was the nature of the prohibition? What was the nature of the hubris that the Pythagoreans had about what could be sayable, and what was unspeakable, and what was the nature of what we cannot say in poetry that seems to be the very spring from which things pour? And could it be violated, that was very much on his mind. His idea of number is numerology, isn’t it? I mean he was about as connected with the world of mathematics as our friend Jung. He’s the kind of man who could grab a mathematician, pour forth the numerology. Like Dante, every single number in The Divine Comedy, including the number of lines, is significant throughout. But no mathematician feels happy when such an idiot grabs him and thinks this is what mathematics is. I’m not certain at all about that guy with the compass and a ruler getting his way through Euclid. Like any of the Euclid we read in its occult annotations, or its Hellenistic annotations, the first theorem sends you out into a universe and into such depth that you just fail to carry through the operation known as geometry. Yet we find him back in Gloucester, measuring, don’t we? We find him actually entering into the poem and forcing himself at least to take the steps, to walk out the measures, as if he were surveying it. We find him learning something about surveying.6 He’s so excited indeed about being able to read a topological map that’s just filled with meaning. We had the proposition coming out of Olson, that we’re not to take this turn—but part of my sense continuously is that he tells us not to go where he just buried it. I mean when he tells us it’s back of the diner.7 I’ve met people in Australia—and it costs them sixteen hundred bucks or something to get out here to do it—who go already on their pilgrimage to Gloucester and who take the Maximus—I lack devotion, I’ve never done it—and walk those steps, count ’em as if you were on one of those hunts where you hunt for treasure. What’s at the end of the count? No matter what else is back of the diner a lot of dug-up ground is back there. Now, the picture that he emerges with that you feel in “Projective Verse,” and feel certainly in Call Me Ishmael, is that it was necessary, impending that there be a new poetry. It’s remarkable that so much poetry fit absolutely in his mind. There’s no question about it in his mind because he could have made it writing at large. But it’s poetry that he means to have Melville carry him forward to. Essentially he sees the push of Moby-Dick as the push for the necessity of a poem, and he turns around and discounts, astoundingly enough, in Call Me Ishmael, the later Melville. He simply tells us it’s not to be considered. He dismisses Billy Budd and “Benito Cereno” and tells us all that stuff is just nothing, and then more than that he takes several side kicks in it so that we are not invited

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out to find out what Melville did in poetry itself.8 Although the man would stop and say, “have you been into Clarel?” He mentions the poems that were keys to him. Only Moby-Dick and only that size of the demand that was there made the necessity for the kind of space and time in which a poem was to take place. The most remarkable thing to me is that if we think of the spectacle of Pound where everything went into The Cantos, and we do not have an associate poetry, Olson also pours himself forth in major poems that do belong to the big poem. Williams writes Paterson. He was writing all his life and Paterson’s posited, and then that releases him to write the absolutely splendid poetry of his old age. The tasks proposed in Paterson itself importantly exceed the possibility of its being composed, the possibility even being proposed. That’s what Williams sees: “I have proposed what I understood.” He understood some counterpart. For one thing he understood a counterpart of Finnegan because he organized it disastrously with the river and the town like Finnegan. He divided it into seasons like Finnegan, but he wasn’t James Joyce. So, he finds out by the end of the poem that it doesn’t fit. Williams was the first person to see that actually, that American feel now of a long poem that is not a poem that possibly has closure. I mean you could put “The End.” And he does a marvelous end, “the end,” as you know in the fourth book.9 And then he finds he’s still in the poem and that’s all right. He bursts out for the first time, and he did go into a depression that the so-called map of the book was not a map. The poem was outside the plan, and when we were reading that pouring forth every single incident of that poem is outside his plan. His plan is perfectly evident. And when I said it was disastrous it’s because, when we come to the insistences of the plan, that’s all we see. We see a kind of city planning. I was entirely concerned about what cities do to rip off the countryside. A city has to eat and so it has to make up something to compel the countryside to feed it.10 Those cities in the north of Russia always had either to come down and wipe it all out and take the grain home, or they had to think up some sell, political or otherwise, to get the food into Moscow, Leningrad. So they sell furs to people down in the Ukraine. The crazy designs of people of cities growing up in the North (where you couldn’t grow anything) upon all the people that are possibly the source—I should say this in the Midwest. That traffic was the one we talked about, and yet it was also related to maps. Olson opens Ishmael about space.11 We couldn’t get into that without talking about phases and times when certain historical things come forward and recede and the feeling, not of cycle, because if you take the cycle thing—that’s exactly what Joyce takes in Finnegans Wake. What you miss is that the initial must always be initiated. You are not making a cycle when you initiate something. And you can’t institute something

Ideas of Primordial Time

and then go back to it because there is no such movement. You can’t win a right. The trouble with the Bill of Rights, for instance, is you think it’s lasting through time. Forget it. A law is not a guarantee, it’s only a map made. It’s a model. If a right is actually a right you find yourself fighting for it no matter what. I mean you don’t fight for the Bill of Rights. If there were a right there you weren’t getting you’d have to fight for it because of something you have to do. Part of the drama of Maximus, part of the drama in trying to find another order of time, trying to find the definition of the primordial, is that you’re trying to undo the widely preached feeling that time was cyclic. You’d get back to it, that you’d go around and so you go through all the ages. This dissolved the real meaning of action, which is to get with it where you are, and that you are always in any act, including ending, beginning. Not “in my end is my beginning,” which is a snake with its tail in its mouth. That’s another figure. I’m not putting that out. Take, “you gonna die.” That’s the first time you get to do it, oddly enough. Each of us so initiates dying that we have to do it all alone, we can’t turn around and inherit it. I think I still am stubbornly believing that only the physical universe gives birth to soul, spirit, with a moment in history, with Kantorowicz, where he looked up and he said unless someone in the class is so demented he thinks that the material world gives birth to the spirit. Everything’s been preached at me the other way around and nothing else has been in my mind but the evidence. No matter where else it comes from, I always see some physical guy has come forward with this thing called “spirit,” waving it around. I love to read the most loony of occultists way out there, who have spirit descending from the stars to create man’s body and wars, but where in the world do they come from? I’m holding a physical book written by a physical man with a physical, historical time, so the message is sure not coming from the stars. I have a thing called “transgressing reality”: I am speaking from the stars. The stars I have heard are also material. If they came down there wouldn’t be anything else that we could possibly do. So we were in the Duncan disjunct and the [disjunction] will now give you an impression of exactly that he wasn’t far off from where Creeley was when he enters the looming specter of the paper which you are to write, in which you will do a formal betrayal of a man who did not believe in form but believed in being right where I’m trying to put myself. Even when he was reading a page, he’d look down here and say, “what is it it says here?” The look on Charles’s face in that film when you see him and he’s going to turn to read something, if you ever thought reading was settled in something you actually did, and his eyes bug up and he goes like this, “wow.” When did it take place that he wrote it down? Could you possibly see it better that he isn’t looking backward? What in the world is a crazy thing called memory? And

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especially when it’s right here on a page. Besides, he couldn’t read his handwriting. Gerard Malanga, who can’t read at all, accuses him of writing some unintelligible piece of writing. But there are passages of Charles which are not to me in letters, aren’t obscure just because they’re obscure or something—I’m still trying to read the handwriting. In Vancouver, that was just exactly it.12 He picks up a Maximus and he can’t quite decide how those pages [went]. They’re too fresh. If they came in that order they must go in that order. And then he tries to read his own handwriting, and then we see somebody in a desperate state because he knows he’s got something down here and nothing will work about this. The light won’t be right. I’m not quite in that place. In the past two weeks the [editing of the] Whitman lecture has been coming into shape.13 Whitman is, after all, something you could write on. He had built his own tomb and he could put his name at the top and so can you. We can do that, that’s okay. The last two days have been taken up in figuring out the tour schedule—kilometers and calendar sequence for the tour of the Midi next summer. No wonder I started out referring a bit to geometry, me figuring out kilometers, and going over maps to see is it likely that you can go from the cave of Niaux, which is prehistoric. Now, we’ve got our time coming up. We’ll put the cave of Niaux in here [writes on the blackboard], since Lascaux’s been closed to tourists because they’re trashing it.14 In just going in has dissolved this particular factor of being able to go that far (in quotes) “back.” So there’s only really one, because people don’t go down the Ariège. They don’t go down to that part, not even the classy Pyrenees. The Niaux cave is the one place you can really see the prehistoric walls. And you can take a group to the cave of Niaux. But only twenty-nine kilometers away is Montségur, which is the absolute heart of Ezra Pound’s sacred twelfth century.15 It is where the Albigensian heretics sought their refuge. And when Pound went there, and as Kenner shows, it is not just Albigensian: they’ve come in on top of something because in between that and that [points to blackboard], this was a temple of Helios and kept its identity. And one can spot underneath the Gnostic, underneath the Albigensian, seeing that Pound’s accurate about Helios—that is of the sun as a divine power. Now remember we’ve got a primordial sun. Just put your heads with it about how cozy warm you would be if we threw you into that atomic furnace. That is no Helios. We’ve got a lot of takes on that sun and we have a domain of humanity. Most remarkable is how in the beginning he [Olson] disposes of himself and humanism. These are words that to get them at the end of his life, so that there’s enough work that he can declare that he is fundamentally concerned with— the humanistic realm, as far as man is concerned—and that’s where actually I think I’m not far off from him. I’m no way not to be a man. And you have no

Ideas of Primordial Time

way to make some ideal figure of one that doesn’t include me, not if you’re a biologist, not if you’re concerned about the species. So we’re not doing that, but that he poses this here and Pound is unwilling to do it, once you pose this, then we know who Helios is. Then we know who Helios is and we return to the entire Poundian matter, any factor of him, and why he falls into his racism. The whole thing makes perfect sense because we’re looking at him as a factor and see the gods are almost there. “Eternal qualities of mind,” he was able to say in his “Credo.” 16 But increasingly they became invasive persons. And yet Helios is surely and absolutely the sun, and there is a primordial sun and that is the one that Pound does not address. The primordial sun, the primordial earth, the primordial time and space. Space he proposes first as if he were going to make the choice between space and time. But he says they’re absolute, which really shakes me. He says space and time are absolutes. I still think that means that we can’t get out of them. They are absolute to us. We know the sun has a life and death. The divine world is not human. But Helios is the appearance of the divine power in the realm of humanity. Not civilization at all, a project of humanity. I’m trying to make use of how come the words “humanism” and “humanity” come in? The real meaning of our occasion here is that we’re the very first time that people have come with various heads, with various eyes, and we are addressed to the beginnings of what will be the way in which we bring forward what happened in that poem, what happened in the man’s work. Who’s got some take on these words of “humanism” and “humanity”? No scholar certainly. I hear it thundering as I was reading and unprepared to do that nice job of accounting for it. I found myself turning around madly, like a kid writing a term paper, and locked down something. I did the opposite, and Bob [Creeley] saw that Guide to the Maximus Poems and certain papers on Maximus.17 He got locked into them; I looked and I thought, gee, you know if I take that book home I’m simply not gonna be even reading nothing but that. I mean that’s a Christmas present. But I can tell you what happened because I got it wrong at that point. I wanted to have information that would be convincing to you and locate for you this thing. It’s the unlocated, continuously; the lure could go out to find a meaning of a word. Although I’m talking about primordial time, the other character—the way I get Charles and why he remains. Why, for instance, the end of the age of Olson? I view myself as no longer in history, not having to do my duties as I understand them. Charles is able to bring forward terms that are so large and can’t be located that they become one’s own. The real terms of your life are not ones that you get to find the source for. Now we’re jumping right to the point. His intuition was that what you call the source is a head. Our sources are hints of a source. The actual source of being of the whole thing which is the feeling of

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the whole, the presence of a formal imperative that when you admit its being there, then you feel the fittingness. You do not do unfit things, but you fail to admit the facts that belong to the framework that would tell you what you do. Pound almost hovers. There’s a difference between a vague feeling of a line and a line which conveys vagueness. He had no objection to vagueness, but not to admit the context in which they’re vague produces another kind of reference to vagueness that produces what we call a vague line. That was the thing insisted on, [which was] much misunderstood about Pound. People ended up having reference to being exact. The great presiding term of our intellectual discourse in our century is “precisely.” It sprouts like wheat. You know two little things down there and we have to get up Heidegger, Heisenberg-er, [and] Hamburger to talk about why we are so precisely not precise. I think I can get across that that’s not what’s in question. It’s admitting what’s present. Don’t be unhappy—what if I’d had something on my mind I was going to convey to you? No way, that isn’t the way my mind works. Charles was on the speed. Well I have to tell you that any debilities that show up are my crazy chemistry. Speed would be redundant, right? It might be the secret of why there’s no Duncan silence. If you took a little speed there might be some silence. Reading Pound, does that mean he shouted I was really sorry? I thought, what do you do to get those big utterances in there? However, this is a big man. I’d been in a car actually with Charles and Betty [Kaiser], but that’s not so unconvincing. I don’t know how he got into any car. It’s easier to account for a supernatural visitation than how do you fit in a certain space. But “I take SPACE”—well, if I stretch out—it still isn’t great, so we’ve gotta have a picture of this space, man, and “to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now.” 18 My thought of Charles Olson’s genius here predicting itself goes back to and forward from this opening announcement of Call Me Ishmael. Within the sentence is given a nuclear statement of time from Folsom cave to now. So that’s the first framework of time and it appears all the rest of his life. There is some place. The first movements of people that swept down and back, and then what I would relate to the picture I persist in, arises from the essentially Judeo– Christian–Roman Catholic time mythos in which there is an Eden and a time before time. And his nature is there. So we have a kind of Eden time [writes on the board]. I think I’m talking about paradise. So we’ve got an Eden time and it has a snake in it. Was it a Christian Scientist who said to me, “Gee, those kids are going back to Eden but they don’t realize that there’s a snake in Eden.” The snakes in Eden are identical. They keep thinking you’ll go back to Eden. They’re not going back to paradise. But Charles has fixed on his mind

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a paradise and it is a time back of time. He blasts this whole world, as I see it, this whole preoccupation of his. The coexistence of all these things is the essential. Not that he’s getting to the truth, but that we get the coexistence of beauty—so finally we got something that resembles how we feel about the universe. And that one will not match what the philosopher does, not match what the occultist does, not match what any history does. That’s why a history won’t fit. It’s coexistence, yet Charles seems to be often displacing one thing by another. That changes the nature of time—back in time is paradise. He doesn’t discard it. In Hesiod he finds primordial time—an entirely different time, an entirely different order. He finds the order that emerges is Orphic. In the same period as Hesiod is becoming Charles’s center, [and] it’s very much my center. I’m not going into the Duncan. You’ll get enough of the Duncan as I’m trying to talk about Charles’s world. Anyone who’s ever seen what happened to the Hesiod in my head will see that we must have had a vast courtesy to address each other. We didn’t always. Most importantly, of course, we had challenge. We had confrontation. And since you saw truth everywhere there, then it became actually the thing that you have to take a sounding of. And Charles’s Hesiod is back: it goes to our orders of night. And the snake appears here, but it’s not linked to paradise. It’s not what it is here. Paradise appears there but it’s not where it was in the other. So I would say the second principle is in time. This is the time that Adam loses in his fall. Biologically we can discover that. I mean the dance of the chromosomes in here is that we moved into another time. Now we do not have a simplistic picture like this because our whole hormonal system enters this, and so the composition of what we think we can dispose of [somewhere], or something like this, is useless, useless. Charles goes back to the Sumerian.19 He tries to drive back to the Sumerian and then he has to find in the Sumerian the undoing of certain elements that are there always in the story of this which is ever present of this time. Then man falls. I’ll risk it, but we’ll come to it when I read through again. What struck me when I came to the earliest mention of man as most estranged from that with which he’s most familiar was that Charles advanced it as a proposition, a project, that we were to undo the estrangement.20 Now that’s not the later Charles’s reading of it. My reading through and through has never been that sense. I have always assumed that Heraclitus is telling us the very nature of what’s here. Life itself and the chemical universe is one of estrangement from exactly where it is. Why else move? What else is moving on, I mean, what’s the most familiar? And there’s a profound energy of estrangement throughout. Some occult [thing] doesn’t make man a proposition that we are only a local happening.

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Madame Blavatsky describes man in one period to find out she’s talking about dinosaurs. Now, we got a movable idea of man and we begin to see that that’s a proposition that ain’t what we’d call “anthropocentric.” Not at all. So the hovering possibility—because you write space large, and you write time large, and man is significant throughout—is that actually man may then just be our own business to be man, but the only kind of man we know anything about is the one we’re doing. “I am interested in a Melville who is long-eyed enough to understand the Pacific is part of our geography.” 21 I see Charles, you know, hopping on down here and saying, “Oh, there’s the Pacific.” I mean, sort of like that would be about it, and then he sees Melville, wow, all the way to the guy who can really see all the way across there to the other end of the thing. “Another West, prefigured in the Plains, antithetical.” 22 “Long-eyed” may not only mean seeing how vast the space of our continent is, but how farsighted, meaning seeing how in time the proposition of America will indeed be Pacific-centered into the future. The word “time” is not writ large here, antithetical to space, but the time of man opens up into the time of life itself. “The beginning of man was salt sea, and the perpetual reverberation of that great ancient fact, constantly renewed in the unfolding of life in every human individual, is the important single fact about Melville. Pelagic.” 23 And so Olson is indeed over there in the territory that also is inhabited by our friend Madame Blavatsky, other theosophists, and so forth. Now, we’re not talking about an abstract idea of man. We did not rise from an idea, we know that damn well, and we are only one of the propositions of life. Remember, that’s where we’ve been turned around as the DNA reveals that, okay, now we can really let that idea of man float like they did the dollar and, while we can, cry as it sinks. And the currency of mere butterflies comes in as poets have announced it might, and we do observe that certain insects will last after we’ve blasted ourselves off the place. And meanwhile they will be complete and absolute representatives of the intent of the DNA. There’s no species that ain’t a complete and absolute representative of the intentions of the entire complex thing. No matter where it is, pick your daisy; it’s got the life code and not some more or other. It’s simply a variation of that life code. We don’t also get to also have lost the life code. How miserable the life code was as you look at Mr. Nixon running around, a living example of the life code extending himself into his real estate, and you hope it doesn’t spread throughout several universes. And it would love to do it. I am a little more the jokester on the sinister side of this. Charles is over here on the rectitude. He was rector of Black Mountain, which I always spelled with a “w-r-e-c-t.” 24 He really boiled the whole thing down to poetry. Only the poem

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was going to do this thing. His insight may be true, that is, that only poetry was likely to crash through the whole business of being art. And actually, if you think about it, heavy as Pound and Williams heard the proposition of the modern, which is the style of 1925, and which produced some notable music, very stylish, and produced a lot of notable stylists, like cubist paintings and so forth, but it’s only an awkward moment or two in The Cantos that even try to convey the idea of being modern. He just can’t get his head together with what he should be, which is a modern work of art. Try preaching it as a modern work of art and look how awkwardly he can handle a jazz band when it appears. There is no au courant, that’s not where we’re standing. To have style you have to declare what Charles resisted absolutely in Y & X. He refused to close the parenthesis. It stood for death for him, but it also stood for the possibility that you could design that space, you could make a pattern in that space. That begins to be the beehive.25 His intuition was poetry, really. It’s already breaking up. It is really impossible for the person in the twentieth century tuning in to the poem to make the beehive. There’s nothing wrong with the beehive makers. But I have a fat chance of making the beehive when you hear about my writing before I met Charles. I frequently try to show off a beehive here and there. All you need as we learned at Pisa was—that grand old man was there—to borrow a pencil and scrounge a piece of paper and you’re at it again. There’s no expense. I mean a painter has to have a studio and it has to be warm enough for the paint to flow and they gotta have the canvas. I mean, you better be making a beehive. Music has been rehearsing the beehive. At every step music recites that it’s making a beehive. That’s exactly what it’s constantly doing. I’m scolding Robert Duncan right now because my “Ground Work” is showing that I am a busy bee and I can really do it and I’m stacking the honey in the right place.26 I’ve got at least the authenticity of my entire age, and that is we can’t do it. In the oracular beginnings of Olson’s full poetic genius, a statement of space leads us into questions of time, tradition, or transmission: “He had the tradition in him”—he’s speaking of Melville—“deep, in his brain, his words, the salt beat of his blood. He had the sea of himself in a vigorous, stricken way. . . . It enabled him to draw up from Shakespeare.” 27 The sea is bigger than Shakespeare, it does occur to Charles. And it certainly had hit Melville, that while Shakespeare was bigger than he was, he, coming from the sea, if from that source, is bigger: bigger than the job he has to do. Now that’s a turnaround because it looks, doesn’t it, to anyone starting in an art, like you’ve got a big job and I can’t get to that job? We have to reinstitute it in ourselves in our own chemistry, we reinstitute that thing we come from. We are larger than the task we have to undertake. Now we see how very strange the

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interchange is because then we have the authentic feeling that the task is larger, and we see that something of what the mere task of the Maximus, or the mere task of the “Ground Work,” which I’m doing, which is the preparation for the work of my old age, or the mere task of repairing the john, that’s the one I love most, the description of Charles, you know, the paper clip fixing the john.28 . . . We are initiating and going into the source which is ahead, and that one like the sea, is the sea again. It is the sea that has been doing the whole trip. And magic or process, he insists. “It was an older sense than the European man’s, more to do with magic than with culture.” 29 Space and time are potentially extensions, enormities we go into, “large and without mercy.” 30 To the Orphic evocation of time and the closing passages, with all sorts of passages, he writes. And I mean the closing passages of his life work, the closing passages of the Maximus. I want to read that because it’s one of the places in which our coexistence is curiously reaffirmed, and very strongly indeed. I want to give you here exactly one of the key things we will be going back and back to, and that is the one in which the word “passages” comes forward. Pound is very definitely, and gets treated, like the father in his mind. When I came back with the Rock-Drill, I think it’s Rock-Drill that I was bringing back—the one that has the beautiful Milan edition—to Black Mountain in 1956. It’s the one that came out in 1956.31 He said, “Damn, he will always write better than we can.” I mean better than we can. I mean, that year. It was that anger. There was a turn where you saw that shot, you saw it exactly. But the specter is much more important because of Gloucester. Remember, Charles gives an account. He said, “Worcester was my city, but Gloucester’s where I spent most of my life.” Think about it in a literary term because Gloucester is T. S. Eliot’s city. It is the city of T. S. Eliot’s family, and the one place where those fishing grounds had so solidly appeared that when Charles goes on to them he’s poaching. He’s in the “Dry Salvages.” 32 I mean that he had landed during the Second World War, and they were the first propositions that there ever would be such great poems as The Pisan Cantos, or that as H.D.’s work after the war makes of her entire mind and declaration. We used to ask in the 1930s, what is this Paterson, it says this is? As you read early collected Williams,33 and we’d gossiped, does he have a poem called Paterson, and what is that? That emerges after the fact of The Pisan Cantos. You got another factor of time in this, one that’s faced all the way. But the spectral poet is Eliot. It leaks through in a passage that had really gotten Charles when it was written. I suddenly burst and realized that the very word “passages” had been in that passage of corridors and so forth in Eliot. I now acknowledge I said, “Eliot was one of them.” 34 You find early lists. The stupidity of the Eliot people would be enough to make you blind, you know. I wanted to leave him

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off. Besides that, I rightly was suspected of being a blithering Elioteer. I mean, you can hear the Eliot ringing and dinging and slinging through all the early stuff. And finally I came to the place where I was going to give up. Was I going to worry if it was ringing? I said [that] I think I hear Eliot ringing. You were one of them, absolutely. It’s the only thing to do with a ghost. There’s a Christmas past and present and future will ring the doorbell every day if you don’t get with it and say hello. Here we are in this place where we get this time. Where he says it’s space, not time, we move all the way forward in this and that to mention where I live underneath the light of day I am a stone, or the ground beneath My life is buried, with all sorts of passages both on the sides and on the face turned down to the earth or built out as long gifted generous northeastern Connecticut stone walls are through which 18th century roads still pass as though they themselves were realms.35 And no matter where I pose how Charles heard Pound’s musical line will carry him through, and be constant to The Cantos to carry him. That line does not yet open for itself the space of this kind of movement that allows a person to write, “or built out as long gifted generous northeastern Connecticut stone walls are.” And know exactly the weight of that one, “through which 18th century roads still pass,” and then, “as though they themselves were realms.” The most stupendous lines, I think, in The Cantos of a power coming forward of his full thing that dazzled Charles is that our dynasty came. It rings, everything’s counted—it is processional. It is a commanding and awesome power that moves through, and has its signature with the date 1616. I started trying to learn how this comes forward with supernatural power, and I saw finally as I unlocked it, counting everything, that it was processionally a series of fours, and the 1616 told us what it was.36 And then he could dissolve and go on in the poem. That is nothing compared to what we cannot count but only our bodies know the count of, and that we reach when we’ve got a line like “or built out.”

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I see it at times in Whitman. That was what I found awesome going back to Whitman because he announced a line that would fling out to the numbers that the body knows that the mind can’t reproduce. Have you ever seen how awkward the machines are that we build or the computers that we build to move like we move? How awkwardly the machine picks up, though it does it precisely, that’s all it can do. We learn the full limit of limit.37 The permission in The Cantos—it can go just as far as that lovely sense of music he had gotten in his ears will go. But something in him was not striding out there. Shall we blame it? I mean, it couldn’t come off of Whitman. You can’t come off of Whitman with the line that we got here because it’s moving into a universe that knows something of the precariousness and can only go on faith and sure can’t have hopes, can’t make big announcements of what’s come. He said, almost as he was sure out in the Whitman camp when he said, “and us boys are gonna undo man’s estrangement.” No more of that estrangement please. Estranged from his own head at that moment. And the appearance here of the word “realms.” A difficult enough word that I’ve gone into, twisted by its tail, done anything with, those who know my own work. I get some evidence of how we get such a personal message of what we have to do that I think the damn poem’s written for me. Which is the quality of a poem, isn’t it? When a poem is actually written, it becomes so oneto-one that you can even get into a fight with somebody else for whom the message is written. Talk about jealousy. We began talking of a man who was always one-to-one, who left a flock of us. God, when he says, “and the man after my heart,” 38 and I realize it’s not me—what a cruelty. Imagine, imagine that. He’s declared his heirs at any number of times and I suddenly see it’s not me. I’m not grief stricken. After all I’m a plunderer or something, but I do feel, oh, I’ll get even. But words like this you can’t so take possession of. They are entirely delivered over. Now I’ll read this without interrupting it, trying to put it down because it will show you how those powers emerge. They are “Tartarian-Erojan.” 39 What I hear in “Erojan” is an effort to go back to where I would hear the primal Eros. There are two Eros[es], and the reoccurring Eros is the one that comes in the second castration. The first Eros, at the Cronus point, but the primary Eros comes in some event back in that night thing, and is so frightening, that the second Eros is not different. The second Eros is where Eros like Helios appears in our human domain, and significantly, it is the dismembered, it is the penis of the primordial, titanic power who has been castrated. And that penis thrown upon the waters, which are again primordial, comes forward and is the Aphrodite that then is the appearance of Aphrodite within the human realm. So we’ve got the place in which the full terror of the act cannot be put away

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because it’s beauty. And we know that this terrible power is beauty. Now remember that in the descent that penis is the body of Aphrodite—and this [is] the thing we get in Homeric hymns—that primordial thing recognized in the penis, in the penis’s sexuality. That’s all that is. Without the Y no penis and testicles, no sperm. They’re so incidental to the whole thing. Absolutely essential, incidental. I mean the Y, you would think it was an abstract or something because a single X can make a body. But if a single Y, that doesn’t signify because nothing happens so you don’t have such a mutation as a possibility in the combinations at all. There’s no body to go along with that. Now I’m really right where Charles taught me to sink, though I still had a disposition to go there, didn’t I? Because we aren’t going to get there unless we’ve got that disposition. That is a calling. I mean the great thing in a book is that you are an idiot if you go on reading if you aren’t called to read it. There’s so much stuff to read. That’s what’s so beautiful about the other part of poetry. It’s in books. We got a lot of talk out front about, why am I not read? The real thing about reading is that you are either right there with what you gotta have and that means something you gotta do, or you’re goofing off and that’s all right too, but don’t then complain that you aren’t getting a masterpiece or something. I mean that’s the Y, our beauty, the thing that arrives at the source and had to somehow prove not to be such a crazy incident. When I told the source, what if that were only the sea? That wouldn’t be there, that wouldn’t be the lure for feeling. Charles came reading aloud this Process and Reality and this is the place where, boy, talk about schizzy, I thought what a terrific book, every quote. So I’m starting reading while he’s lecturing. I’m sitting there reading and writing and The Opening of the Field is going on and you could see Whitehead arrive in The Opening of the Field, so you could date when Charles is sitting there because it was right off “INSTANTER.” 40 I would say, “did he just say that or did I just write that down?” and it would already be in a poem. I wasn’t worrying about [that] it was just in a circuit. And then I began also to be aware my Whitehead ain’t his Whitehead. I’m getting a message that isn’t coming off his end of the Ouija board. Let’s see if I can give it its actual sweep through the work. It prepares us for the “my wife my car my color and myself.” 41 In the imperatives of “Projective Verse,” “must must must MOVE INSTANTER!” 42—“must must must” is the capital letters again, big letters43 and one of the places where I at least find myself thoroughly honoring, but also it shows where that man stands. For me he’s called “the poet,” like the Middle Ages called only one person “the philosopher.” No other identification: the poet. “Must must must MOVE INSTANTER!” And that means that is where we heard the poet. That’s our business, that

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we be the poet when we’re writing, not something goofing off or anything else. I just want to pick it up because it is certainly there: positive, clear in “Passages.” 44 At least, I hear it continuously. In “must must must” the mode is imperative, the pitch insistent. We are rallied to go beyond recollection. There is no time for lingering. This is not the time for idleness, for sprawl. Speed, he demands, as at another time he commands heat, quite “hot from boiling water.” 45 Tempered, that is, this metal is to be tempered, and spectral from the one poet I think bothered Olson, the one pestering ghost and rival for the Four Quartets, if nothing else first placed Gloucester there, and the fishing banks and the North Atlantic, English transit. There at the center of our imagination of a poetic world from Eliot’s The Waste Land, we hear, we cannot help but hear, for the chorus is immortal, “hurry up please, it’s time.” Eliot has in turn heard from [Andrew] Marvell [the frequently anthologized “To His Coy Mistress,” 1681]: But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. At his back, the opening parenthesis, the birth date and the man Olson now, 1945 would it be, with the inception of his calling in poetry, Call Me Ishmael, his rallying answer makes his drive forward. It is the drive, the driving force. Even in the lovely hovering song of his lyrics I hear the tuning up [of] the motor, the readiness to get with it. It is a drive forward to come through before closing time, before the parenthesis closes. In this poet who so opened up to us the proposition of composition by field, as ours in poetry, the Gestalt psychologists made clear how the art in seeing was a field operation, and there was some recognition that what we call experience as such, and certainly the imprint of music or the novel or the poem, was not linear in its time, but a field of reference. The concept was there. But Olson drove the proposition home for me in the “Projective Verse” essay. It is curious that this poet I read so to be in the line of Marvell and Eliot, and that line was, is defined by Eliot, that the closing bell sounding lines echo throughout. Time & exact analogy time & intellect time & mind time and time spirit.46 The voice would change and go elsewhere, but no poet cannot know what

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he’s letting come through. When that comes through there, it doesn’t dissolve, it’s now held entirely inside of Maximus. As long as you thought it wasn’t inside Maximus, it was spectral. But when it comes in—and it was leaking through— when it comes in, it’s something, not an echo, but rings, and now it’s inside. This is like seeing [Jean Paul] Getty’s museum47 and realizing that [an] American billionaire was so marvelously completely vulgar, so completely in possession of everything you don’t need, no manners in this, that he puts a Titian inside of his own taste. He puts it inside his little pleasure palace. Boy, that’s blowing up our whole so-called system of hierarchies for sure. Getty is the kind of guy with all those millions. He would buy the sun and put it in his backyard, for dazzling the neighbors. And probably find a way to cool it down a bit. I mean the very thing you thought you wouldn’t let in, you just put [in]. It exists there, and when it’s there it belongs now, it belongs entirely—that poem no longer belongs to where it came from. It is curious that this poet I read so to be in the line of Marvell and Eliot and that line is perhaps defined by Eliot—the closing bell, sounding lines are more in this transmission than ever. I, too, finding myself so much in the Eliot transmission in the midst of my own “Passages.” And it is the closing in the impending doom-stricken moment Marvell sees in deserts of vast eternity, and Eliot, where vast becomes desert, so entering in The Waste Land. Eliot makes that vast come forward, and he’s got his waste in that, I’m sure. Olson gloriously brings us through stone, the ground beneath, through the graveyard end of drive, [and] then suddenly walks into the primordial.

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Timing and the Creation of Time in Charles Olson’s Maximus

I

showed you that Eliot’s coming into it [The Maximus Poems].1 Any guy who is thinking he’s getting back into an Episcopalian church, who in the context of a poem, and in a poem, is going to say, “In the beginning is the Word,” has let something loose. He doesn’t even have to talk about tigers. He doesn’t even have to talk about a thing. He’s let something loose. If you pick up a poem that way, it comes on in an entirely different way. Do you want to take a blue book in it, now do you want to end it by having—knowing something about it and possibly—? And that’s the time we moved into, and there was no other way Olson’s coming on. That’s what he opens Call Me Ishmael [with] and tells us that we’re in that place for certain in that book of Melville’s. I was shocked myself to see, going back and reading Ishmael—because I also admire the real triumphs of genius— that Charles deflected us from reading or taking seriously Billy Budd or “Benito Cereno.” Certainly Pierre is a book that is shell-shocked because of what Melville feels to be in it. And Charles is going to say the whole thing isn’t worth reading. That one must be a different message. But those fine short stories? What struck him in the Moby-Dick was not only that it’s striking out there, not only that it has an imperative you can’t get out of, [but] that it’s absolute, without mercy. Wasn’t that space—vast, without mercy—merciless? 2 We were merciless, and rightly and are. That’s what you hear in me this afternoon and that’s the only way to come in here, not through taming myself down. Within a generation or two generations you got a Roman Catholic Church before you turn around, and people are meeting in large conventions and getting it so it all actually fits, and there’s nothing hairy left. And the people who are actually eating the baby or something are already spotted. All that scary stuff 69

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that comes up because the word goes out in ten directions and only your own keel will keep your behavior going. All that’s erased by the fact that we finally get it totally placed. We practice displacement, and do practice displacement at the points because we’re self-domesticating. I put it over there as if it would take a congress to domesticate an incident, but I’m just domesticated almost the minute I go there. So, we’re mercurial is another thing. Who in the hell is Mercury but the guy who goes so fast he can’t keep track of himself? So I will read one of those lovely little moments when I appear in the middle of Maximus. While we’re talking about time we’ll talk about how curious it is to appear in Maximus. If you thought it was curious that Eliot appears in it, and I thought it was curious that Ferrini appears in it, then of course all of us kiddies would eventually in one way or another come into it. Listen, when he starts out, “like Salt Lake north,” those are those crazy Mormons out there: like Salt Lake north where Fitzpatrick3 crossed on his mule & with his Indian wife frightful places lie passively in Edons on Pacifica no good yet hubris and hybrids or eyelids against bad light no hope for Sutter slicked Doner only Sauer—and Duncan who troc-mocs in with the light of séance and the golden light of those paintings he knows what the dream may be carries a fowling piece like the possible World Travelers imagine Duncan in doe-skin and with his fowling piece—between those romantic paintings and not Peter Rabbit Robert Duncan in fringed jacket against that bad sunset from all cross the intermediary space, the East doesn’t get home beyond Sacramento4 That’s a little echo of Spicer land, because Spicer used to worry that his writing might get to the East. He meant Oakland, across the bay. What is the time I want to get in on here, on top of the paradise time, time back of time? I’ll start with the one that Olson attributes to me, and probably a letter shows me talking about. He was having a hard time. How does he move what we call history? Sometimes I’ve played tricky cards on this when I thought I’d have audiences that I might put over that Olson was going to be antihistory.

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The real position is that he needed a history. And what we call history was not going to do it. Remember something else takes an Eden beside the sneak snake, and that is the naming of things. Adam does that after all in this state, not in that one. So everything’s prepared for being caught out and then a history starts. In the entire idea of the need for a redemption of a fall, the nature of why we have a history at all is because you have to go through a process, a process for return, a process for a redemption. All the pictures that are made necessitate a history. Another picture may be, really, that redemption itself is like the snake. The need for redemption is a fall. That’s all absolutely contemporaneous in one event, and the minute we even allow that it’s there we’re in a history. It then is a constant process, and that’s where I want to start, to show you the location of primordial time. In the Judeo-Christian picture ordinarily they have the same puzzle, because in the Middle Ages I do know something of how time and eternity operated. We’ll call this because I’m drawing a field [draws on blackboard] and we have a linear history—that is, only one thing’s happening. And yet there’s a whole field in which you could possibly err. You’ve got to be able to err. And yet only one thing actually happens. You either do or do not do something, but once it is done it is actualized, so you have the appearance of an actualized universe. And that one dawns on Whitehead. This is where Charles meets his term “primordial.” So it’s my picture, but also the one I see him getting; he was excited when he saw it. Where to put creation, where to put that thing that was in his way. Whitehead notes that there’s a thing here that is in my poetry, increasingly, or a thought, I realize that, [of] what I think of something, what we call a present, as if it were a tense [writes on blackboard]. We are familiar that the principle in The Cantos, the one where Pound doesn’t get caught out because he does show us exactly. . . . Anybody who’s going to come out and call Marx and Freud “kikes” is caught in the presentation of what he actually feels. There are no guards on that. It’s madly inappropriate, and absolutely the disorder of Pound. The gap shows. And so we got a surreal effect that tells us the principle throughout the poem is that the truth the poet tells is very different from the truth of philosophy, very different from the truth of politics, very near the truth, by the way, that the doctor has to be told. The poet is the only place where unreservedly, regardless of how mad out of where it looks to us, we tell the way it is at that moment. In “The Venice Poem,” out of the depth of what is still the very center of my emotional life, it suddenly bursts out. The lines against cocksucking and buggery.5 They’re the first use of the word “cocksucking” to mean that in poetry at all. And I stare at it because that moment tells me and it and everything. St. Augustine sounds kindly, and St. Paul sounds like the liberal about to fix society up, so we’d all be doing fine.

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When that poem comes forth to tell me, so the poem comes forth and presents it no matter where it is. We wouldn’t even know how disastrously deep we were if we didn’t have that “kike” Marx. That’s our American predicament, and most Americans aren’t saying that out front; they aren’t even thinking it out front, their brains interacting right there. It’s in the dream. But it’s helplessly the poet [who] has to use the word and the names that show you exactly what we can no longer say. We are the people of the dream. So we’re moving toward dream time here. But Whitehead is concerned with the physical world. It’s only here in the present presence, presentation, that anything is happening, and we were moving toward paying attention to what is happening in the line as we’re writing what is happening here. Remember those four casting rhymes and the forms of music in which when the lovely melody starts, you can complete it. Its mystery changes when it comes right down to you’re always present in it, and that’s where your attention is. I don’t believe a Mozart, but his whole century was capable of producing beautiful melodies. The one thing built into music of that period is that you could lose track of it and you wouldn’t lose track of anything because it wasn’t necessarily happening right where it was. In a Cage piece you haven’t missed what’s going on, you’ve simply missed what happened. There’s nothing going on, but you’ve missed what happened if your attention wanders. And in a poem, very much that. It was right down. So a sense of the universe was emerging. It recognized itself when it went to Whitehead, and in his Aims of Education, he said, “the congregation of saints is a great and august body,” but it has only one place to meet.6 That’s right here and it can’t any more be here than I’m seeing it right now. I understand now why it’s so essential as the absolute moment in the poem that it be so charged. There wouldn’t be any more congregations of saints that I see. I’m not talking about vision. The donation is a very different thing, but that’s the attention in the moment and that’s the “INSTANTER” that Charles is moving toward. He finds it here, and the minute he finds it in Process and Reality, and Whitehead is moving from concepts of physics and concepts of a mathematics to describe something that he’d thought of in many other references, Whitehead grasps and he said, “Ah, of course, the created world is everything that we called past.” This is creation [writes on blackboard]. And that is a phase of process that is present. The primordial, that which has not come into being and is the other side of the immediate present moment. Throw away the past, but great sections of the past appear in the primordial. What happens when you discover what happened in Sumeria? What happens when it enters your mind what Queen Elizabeth was doing on Tuesday? So we’ve got now a very different thing in creation. This is the only place creation is regardless of what we call it. So it isn’t past, it’s the actual. I’m talking

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about the period in which we are all in correspondence, in which Maximus is being written, and by this period I’m working on Letters, a book which precedes The Opening of the Field. And actually in Letters my flow of poetic possibilities is much more open than it is in The Opening of the Field or in Roots and Branches and in Bending the Bow. There I feel such a necessity of what I have to do, that it’s not the playground, the wonderful playground that Letters was. Creation appeared to me in that playground. And my central figure at the time I was working on Letters was a figure from the Kabbalah of God playing with the letters of the alphabet, and out of this emerg[ed] an enormous field of potentialities, [with] one work going in them, and that is the creation of the actual and the realization of that actual [writes on the blackboard]. Now no matter what you do you’ve just done it and it’s actual. You’re actually sitting there. We’re not even talking about real here, a process of taking the actual to be the thing, of “thingizing” the actual, of realization—the way in which you participate deep in creations. Naming. Name it. In H.D.’s life, Freud said, “name it”; in H.D.’s poem it’s not Freud who comes forward, but a master of the order of the poem who comes forward and says, “name it.” And then she says, “I can’t.” 7 Then the entire poetic world has to flow forward to realize what is actually there. Essential in our school of poetry was that it was actual. There’s no decoration. And by Letters I had already got a directive that so separated me, let’s say, from the impressionistic kind of language. Think of Hart Crane when he’s asked by Harriet Weaver,8 what’s going on in a poem. Read through that and you find that Hart Crane was able to go into the world of the creational, and very much into the world in which a poetic creational world was pouring forth himself, providing he not have this actual realizational thing. When he’s asked about it you find he’s got all sorts of impressions and words that feel and feel like they’re illustrations of the space. As if you had arbitration within it. I saw that there must be no word that is not a function of the poem. I mean the function of the poem. Let’s now talk about meaning at the dictionary level—and I was not taking the dictionary level in any simple sense, it was the O.E.D., the only one that would give all those layers, and Charles was already saying, but what we need is a dictionary of roots, and he did not mean that there weren’t roots in the O.E.D. He knew that there must be layers of experience in words. Words are the repository of human meanings, and none of us own them in any sense personally. The delusion that went on, now we can get at what we fought in Eliot, although he was a root of much, he had to be a root of another fight because words appeared in their glamour. Those of you who know my work [know] I wanted to bring glamours, not discard them, not clear them away. In that I think I’m very different from Charles. Many people can’t read what I’m doing when

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the glamours appear, but it was very hard in my head that the Celtic thing must be brought forward, that the glamour that every area of what is present, every floating idea, every seduction must [be] present. But it must be realized [too]. I knew all that was actual, and Freud is one of the ones that give us a key. He tells us we don’t have any fancies. Shove off Mr. Coleridge. We’ve divided our fancies in the mind of God. If you think you could have a fancy that is not the mind of God, you have not yet realized what’s going on in that fancy. In that little picture of fancy—free bunny rabbit running in to get the cabbage—I think you see continuous change back and forth. He catches me at it. There are several notes of Charles’s when he says, “Oh damn, there he is again, and he really actually has got a cabbage in his hands when he just told me he was coming over for the golden lights.” I mean, Mr. Coleridge may feel that rhythm wasn’t in there and Pound may think, maybe he’s going to put some jazz in there. There it is in the creational world. If you’ve just let it into your world you’re in trouble. Walking right into the primordial is the creation. That’s where the creation is constantly going forward. But you can sort out the poetry along a different line than the zealots and the ones who are in the business. The business ones think the poem is an expression of sensibilities, that language can have color. It’s got similes, it’s got metaphors. Now metaphor, the carrying of meaning across, that’s something else. None of those words get to be discarded. But you don’t get to have a diploma in this plan, no matter how many times you graduated. And if you went up in a hierarchy, is there any place in the whole thing in which, if as you enter the primordial, you could be equipped? There you can’t be equipped at all. Everybody’s equipped the same way. Throw a stone into it and the stone is having the same time in the primordial you are. It’s in the same actual thing and your only thing is to be there and know. So that sinking feeling was a beautiful part of this time. Haunting Olson was the figures of a time of redemption. They’re the conscience. Redemption is the admitting of the actual. That by the way is you cannot redeem before you have confessed. You cannot confess that you have not actually, and admit that you have actually, been around. Facts are the same way. If you’re writing a poem and if it even comes to you, like that little thing I did, right? What if I hadn’t done it? It came to me and I did it—what if I assumed I hadn’t done it? There’s no way in which that could get in there except as I actually admit it. Admission is a very important part of the process. In Olson, the picture of the redemption of the world in many mystic things, up through your acts and so forth, has two times working in it. The movement of a people through history to fulfill a will, and the movement of a people through history to redeem, or in the Jewish terms, under an agreement, to perform the agreement

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of history. History isn’t just what happened to you. When Charles is moving to another history, by the way, and when he says “another nation,” he’s moving to another subscription that as he writes humanists, we now know is not going to be made to a god or anything. When we are left with Maximus, my excited feeling is that our great characteristic in our time is we have every aspect of commitment, and we move into the primordial with no promise. Absolutely no guarantees. Charles has pictures—we are “the last first people,” we’re the first last people.9 His sense of there is some difference, and he tries to locate [it]. He knows there’s some difference about the way we move. Not the difference of disowning. In many ways no other state in any other civilization has ever borne or admitted the state we’re in as we have. When Dodds gave his lectures on The Greeks and the Irrational in Berkeley,10 it was a period when I was back in medieval studies. . . . Talk about synchronicity. The message comes in a series of Greek lectures. The Greeks fell apart because they could not admit what they knew. By the time they had Plato and Aristotle they were already falling apart because they would like to vote one ticket or the other. Now holding what you know is holding everything present. I think you all know that there’s a little incident in this—the one that’s been labeled the Shakespearean crisis. [John] Donne and Shakespeare held together the idea of king and the impossibility of the king. It charged everything with enormous energies. It charged everything with challenge because there was no way to resolve it. And the British finally resolved it by cutting the king’s head off, which merely plunged the king back into the position of Christ, and you were back in an enactment at a terminus of a Christian possibility of a Christian kingdom, all of it then turning into a play, which Shakespeare announced it was. A poet leaps forward to see what kings will be at the end of kings. The picture Dodds had was that after the second war we couldn’t separate ourselves. We no longer drew a line that we were just European. We could not have separated ourselves from inheriting what was happening. People were already having Eskimo dreams. I mean this thing was flooding through and what was called “anthropology” before was dissolving into not a knowledge of something over there, but into things we had known. If we admitted that what we believe biologically, we all reproduce, lo and behold, and so we are one species, and there are no different tribes in races and nations. That was not working any longer. And underneath that he [Dodds] said the Greeks couldn’t even tolerate that they and the barbarians were the same question, so the Greeks went to pieces. They began to lose their own thing because they had something that they knew was true that they could not admit. The British empire’s falling apart. He [Dodds] said, “We couldn’t hold it.” You can’t go to history and learn how to run a city like

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New York because you won’t find a city like New York in history. Thank God for the rest of history. There are no solutions for these masses. It is our adventure, entire adventure, and masses-wise at the point when the O.E.D., and that’s the eighties, isn’t it, and the nineties of the last century, when our knowledge of just our English words—forget the rest—was already overpopulated. The population no longer in that dictionary is the present one. It extends through time. Now remember, there’s a little illusion about this actuality and this present, and this looks like past, present, and future, doesn’t it? The realized looks like it’s in the past. Whitehead points out that we do realize what we call the future, and our feeling of the future, if it is vague, is vague the same way as our feeling of the past. Is the primordial really located somewhere? It was very comforting if it were here and we were going into it, and it’s just here and that there’s nothing else there. No, Whitehead says, the future has the same character, oddly enough. The mathematicians are puzzled. Why do we have unidirectional time? I still will read physicists who are puzzled. They just never looked around and asked: Do I live in unidirectional time? Is the past vivid and can I get there? Can I walk back there any more than I walk over here? This moment isn’t any directional—no direction at all. We advance into the past. Time psychology enters our present picture and opens it up in another way. He said, “Well you know—actually you all feel like you needed a new sense in order to have this fourth dimension, but you’re really just like somebody who’s in a museum.” There’s a sculpture that’s two hundred feet long. This is the shape of a lifetime. We would call it, if it were possibly here, an embryo. But after all we’re going to see the whole thing. So we get along about midway and our idea of the embryo is not much clearer than our idea about what’s at the other end down here [writes on blackboard], and by the time we get all the way down here and we’re at this end of this thing, ourselves spread out through time, so actual we don’t actually get to do anything about it. It’s lovely if we’re creative, we’re going to write an art critique of the whole thing. [Proust’s] Remembrance of Things Past, right? And space-wise that’s all the significance of what we call beginning, end, and so forth. It’s right there. You think you die but everybody else experiences you spread out through time. A series of persons, and they can describe all the sides of this figure, but this figure actually exists. Time is actual. So when I talked about actualizing or admitting that needs creation, because we are constantly creationally figuring what we don’t see to belong to what we admit. This primordial time exists everywhere throughout this whole field. The one we pose up here, and this primordial time that we go into this way. So we could only picture that we’re in primordial time throughout, and we have different ways of illustrating it. We illustrate part of it. We know it’s actual everywhere. That is

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[the] part that we’re held to. That was said beautifully in Process and Reality. The only significant thing we’re engaged with is actualities, and that’s where Charles’s action is where what is happening. But what is happening is an imagination of all this area we can’t see. I’m a strict William James line guy when it comes to the unconscious. Subconscious I can understand in Freud. But he starts using the unconscious as if it had anything in it we know anything of, or when Jung says that the pictures that he sees in books come from the unconscious—this renders it not unconscious at all. That’s the great big storybook of the consciousness. But one thing I know is that consciousness is endlessly creating pictures of what it can’t see. It is endlessly drawing pictures on the walls of its cave of this thing it is. The only leap is that it knows there’s an unconsciousness. Say it’s mad and it is posed as an unconsciousness—that would make no difference. It is illustrating throughout its whole life the event of the unconscious. It fills it with pictures. It draws it on pages. When I was little, my family was given to reincarnation, and would read me out as Atlantis, so they’d say. If I were drawing a building and I really wanted to get my family in the mitts, you know—and they’d say, “What are you doing wasting your time?” “I’m drawing Atlantis,” then I had them. But if my family had been Jungians or Freudians I would say, “I’m just drawing my unconscious. It’s my unconscious, Mama.” I’m not wasting your time or mine. So actually this is the artist’s excuse. I see poetry pouring in there. Now let’s go back to how peculiar, indeed, that we are so strict that our actual, as we illustrate what we know nothing of on the walls of that cave—for we bring doubt upon ourselves, and we did. That’s what’s characteristic about us, characteristic about Creeley. He will not get to be in a Creeley poem, in anything, but what is actually the present. It moves all right, of course, but everything you’ll know is actual, including a drink, including I just actually made up this next step. But you sense right away how different this is from anything in which you get to do something. Mike Weaver (the guy who did the beautiful book on Paterson)11 shocked me in London because he got up and said, “The Black Mountain school are the ones who introduced anxiety into the modern mind.” I always wondered what Charles thought “negative capability” was because our capability of the “negative capability” is just about zilch, because we are the most anxious.12 Not a word gets to come in and flutter mere wings. I try to practice it. Too many generations of Puritans are present right here. I sense the poem when I know how every single one of those words is a presence like a person, and every one of them is felt of being there. Jackson Mac Low has one of the clearest statements about this, about the individual words in the poem, and that unites us with the sort of thing that Stein is advancing. Each one is an event. That’s it. Let me describe the Whiteheadian thing here. These are the figures that haunt

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Olson. The man decides [an] “instant” that is “instanter” [writes on blackboard]. He talks about it as stance, and I think what I’m calling this [is] presence. I can’t see the duration of this presence, presentation. I see it as modal. Olson has his own apprehension of mode. When people read Proust they called it a psychological time. If your psychological time weren’t actual, what else is it? It is multiformed, isn’t it? Every series of how you’re experiencing, dozing is there. The first time I had a group of psychological interns and internees together—and it was to show them what’s going on in a poem—Ellen Tallman, who got me to go to this retreat, said, imagine the real ones that are uptight are these interns. And the ones who are lost are the ones who are doctors. One of the points of the Hypocritic oath13 is that I never imagine in all my born days. It couldn’t possibly be there. I mean I can’t be out on that uncertain territory when I am dealing with facts. One guy when we just started our first session, and he had never done this before, and when he learned about it he fell back asleep and snored, and so I got a recording of the snoring. Then he says after he wakes up, “I apologize.” And I said, but you were there, and we played back the snoring. I said, you know you didn’t get not to be here. I didn’t see you vanish. That would have been something, but you were here and we got the whole picture because we have one of those crazy recorders, you can check it out. And there it was. We’re right back at the actual. You’ll find us in our poetries all the way across breaking it down to very small units so we can, in a sense, train ourselves to catch out the actual. That long line I read from Charles where I called your attention to that is really the full command of what a long line can be. It’s beyond anything but the count of entire presence in the actuality of what’s going on in that line. That’s where the count is. You dance in the end of your fingers. Everything has to go over there. If you were to do it from here, it’s impossible. You can’t have ends of fingers by that time, can you, because you’ve dissolved all that. Where is what? It’s throughout the whole thing and that’s the way it moves in language when you’ve got a line of that mastery. The significance is you know the snore happens in what is happening. We are so trained that what I’m saying, for instance, now has probably got something that is improving it. That’s interesting, but we’re all gathered in a room and if we were concerned with what was happening it would be of great significance. First I’d think it was an injury. I can’t say more than I gather from the feel of all of you out there, and one of you snoring opens up lots because it is communal. That’s what I’m getting across—the poem opened up immensely just because there were a small group of us who were beginning to see it open up that way. What do you think our dedications were? They were the names, not of pals, but . . . names of the people [who had] been struck. How can you call yourself a school or something, you and Olson and Creeley and Denise Levertov? You’re

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not the same at all. It was not to see there was nearness. There’s a letter, it was in Origin. I had addressed him “Dear Near-Far Olson,” 14 meaning both that he was way over across the continent and that was far, it was a thrilling idea that it was that far. Let me carry you back to an idea of time hidden in the nature of the Fall, when the Christian story is told. It’s the one that’s also in Judaic mysticism. Judaic mysticism does hide the Shekinah and there are Christians who do that.15 So it relieves a bit this entirely homosexual theology. But in the hard-hat row, you just can’t let ladies in there. The Catholics yield and they get Our Lady. In the beginning among those heresies were those people who, quite rightly, noticed that the Holy Ghost was quite possibly Our Lady, as all ancient people would recognize right away, Our Lady of the Doves. And that accumulation of animals around the Christ that looked remarkably like Orpheus belonged to Our Lady. But the trouble comes in the hard line, and a wonderful little Gnostic story begins. It has the difference between “loving” and “in love.” In the manifestation we’ve got twin sons of God, Christ and Satan. Christ loves his brother, so this is the love—father has no love, father’s pristine, untrampled—so love has something to do with history. But Satan falls in love, and he falls and the distance he falls is the distance in which creation can appear. He’s got the bottom, the fundament will be where he falls, and he falls to the end of time and he falls to the end of space-time, and space appears. It is the distance of a falling in love. And then throughout a power goes, one of them absolutely knowing nothing, nothing has been changed. You love the guy even if he fell down there and looked awful at the bottom, except that the Gnostics know that now we have the figure of Narcissus. I mean the other Gnostic figure is that Narcissus didn’t peer into a pool. He peered down like this and he fell in love with himself at the bottom. And now in fact that same figure of Christos and Lucifer. Is that the end of time? Is that the end of space? And the only way for this rapture to possibly become manifest is creation, and all throughout creation there’s a sinking feeling that you’re falling, and all throughout creation there’s an absolute repose that isn’t even infuriating. This is a picture and it’s got a mythic quality to it. It opens up a feel of universe, and this kind of thing spoke to us, because this feeling of presence, the feeling of we knew not what as we go on in the poem, stated over and over again by all of us in different ways, is something that is stated by poets in the great transmission. It didn’t take me long to look around and find that not only the big boys like Blake and [John] Milton have other versions of exactly that figure. Victor Hugo is a commanding poet in France in the middle of the nineteenth century, and [Arthur] Rimbaud’s secret that [Georges] Izambard gave him is this picture.16 The poet comes back and illustrates the space anew because he knows

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this picture. Remember this picture’s not right, so creation has to take place, and every one of the initiations of a poetry is the truthful illustration of the space, and it can’t not change. I remember when I was in my teens. I had a period in which I developed a way of reading cards and met, of course, the instant mystery. I’ll cut them again. And how come that’s also the cards, and that’s also time. And now it became before our friend [Jorge Luis] Borges,17 but he’d existed before Borges did, the infinite regress in which you go on doing nothing but reading cards. It continuously illustrates this space. Now can it almost get across to you why it is that poetry doesn’t stop? I mean why it’s required? H.D. writing to me when she was in her seventies and that “Hermetic Definitions” came.18 She wrote to me and it appeared in a poem again in the text of the poem, and she says, “Why won’t it let me stop? Why do I have to write again? Why do I have to go on?” It’s not an anxiety, but the absolute presence in which your whole physical body, your whole circulation comes forward and can’t desert what it has been deeply into. It’s remarkably like dreaming. I am guilty of deserting, dreaming, of having been in my early years, in my teens and twenties, actually very much in the presence of dream. In that poem at the conclusion of Maximus, one thing that struck me so [is] that the “18th century roads” are a realm, and realms begin to ring back through the whole poem, and we see that eighteenth-century Gloucester was a realm, a realm of being. We inhabit states, bodies, realms. How telling because of the presence in which Pound stood that those appeared as thrones, dominations, and powers. By breaking into grief the man emerges in the poem, and shattering thrones, dominations, and powers, shatters the presence in which he stood, and brings forward the fragmentation of all thrones, dominations, and powers. But we recognize it as a secret hidden in fragmentation and certainly it was noticed in the symptoms of our work. In the very early period we were just advancing beyond that proposition that we saw in Williams, and also one in Pound, where there was the music and these Cantos—and he was proposing they were fragments. But when Olson met me in 1947, he also found me enmeshed in the secretary of a man by the name of Jaime de Angulo, who was an anthropologist.19 He was also an amateur linguist. The main subject of conversation with him was that language was itself a realm, and I was beginning to be aware that the contemporary linguists were looking at language in a way that looked very much like [what] Gertrude Stein had come forward with in 1906. They were looking at aphasia as the actual key. It was an abyss appearing, a cliff appearing, of presence in which you moved into a primordial. You couldn’t assume that you had a language. So in a sense you had to create a language, yet you had no place to be but in a language.

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I set about imitating Stein, breaking down my confidence of the sentence. You can see how I talk, and that is a long development of losing myself, so I have to go in search while I talk. My head can have ideas any old day and certainly I do not need to talk. I certainly don’t need to write a poem in order for ideas to come. The world goes in and there’s always a continuous field. I dreamed desert dreams. That means I’ve deserted a whole realm of ideas. So obviously I have an economy in which I didn’t want to get with that. I don’t dream, but I don’t have to get back, because the presence doesn’t exist just in the realm of the actual. It’s also that realm of dream. So you see fragmentation right away when you go into the Maximus. Physiologically, of course, it goes on further because the man is smoking and more and more and more and finally we find him in advanced emphysema in that film.20 But his accent upon the breath is not the one that Allen Ginsberg proposed. But he floods all over his own presence, in his sense of exactly where he is, so that you can’t bring his attention to what a line is doing, but you can’t bring his attention to what the word is doing in the line. When you do he does the same thing Hart Crane did when Harriet Weaver21 asked him about the poem—he starts rationalizing the occurrence of the word in the line. The adjectives he thinks are adjectives. He thinks they are modifiers of the nouns. The first thing you learn is no event is ever a modifier of any other event at all. This Whiteheadian idea Olson came to see as this primordial moment: Whitehead doesn’t talk about man, he talks about events of the universe, and man then doesn’t get separated from anything else. Charles is addressing what is man. It’s tremendous to realize that the eventfulness of every instant is everywhere, and you happen to be this local event of the universe and of nothing else, and in that you’re exactly like anything you possibly see outside. You’re not outside or inside because you are a unique event of the universe. You’re actual and you have one place and one time you’re standing, where nothing else stands in. But that doesn’t signify because you’re an event of this universe time, universe space. Now we see where the primordial and where the paradise appears, which is just here in the present. It’s not in the creation, not in the imagination, but it is always prime. It’s as if all the time we could put it all the way back there that it must once have been, but this is the once it must have been. We stand right now in paradise and the whole thing is present—there’s no other way. You can hear it in the Whiteheadian sense when he said, “The congregation of saints is a great and august body, but it has no place to meet except right here.” Surely paradise also has no place to be, and when we turn to mystics they have exactly that sense. It is here, it is now. The original Christian proposition was, it’s going to be tomorrow for good. “We want it now” is a great cry but what if they’d said, “we have it now.” My

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complaint about ecologists is we want it now and we got to get it later and clean things up. It’s just pragmatism. You got paradise, and it looks like it looks. This is what it actually is. Can I excuse myself with it or it with me? Would there be a point? Shall I redeem it? When we really let ourselves go out there, all of this turns into a joke, laughter begins. Suddenly the thing that looked possibly ugly produces a wave of laughter and we find ourselves in the only paradise we really know. We have testimony of people in simply appalling situations. We think, that’s a victim for sure. Suddenly on the victim’s face there’s another look, because they got with the only thing they had to work with, the only place they’ve got to be for it to come from. You’ve got a lot of things you can do, but always submission isn’t submitting, that’s one of the ways of going into the primordial. How will I do it? You can have all sorts of thoughts. Because I was already in it, so how do I do it? I don’t remember. I am sure I couldn’t do that again. I’m standing here in my dignity, right here where I am. Any step you take, you take. Having mentioned that I’m in the primordial, I wouldn’t waste it. It looks a little courageous standing here in the presence, advancing into the primordial. That’s a bold thing for us to be doing. Then we saw it was funny because we saw there was no other place for it to be there. You’ll find things like that entering the poem. What was Charles’s subject matter, and what was actually there in his head? He doesn’t move off all that actual concern about ships, about the economy of the whole period, about the way to take hold of [a] city. That’s his “Tyrian Business,” and his business is the presence where he’s got to stand.22 That’s his primordial. That’s not to be moved aside and find the primordial behind it. That’s his dream business. We don’t stop in a dream and ask why we’re walking along this road, but we’re still stuck walking along the road. Charles came to a place where our present time emerged in another one. I will end with a little peroration on a time I found in Australia, in a civilization that is into a thing called “dream time.” I love to call them “a-bor-igi-nes” because that makes them so right there. Not back to Pleistocene man. I’m talking about the ones right where we get the stories. The entire culture, civilization, too, forms a city-like relation with each other. That’s what a civilization ought to be, a civility among a people. It’s based on such a profound understanding of dreams that I see no possibility of our coming to an end. The Freudians rushed in there and saw they had a gold mine and of course they came away with Freudian gold, but the wonder of that dream world is intact. They live in relation to the “eternal ones of the dream.” 23 Now this is actually explored by Freudians who are going in there and they can tell us about the penises of the eternal ones of the dream and the cunts of the eternal ones of the dream, and so forth. Happy Freudians. The Jungians haven’t moved in yet

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to tell us about the archetypal something, but eternal ones of the dream I really understand. When Charles turned around at one point and said, but Duncan there are only five people in history, I didn’t understand it at all. I kept trying to figure out who they were, I tried to name them. Five, I’ve got five fingers, and who are they? All of us are only those five people—the eternal ones of the dream. I’ve always been haunted by the thing advanced by the Christian world, which is eternity. Eternity Charles picks up because Whitehead says that there are eternal events. That’s what the one standing right there in the present is—it’s an eternal event. The reason you have a sense of being there is because you’re an eternal event, a unique and necessary eternal event of the universe. The reason the chair is so solidly there is it’s a unique and eternal event of the universe, and what we looked at. I see right away where they tell us this is putting it. And I think you might see it. It looks like nothing could possibly be moving. Eternal couldn’t be moving. It’s not just moving in one direction. You can see that I’m really telling something about the dream as I sense it when I told you about love flooding throughout the entire area of a creation, and yet that creation being the distance in which something fell in love and into a separation. That the unity comes by the illustration of it in actualities and realization. Now that is not philosophy. It has to be over in kooky myth talk. We can’t go in the lab and check it out, and I don’t want one of you to corner me because I’ll flunk in two seconds. If there were a logical way to give an account of what I just said, which was glowingly real and true to me. That’s not what you talk from when you’re trying to come into the area the poem ought to go. You know how long the poem was preached in school after school, and you’re taught in schools, but you were facing poems that were not like that. Immortal poems don’t behave that way. They always say the poet had a license. But the main thing a poem was doing was behaving like our Aristotle. You get an idea, and then you exemplify the idea and then you got a conclusion so you’re through with it. Charles talked about pigeonholes and what you do with them. Part of it goes into your system and is nourishing, and the other part you’re through with. You are talking about how are you involved with the universe, and it’s that that made this poetry, and makes the poetry be heavy. There’s no way for it not to be. I mean there’s no way, for instance, for Creeley—I’m thinking of Creeley’s talk last night—for him to go to the matter of Olson without finding himself fully and absolutely in the place where he feels in this presence, which is in his commanding inability to be there. It’s a description of what is the mastery in a Creeley poem, is the commanding inability to be here. Now the soundings we take, although uniquely there’s only one here. Since we are eternal events of a universe, we do exist in this large

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illustration, and everywhere it comes through to us. That’s why language comes through. It vivifies the particularity of what we each have to do. We should close with reading at least with a swing in Olson. I looked for poems that I wanted to get, and not in Maximus, although we talked about poems in Maximus. I intended to explicate how musically Charles composes some areas. Whereas my rather square picture of what composition was, which I can feel glorious relation to this, wouldn’t change anything because it would verify your right feeling about how you compose a line, and you’d see how well he listens, and how actually he has a sense of contrast section to section. So what I’m going to close with is not Maximus. I always see that as awful, that presence, prescience, presentational—miles of Calvinists. This is already a lovely Catholic [idea]. I’ve seen it in the northern paintings of the Van Eycks and I see it throughout Italian painting and so forth. It’s Charles’s theory, “Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele,” and it is [one of] his springtime songs. In this period he poured forth little poems on postcards and these came forward as the poems for a spring morning, suddenly so completely and humanly there that you get the joy. This building is also that eternal thing we’re in. Luckily, eternal doesn’t mean lasting. That’s what’s beautiful, it’s just a presence. [Reads “Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele”]24

The Power of Imagining Persons The Poem as an Interior Play

Introduction Robert Creeley

This evening begins a possibility which it is my own honor to initiate under the auspices of the Gray Chair, and which I much hope will have a consequence and continuity for many years now to come. The Charles Olson Memorial Lectures honor this department’s relation to a most extraordinary man, who taught here from 1963 to 1965, thanks to the acumen of the faculty of that time and its department chairman, Albert Cook. Despite the briefness of his residence, the impact of his ways of thinking [about] the world upon his students, and equally upon his colleagues, has proved a virtually incalculable influence, for he was a poet in the fullest sense of that word. One whose duty is to make articulate a picture of the world wherein all human fact and function may find place. Sadly indeed, Charles Olson himself can no longer speak for us nor be here tonight as one so humanly might wish him to be. But, if he were, there’d be no one more provocative, more comprehensively engaged in their mutual work, more actively perceptive of what poetry constitutes as human value than our guest, Robert Duncan. The association between these two men began in 1947 and continued decisively until Olson’s death in 1970. Each was the decisive reader of the other, the crucial ground of proposal and response. For Olson, Robert Duncan was a master poet, a term he by no means used lightly. Those of you who are actively familiar with Mr. Duncan’s work, from the initial Heavenly City, Earthly City, to the presently continuing “Passages” and texts of parallel intensity, as The Truth and Life of Myth, will know for themselves the generative powers of this poet. 85

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Thankfully indeed tonight’s lecture is the first of four which Robert Duncan will give during his two weeks with us. Please welcome then this extraordinary, generous fire source, our poet Robert Duncan. Lecture Robert Duncan

If I called the whole series of four talks, in its proposition, with a simple title, I would call it “The Idea of a Serious Poetry.” And I want to make myself an open preamble, in which I give an idea of what I mean about the ultimate seriousness of poetry. I certainly share with Charles Olson the conviction about the seriousness of our human existence and being, and that would be of any- and everything we do, and poetry is something we do. It is that we are ourselves, each and individually, the serious business of the universe. In our case, of course, we’re terrifically struck by our knowing. Whatever our serious business—and if we find ourselves trashing our yokel local universe, that must be what the universe is doing—nobody else is doing it, buddy. There’s nobody else here. We have a present view of ecology that thinks we must be doing it wrong. If we are doing it wrong, the universe is doing it wrong; there’s no way in which we get to be out of that proposition. So I’m talking about the idea of a serious poetry. The seriousness goes deep into its consciousness of its event. The two things, the drama of our times [and] the extended consciousness in search of the universe, all the way through, that’s one of the great dramas of all man’s pursuits. We picture a series as something going in one direction. When I started “Passages” and I started “Structure of Rime,” I went one, two, three, four, and thought that an ordination was the description of a serious pursuit. Yet, that was in some sense not truly serious because my imagination had already admitted that no such progression even describes what following through the nature of things would look like at all. The depths and the heights and the sequences and the feel of a physical universe, of the material world we have, won’t answer to be truly serious when we give it ordination. That’s one of the changes. I have the other feeling of the drama all the time I work. We adventure upon a faith so fundamental that we are brought before something that must be identical and has that name God. As in science, we search for and cannot come, ultimately, to know that universe—it is our business. I go universe, universe, to universe, and it’s going to sound more and more like Charles Olson, for whom also that was a serious business of every event. When I turn around I seem to be most heretical in every position in relation to the

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earnest segment itself. We can’t borrow each other’s sense, so we do something different, we awaken our coexistence with it and we rhyme. I will be advancing, not the sense of a universe, but the sense of how primary that poetry is as a serious pursuit of the universe. And the sense of rhyme throughout poetry as a primer. The sense of tone, or rime and rhyme as sounding alike and not sounding alike. Taking soundings, taking hearings, how primary a contact that is. There’s nothing between the poet in his pursuit of the nature of poetry and the universe. I’m sure for the philosopher there’s nothing between him and that knowledge of the universe, and if he borrows a science he is robbed of his occasion. And in this way I have the sense that we have human vocations and human leads, lures. Whitehead advances, I think, a lure for feeling. We have lures by which we experience our serious business in the universe. Falling in love is one that is experienced with depth and intensity; its serious meaning must be that it leads into the universe. It feels like the feeling of the powerful sense of language when it’s transformed by being in love with language, and when language then appears as a dazzling field of rhymes. Just as in falling in love, that dazzling feel of everything being potential and everything being possible does not mean that you go everywhere. The poet does not go everywhere, but goes straight to the rhyme. There’s only one, although you could demonstrate with a rhyming dictionary [that] there are many [rhymes]. When the whole field, that the rhyming dictionary tells you are choices, is awakened, only then should the poet move at all. And that’s a high of excitement, and what I want to address is how the following through is to be observed when this tremendous excitement appears. It advances a threshold; it’s bewildering. It is like falling in love. In the threshold of falling in love there is such a bewilderment. There’s a surrounding atmosphere. There’s a sexual aura in which you seem to be looking everywhere for where it will be. But in all of that prepared heightening, heightening, heightening hormonals—the whole body is a wonderful thing. I was a poet writing before he [Olson] started writing poetry. I think I am the one who experienced a conversion, a tremendous conversion of what would otherwise be assumed as an entirely established practice in poetry. I was supposedly there, and so I had . . . something like a real finding myself in the midst of myself. “Projective Verse” was one of those calls forward. That it was a body, that it was incarnate, that it was right here, this body that is so aroused. That’s why I use that field of falling in love. What else falls in love with your body? The body’s excitement seems ungovernable. Everybody says you’ve become blind, you can’t even see where you’re going, your judgment’s wrong. Everything that they would say all the way along about a poem. Certainly you must be a fool, and only faith carries you forward. There’s only one there. When you’re writing

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there is only one rhyme that appears and it isn’t a rhyme; it proves to be a word, and a word of such power and actuality that it is governor, and there you discover your mind. You don’t put something into the poem, you don’t find it in the poem. It is absolutely meant for you, and you have a feeling of another thing, fate and destiny. At Black Mountain in 1956, Charles Olson was constantly addressing and trying to fix in his mind where the will comes in.1 He knew this was essential: Where does the will? What is the nature of this will? What was the nature of the feeling of the destined, of the absolutely fateful way in which you actually act? Charles played my heretic—I look and I see him merely saying, “We’ve got to act, buddy.” And then I say, “Oh, that sounds like fun.” But let’s read him deeply and seriously; then he means we’ve got to wait until we know. If you turn it the other way, there are many people acting all over the place, long before an action appears, long before they’re in tune with it. And so in our poetic terms we learn not to write until something is as compelling and absolute as a dream. I’ve had psychiatrists worried. They say, “Isn’t that kind of passive? We see a strange passivity in you. You come on with a lot of dominance, meanwhile you’re waiting around until something moves you.” This is a strange thing for a body to do. Didn’t anybody explain to you that you don’t wait for something to move you? I’m not really passive, I must be active, I know it’s wrong. Not when it’s there. We’re seeing it wrong when we think we’re talking about a passivity. Obedience, it means very much. But I am obeying something which is actually identical with . . . my will. Every other will I ever had was not mine. Every other will was not actually coming from the purpose that was seriously there. So I’m really addressing an area of poetry, and with great deliberation today, because I have a feeling that contemporary poetry has massive techniques, poststructuralism, for copy, copy, copying, and copping out on what I’m talking about. If you could describe it as a set of structures it would be merely language. We inhabit a universe that speaks to us. When it fails to speak to us, we’ve lost language. The religious will say we’re dead. Lawrence will say [it] in the terms of a novelist, no longer talking about a religion. St. Paul will say the dead. I walk through a world where we must distinguish between the dead and alive, the spiritually dead and spiritually alive. What was Paul talking about? I think he calls it “the life.” We’re addressing the occasion of poetry. That language when it’s there is the world about us. We do not think up things: it flows into us, so that when we come to the threshold I’m talking about, the world floods the moment we write. But we don’t get to sit down and push that moment or invent it. Yet it might be there continuously. We might be so called upon that we will not only be writing day and night, but for quite some time before that text unrolls for us. And I am not

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now talking about those texts that belong to a religion. I am going to talk about the universe as creation, and about the creational. I find myself as poet in some profound misunderstanding with the religious world. The historian Burckhardt comments that there is an irreparable misunderstanding between the man of religion and the man of poetry. Both of them he finds absolutely primary for our spiritual world. Burckhardt gives us poets something very big. We all have trouble about our mean, trashy, badly written little American wars, which are really just the worst of our poetry. And meanwhile, the third man in Burckhardt’s lineup, well it would be typically German, but it sure sounds also like the Zionist world of the Old Testament. The third one happens to be the absolutely murderous expander of God’s wrath upon the world. So, if you want the poet to be in there in the terms I’m giving in Burckhardt, and you want the historian to be in their terms, the other one’s very scary indeed. The other one writes it like the hammer of God and wrath of Hitler, or of Napoleon. Of just certain great experience, like the hand of Jehovah goes over and leaves all of Egypt decimated. That’s the other one that Burckhardt sees in history. We’re going to be serious and if I’m going to even invoke it, I’m invoking it because this is a powerful reality to me. We can’t talk about how easily we coexist with this thing I started to talk about, but you don’t get to easily exist that way with falling in love. The power of love absolutely would not mean a thing if it were not transforming throughout of something we are that’s incapable of loving. My own experience, powerful experience of love, is that it comes forward to transform something in me, that it cannot ultimately transform into loving. Faith is not easy for me. If I were not running for scared, this experience of faith would not be a lure into the serious business that I’m talking about. When I write my poetry I am terrified of language, not of what I feel. Actually I am at home with what I assume myself to be. I’m not talking about my personality when I talk about these other things that seem to me so ultimately real. And it is the tone of, not only of Charles Olson, that I go as deep as I can in full faith with you. But it is also in the framework of Robert Creeley’s calling me to order, to volunteer whatever I was going to volunteer. He didn’t name what I am going to do. He said, “I want you to come and do,” and I said, “It will be four lectures, and I know, I really know right now what I’m called on to do.” So I have answered the call. In the first place we’re talking about people who are friends, who enjoy each other’s company. In the midst of that is another occasion I have to dare to touch upon. I’m going to touch upon it without at the same time trying to offend our human level. We have a situation of coexistence in which

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we call up, apprehend, what moves love. The trouble is the way they’ve shaped this room. So no matter what I do, if God were to move me to it, he’s wasting his time. No matter where it’s put away, it’s going to go to pieces. So we are in a nice human condition, we’re back where the deepest things into it come forward in another dimension. That’s exactly where a poem goes. With all the earnestness in which it’s got to go only one place. Next time I go to read it, I’ll say, “That was my feeling. How strange my everlasting feeling is.” I take it right back in the form it was presumed I had just expressed my everlasting feeling. I’ve seen Charles say, “He’s looking at his everlasting feeling, but it’s literally here in his handwriting, and he can’t make his everlasting feeling out. It may ever last but it’s just escaped him because he made it so it was gonna escape, no matter what.” After all, it’s the blacks who discovered, in order to really get what America is, we got to bring our roots here. There were movements to go back to Africa, about finding the roots that are the roots of America. Blake looked and knew the roots of America were in Africa.2 He knows as a matter of fact England is to be healed when that black root and that English root are actually wedded. And he sees it happening in our future in a huge turmoil in a new world, which is a mystical ground of such a thing taking place. I’m talking about the return to roots, going to very grievous roots of our share of a humanity. We have wanted to get away with it. The eighteenth century thought it would cure this by having a deist’s disposition to the matter of God, to the matter of the depths, and by rationalizing, even when they were going to be horrible. It became the century that invented the insane asylum, and invented reason, two twins of remarkable likeness. Instead of coming in contact with the depths, we are announced to be insane, and we’re put into a box where we can be in the depths. And then when we’re reasonable, when these depths don’t come up, and this thing I stop calling, and I don’t start shaking and crying in front of you, and I’m not going to do it, you know, cool. At the end of this century, we’re beginning to observe that the most insane thing man ever did was to make that split. Put away half of the evidence of what he was, which he ought to be always there, as if it were different from what he was, and then install the other evidence as if it were rational. The rational man is a wilder invention than the unicorn, the seven-headed Hydra—no one ever saw one. When Dryden comes up and says that he’s going to rewrite Shakespeare to meet the consensus of opinion of reasonable men, I want to say, “Dryden, in your born days, where did you ever see, and will you produce for me, one, much less two reasonable men, and then get an agreement between them so I can know how you’re rewriting Shakespeare?” 3 There was no such creature. Actually, of course probably, Shakespeare rewrote Shakespeare for fairies to read, and

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we’ve got more fairies in San Francisco than God ever proposed there’d be reasonable men. Now that we have undone my anxieties supposedly, I will launch into the framer. I’m going to be moving around between two poems for this first threshold state. Both of the poems have to do with relations to this state of the tremendum. A poet’s approaching an area which man called sacred or scared. As a typist, for instance, I’m amused by how many times I type scared for sacred, and especially since I used to earn my living at typing, I’m not only amused but I would also lose time as I typed scared for sacred. But they are actually the same domain. And we are all familiar from more than one source, reminding us in the earlier part of this century, that the sacred is both forbidden, both obscene and holy, etc. The actual feeling is dread. There is a dreadful joy, and there is a dreadful despair. There is a fearful joy, a fearful despair. The ground is one. Awe and awe-ful are really consubstantial. When we’re dismissing an awful piece of art or an awful smell, we should inspect the depths of that sense of the awful, because the awe-ful is one of the senses of the thing that is experienced as God. The third lecture is going to be on the gods. The fourth lecture is on the universe as presence, and there I want to turn to how I see it, but the term we use once our Western world begins to talk about God and the gods. Once the father falls away and God is left there. And there are thresholds in language, when the Lord is there we’ve still got a construction we can demonstrate; when the king is there we’ve still got a construction we can demonstrate; but there are certain terms that come closer and closer, in relation to language. It’s the verb, isn’t it, it’s the thing called “the word.” Once it’s a sense in the tremendum of a presence and beyond the knowable that the only faith makes the leap. Poetry also knows certain thresholds. And this evening I want to address what I originally proposed were visitations in poetry. In the first poem I’m going to read and think about, there’s a visitation, and this visitation has long struck me. It’s a poem where it’s surprising to find a poet, where it’s surprising to find it, because it’s got a prototype in what’s usually taken as a religious set, the hermetic documents, where there is a visitation, an angelic visitation, or a visitation of Hermes Thoth,4 a tutelary, daemonic visitation, and it’s in the same terms as a visitation of Chocorua in this poem of Wallace Stevens.5 The terms are so close that I keep wondering, did he catch it from having read the Hermes Thoth visitation? Now I describe myself as a derivative poet, but I’m not talking about derivations. The power of texts is that it leaves you vulnerable to the invasion. You, or I also, enter into a series of expectations—if you’re more anxious you criticize it, if you’re very anxious you trash it. And if you’re very anxious and don’t want

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to even come in contact with it, you admire it and appreciate it. The dreadful is so kindly that if you appreciate it, it will leave you alone. It’s also so bored. One of the terms for the dreadful seems to be “ennui.” The universe is so bored with you that if, in the degree that you appreciate the universe, it will promise not to touch you. It’s a form of not touching things to appreciate it. This is from the work of Wallace Stevens. Much of Wallace Stevens I see as an evasion, a very nervous evasion of crashing through to something that threatens frequently. It’s quite surprising to find now one where a question really rises, and I cannot read this poem as anything other than as an immediate account of a daemonic visitation, as your telling a dream in the morning is an account of your dreaming. And what I want to anticipate is that I will return to the business of what happens when you tell a dream, and what happens when the poem is giving an account of a visitation. Is that a threshold, or is that the place a visitation takes place? It’s an open question—in the telling of the dream, as in the happening. In the telling of the cards you encumber the fate: Does it proceed? Is it somewhere else? The act of faith is in the telling of the cards. That’s where you know it, that’s where you read it, that’s where you encounter it, and if you don’t believe but you still heard it, and that’s where you begin to know that those things are unfolding. The poem is not a superfluous attack. And in the writing of the poem alone is where the visitation we see in the poem takes place. Actually, the universe does not leave us alone. [Paul] Cézanne going every day to paint Mont Sainte-Victoire, that’s something between Mont Victoire and Cézanne.6 If he goes over and over again to paint it, every time it’s in the painting, it’s as if he had never met the mountain. And he returns unsatisfied to come to the mountain again. But he hates it. It’s in the painting and meanwhile Cézanne is as separated from the mountain as we are because everything is pared into the painting. Total, creative. In the terms of our Judeo-Christian mythic understanding of the figure, God returns all the time to his creation because he can’t get there. There are Gnostic ones in which he has nothing to do with the creation. There are a million pictures of this. When I’m telling you that, I’m telling how I feel deeply. There may be other awakenings. But when I do it deeply, it seems most true to me that God comes through over and over again. He can’t see through creation to the created thing. In Cézanne’s case, the mountain is there. Once man is there, all the creation, the physical world in there, and it’s an interchange where everything is happening. And that is also our experience with language. We do not put meaning into language, and we cannot put our own feelings into language, because language is a commonality. And we go out of what would ever be individual in us and go to something that is entirely common, the words we have together. There is the only place we seem to find

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the deeper experience of ourselves. As a writer I can tell you truly I go there, so this is a doctrine of communion, communication, and the reader as a communicant and the writer as communicant. That is absolutely fundamental in my understanding of the poem, at the present time, and is the way I read Olson and reading coming back as belonging to the same feeling as the nature of language. Now here is this visitation and appearance of this angel. [Begins reading Wallace Stevens’s poem “Chocorua to Its Neighbor”] That was what I sense as a cop-out at the present time in poetry. When we have our theories of language as mere language, or as being in our hands, we borrow [from] Williams that it’s a machine of words, which belongs to the vast context of Williams.7 Williams didn’t shift and change; he accumulated a lot and founded a huge ideogram of what he meant. And part of that ideogram is that machine made of words, yes. It belongs with every other part of the revelation—that throughout his life Williams felt in a million directions—of what that statement could possibly contain. Take it away and tell us you got a Tinkertoy and that by reduction we just got words, and you can use a dictionary and do it, or that the computer is not going to get you into trouble because a computer can put the words in rows. This threshold can be demonstrated in Williams. We haven’t got any machines that are not the universe. They seem to be made out of stuff, they seem to be as absolute. They too will enter absolute submolecular activity when they are blown away on an atomic roaring fire; they’re as subject as the rest of us. We can’t take the machine as some people do and say this is artifice or something. That’s an extension like a flower and like a leaf, like anything else, unless we get to extend things supposedly in some sense other than every other part of the universe does. Are there accidental makings? That’s part of what’s on my mind. The poem is as absolutely out there going everywhere in this realm. And if you think how impermanent the machine is and how very impermanent the flower is, and how very impermanent all the pollen is that doesn’t even land to go on in its processes, that’s part of the shimmering apprehension of how intensely important every single event is in an intention that moves inscrutably outside of our individual intensity of having to do what we do. That lets me go back to Pound’s statement: Poetry is “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” 8 And I would certainly say with the depths we know of what words mean, not what the dictionary, but what they—I meant to do that but I failed. Everything means that, the whole universe travails, that word has been laboring for three thousand years to reach it. I can’t

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name what it is but I must work with that word because I know it’s got to go somewhere. We save them in dictionaries, we have them in the flow of poetry because every one of those was an intuition at that time of that meaning, and now meaning is not positive, meaning is the feeling of process, potential within the human community that moves with that word as an individual in the vast array of human work. One of the marvels of our time is that we now have come into full consciousness that we’re a species. We’ve junked the business about being primitives. The linguist turned around and said, “We can find today no primitive languages.” The rest of you anthropologists may say, “It’s primitive to eat other human beings,” etc. Maybe, no doubt, maybe there are primitive social orders. But in language we know that is so absolutely insane; we have been looking for a primitive language, and all contemporary languages are contemporary, and are advancing, and none of them is primitive. Some of them are traditional, so highbound, [that] European languages were so phobic toward changing that when they came to Indians in California some of them made up new languages in new years. There were groups of Indians that were despised, but all their energies were going forth into storytelling poems and making up whole new languages, something that we have got very, very strong barriers against. Even Joyce trying to make meld of European languages, or whir of languages, that’s the first place we have somebody trying to write in a language in which all the echoes of all the human feats would be that are available throughout, and you’d have an anticipation of a flow of languages among men as [a] species. The inventors did it as a community. They were a small community. Now they’re in large ones. They don’t invent languages, they want their language to be heard with ours, within communities. Go to Margaret Mead’s last lectures where she’s talking about returning to New Guinea,9 and she discovers that her New Guinea people want their language to be heard now along with the other languages of the world. They want their stories to be heard the way they tell them, and they want their songs to be recorded to be heard, because they’ve heard that song, they’ve heard French songs. They like them and they know that whoever sang it that way hadn’t heard it the way they sang it. So they said, “Gee, it’s great, but we can hear. They haven’t yet heard the way we sing it; we want them to hear the way we sing it.” When I was going to Australia, Jerry Rothenberg said, “You know, if you just could go to New Guinea,” but nothing could get my trajectory to include it. That the New Guinea government, now that it’s native, now that it’s not Australia administering it, the poets of the Upper Sepik want poets of other countries to come and exchange poetry lore work. They want to know how we dream in

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our language. They find it mysterious enough, and I think I would be forced, if I were to answer their question, to say, “I think we have only one person who ever told us near how we dream in our language, and that’s Wordsworth in The Prelude.” All they remembered after that was something recollected in tranquility. And I was astounded when I actually read that Prelude, to find out that was only part of the alchemical process. He talked right after that about there weren’t no tranquility. You went through a stage in which something was supposedly recollected in tranquility and overnight a storm appears in language.10 You have a storm within you. The minute you enter a period of tranquility there’s a strange aura in which you write. If you write in a storm, your writing doesn’t have a storm in it, you’re bigger, there’s more storm going on. The storm’s there in hiding, not tranquility. Meanwhile, after Wordsworth, people were trying to produce tranquility on the page to guarantee they’d recollected something in tranquility. That’s just exactly like conception. It may be in tranquility, but we all know that once it comes forth we can just forget the tranquility. [Reads “Chocorua to Its Neighbor,” stanzas xx, xxv, xxvi] There’s one other poem that comes to mind in which we have a mountain actually speaking in a poem, and that’s by a poet who didn’t have much respect for me so I hate to remember him. Lew Welch actually has the set of Tamalpais poems.11 In order to get rid and even with him, I did say to Lew, I said, I wish you’d let the mountain write your poems all the time, because actually that mountain writes a great poem. And I really had the feeling again that poets have had a primordial voice they could go into in the elements—the wind, the sea. You get their voice, wind and sea, and from the elemental chatter of birds—it’s not the same as hearing the individual birds, but the elemental chatter of birds— and from the elemental free speech chatter of children, in which children are experienced as elemental and have not come into our human speech, so that there’s a level in which we’ve got poems that verify that’s where they came from. We’re aware that many religious people get their voice from the mountain voice. The voice comes out of the mountain, testimony over and over again. I cannot but take that testimony as not mythic now. In these four lectures, I am not talking about myth, although, for instance, my primary picture of the universe will be mythic. But I’m talking about experiences of mystery that involve a counterpart in poetry of what’s in a mystery cult, because it’s cultivated. Our poetry is obscure. But the instinct to study it may be our only lasting mystery cult. There are great events in it, and I name one of them. Take Wordsworth’s great event in the poems. When you come to the depth,

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the tremendum in the poetry that’s in our common English and then American, Australian, Canadian, etc., language. Certainly there are great tremendums in Wordsworth, and tremendum here doesn’t mean ideas. I’m talking about the overwhelming music that advances when those passages of Wordsworth are read in the voice. I heard it read by a scholar, Geoffrey Hartman, no poet.12 Geoffrey Hartman has in the course of his lecture read Wordsworth, and his voice advanced to the voice, and I was so moved that I’m still in tears. You do not hear the content, you feel it. Actually it’s a body tone change that goes on. In some way you know the content. So when you return to it, your experience is of reading what you know. Yet you’re moved beyond our usual intellectual distance we take from something we’re hearing and seeing. In Aristotle, when he is talking about Empedocles and in the Poetics says that poetry’s really just entertainment, and this is a vast misapprehension of Homer, and Homer’s an entertaining story, and that’s the proper dimension for poetry. And then he takes an example that you almost stare at, and that shows that Empedocles is not poetry, because he’s thinking. I mean, because it isn’t entertaining. But unfortunately Aristotle actually has a very different time with Empedocles, and while he’s able in the Poetics to bar him from being poetry ’cause he isn’t entertaining, he still turns around, and if philosophy bars him from philosophy because he casts a spell, and the music of his language is such that Aristotle can’t think while it’s going on, then he trips. That’s perfectly evident, he goes out on a trip. And when we begin to hear how Empedocles must have been read—well, that’s what we call a poem, isn’t it? Who was reading Homer to Aristotle? It’s on the page and they must have been awfully polite in not reading it aloud, because if it had been read, I think if Homer had been read in the voice, you wouldn’t be sitting just being entertained. We’re talking about language as it advances and becomes so real to us we have no separation from it—this is an address to threshold. Now, in the Wallace Stevens one, we’ve got what I call an invasion in which the threshold moves in, overtakes a person with a theory of fictions. I have taken out certain sections in this poem because Wallace Stevens’s mind spends most of its time prepared to excuse itself from the invasion of such a threshold. In the bewildering poem “The Comedian with a Letter C,” 13 there’s a mixture, and you can’t take it apart, but it is a poem that is inviting to any scholar who wants to take a look at it this way. It is invaded throughout by this tremendum I’m talking about, and the fiction is working throughout, and the humor worked throughout to try to make sure that this invasion does not wipe out the poet while he’s at work. This experience, this overpowering presence that in some way is allowed to come through—Lew Welch is persuaded to a Buddhist view of the world. He does not experience this in these terms, but Stevens clearly does. The author of

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“Sunday Morning” 14 experiences the loss of just the same thing that I come from continuously from my roots. American roots—there is something in the event that we are the very first nation that is not a race, so African roots are our roots. But they gotta be brought solidly to America, they can’t be a show out front, and we too have to get to them. And we can’t, as Whitman thought, gosh, at least we could free ourselves from these awful European roots, but those African roots are awful. Let me read you the poem “Pœmandres, the Shepherd of Men.” . . . This is the opening of a hermetic address, which again certainly seems to be exactly an invasion experience, and certainly a visitation experience, and certainly one very close to—so close to Stevens’s that I have wondered at times, could he have read it? I’m going to be reading it in Mead’s translation, which is the translation that Yeats read it in, that all the people at the turn of the century read this poem “Pœmandres” in. And so, if Stevens had an early source for his Pœmandres— unless he might have, I don’t know, if he would have had a French source, nor would I know what that French source is. But when I do it in “Passages,” I recall this poem “Pœmandres” and I use exactly the “with some delight” as I do with “antiquated enchantment.” And with strict magic attention, I use the language, one that Ezra Pound would freak out at, and yet this is the one that Ezra Pound read. The time that hovers throughout Stevens is a once-upon-a-time time. Day and night appear in mystical literature as if they were entities. They’re a series of terms here that we will return to, to try to get further takes on my picture of mystery cult magic operation, and mystic unities, feelings of unity. And, but myth is really what can’t be spoken, what you know when you close your eyes. You have no such feeling of unity with the world while you feel invaded or, in the second poem I’m going to read, you feel that you’re making an excursion, you’re going out. And the same aspects in the second poem, which is Creeley’s poem “The Door,” the same aspects appear in Wordsworth of fear and so forth, appear in the poet, in this of poetry’s means of excursion, going out into where you know not where, and it is absolutely called for when you make that. “The Door”—I had no other immediate sense of an excursion poem that would be in our twentieth century, although there is a great quest. Soul quest is our third lecture on Pound and the fourth on the godly sea, the theme of setting out in The Cantos. 1. It chanced upon a time my mind was meditating on the things that are, my thought was raised to a great height, the senses of my body being held back. These are nightmare terms. Most of us know them because we don’t advance

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seriously into nightmare, to what it is to fear and go into the universe. We’re on a threshold in nightmare, and by feeling it personally we feel a personal threat first. . . . just as men who are weighed down with sleep after a fill of food, or from fatigue of body. Methought a Being more that vast in size beyond all bounds, called out my name and saith: What wouldst thou hear and see, and what hast thou in mind to learn and know? 2. And I do say: Who art thou? He saith: I am Man-Shepherd, Mind of all-masterhood; I know what thou desirest and I’m with thee everywhere. That comes into “Passages,” not because I have identification with this experience, but because also that experience for me of falling in love is identical with this. Coming into that universe of one’s ultimate meaning in the falling in love is that statement, “I know what thou ultimately desire[st].” I am the one that has the answer, and now you who have never known your desire will know your desire. I’m not what you desire. This is of course what the universe starts coming forward in the nightmare to reveal. 3. [And] I reply: I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God. This is, I said, what I desire to hear. He answered back to me: Hold in thy mind all that thou wouldst know, and I will teach thee. 4. E’en with these words His aspect changed, and straightway, in the twinkling of an eye, all things were opened to me, and I see a Vision limitless, all things turned into Light—sweet, joyous [Light]. And I became transported as I gazed. But in a little while Darkness came settling down on part [of it], awesome and gloomy, coiling in sinuous folds, so that methought it like unto a snake. And then the Darkness changed into some sort of a Moist Nature, tossed about beyond all power of words, belching out smoke as from a fire, and groaning forth a wailing sound that beggars all description. [And] after that an outcry inarticulate came forth from it, as though it were a Voice of Fire. 5. [Thereon] out of the Light . . . a Holy Word, (Logos) descended on that Nature. And upwards to the height from the Moist Nature leaped forth pure Fire; light was it, swift and active too. The air, too, being light followed after the Fire.15

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It’s out of these texts too that we have an idea of how old the practice of alchemy is, because this clearly seems to be taking place in an operation of elements, and is most understandable as an operation of elements within the alchemical laboratory thing, in which it is in that theater that you see deep into the universe. You’re not separated from it, but you are acting in the chemical lab, but in the way you’d be in the dream: you have no separation from it. You’re not going to draw from it some laws whereby you can do things with light or you can do things with fire. That’s what happened to chemistry when it divided away. You return to the first ground in chemistry to look into the mineral and elemental worlds and, as at the theater, to see play the drama there. You may return and know enough what the drama is going to be, but you go to Hamlet to see Hamlet played, not to do things. It goes to the awesome thing taking place in the elemental chemical world, and it no longer looks deep into it to be moved and come into that very depth they’re looking into. Instead, it’s checking out the dancing girls and afterwards at the stage door it knows it will get a product. But this is an event taking place. It comes, occurs again, in this poem’s language. Stevens resists over and over again. The resistance may be why it broke through so clearly here. So, in its largest sense, it was meant for us. I will close by reading “The Door,”16 and so what I will do is now go into some of the things, some of the remarks that might have come afterwards. In the sense of coordinates, one reason of course that I come close to “The Door” is that I have puzzled over and over again, because when it was first sent to me it bore its line “for Robert Duncan.” And in two levels, as the world puzzled as we wrote our dedications of our poems to each other. But they were also written for. I come into the room and on the desk is an envelope, and it says, “for Robert Duncan.” That’s a present. One of my friends really remembers me. I pick it up, and I open it up, and the message says, “you have the following duties to perform, and you had better do them.” Now, it’s still a present, isn’t it? It was presented to me. It’s still “for Robert Duncan.” There is no present in this world without consequences, and a great many kindly, smiling, wicked, demonic, friendly friends who lay on us things that will take us a hundred million reincarnations before we’d ever do what that laid on us. Okay, so I got a poem laid on me, “The Door” “for Robert Duncan.” He was showing me the door. Everybody else gets to stay, but the door, exit, no matter how we play, turn it, we’re caught in a dream, if we’re gonna draw into its consequences. See how nice and small, I really knew myself. So I’m not going to be caught like John of Patmos: “I, John, saw him, my eyes are closed.” 17 When I close my eyes, I begin to see. You can’t start out writing poetry at the age of sixteen and keep going, poor as it looks to other people, and be able to close your eyes unless you’re going to

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sleep, and got a nice sleeping pill or something, without beginning to see if you mention seeing. See, I opened my mouth. Unfortunately, that’s why it’s both closing your eyes and closing your lips. It doesn’t mean that you got let in on it, but you vowed to keep that closure. That’s the unhappy chosen people. It’s laid on you, but you also vow to be the chosen people, so you witness before the world that you’re chosen, so you sign up that you’re gonna do a whole bunch of strange things. You’re not gonna be equal, if it’s the Jews as chosen people, but there are more than one chosen people. If you keep the laws all the way through, soon you’re actually identified. At the end of a French interview, there were some French poets there, and the current ones are really sort of with it, and the interviewer was all wrapped up in [Jacques] Derrida land and so forth, and I said, “that’s just as definite as being Jewish or not Jewish.” 18 And a half million poets want to qualify their poetry by walking out and being a philosopher. Trying to make somebody think you’re a philosopher ain’t going to work when you’re not one. That’s also being an initiate. Because to come forward not knowing that it’s got its own thing, that’s answering to something that’s already said. I do not know what I am—that’s a big quest. I am one in quest. Or I am one who refuses to go in quest. All of those immediately entered into the deeper drama that flows throughout the human, and vivifies our human community. The next step I spoke of was communion, commons of language, and communicant. What I see [Lewis] Carroll and [Edward] Lear and the beginning of nonsense in our language, and then Gertrude Stein boldly opening, is that nonsense is part of the adventure of sense. That when we turn seriously to think of the people who try to deprive language, we see them in a human drama of deprivation. When you talk about reductionism, that doesn’t mean it’s small. I think of Egyptian terms. Isis is all colors and is present everywhere and in every moment, dazzling and bewildering, if you are of her and name yourself of her cult. But Osiris arrives but once, and he is—she is not all colors but every color— and he is all colors, white, candid, all colors present. Egyptians recognize that. So poetry is communication and the universe—as a field communicant I’ve got—it is in communication throughout. That’s what it means, and consequently it’s in communication; in terms of the Old Testament, it is in travail. And I am speaking about the one that we find in physics, just as they were. We have a different picture today of that universe, but it’s the same universe, and their picture is not inaccurate, but the thing they deeply knew about it, it’s in travail. Look at the particles today, and it’s in travail. Look at everything we know about the universe, and it is also, when deeply felt, in travail. I think of Heisenberg’s remark, that the only appropriate emotion, when you are deeply and seriously

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concerned with the universe, is grief.19 The thing you actually feel. So you can’t get out of grief. Many people go into science because they hope to escape the grief that they see in drama, or in certain poems, or in emotional relationships. I think, “Gee, if I could get away from the human thing, and if I could start with this thing that’s over there, I won’t come to grief.” That isn’t what they’re talking about. And they’re not then talking about a human lot, that is, our great common lot. The orders that I’m going to be talking about in these two poems—receiving and sending—they have to do with exactly the same threshold and their relationships to that threshold. The ways in which we come into a place where there’s an interface. Receiving and sending, hearing and sounding. In the “Dante Études,” Dante says man’s deepest purpose is to have a hearing.20 The reason he creates language is to have a hearing. And I would add that we imitate with the sounds of our mouth speaking, because the universe speaks to us. And yet we feel it needs a hearing, because as we love it we seek it. We go out and seek it, which must mean in this reciprocity that throughout the universe every part needs a hearing. It’s not idle curiosity, that we have never been allowed to go as in every depth of that universe, and yet always, always with the terrible presence of an appetite that must also be throughout the universe. At one appalling moment in Process and Reality, Whitehead said, contemplating why do forms of life eat each other, and also what are we doing when we’re exploding things, so-called destroying them, he said, “a god does not seek understanding; he seeks higher intensities.” 21 Well, the highest intensity I knew about was like our atom bomb. I mean at the highest intensity is what we apprehend as the tremendous, now catastrophic end in return of the universe into itself, and that picture of our universe in which it enters a collapse and again explodes. Which is a highest imagination of an intensity. So this must form throughout, and our little destructions and creations that seem to mimic this throughout, like a pulse, and coexistence of participation in our intuition of the universe. We are the universe. Invasion and excursions. Charles writes in large capital letters, and since I’m a bad boy I get Moses’s commandments. I’m like the printer that left the nots out of the commandments in the Bible. Is it “form is never more than extension of content” that’s being labeled as the Creeley message?22 Anyway, what interests me because I’m talking about an extension throughout the work: I know that a comment about form is content, but why the extension of it? Why does everything extend? Why does everything flow through everything else? Not only do we search, but everything lures and calls us into the search. Now let’s read “The Door” as an excursion. I’m glad that I’ve gotten to such

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places that it would be the firmest and most solid minds that will psychologize this, because I want to read it as how poetry gets walked right out, when it’s called to go, into an excursion someplace. This excursion is remarkably like an early excursion poem, the one I mentioned of Empedocles, that gave Aristotle such trouble, because you go and certain instructions are given. You noticed in the Wallace Stevens poem, instructions are given. Names are called, sounds are heard, temperatures change, things grow enormous, and so forth, and certain instructions come forth. And I would say that in one, Robert goes out in this excursion, and yet now in turn puts the orders of this poem “for Robert Duncan,” not only to extend a present to and recognition of another poet, but that now this will be for me. Not only tonight to address and acknowledge it for me, but gee, I think, “I’ve just been circumcised.” To make such an acknowledgment is to do that step in which you don’t just appreciate the mystery of a poem, but you solidly announce that you are undertaking to have acknowledged it and something of myself, vow to keep the closure of the poem. When I read Joyce at the end of A Portrait of the Artist and it said, “silence, exile and timing,” 23 I said I know about the exile, and timing sounds great, but one thing I’ve never been in my whole life was silent. The things that look like disclosure, that I understand. On the other hand, we can’t keep closure; there must be a way, I have to find a way of keeping closure. On the other hand, people say you talked for a whole hour and didn’t say anything. That must be one form of closure more successful than silence! [Reads “The Door”]24 The particulars in poetry when it enters this dimension are as absolute as reporting how and exactly you move through the halls of a building. One of its symptoms, as in the Wallace Stevens, is how one thing after another is known and made of each symptom as it comes into view. As it is in a dream where you know you’ve got to get through, and you go, may I go now, am I allowed to bow myself down in this ridiculous posture of renewal, of the insistence of which I am the virtue.

The Fatefulness of Ongoing Identifications The Poem as the Recall and Adventure of Self in Projection

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he first lecture was on excursions, going out, through the poem, going out into a wall that opens up. And the prototype that we had for that was “The Door” by Robert Creeley. And the other was the visitation, or the incursion, the something coming into the poem, entering it from outside. And the evocation of something that comes in was one of the forms in poetry. I want to address in all four lectures the possibility that there is an outside the poem and an inside the poem, and that there’s an outside our human domain. When I was trying to call up and even fill myself with a certain kind of dread, and to give you some sensation of where the daemonic is felt, then back came the question, what does the poem seek then? It seeks to return to its humanity and in a way we’re back at the quality that art demands—to hold attention, so that what art needs is not a redundancy at all. It needs a situation in which things are held at a very high tension, so it’s that energy that it uses. Those of you who know the work of Charles Olson will remember how very important to him the experience that he found in poetry was, and that was the high sense of an energy that charged the whole thing.1 We could also call it a high sense of anxiety through the entire structure. We all use language, we talk with it, we do various things with it; surely the one place that poetry can just take off from must be the very beginnings of the individual’s entrance into language. The need for an art of shaping things, of bringing things together, the need for it to be organized, is that it has to contain an energy that mounts and mounts and mounts. But that art comes, not because there is an organization, but because there is the potency of a disorganization. You wouldn’t have an activity 103

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of organizing if there were not, very importantly, a disorganization, and this is the source of the energetic, constant, actual life. The proposition on my mind in the very beginning was how the poet impersonates. Perhaps the simplest form that you would all know of is the dramatic monologue proposed in the nineteenth century. And then we’ll have more various cases of that to address. And incarnations. So we’re going to be starting with Pound. When I was in my teens I had not yet ferreted out what his first versions [of The Cantos] were. I sensed this was like a soul in the series of incarnations. If there is an incarnation, it is then a fateful relationship to the art. The art is demanded throughout in order to keep both the order and the energy in disorder present. The great question is, why is it that it isn’t skill that the practice of the art increases? Why were they [Pound and H.D.] that intensely involved in working constantly on rhyme, and questioning over and over again the nature of the melodic lure that carried them into the movement of the poem? Why did the craft increase and increase and increase? This is not the only area of poetry, by the way. I’m talking about areas of poetry we would classify as a psychotic. When I say “higher” here I’m thinking about an energy, a charge. Although I experienced it as higher, in regards for instance, I’ve borne testimony at every place of my experience of Olson’s art or of [Louis] Zukofsky’s. But of Olson’s it was most mysterious because it was both a higher command, yet I’d been working in art the longer time, and at the same time he was a contemporary. So I was rather bewildered. I had really thought in terms of generations, of father, son, grandson, and so forth, just as I tend to think and feel and recite seasons. A protection is not a defense. A protection is when you’re going to do something and you find the way to do it. Its movement goes in there. The body protects the entire energetic field that it is. It’s built in a series of actual protections. This character can go forth and move forth. And when it makes its defensive movements it’s only that it be able to go forth again. And that is true also in the poetic art, its significance. The more rhymes you have, the more actual going out you can do. One of Pound’s first instructions was go by the “tone leading of vowels.” 2 You can remember coming across some words you didn’t want. You have a vocabulary, but that’s a world beginning and also it’s a fate. The least fate is that your poem will be ridiculous if you reach for a rhyme. When people laugh when they see that you’re an awkward rhymer, that’s your fate because you started that thing, and the rhyming is actually a very high experience, is a very high and demanding spiritual protection going out. And Pound said, go by the biggest field, in which you will have to deal with the whole world, which is “the tone leading of vowels.” So that you go by the vowel sound now, all those consonantal

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sets with their vowels. You go by what used to be left out entirely. Our vowels are really working with the wind. So they are the one place in the involvement of a poem [where] there are intentions and the art is most involved. You can’t control between yourself and the reader, so everyone is leaping forward. Again, you go forward in that. Bobbing up came the word “interface.” 3 I experienced it, I was racing ahead along a current that was very strong, and was coming from very definite centers, and suddenly I wrote to Jess, it was as if a cork had bobbed up out of an absolute lexicon and vocabulary belonging to the occasion. Freud showed us, and a million other people have told us poets long before that, that those little things that bob up are the ones. Dreams reminded us long before Freud noticed. It came from a lot of talk, I thought. Jargon, I hate jargon. Is that jargon? Can I do away with it? It’s a hearing, we’re all present. The operation isn’t just going on here; I can’t hide what goes on in the operation, not when it’s a word. Stick me with the hard-line definition of “interface” and we will have to have it at least as a specter. The one thing that actually strikes me in the great Communist Manifesto is the specter that is proposed. I’m still of that romantic period that Marxism is, which was born right in the middle of romanticism. I also am a romantic so I am sure that everything’s got a specter, that there is a specter. And our specter for the day must be “interface.” It’s the one I did not want to come up in any vocabulary. And I say give me the one that’s a technical definition, and I will now read it aloud: “Interface: a shared boundary, for example, the boundary between two systems or two devices.” How almost immediately a poet misreads everything. You’ve heard of poetic devices, haven’t you? What technique are they talking about? That’s how Dante excused us from seeing angels. He said, an angel came forward with a harp burning in its hand, but the holy Roman Catholic Church— that’s a device. I can show you that gods appeared in poems of the classical world, and they were devices. And we were safe. Poets were not burned for talking with angels, or for having angels carelessly appear in dreams. But within another century saints were burned for talking with angels, ordinary people were burned for talking with angels, and so forth—so, devices. Whose face, interface, you know, that was no face I saw, that was an “interface.” “The points of separation between two programs, such as a developmental program and a production program; the points of contact between organizations; the boundaries separating two elements or aspects of a system, such as the boundary between a person using an information system and the input or output station itself.” Gee, all those characters. What did I say we started with? Excursion and invasion. Something came from the outside into a system. How did it get to come from the outside? How do we possibly have something coming from the outside, and our going outside?

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The poem goes out into something, to a language which must be a closed system. That’s another interface between this and that as we move on to impersonation and incarnation. “The ‘interface’ may be mechanical, such as surfaces and spacings”—and Dr. Williams said, “Yeah, man, it’s a machine made of words.” 4 Thinking what, did he mean that was safe—“in mating parts.” It’s called a Freudian reductive mind when you read the phrase, in mating parts, and have something not very reduced but increased on your mind. “Modules, components, or subsystems; electrical such as signal level, transformation points, impedance, matching points.” Now that’s what I hoped was going to be handed me. I have no way of understanding it except the wrong way. “Or power level, transformation points of two.” This is how they got people into alchemy and made them pay lots; they said, I want a transformation point. This sounds like Dr. Dee promising us how we get out there and in there. His preface to his Monad reads just like this and it’s in Latin, which is gassier, because I can’t read Latin. “Or any other transition point, such as the human versus machine boundary.” Dr. Williams had to be on one side of that machine made of words. He said there was only a machine made of words, but the scariest thing about a poem is that it’s a machine made of words, because you happen to be the one mating. I think that’s forbidden in the Bible. I mean they forbid us mating with angels and they forbid us mating with animals. They really are very sensitive about what combinations, and if they had known about machines. “Machines versus outside environment boundary, or machines versus machine boundary. In accordance with the definition of system, every element or part of a system must ‘interface,’ that is, react or associate with one or more other parts of the system.” That’s why you need an art. There is nothing in the whole universe that’s not continuous and continuously populating. And so you need an art. A marriage is a very high art. How come anybody ever proposed that when actually [Alfred Charles] Kinsey made the score? So that must be an art. There must be something absolutely creative moving around. Now we’ll return to the other question, because we’ve got them damn poets who speak from what they are. Why then is there such a powerful range in poetry of incarnation, now not the angel coming to inform with a message, or going out as in the Creeley poem, to where she is who gives you the message, tells you the very important thing? But now it is something quite different. Pound at the beginning of The Cantos, once he cleared away his first beginning, identified, not with Homer, but with Odysseus. He also identified with a series of translators, even in the essay that he writes on the translators of Homer.5 Right now in my mind, this is a little like the puzzle in the Bible that there are two genealogies for Jesus. A genetic impossibility. There are two genealogies. In some occult

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schools, they deal with it literally by his actually being twinned and combined magically, one of the most astounding of these ideas of an incarnation and the impersonation. This Steiner beats George Steiner around the clock ten times over,6 because it’s the wildest thing I ever have found in our theosophy, and it certainly beats Hellenistic theosophy as far as I know. But Rudolf Steiner, by following literally the Old Testament, then suddenly solves it. There were a series of Zoroasters. The following Zoroasters are descending into an historical person, but those would be reincarnations. But the first Zoroaster, in a magic, an appalling magic—because a sacred event was necessary to make a history—split himself in an absolute schizophrenia, so that neither part would ever know it had been part of a unity. Absolutely not. And one line comes down this way to the one line of Jesus’s descent [writes on the blackboard], and the other one comes down this way; we’ve got a split of two genealogies. Genealogy splits upon genealogy as you would. Think of the writing of Jane Eyre, where over and over and over again the sisters and the brother appear in different combinations. That Charlotte [Brontë] had found something out in Shakespeare that was a secret about what could happen in the novel. What she surely had found was that throughout great lead plays of Shakespeare we are seeing the same scene as we would in a dream, reenacted by different people until the whole cast has orchestrated the scene we are looking into, and we begin to know the way. Now we most know it when we think about dreams, reproducing and re-presenting scenes and re-presenting arrangements of people. This schizophrenia moves along one line to a Zoroaster, and that will be this side of the split, and along another line to Moses, and so forth. And they will appear as terrible enemies. They will appear as the two gigantic religions, charged by an ultimate schizophrenia, and then magically combined at the moment of the baptism with John the Baptist officiating, magically combined, and one child dies and passes into the other child, and finally these two things are unified. It’s stupendous, all because he [Rudolf Steiner] insists on the literalness, not the mythicness. He will not theosophize at this point of a genealogy. He will insist it must also be there. And then he projects a fantastic picture. This is art nouveau theosophy. The architecture, the painting, and everything, it belongs to the end of the nineteenth century. It was a very persuasive head, so cults followed it, poring over that and rearranging history back to the beginning. This seems very much like how entirely a poet is persuaded in the course of a poem of the absolute necessity and ultimate reality of arrangements that are really just that fantastic. We are talking about a specter, that it will haunt us. We can’t let it go. We know the arguments against it: we can say it’s impossible, we can say anything we want,

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we can say “silly,” but we haven’t just forgotten it. We may only remember it as the wildest mad case we ever saw, but we remember it. And that entering into the mind is some of the power that also is in rhyme. It rhymes with something, it also does not rhyme with something. So I have disorders that are the key to the import, the importance of an order, disorders that give rise to a real urgency to generate order. We don’t waste. We don’t have energy to waste at all. It is called up from an urgency. That’s an underlying importance of what was found, let’s say, in psychoanalysis, that they weren’t facing people who didn’t have anything. If they felt disorder what they felt was the demand for order. The ones you would feel orderly are not in it. You don’t have to be disordered to need order. So that poetry must mean that language is experienced by the poet who returns again and again. Language must be experienced as having some kind of disorder, and immediately generating an art, which must bring it into an order, another order than the one presented. The things that other people have taken for granted don’t look like they could possibly be taken for granted: they’re experienced as disordering, they’re experienced as not meeting something, an urgency. So I do have a feeling of universe again. If I am unbalanced it’s not toward a pessimism, but unbalanced toward an almost lunatic optimism. That is, I can only see that it is a disorder seeking to come to an order, except that I’m haunted by what that means. That’s the great depressing beauty, let’s say, the one real product of life is death. The one sure product of the plant that we are, the organic thing we are, the one thing that is sure to do is to deliver us to the way we will die. That’s the one thing life intends. We all share it. I have a line in the Pindar poem where I say, what if they don’t age? It’s a pathos the gods have, not us.7 It’s as if life—is it a life, does it come to that? It almost is on my mind. If it doesn’t get to go through the stages, well that’s a feeling of a poem. I’m talking now about the feeling of a poem, a feeling of crisis. Let’s get to our incarnations, impersonations. William James, who is interested, as many people were at the turn of the century, in séances, attended them with great earnestness, and wrote on them. And one place, a thing that struck me—and he’s making a note really to himself, as he comes to feel the whole universe—strives toward an impersonation, strives to impersonate. Questions coming up—are they charlatans? It’s striking to him that one thing going on in the séances, when the medium is receiving voices, is impersonation. The medium is impersonating. And the couple of times I’ve been to séances that’s how it struck me. It’s very close to an impersonation. You look and it’s a voice impersonation. There are other mysterious elements, but the great question: How come the voices are recognized? But James is thinking of something else, how throughout

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the biological world there is impersonation. Butterflies that look like flowers, flowers that look like stones, and so forth and so on. An immense picture of our species’ picture of itself is filled with kinds of impersonation. When we wear a mask, are we really masked in some artificial sense? Is the butterfly not masked when its wings look like a pair of eyes? Is that an accident on a butterfly’s wings? When we wear a pair of eyes, are we that knowing? Has the mask we made not also come out of our biological being just as much as the mask the butterfly makes? And while he’s away you say, oh brother, you really are playing with those French fancy things. Because it gets on and on, and again, as with this, when you turn away, and you finish rationalizing yourself out of it, you’re left spooked by the active art throughout the universe next time you see those impersonations. Then you turn around and say, oh well, but we noticed the butterfly mask so we made masks. Man everlastingly, nervously trying to separate himself from being in the most awesome position. Maybe butterflies are anxious, I don’t know. They probably are, if you go through those metamorphoses to try to be sure that you’re not gonna forever be in one of those states that it goes through. We’re back at what the psyche is. But man is also fascinated. What is it, what is the fascination? He sees the secret of himself in the metamorphosis. The theosophy is an account of reincarnations, the stories. I’m not talking about myth at all in this series of lectures, I’m talking about recognizing something when you see it out there, and it becomes thematic and central. And so if we wear masks it’s an essential recognition. The face must be a mask. We ceremonialize, and so the mask position is one of the ones present now in this business of incarnation and impersonation. In bodying and speaking to a medium, the persona is really a thing you speak through, can sound through. The sound comes through. Now this is different from the angel bringing the message. As far as I know, it [the angelic message] is in all of those trips, it is always a woman. It can be down under, it can be up above. A poem on my mind, and it certainly is in the Creeley poem on my mind, and the other one, “Pœmandres,” the instructions are given by a woman . . . who tells the nature, the crucial turn of the universe. And so she’s also [a] sphinx in this guise. This doesn’t mean woman is sphinx. I mean you wouldn’t just turn to a friendly woman and say, come on, sphinx, give me a question, I mean, oh, pardon me. They have given me a few. It was “interface” that I got from one. So I’m not going to believe you can escape from it. The séance table is that link between the romantic period and Pound’s first proposal of The Cantos. In the first version of The Cantos, the one he proposed and stayed with for some time before “and then went down to the ship,” when he was already on the ship of Odysseus, and was going to be moving through a sea,

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an open sea.8 And his contemporaries saw that, they saw the tremendous declaration of his venturing forth upon the ship. That is no longer the sea of just the first Odysseus, it’s the sea of everything’s present. Now Poseidon is an immense history. And the turmoil and confusion of the sea is the turmoil and confusion that we see history in, in The Cantos. In the Pisan state he suddenly sees that he has arrived, and he begins to speak in his incarnation. He begins to know he’s got to know what first he did to offend history, profoundly offend Poseidon, profoundly offend history. Charles Olson tells a story in which he absolutely malforms before my very eyes. I came back and I saw him the first time, after I’d had my sessions with Pound in 1947,9 and I said the thing that struck me was that in all that time of four hours a day, there was not one reference to the sexual life of other people. I said, when we gossip we’re always making remarks about people’s sexual lives and so forth. And Olson said, that’s right, that’s it, Duncan, he [Pound] hasn’t got any sex, he’s a sexless man. I said no, he belongs to my father’s generation. I was trying to say he comes from a different kind of mind. That’s it, he said. Okay. The other thing that strikes him is what kind of women come forth in The Cantos. Boy, that’s being thrashed out today. But you want to watch Athena when she comes forth, watch her in Homer. She says, you think you can lie, I mean you think you can turn things around, you think you can find the way through confusion, but do you even spot me? This is an intuition. It’s a shadow in The Cantos because in one sense this is a serious carrying through to the thing we begin to know the poem is. Our time really does have much prohibition about such carrying through. But it isn’t just our century. By the time you come to the deists in the eighteenth century the separation is much further than the ones in which the church, not only the Catholic Church, but also the Muslim Church, are separating people from any contact with angels. So by the time you come to most Protestants, they either have a theory of angels or they don’t believe in angels, and by the time you come to our century, angels are a form of mental derangement. It was permitted to talk to your angel in the Jewish community as late as the seventeenth century. There was no church. Had there been a church, had there been a temple, they too would have undergone the persecution. I think the entire Judeo-ChristianMuslim world was withdrawing from all permissions to have any spiritual intercourse with spiritual realms. With imaginary realms, too. After the Albigensian Crusade, the Roman Catholic Church undertook a crusade against the romance poets for their poetic doctrine of chaste love, which was a very high form of perversion.10 I mean, chaste sexuality. [The Albigensians] had a doctrine of absolute chastity as the highest form of sexual excitement, and the church turned and held

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courts against the poetic doctrine. And so it shows that the Albigensian thing went further in every direction, and the same split can come when we get in [Gershom] Scholem an account that within the Jewish world the rabbis of Poland and of Russia went to the czar and asked for pogroms against the Hasidic magic and these false Jews who had entered into a heresy, terrible heresy, in which spiritual powers were let loose.11 I want to get back at those séance tables as they come forward, because Pound started The Cantos with a proposition of a booth. He said, first I’ll spill my catch—so it was to Ezra, all the things. That was one of his pictures. Why can’t I just spill forth all the things that I have gathered? That’s one of the things, fragments, drafts, that’s kept, it’s the name of the last book. The thing he felt fatefully at the last, his failure, was announced in the beginning—this will be no more than my catch, spilled upon—but where is he? Already he is in some Renaissance city, he isn’t quite sure where he’s spilling that catch, and a booth appears and a soothsayer appears; the whole thing is in a kind of séance. And there appears, then, in the very first draft of those Cantos, Heywood, secretary of nature.12 In other words, a Rosicrucian, mediumistic theosophist of the seventeenth century. And then he disappears. The Cantos begin on that Odyssean trip and when Pound comes—I will venture here roughly. I’m not lecturing literature, so you can all quickly get it if I get it right or wrong. But the point is that he [Heydon] would then come toward the last of the commanding passages [in the “Thrones” section of The Cantos] when the saints descend, and all the time it’s been that message that he found in that book in Yeats’s hands. That links Pound back through Yeats to that theosophy at the end of the century. Pound was a Pre-Raphaelite. I remember discovering they weren’t modern, they were just painters, they were just—oh that’s a lovely word, “just”—they were just those beatniks the Pre-Raphaelites. Pre-Raphaelites were a circle where I have to realize we’ve got [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti stretched on a couch, smoking opium, zapped out with his pet wombat, and Swinburne is dancing around the room naked. Not until we get the actual beatniks do we get the scene again, and it won’t fit in an English Department, so you go pretty quiet when you get to Pre-Raphaelites. They do not look like they’ve got their heads on straight. And their father had a theory that Dante had a heresy moving through everything, that was so essential that poetry had to take hold of it. That one was that Beatrice represented a power that was something they’re not going to be able to do and claim if you are Catholic Orthodox, something that broke the bounds of the Christian subscription. Poetry included more than was permitted. The promise was that poetry could move outside of the civilization it revived.

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Victor Hugo, in exile in the isle of Jersey, sets up séance tables, [and] not only receives poems off the séance tables, but when he’s in the other room sleeping, people remaining at the table still receive verifiable Victor Hugo poems. The conversations at the table are the most awesome conversations. Most séance conversations are as pitiable as the people who have got on the Ouija, trying to get somebody to talk with them. But Christ comes to the table, death comes to [the] table and talks, and we have a series of great information moving over that séance table in Jersey. All the rest of the séance tables are haunted by the shamans of North America, the Indians of North America. We are the locale in which people here in Rochester started having Indian guides. As you wipe out the Indians, the dead Indians gain power and they come in on the wires. They’re not where the ancestral voices used to come to the tribe. The theosophists are one of the first tribes inside the American community. Mormons or other tribes—huge invasions come to the nineteenth century from our tribes. If you wipe out a people, you don’t wipe out a people. If you don’t want to think something you saw, that is most powerful to come through then in every dimension. Because it’s been relegated to be, what then, on the other side of an interface. To be not on the other side of an interface. And Pound, whether directly or no, but it does have a medium there. Even Eliot, in a charade of The Waste Land, has in the very central thing—is she a pretend Madame Sosostris? Is it a pretend that those voices are coming through, and very much in the manner of talking, of opening an exchange table of a séance? Yeats is the link. I always think Yeats contrived that he needed a reader, because he wanted to get into his hands this poet, and be sure. He was anxious. He wanted to be sure that this tradition went on, and he cheated. Poets do not pass from poet to poet the news from generation to generation, not this news. We go as Blake did to read the poets of the past and hear them, as no one else ever heard them; then we know we’re hearing the news. Blake finds a Milton that no one ever heard, including Milton, and knows he’s gotten the news that Milton was passing on. You don’t pass on what you have, you don’t pass on a redundancy, but you have to be what you are for the transmission to go through. And poets read and find kindred spirits that assemble, and they’re the mark of the ancestors, the eternal ones of the dream that they then have present when they’re writing a poem.13 Is my poem measuring to the poem I admired? Sometimes that’s a rather pitiful one. Sometimes they’re wonderful, wonderful disproportions. My aunt Faye was one of the most imposing of those psychics in the family. When I got to college, I kept wanting to really top those wild ways of reading things. So I thought, here it’s The Waste Land, that’s going to get her. So I bring

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her, and I leave her in The Waste Land like a smart-assed kid, in my freshman year. I’ve just seen this poem as a way out, and I give it back, try it out on her. So I come back the next Sunday, and she says, well Bobby, she says, I don’t think that this man knows what’s going on in here. And in poetry, you know, the great danger is just being a medium. Eliot’s just a medium. He doesn’t want to meet what goes on in here. He doesn’t know, and she starts going on and on. He’s got these footnotes. No, this is this and this is this. I was just bug-eyed, and she’s got all these traditions. She says, no, you want a real poem, like “Trees.” And then she recites Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” You don’t want to be a medium, you don’t want to be invaded by all these voices. You use mediums, she said, you don’t just let voices come through that you don’t know anything about. When you have that when you’re a kid, you recognize maybe we’re also talking about a danger territory. Plato of course said that was exactly the danger territory the poet was in. I’m really now so caught I can’t tell whether it was Empedocles or Parmenides that he’s talking about.14 Plato is talking about the voice that comes in, which the poet is the medium of the voice and the medium of the story is continuing. And Pound’s job erases the proposition that it’s a medium table in which it’s coming in, and yet it’s voices as it goes on. He enters history and now he’s entering into a reincarnation, memory kind of history, all the way through. And I won’t take just the opening canto and not read the whole canto, but I want to show you what it was that struck me there right away. And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship. By the time we come to Circe, we realize who we are. And he knows what ship he’s on. Yeats had theories about Pound. He was loading the whole Neoplatonic system that never disappeared from the spiritual world that Pound can actually call upon when he’s in extreme spiritual distress. When he only briefly is in anything that looks like a scene in hell, and because he has no guide, is of course his own circle in hell he’s in. Dante hits his own circle, and Virgil says, if you stay around here I’m gonna leave you. You’re gloating in this circle. You’re supposed to move, you’re supposed to go with me, not stay around here where you find it fascinating. So we know Dante knows, and we know, and Virgil tells him, all right, you recognize your circle in hell, but that is not what you get to do now. He’s in the middle of a dark wood where he starts out, he doesn’t pretend he’s anyplace else. He’s not stuck of course in that circle, but there he is. Pound, who takes no guide, and rushes out, finds himself just in his own circle.

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In the perverters of the word, the man who misuses “Jew,” “kike,” “shit,” and so forth doesn’t drive them through to their consequence. Who can say “boss,” and still not see what that says about Mussolini. That man has a circle in hell. He prays, and Plotinus appears, and freezes the place in hell where he is, as if it were the lowest place of all of them. But freezes it solid so he doesn’t sink into it, and brings him up. And the first thing he sees is Blake running madly. What is Blake doing there? But it is what he saw when he is brought up out, and he sees it across the plane. You can find that in The Cantos. I see as the ritual of the order laid the fate on him. The French have two poets belonging to occult orders: one was [Honoré de] Balzac and the other is [Gérard de] Nerval. Victor Hugo was not in an order—that’s poetry that bled into that séance table, that’s an open book; it has not orders on top of it. But Yeats—in his order the key was the tarot—and I’m sure he read of Pound’s tarot, and read his fate. And in that fate must have been the betrayal of companions, must have been death. At Pisa, Pound expected to be killed. He expected that he had arrived at his fateful death, and that his betrayal of everything has now been declared. No way. And the grandeur that he comes to is realized, the government can’t call you a traitor. And the terms they were calling him—traitor— weren’t sufficient, and he comes to a profoundly moving position in which he realizes that he is in the circle of hell. Hell is where it doesn’t move. The same thing in purgatory is where it’s moving and in travail. So Pound at the end of The Cantos is in travail and despair. He’s betrayed the word. No place else except in The Cantos has anybody gone far enough to be able to speak from the depth of the sin of our entire world trauma. Yeats, I think, was just simply laying on them. You are going to come to a time when there will be no companions, and so in the end of The Cantos he recites how the companions have turned against each other, of what grief he’s in, because the most he recognized [was] the key group. Eliot hated Williams. Wyndham Lewis hated Joyce. Then Pound said [something like] their hatred ate into my dream season. And only at the end, when he can see his own, can he possibly say that he was in grief when he was young. And when the ones that he knew were the company. Williams is bewildered that Eliot hated him. Williams’s boast tells us that The Waste Land was a great event and that it derailed him.15 Pound isn’t talking about two people that didn’t like each other. In the mystery, it somehow comes back to the Pound. Now, it’s there at that same time—it is Yeats who had in his hand that book of Heydon’s, which is so rare.16 The key quotes from it are in a book by Waite, in his first book on the Rosicrucians,17 where he quotes key passages of Heydon, as [Mike] Weaver for instance quotes letters of Williams in his book on Williams,18 and gives us across the thing we need forward for our community

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coming through. Also we know that Pound attended the Quest lectures, and gave one on the troubadours, in which he talks about the mystery cult in poetry and the esoteric nature of the poem.19 He had attended those lectures because he wanted to know the news of the light body, of Aphrodite, who was a light. That crystal of Aphrodite appears at the end of the poem. The gods are there in address, that makes a sense. And then he has “Venerandam, / In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite.” But before that: “Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus / in officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.” 20 He [Pound] has an essay on the Renaissance translators of Homer, but here I want to bring forward the thing of reincarnation. Two things move through this poem, and Andreas Divus, he recognizes himself. He is involved in translating this very canto that he found and translated into Latin, and he was haunted by a reoccurrence of the task of translating. But all such reoccurrences of tasks throughout poetry are reincarnations, and Pound was a reincarnation of a line that goes back to Homer. And the lines that come after Homer. In Neoplatonic terms there are also spectral reincarnations: Are the translators, each one, coming in to reembody, to give into a new body, an august power? The joke always about doctrines of reincarnations is always why are the ones who are Cleopatra so not Cleopatra? Reembodying an august power is not quite the same as being an august power. And the translators—when they sneer, they’re making the same sneer they make toward the doctrine of reincarnation. I see this laid on in a tarot reading, and a doctrine of reincarnation Yeats would not have left alone. Yeats interfered with Pound’s going and finding where he would have his proper line. Homer was Pound’s find; that’s not Yeats. What he interfered with, what he wanted to see, was that [the] theosophical stage that he belonged to was passed on. And that did happen. But then he broke what seems to me the most important character of the poet in spirit, once we have reading writing. There must have been a long stream in which those who could manage to recite the poem kept it going until again there was a reincarnation of the poet. Let’s picture that we have an ur-Eliot, ur-Odyssey. If a poet occurs, and finally Homer occurs, disaster happens to the story. Poets do not just sing the song you heard; creative energies enter and the song changes. And we’ve got evidence there must have been a Homer because the telling of Helen, for instance, everybody knows [is] a falsification of [the] story. Meaning the re-creation of the story, meaning creative spirit has come in, so they are not passing the tribal story on straight. Herodotus gives an argument that historically Helen has to be in Egypt and can’t have been in Troy. Euripides [makes] another presentation. We find in the story of Stesichorus that this is a profound interference with a sacred story, is a profound blasphemy, with terrible consequences, and we have

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the blind Homer and the blind Stesichorus.21 That’s because a poet had happened along the line, passing on a sacred story, and it’s not a favor to any tribe. A poet knows more about their history than what they were passing on here, and he will tell them they are something they never dreamt they were. They have every reason to try to keep their tribal identity through time. And I think a Homer happens, or the poet happens, not carelessly, [but] in some time of confidence, in which a poet feels he can interfere with the identity of the tribe. A tribe isolated has to keep its memory of who it is so that it has the full feeling, so that when you’re born into it you’re born into a full feeling of identity, and that seems to be an absolute essential for us. It is for our family tribal feeling. All of us minutely mistell our family stories, and then research restores them. But the poet, as I said, changes. In poetry, once it’s written down, then the poet becomes a free-moving viral energy, and he ransacks the entire range. I don’t know poets who don’t, or of the ones I know, few don’t, and we call them “loners,” they’re not in this business of the transmission. In the transmission you search everywhere, and you name now your own teachers and your own ancestors. You create and name and recognize those you belong to. So in a theory of adoption to now adopt, where we think of parents adopting children, now the children adopt and recognize that they come from Hawthorne or they come from Melville, or they come from Emerson. They recognize that they belong to certain lines. You will find that their Emerson—and my Emerson, because I come from that line—has interfered in the same way with Emerson that the Homer we would pose has interfered with the whole business of Helen, the whole sacred business of Helen. The two coexist. Remember that august powers came forward, themselves creative, to tell us, not only that that guy Homer had interfered, but to tell us what the story now must come up, and by interfering you do another thing. That which was kept secret has to come forward into the public. If it was in the mystery, how come it comes forward, how come we’re told she was in Egypt? If it was sacred in that way it might be hidden in the story, but now it comes forward and becomes a troublesome incident and we can’t decide. So I see Yeats as interfering and Pound as blasted by the interference, blasted by some of the same things that saved him, but bewildered because, since, Yeats had laid the Neoplatonic, theosophic orders upon him, and when he’s in prayer he prays to them. The primal Dionysus appears so that’s not one of those orders, is it—the animal? When you find Pound calling upon his poetic orders he goes to [Henry] Lawes, he goes to [John] Jenkyns, he goes to the song he heard, and as a young man he asserted it.22 So in The Cantos at the end, that’s where we hear the names, the sacred ancestral names. And the two things have come on. And our modern poetry seems now to incur knowing about itself. Where before

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there had been free agents, we now have got a compelling net both of what I would recognize as my kindred, but [also to] what it belongs. And Dodds lecturing on The Greeks and the Irrational.23 In the years when I had gone back to the University of California where the Sather Gates Lectures24 were going, he was clearly, urgently, more than you would read on the page, saying he was sure that we were going to be unable to carry what he called “the conglomerate.” The conglomerate’s not the load of what’s out there in the library like when Pound looked and said he couldn’t read all the books. The conglomerate is what we admit we have come into contact with, the interface that came in there, and you’ve got to deal with it. Dodds felt that the Greeks had collapsed because in some way their civilization had become so stupendous, and because it wouldn’t become trivial. He saw that the Romans managed quite a lot by actually theatricalizing their themes. But remember, the Greeks did not theatricalize in that way. If Freud had read Seneca, would he ever have thought there was an Oedipus complex? It was a show out front, like a circus. But he didn’t, he was Greek-minded. It was a different world. But the empire can last with great strength because it’s theatrical and because it’s not serious. Dodds is thinking about him [Freud] because what he reveres is the seriousness. I was thirty and my life felt that way ’cause it was—I don’t know if I could deal with the mere conglomerate of being thirty. He was really saying, I can’t see that our civilization can carry the conglomerate of its meanings, that we now admit, if we will admit anything. We can’t do it as simply as the Jungians’ purpose, of our sacred things. He’s not talking about our information, he’s talking about our actual sacred things we brought forward in this vast complex. That Pound went to the Quest Society, printed in the Quest thing. The Quest Society proposed such a quest, such a way of building a ship, over and over: How are you going to go into Neptune? He was thinking of the conglomerate also very much in terms of the Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford mental world. And yet he was right there talking about it, that conglomerate—now it looks okay, how do we handle the cement? But it is Poseidon, it is the tumultuous sea in which the mind ultimately is. The mind in terror, in all of its surfaces of consciousness, is a tumultuous sea, and has built, over and over again, boats. H.D. has a poem in which she recites those boats as set out, sights the boats. I was thinking of Lawrence’s “have you built the ship of death,” the boat that will pass through.25 In The Cantos at the end, a Ra and Set boat appears, to contain Ra and Set, and that’s what drove me to write a poem of that boat myself, because I began then, because it comes into our poetic matter to go back and see.26 No wonder, it was static, yes. Egypt lasted so long in its mysteries because it had in its boats what most other people set apart in an absolute nightmare

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of water. But it didn’t have its boat until all of that was there. And then it looks stationary; it is moving only in a different sense, and yet is on the sea. Pound is one of those many incarnations of whatever the Odysseus is. Now remember he is also the man who talked too much and who talked too cleverly, and who somehow had both a magic and a fate, and deepest meaning of the fact that poetry was double-tongue between two names. And with warnings coming now of that other one is talking and now we will know that his talk is saying something that you are not hearing, so listen carefully. He is brought up before Athena, who says, you have been brought up before the very power that you take that word from. You think your talk is cunning, you think you do not know who you are. H.D. does something else, but it still has to do exactly with Homer. It interests me that when we come to Charles Olson and myself, it is Hesiod’s work, very close to, and Heraclitus. And then Homer begins to come through and through and through. But I wonder why the Theogony and the Works and Days didn’t come through. We were talking about protections. We’re in a larger drama, we can’t rescue ourselves when we’ve got to do whatever we’ve got to do. So no, Pound turns to Confucius, that’s his Works and Days. He does have that, he does know where that is. H.D. is really adrift in an astral world. She goes actually to séance tables in her fifties and sixties, and then in her life poem, when she comes to write it, Helen in Egypt, she does something different from impersonation. She takes herself to be Helen: “I take myself to be Helen.” She had schizophrenic episodes. They were episodes of great bewilderment and actual schizophrenia where some of the personalities knew the other ones, and others didn’t know about what was going on to the total personality. That kind of multiple personality occurred three times in her old age, and meant that she lived in a kind of asylum all that time for a very good reason. But also what’s remarkable is that the writer was the one who knew what was going on. So at the end of one of these stupendous episodes, which clinically is observed and so forth, Norman Pearson said, Hilda, could you write what that was like, and we have an amazing novel called Magic Name27 that is a revelation of what it is to be in the spiritual world in which not only are you in a multiple set of person[s], but you are in a multiple set of worlds. In one of the depths of the thing she does not know if she’s lied about having hallucinated the man who is in the hall in the eighteenth-century garden. She’s come to the ultimate of that place that Odysseus is master of. The cunning master of words does not come to that place supposedly. Norman Pearson gave me the keys to his room in the old library at Yale. The books weren’t in Yale, they were in his library in the middle of the library, and I was to be taking notes on anything I wanted to in that whole room, and

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I suddenly saw that on the shelf of her books, and there were the occult books and so forth, including Magic Incantations.28 I saw suddenly there was a volume of The Cantos; there were no other volumes of The Cantos. H.D. began reading The Cantos when they were in a collective volume. She went through The Cantos. I sat up all night copying down in a notebook what she underlined, where she checked. She checked every appearance of Circe. I hadn’t noticed how many swine and pigs there were in that poem. Remember, it’s fascinating: he’s the guy who didn’t get changed. It’s almost like Circe came around; Circe reads the poem, and she said, there’s just one thing here, Homer: Odysseus. She had checked it out, she’d checked straight through. And yet that isn’t where she appears when she herself takes herself to be Helen. That’s not a reincarnation. “I take myself to be Helen.” In order that there be a Helen, I will take myself. In order that someone stands here in front of you and go out on a limb, which is not a limb, and the minute we doubt it, I won’t even fall for it; you see I’m in for safe, in order that anybody do that. I take myself to be such a fool. In other words, there must be one. It’s back in those dramatic monologues that the whole thing is opened up. Would you expect [Robert] Browning to jump all that distance? I read [in] a review of a book recently that Browning was a cop-out because those things aren’t serious. But then read the one poem of Browning’s that we are told to read in The Cantos, and here Browning was not Yeats’s man in this—this is one of the places where Pound tells us his key, and that’s [Browning’s] “Sordello.” You’ll find indeed that Browning knew about going through worlds and into persons and out of persons and that his “Sordello” belongs to a romance poetry that only Robert Browning could have known about. So again the key in this is that I’m sure that’s where Pound found that one could move that way in this. And H.D., turning in the “Pallinode” to be Helen, moves between the Hellenistic, with all that fun, the Hellenistic readings of Homer, when Homer becomes theosophied. The other great distance between Olson and myself is that everywhere in regard to the myth, I have theosophied. A scholar of Gnostic texts said, “Where did you find that Gnostic myth?” And I grinned like the one god I will allow myself to impersonate did, to Apollo, and I said, “If I didn’t find it and cheated, I must be a myth maker.” I was sure it was there. The myth maker’s sure it’s there. I said, oh yeah, I’ve looked for it, but I’m sure I actually am a scholar and I found it. If I’m not a scholar I must be that awful guy that made it up, what actually happened. You interfered, you interfered with the whole thing. She [H.D.] starts with just such texts (they weren’t there originally, by the way). Pearson wanted her to make a series of records, and she was in the course of writing the poem, so she sort of says what’s going to happen. She turned that into a form in her poem. She realized that she could begin to get different levels of it.

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And now we have just our little five minutes and I will let this take the charge with all faith that I took “The Door.” Didn’t “The Door” really do it without my having to say anything after “The Door”? She is taking herself to be Helen. This is the Helen that they’re talking about, the Helen that’s in Homer. There’s one place where the Helen in this poem does something that I thought, “Did she make that up?” Every occurrence of Helen is a reincarnation of Helen, is an announcement now. This is the opposite of the descent from a Neoplatonic order: they’re all an announcement that the self, that the woman self must be taken in Helen, and then this, of course, in a theosophizing world is also the Gnostic Helen. There’s not a Helen she misses, and her love of Goethe goes deep. In the book she separated because in some way it was the most personal; it contained the fact that she, in her old age—she was an old woman, and more than that, limping and crippled. It’s the nurse who appears in the Helen of Goethe. Goethe’s Helen is the deepest read throughout and reflecting back along with all rumors of secret Helen texts: Helen is not yet found, and all the time of course, absolutely revelatory to her of the central dream reading of her own life as belonging to the matter of poetry. She’d gone to Freud. To what extent did her dreams, to what extent did her fantasies and her hallucinations belong to the matter of psychiatry, to what she would do with her soul? But this is not a soul book. This is a book in which appears a power in full of a self that is a woman in poetry that will not be forgotten. That has of the same order of Odysseus. The Helen has been lingering, but we found her in men’s poems, didn’t we? She’s there. By the way, [there is] the present trouble in which women feel it’s cheating for women to be present in men’s poetry. This is as if Dracula would announce, how come I’m in your book, Bram Stoker, ’cause you ain’t a vampire? The important thing is this coming forward [of] a figure in poetry, and really coming here with a self, herself can be taken in Helen. His self, we will have a very bizarre turn but I’ve read alchemical texts. His/herself may be taken in Helen. As a matter of fact, here, we do find it is his/herself. And that was part of what, psychically, H.D. experienced it in her split, his/herself, and the Helen can contain that. “We all know the story of Helen of Troy but few of us have followed her to Egypt.” 29 All right. A series, following it all the way through to where you really know it is. “How did she get there?” Stesichorus of Sicily in his Pallinode, was the first to tell us. Some centuries later, Euripides repeats the story. Stesichorus was said to have been struck blind because of his invective against Helen, but later was restored to sight, when he reinstated her in his Pallinode. Euripides, notably in The Trojan Women, reviles her, but he also is “restored to sight.” The later, little

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understood Helen in Egypt, is again a Pallinode, a defence, explanation or apology.30 Right here I have to read what is quite clearly a defense, explanation, or apology. I was going to say, “no way are we going to have any defense, explanation, or apology.” I’m going to begin in that poem and not find some passage of my own. And I kept thinking, why take the beginning? How easy, maybe I never read any more. Just when I said we weren’t going to get into—we were going to be protective and we were going to be out there—we’re suddenly in an entirely different thing. We are in “Pallinode.” According to the Pallinode, Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities. The Greeks and the Trojans alike fought for an illusion.31 This is a deep reading of this sense, of the Helen in Troy sense, of what is going on in the Iliad, the revelation. This is a woman who has been in the illusions. She is not saying that it is not a reality, real illusions, of such a powerful kind that you can’t tell if they’re real or unreal. Did I really, am I really hallucinating? Or I’m saying “hallucinate,” so caught with the language we say. Do not despair, the hosts surging beneath the Walls. (no more than I) are ghosts; do not bewail the Fall, the scene is empty and I am alone, yet in this Amen-temple, I hear their voices, there is no veil between us, only space and leisure and long corridors of lotus-bud furled on the pillars, and the lotus-flower unfurled, with reed of the papyrus;

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Amen (or Zeus we call him) brought me here.32 The next lecture will be on the gods. This one will have as its key, and then set forth on the sea. “And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers.” The next one is, and set “forth on the godly sea,” so we’ll center next time on Poseidon, on the sea of Poseidon, which is filled with god forces. We’ll be back in the Helen, which is that sea also in other aspects, other places of that sea. One of the phenomenons of our time is that in The Cantos you can have all the gods, but you cannot have Yahweh. You can have Our Lady barely; you cannot have Jesus. There are such a company of awesome gods who have commanded history, histories of not just tribes of men. While Yahweh may once have been a tribal god, I think that [he is] a commanding presence throughout. I think Confucius today must find his way to have his right behavior within all the raving, wild, senile, volcano madness of the Psalms. The great step of H.D. is that if we are gonna let the gods come back, her Helen does not exist in any Greek remove at all. Flooding in come the whole company and present throughout. All right, in that case, is it only the fall of Troy? And I’ll read this again: do not bewail the Fall, the scene is empty and I am alone yet in this Amen-temple.

“Forth on the godly sea” The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry

T

he proposition of this lecture is to address the appearances of gods in twentieth-century poetry and raise the question: What is the need of god in a realm of poetry? I won’t worry about the need in other realms. Is poetry embarrassed before the presence of the gods, of gods in poetry itself? The proposition of the last lecture about excursions took the opening lines in the opening canto: “And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers.” And the line of this lecture is “forth on the godly sea.” I think we should hear first where Pound was putting that “forth on the godly sea.” He knew it was going to have to stand forward, beside—and with an enormous drive in poetry—beside T. S. Eliot’s already apparent rectitudes in relation to God and church. They are very close together. But remember there is another person where Pound was also not going to not hear that line going, and that is a poet that is of equal importance in his poetry, D. H. Lawrence. There was projection of encoding and of impersonation of gods and a cult of the gods. And then eventually Lawrence’s search for gods is flooded and taken over by gods. Then Eliot attacks in After Strange Gods, but actually in that same period he also attacks Ezra Pound, oddly enough. (Does Mr. Pound really believe in Pound’s adherence to Confucius?) If you turn to The Waste Land, but even more astoundingly, if you turn to Four Quartets, they are constantly breaking through to the world of strange gods. And that is one of the great cover essays, “After Strange Gods.” And when I grew up in the ’30s everybody saw Eliot as attending that Episcopalian church every Sunday. Meanwhile if he sat down at all to write a poem, I think that strange brown river was appearing and heavy appearances flood through of the 123

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Hindu world into the European world that he proposed he might hold onto. So we have in the two movements there, of Eliot and Lawrence. Lawrence came to this world. Remember, he is a great caller-up of Pan, a great caller-up of the gods that had been disclosed to Europe all over again, in The Golden Bough at the end of the century, at the same time as the writing of Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. By uncovering what was supposedly an ancient vegetation cult and the nature of primitive cults of the gods, while that may be dismissed by the anthropologists as poor anthropology, the actual effect of Frazer was of an entirely different order. That work sowed into the European mind and spirit the vegetative cult. It doesn’t even signify that the Romans had one or the Greeks had one, because in the 1920s masses of people began to have such a sense of the reality of Christ, of the reality of Attis, of the reality of any god they met. We fail to apprehend the major forces of our time if we do not see that for or against Freud, or for or against Jung, we are immersed in their figures. In recent things we’ve got corrections of The Golden Bough. They may be corrections, but they still can’t intrude upon the hold and reading, and certainly won’t, when we exist still in deep offense to the earth, to the raising into the imagination of civilized man a meaning throughout in which religion is earth rites, earth cult. Freud of course is drawing on and influenced by The Golden Bough, reinforced by The Golden Bough, overconvinced, too, by The Golden Bough, because it is a sexual cult in which the revivification of the earth is entirely in a series of sacred marriages in sacred places, and blood rites returning the body to the earth. Freud’s Oedipus picture, or the death of the father he gives in Civilization and Its Discontents—that death of the father is the rite in the wood that Frazer addressed—[relates to] the ceremony in the Bough, [which] was the replacement of the old king, and the killing of the old king, and the marriage of the young Oedipus, the young father killer, the marriage of that Oedipus to the mother. Freud, like Frazer, gives us the trouble but does not follow through the story, because while he talked about an Oedipus complex, Freud did not talk about a Jocasta complex. Freud would not have been able to talk about repressed anything if he had read Seneca’s Oedipus instead of the Greek Oedipus. The Romans were not noted for repressing. It’s very hard to get the idea that there was some subtle undercurrent, because they just came blaring out of the circus, and still seem to in [Federico] Fellini. Fellini has gone too far, and then you go back and see the Satyricon also went too far, and then you go back to an historian and find everybody went too far. So it’s a perfect example of a hopeless place for psychoanalysts to try to get, absolutely hopeless. They couldn’t even keep up with

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it. And Freud and Frazer were great detectives, coming right upon of course, as now they have a popular novel, right upon Sherlock Holmes. It’s a great era of the detective novel, in which a murder is committed and you’re uncovering a murder. Where it comes together in Frazer, this rite has something to do with, not only the sacred of a sacred father and a king, but the gods. That’s the very earth foyer of the gods and opens up a blood cult, in which there is some tremendum. You better look at dates, but in my sense of it, [Rudolf] Otto’s naming of the numinous in the German world, his description of the numinous on the idea of God comes in the same period. So that the nature of the idea of God in Christian theological terms has been brought to this same area of dread, and of some stupendous quality of a place, dread in a place. I was describing Pound as he set out on a sea journey and Odysseus came into the realm of a Poseidon, which was a sea of tumult. In the very first draft of The Cantos, it is a sea catch that he throws upon the marketplace. And in the closing cantos he is in the wash of shipwreck. Those are fragments. Both Eliot and Pound are aware of it: Odysseus is after all the man who comes through the shipwreck, and in The Cantos we’ve got the wreck of the ship, which then is identified in Pound’s mind, and ours, projected as the wreck of Europe. The many figures, the ant and a broken ant hill, [are] but the fragments and the jetsam. Isn’t our only role in relation to our period to rescue the ship? Pound gave a series of Rosicrucian-like essays, “Gathering the Limbs of Osiris.” 1 What I’m picturing: Pound in his despair at the last has just the scattered bits of the ship. But the ship is a body. This morning when I wanted to get my mind off of what I was going to be talking about today, I turned to an interview of Creeley on art and came across a passage in which Creeley was talking on it. He was very interested in the self, of the ego, being a ship, being a vessel. I stared. I was going to bring that passage intact. It’s the interview with Kevin Powers,2 and all of a sudden in the middle of it, Creeley turns and starts talking just absolutely as in a dream message. And he does relate it straight to the ship of death. But he is reading it now, not a ship of death. Name it the ship of death, but it is somehow in Lawrence the essential body, essential individuality, that all alone goes forth upon the sea. And we’re then right near what happens in the course of Olson’s poetry, constantly referring to the sea. In the beginning Gloucester, the fishing town, Gloucester that really is the edge of the North Atlantic—not the edge of the continent, or the interface, isn’t it? But the man faces the sea, as the maps show us, as he shows us continuously, and then turns and faces the land, I mean that’s Dogtown and so forth; both the land and sea must yield their secrets. And actually the compass has no direction, no directive outward, because you are at the

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magnetic center. And this is that same ship, essentially a ship in which, now not a picture of a shipwreck, but a picture that I first knew, not in Olson but in a wild figure of Henry Miller’s in which he said as we went into the Second World War, he wanted to dive right into the sea in its turmoil, and I think it was like a whale. An extinct species, and so is Miller. I don’t remember exactly where he got it, how that figure came, but it was still that same figure to go into the sea. Not to manage it but to go with the whole thing which he saw, in immense turmoil, and you had a sense of life in the flux of the sea. We will return to pictures of this sea as being a ground of the gods, but the one I want to speak of now, and then return to it is, and I think the link here is to talk about that center first. Now we picture it as being at sea; actually that’s strong in my poetry. You find me constantly proposing I’m at sea. I’m at a loss. So in a way I don’t know that that is Charles’s sense. You’ll find me also inheriting from Charles taking soundings, which I do, which I’m certain that that’s what we do when we hear the rhymes, and we hear more than that, we hear how hearing the rhymes of a word’s existence was to Olson, so that it went clear to its roots. Soundings means to hear the bottom of sea and also know the depths. And that is the O.E.D. and it didn’t go far enough for Charles. I’m reading currently a book on Saussure that points out that Saussure rescued us from just that sense of roots,3 but of course that was being rescued at the beginning of the century and we weren’t rescued at all, because Saussure insists that we live in a language which is only the one that is going. He tries to insist that our living language we speak, the language we are actually in the presence of, is not the language that has roots or previous events.4 But that’s like a man who has just rowed out on the sea with bad weather warnings, and will swear to you that what’s happening at the bottom of the sea cannot affect the top of the sea, in any way. I asked in a French class, how do you say “undercurrents,” because I began to realize if I said sous courant there was no such word. That’s where the French are. Imagine being in a language with no undercurrents. It’s hard to find an undertow, because it gets mixed up with backwash. The American English language distinguishes what happens in the surf, or what happens when you’re in an undertow, whether it’s a backwash or an undertow, a tidal wave. All of those are well laid out compared with the language of the mot juste. And just try it for “undertow.” And they must be the happiest swimmers in the world, who have not encountered certain things that are liable to sweep you off your feet. Riptide. But we know about undertow and riptide. And this area is the one in which the gods also come forward, and their voices and the charging upon the land of breakers, and the meeting point between land and sea. The most important thing about gods to me is that their cult rises and finds

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new terms. Certainly at the beginning of the century we find the cult of the gods finding a way for it to take place. And the question comes in my mind, maybe in the classical period in Greece, when we have great architecture and great statues of gods, the cult of the gods used the Greek genius and yearning for statues and buildings in order to take its cult there. It’s interesting that as we move into our period, a kind of scholarly detective energies of the gods set up a cult there. What we call a “cult” in psychoanalysis produces gods in the same way that sculptors did. They simply take their cult in the thing that’s going on, and it must be one of the most unwitting periods. There is in the age of reason, and there is a book on eighteenth century faces the gods, I think that’s the title of it, I don’t remember the author.5 Adams and Jefferson set up in the age of reason a cult of gods. Not because it is reasonable but because it seems to be the terms in which the gods will be there. Atheism is one of the highest cults of god. It’s an intense experience: emptiness, the death proposition which Nietzsche first experienced. We have from Plutarch the story of the women wailing on the shore that god is dead. The temples are empty, we have Plutarch saying the temples are empty. And we have a flood of news of gods on the subject that they’re empty. Men’s need for gods means they will set up the old cults in terms we wouldn’t believe. Well, anthropology supposedly was explaining to us how superstitious it was to have gods, and now we’ve got more. They are social entities, not in an unconscious sense at all because their cult does not exist in the unconscious. It’s perfectly apparent that we must have an unconscious. Our bodies show that we have circuits and systems that operate, and we are not conscious of them. They’re subconscious systems because they can find the symptoms, so some part of the body knows they’re there. Some part of the body is conscious, and you can begin to see that it’s just that the mind does not want to admit. So the admission of the gods and evocation of the gods are two terms that are reciprocal terms and they’re much like our terms of visitations and excursion[s]. We’re not, by the way, in taking this evocation of gods and this admission, admitting that they’re there when they’re there, and admitting them fully, which means searching for them, so we come to the uncovering [of] their presence. The psychoanalytic layers are uncovering their presence in the language, not in some unconscious. We have a creative life. We make up pictures upon walls and in poems and everywhere, to stand for what we can’t get in contact with. I’m taking the unconscious in the stupendous range in which it was first proposed, the one for instance William James believed. Freud also believed, so where he’s talking about the conscious that later gets put into the collective unconscious, he talks about a subconscious. But our human testimony is so filled with witness to man’s being haunted by, filled with archetypes which are actually the figures

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that we see on the caves, the figures that art has produced endlessly, so there are events of consciousness. My trouble with Jungianism or with Plato is that [they] propose archetypes when actually they’re things we’ve seen. There’s not one archetype of the collective unconscious, in all of Jungian talk, which was not first seen by Jung and by his patients. And seen—sculptors made these. What are they [the archetypes] doing then? They take all the things of the world and they become sacred. We’ll use the “interface” again. They stand there where beyond we have no way of being conscious. We acknowledge the greatest expansion of consciousness, of knowing what everything is. We will always be at a place where we face what we don’t know. In the serious figures of God that is exactly what God is—the unknowable. The very first possible visible. If you take in the first one you could possibly be, that would be the Shekinah, and then there might be an image.6 If you have an image it is not what’s above, and yet there’s a mathematical image in some way. That’s still in the conscious world. Everything you can draw about the tree of Sephiroth and everything you can draw,7 to even draw that above the Shekinah there is a triune power—all that is the conscious. I can speak of it, I can draw a geometrical figure. I don’t mean that it’s right or wrong, but that’s the figure that the conscious mind draws of it. So creativity is always absolutely and utterly creative, and that’s how it pictures itself, as creation. There’s no guarantee. The awesome thing about that which lies beyond the reach of consciousness is that it is not even a property of consciousness. And consciousness, once it names it, all of that is consciousness’s picture. We could say it was a vast anxiety, but it’s also a recognition and it is also drawing what you haven’t seen yet. Drawing, filling the caves I see, caves. Yes, they’re getting together with the animal world. We read it rightly, they’ve [animals] got the most intense things of their world. They see it with great intensity, but they seem to have a small lexicon. They are located with sun and moon and earth and a set of animals. Selfimage is very difficult in those cases—I mean in an image that’s already part animal and felt, so it’s a feeling. On the story of feeling, all of that is thoroughly in the conscious mind if it’s there at all. I see illustrations on the walls of [a cave] as an impossibility of seeing everything. Because it [the art on the wall] uses the things of the world and because it wants to reach what it can’t reach, it searches out the whole world, as science does. Science is exactly the same as art because it is seeking to know all the knowable in the same illustration of a cave because it is driven by its absolute insecurity. It can even name the unconscious, which is a name in the consciousness. There has to be a leap here to even understand what it is that one goes out and poses. Now the Poseidon sea is a picture in between a picture of the sea, everything

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that men knew about the sea. And meanwhile man goes, oceanography, everything, he’ll measure it, it’s quite there. It still is an area that we’re involved in measuring. I’m trying to define its currents, trying to find principles or formulas. I think that we found uses for it. But the thing that drives us to find is still this illustration—how to have a world that is so illustrated that we don’t confront what we confront all the time. And by the way, we of course are exactly of that vast part. So that experience is much easier to be in. That’s the design of the boat again, in which you can’t read these poems without being aware that the sea is also the man. Olson talks about soundings and about the absolute necessity of knowing the fishing grounds. I mean, in the beginning of Gloucester, it’s awfully important for him to be projecting all the time that he’s got ahold of a history. But my picture of the genius of Olson or the creativity throughout is that he’s reassured that he’s addressing Gloucester. Every picture he makes of Gloucester, he knew it will take the actual document to make sure that it isn’t where the document looks when it’s in the poem. The document in the poem ceases to be attached to Gloucester and starts to act as if it were metaphor, a word that Charles very much attacked. The trouble with the word “metaphor”—it says that which can carry the light across. In no way can you connect with it, so that the thing that appears is both metaphor and the impossibility. Who is Ferrini? He’s actually there, he encourages, like in the wickedness of a dream, he encourages Charles to go along, and I’m struck, because I tried to find the migration point in the first book of Maximus for when the tremendum appears. In all the openings of Maximus there are passages where you see what Charles knows he might be up against. You get my drift: 4 Winds (or let me call it “Island,” or something more exact— “Gloucester,” just that flat, making my polis yours or if you have to be romantic, why not call it “The Three Turks Heads” and have something at least which belongs to the truth of the place as John Smith so strikingly did?8 Toward the end of this book we find John Smith in the borderline,9 between looking like he so strikingly did, and beginning to move into almost like a

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character in Alice in Wonderland, into the tremendous and typhonic and subterranean powers at the beginning of the world. He’s berating a little magazine, Four Winds: the shocking play you publish with God as the Master of a Ship! In Gloucester-town you publish it, where men have cause to know where god is when wooden ships or steel ships, with sail or power, are out on men’s business on waters which are tides, Ferrini, are not gods on waves (and waves are not the same as deep water)10 It is not reassuring: the dream has an announcement that deep water and the poet’s business rightly are soundings. And so we’re on the thing. Why does a poet search myth? Why is it necessary, if a poet is to begin at all, not to put a myth in a poem? Know where the rocks are. I’m talking about the rocks in a language. In a poem’s venturing into a world of poetry, where even if only two people in the room were into poetry, they would see the rocks and know them, and you’ve crashed on them because you didn’t know what it was that happened to that poem. So the poet comes to know masses of myth. For a long time it was thought that the poet was connecting us with Western tradition, but that was blown in The Golden Bough. Untenable anthropology did marvelously for the new world of man in which there would be no traditions. Malinowski, anybody could turn around and look at their tribes, but they couldn’t look at them today and find that, because they also have undergone the transmutation of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. They have been thoroughly painted and moved into the world dream in which all tribes can mingle now and all tribes have the same dream, and it’s a tremendous dream. This was the anxiety of gods that I think I spoke of in the first lecture. Can we know all of their presences, but since we know we are of one world, we have no horizons. It’s wonderful: we raise the full Pre-Socratic shock of the horizon in one where all of us know the horizons are now both there and not there. And so they have a different significance—they’re

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unitive. One would have thought the news was in that we were a species by the beginning of the nineteenth century. What in the world is a tribal identity? Now, once it’s washed away, that does not mean that its gods washed away, its cultures washed away, its art washed away. No, it floods throughout the world. The tribe was a boundary. And Charles starts with an oath to Gloucester, just as a man setting up a cult. I do know that in our first conversations he wanted to know what did I think and what did I know about a temenos, a place that you kept. Now we’ve moved to a place where the world is a place we keep, and its sacred places we do know each, say, as we know Tamalpais and so forth.11 The places where you are as sacred as the local cult. This is like what had begun to happen in the Greek world in the Hellenistic period, when it was flooded with Buddhists and yoga. Alexandria is the first example of a nexus, in which there is a flood through tribal boundaries. Tribal powers can mingle and populate. So that while the Egyptologists will tell us hermetic texts are not Egyptian, they are. They are also Greek. But they also begin to show manifestations that look a little like voodoo. The gods appear and take hold of people. In extension this whole world seems to be a cauldron; out of this come some of the earliest figures we have of an alchemy, of the mixing of elements and of the mixing of opposites of dark, light leading to a transmutation, once out of that Hellenistic period. And all periods that enter this breaking through of boundaries and flooding through of energies return to alchemy in some guise or other. Jung returns to alchemy. That’s one of the most powerful areas of new thought and suggestion about alchemy. It’s overly sure that it’s Jungian. Jung had the cult in what we call the “imagined mind.” And that one posits itself in this new ground in which the gods are reoccurring and in which alchemy reappears. Its message goes through when you go there. Just as Rosicrucianism picked up the mélange of the Hellenistic period, and spreads, as Frances Yates begins to uncover it,12 spread[s] such a rumor that all of Europe was looking for the master of the Rosicrucians. The only difference between the master of the Rosicrucians and Jung is, everybody knows where Jung is, and the master of the Rosicrucians, no one knew where he was. We also begin to be aware there were shamans and people who could begin to become the great con men of the front of the unconscious. They would enact the unconscious. While we’re illustrating what we knew nothing of, now we can act what we know nothing of. Everything is a meaning, and suddenly, is it more tremendous if I can convert it? Martha Graham’s Medea is the same place—you say, thank God, that’s Medea.13 And now I see what it all is, and everybody is perfectly at home. So dance can occupy lots of different areas; so does poetry. It’s at that point that we see something

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of an activity of holding and keeping that order and extending that order. And reassuring. The gods I don’t put in the unconscious, and most of them do not have their cult; they stand way forward from the boundary of what we don’t know. They enlarge the central experiences of our life, and so they’re tremendous. Where we have god cults, they’re experienced as something outside us. We have a psychology that brings us up and into a realm of an experience of other orders of being. Are they projected? I still hear in Olson’s proposition of a projective verse how strong reassurance is that we project these figures. But when men give an account of being in that state—the ones who have been, by the way—or when they portray it, it’s hard to see that that’s a projection. There was an intense presence in a single statue that you can start and have the feeling of a cult and return to this place where this power is and [is] seen. There was such a cult in the little town of Banyalbufar.14 After we had been there for half a year we were taken to the fuente, which we realized when we went there was actually the center of the town. At Easter they made their circumambulation of the town, on the days of the Passion, and we were asked to join. And the town’s name for Jess and myself was Los Amigos—that was a very definite thing, even what the town needed, Los Amigos. We were asked and we said, “Should we go in the church?” And Madeleina15 turned with scorn and said, “No way, absolutely no way.” What we marched in was a circumambulation that must have gone back to the beginnings of time. That town already had a strange kind of time it lived in, but certainly they knew it was far back of the Muslim occupation and of the Christian occupation of that island. And the fuente had a kind of a[n] early Roman Phoenician look, that is, the rock had been carved. Just enough to actually make it so it was a door with the water coming up out of the rock. But el árbol hadn’t been carved and it was a tree. El árbol was not Phoenician or Islam[ic] or Christian. And we were taken into that presence and in a sense introduced, and it was no religious ceremony. We weren’t told, look at here. But you read it straight. We were trying to ask were there witches, and then it was explained to us that that’s the town next door, all witches, [but] there are none here. And we only got into trouble when we were asking, we suddenly realized it’s fadas [fairies] we were asking about, and then no one wanted to talk about it. Cats and fadas you do not talk about in the village we were in. While these layers are layers of what we would recognize as religion, I don’t think the people in that village experienced it as that. There were their numinous centers, and we know we’re not in the unconscious either, absolutely there. We’re going forward a bit toward the presence of the world that I felt was truly numinous. Potentially they had kept a cult, although they were returning to it all the time. See, I asked about fadas and then we caught on that

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you do not [ask]. This life is the stage in cult that seems to be able to go through thousands of years, and it’s called “keeping the seed” of the cult. If it’s cultivated you’ve got witches again. If it’s cultivated for only a short time, Joan [of Arc] will talk to the fadas in the tree, and Our Lady will come and she will ride forward, a supernatural power, and it would take the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the British to burn her. And in an absolute turn, her male counterpart will be yield[ed] away, and at the end of it will be a great avatar of chopped-up and massacred bodies, and the blood part of an occult coming to what? There is a seed, the tree is kept. This keeping of the tree, the keeping of the thing where it might happen, we do in our lives. In Freudianism we keep a trauma. Freud early says anything that’s satisfying must disappear. So the entire phenomenal world, the entire conscious world, has not emerged. His proposition is that we see only what we’re engaged with, only what we’re trying to come to see. See how different this is from the unconscious? In the largest thing it’s a creation, we are doing our duty and creation was going, as we go into this realm of seed. In some schools of occultism we are compared with bees, or we hear it again in Rilke, echoing those schools when he says we’re the bees of the invisible, storing the honey in the language of poetry.16 Poetry also keeps its seeds all the way through, in the lines of transmission that the poet turns to and finds himself involved with. And you will find Charles Olson, for instance, and the poets we’re talking about, Pound and H.D., seeking those seeds that they also have met, because they can’t pick up seeds that haven’t been there in their lives. If you do not have the tree, you can’t enlarge the cult, you can’t cultivate it, and then you come into that garden, that in the United States was seen very brilliantly by Hawthorne to be Rappaccini’s daughter. That’s where the story of Rappaccini’s garden is. This is in with our nineteenth-century reinstatement: the garden is central. While we have a Western tradition, and we transmit it, those things we call myths, they are seeds. When they’re cultivated, and then you find it a very different activity, one that interested Jane Harrison. When the myth of Joseph and [his] coat, for instance, is taken and then you begin to cultivate it, you get almost immediately a dream magic, but in the actual world of the multicolored coat. Immediately you get dream readings, you get hermits in the well. You would get all the stages of the story. You get Potiphar’s wife,17 because people start enacting, now that they’re cultivating the seed. And as they cultivate it, the story begins to individualize. And while it is the incident of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, it will now prove to be absolutely individual. And we have that most important thing in art in which counterparts appear. The counterparts when they appear, the thing that’s in a fugue, that’s the cultivation of a figure. The opening of a plainsong, the opening of a melody from

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the possible relations of a series of tone. The opening of a scale, just a scale, the appearance of a scale, is the cultivation of sound. As we keep sound alive on any terms at all we’ve still got the kernel there. Always the kernel, and so it’s open, anyone can enter and start the cultivation. In our period, along with the massive cultivation goes lots of rationalization about what you’re doing, it’s a great wish coming forward, and wants, in the cultivation, to have power to emerge. And so lots is hidden. We assume that psychoanalysis is therapeutic, but not the people. We find Freud saying that there was a misfortune that arose in individual therapy, because he’s talking about a great happening en masse: Civilization and Its Discontents and talking about civilization upon civilization, on the same scale in which Dante talks about a civilization of civilization. When Jung comes to look at Europe, it’s there you see that his huge terms begin to have kinds of dream intuitions, and one telling a story again. I came across a quote from Stockhausen, the composer, who was asked in an interview, what is he doing related to Cage, and how does he relate to some of the things in physics, all sorts of current ideas?18 You’re in the current of ideas? What does that mean to you? And he answers: Absolutely, I think that once we’re able to see our era from a historical perspective, a general spirit of the age will emerge to make all the different faculties and disciplines look very much alike. For I believe there is a spirit inherent in evolution which, while being inside, also comes from the outside. It penetrates the human mind and changes it slowly. And while he [Stockhausen] does not extend further where that goes, in the entire interview, in the work we do, we know something is changing. In despair at the end of his life, Spicer at a poetry conference gave a lecture on poetry and politics, and said that poetry does not change politics at all. It doesn’t change minds.19 It’s impossible that it doesn’t; language changes minds. If you have aversion to it, do not listen to it. To do almost anything to it once it comes in, there is no such thing as a change not going on. But what did Spicer mean by “poetry,” because he had an intense sense of something coming from the outside, or from the inside, that would actually be working in the human mind and changing it slowly? And what we are is a manifestation of something going on. And he said of the unconscious, or he called his [unconscious] “dictations from Martians,” so he was asked, “What do you mean Martian?” And he said, if it comes from the place I’m talking about, [it doesn’t matter] if you call it Martians or the unconscious. If there is an unconscious it’s us and the universe, it is not over there outside. [William] James was looking at systems in the body that he couldn’t see any way that they’d be unconscious. By the time we are talking of neutrons, that must be in the conscious, so we have a world in the conscious that even emerges, and we still have a larger sense, and not a smaller sense, of the unconscious.

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Even neutrons are not the unconscious. In James’s day just beyond the atoms might be a proposition of the unconscious. But now we have the world of particles. It’s still the drawing on the cave. It’s still the conscious world, it’s absolutely, recognizably the conscious world. And bravo for those who feel that we have diminished in some way the proposition of the unconscious. Spicer has a sense of inside/outside, and working back to where we talked about an excursion and a visitation, something felt outside and inside. Movements in relation to our own human boundaries, defined by our speech, the world speaking to us in our speech, speaking to it, but in two different languages. What does speech verge upon? An area of sound or noise that could become noise? And you find composers like Cage in our period extending there, taking away the tribal boundaries of the octave, taking away the tribal boundaries of the range that we define for instruments. In Plato there’s a feeling if the modes were to change at all there would be a complete collapse, not only of a civilization or a government, but of the very central orders of the world itself. Our period goes out far beyond what was proposed about modes, and its adventure breaks what we thought were the boundaries and advances into what we thought was noise, and we become sophisticated in that area. There it is—John Cage. Noise that we immediately recognize as John Cage. We climbed Gaudí Cathedral, because we hadn’t seen any shots of the Virgin and Joseph, and we climb out at the risk of falling off everything astounded, because in the first place they are such big banal dolls when we get there. And we find that the face of the Virgin and the arms are all covered with a whole Spanish world of graffiti. We write graffiti on every bit of our experience. If we didn’t have our name signed there, somebody might not think it was our biography. So we’ve got cult and the cultivation, and then the largest one we almost notice, because when Pound calls it “Kulchur,” a culture, the cultivated field is laid out, we know what we’re growing that season. In a culture all sorts of stuff starts growing, and it looks very much like something inside and outside, penetrating and changing it slowly. Back to Stockhausen. If you have not heard it, think of this passage of his, and hear at least a record of Stimmung, because in Stimmung Stockhausen, with great deliberation, brings forward the name, all the holy names.20 The names of daemons are chanted in rhythms which, if opened out, go out as far as you can think through time. The present interest in the ragas is that you open up rhythmic extensions in number, that couldn’t complete themselves until they come beyond the imaginable bounds of our civilization. I meant just tremendous ones, beyond the yuga, like the boundaries that the Hindu world gives for a period and a civilization.

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As Malraux pointed out,21 it is in the museums where culture is behaving like a culture. And we turn from Titian, and now we are in the presence of African sculptures. And whatever their original purposes were, they all are seen as belonging to one world, which is not where they were seen before. At the beginning of our century, the Africans belonged to the curios, or the museum, and the Titians belonged in the Louvre. But in great collections today they’re together as works of art, or they’re potentially in the museum. Titian is in the museum as an example of what Phoenician primitives did and Phoenician voodoo dancers did in the Renaissance. You can see why our minds have moved; they have become unsubstantial, they are of one body. We begin to see what’s going on when this is all brought together. And it will tell us what’s going on in the Titian when it goes bad, or in the African sculpture when it goes bad. Now I want to bring forward a figure from H.D.’s Helen. In the propositions made by Renaissance alchemy, and certainly in Jung, the propositions of alchemy are still dialectic. You go through a certain series and it will lead somewhere. The accumulated alchemical papers are evidently of a very different kind. Those papers were printed by a very special cult within alchemy, which had a dialectic. And when people turn to do a history, they are depressed, because they turn to thousands and thousands and thousands of accounts of the theater of what’s happening in chemical experiments. Not formed now into a dialectic, not having a definite thing it’s going toward, but like the culture, which is the opposite of a dialectic, which is a mixing ground, in which are mutations. So that [Gregor] Mendel is quite persuasive; that’s what we’ve had in alchemy.22 I don’t mean the picture was wrong. But it wasn’t until somebody broke through and found out, no, that is not the whole genetic picture: there are mutations, and mutations take place in a vast cosmic mixing ground, mixing bowl. And they weren’t going to see that until they were making their cultures. The cosmos is seen as a culture now, and the culture is seen as everywhere, interpenetrating the orders, and changing them, changing their mind, working from within. When they followed the DNA through, they have found a virus added itself to our fundamental information. A virus which, in the world of viruses, is certainly the enemy for the whole experience of the chain of DNA. And it added itself and perpetuates itself by initiating a process of reproduction. That is different from cloning, and only can take place because the virus is in there. We are a species, yes indeed, we have a genealogy. We only continue because we’re a culture. We only reproduce because we’re a culture. That’s the first thing that happens in a culture, something comes in to infect the whole thing, and it reproduces itself, and then we have the world we’re talking about emerging.

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And in the H.D. poem we came close to everything being brought together, and the breakdown and association between Egypt and Greece. H.D. took herself to be Helen, but the Helen breaks up and when Achilles breaks up, they break up. Other things seem to be invading, and we have a long poem dwelling in an area that, actually, the woman experienced a counterpart of it in her psychic life. We still experience it as what we call a schizophrenic breakdown. Other periods have lived in glorious and wild schizophrenia. I’m glad they’re not doing it these days. We do have schizophrenics abroad; they get jobs as presidents and run whole armies and do things like that. Back of Helen in Egypt, there seems to be a pharaoh, Amen, she isn’t sure, who dreams Helen and Achilles. Sometimes she gets instructions. So, she’s within a dream, but the dream is coming thoroughly from a consciousness not hers. It is a king at the center of this hive, not a queen at the center of this hive, a hive life. As we move into the world of [Émile] Durkheim, as we move into the world of [Jean-Henri] Fabre, we begin to recognize that we have individuality. We begin to recognize the individuality of bees. But for a long time our expression for something we weren’t was a “worker bee,” or a something bee. We get messages all through the hive. And yet in the H.D., when she comes into the depth of what you’d call “herself,” she is hearing from some central thing, which she identifies—but can’t quite identify—she identifies as Thoth-Amen at the center: Initiation? Does Helen brush aside all the traditional philosophy and wisdom, to imply that enlightenment comes or does not come, as a gift, a whim “of this ancient Child, Egypt,” rather than as formal reward for recognized achievement?23 One of the greatest dominating figures for H.D. in her last years is not that a woman is fulfilled through a child, but that the woman goes in the labor, that the child comes and informs her, that she is informed by the child. And if you think about parents anyway, they’re told off by their children. That’s the nature of generations. They come to look at what must surely be a consequence of their life, if that were the only level of what they’re looking at. Oedipus tells off daddy, the real information going the other direction around, the child comes to inform, and the child is the father in this. You may ask why I speak of Thoth-Amen, of Amen-Zeus or Zeus separately, you may think I invoke or recall a series of multiple gods,

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a Lion, a Hawk or an Ibis, as we were taught to think of the child-like fantasy of this ancient Child, Egypt; how can you understand what few may acknowledge and live, what many acknowledge and die? He is One, yet the many manifest separately; He may manifest as a jackal and hound you to death? or is He changeable like air, and like air, invisible? God is beyond the manifest? He is ether and limitless space? you may ask forever, you may penetrate every shrine, an initiate, and remain unenlightened at last.24 If the discussion were taken back, the genetic level would be the Y chromosome. The X chromosome makes the living body, and is the actual creative identity. I mean, both male and female have their bodies by the X chromosome. A single Y will not make anything. It seems as if it were nonexistent entirely. It won’t make a body. There is no such possible aberration. It merely comes into the culture and we have a change in the culture, and so if there is an X and Y there is a development of male sexuality. So the male sexuality is invisible. It is not at all what goes forward through time. Since the male has the X, the fundamental female sexuality is the one that perpetuates itself. It is that one that must have had the mutation with the virus that would make even the change in which we have this depth void, a development of two X’s. One will then determine the development of a sexuality, the other one is still the living body. Two X’s could be mosaic too. It’s a marvelous picture as it unfurls in our period because it’s begun to see that every cell in the body has this signature and drama in it. XXY is their entire area of the hermaphrodite. And that’s because the extra X and Y both set about developing mosaically, propositions of sexuality. But the

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reproductive thing is just the X, that’s the one that is reproducing itself. The Y is not perpetuating itself—to invert our news that the woman was incidental to the man’s reproducing himself, the one thing he wasn’t doing. One thing: it was not the species. And we gave the species its name, “man.” In our language, and in my poetry, I don’t undo it. We have got a very charged situation in which man is the local representative of “man,” man the species. He’s got a suspicion and a story together, and the story is told, not in just our Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition, but its story is told in many, many transmissions. Now we’re not drawing on the wall of the cave; this is the great story that carries the hint throughout of what would happen if you inverted it. And yet any child asks, “Mommy, how come she was taken out of him when everybody knows he is taken out of her?” We’ve got again an inside and outside proposition. H.D. was feeling the presence of a god.

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I

n the design of the four lectures, this one was and is proposed to address the world felt as a presence. Although we find ourselves talking about ideas, and we have ideas of gods, see, the central thing I still wanted to return to is the time in which something is released that is felt. I want to go forward to how much poetry has to do with exciting a level in which we feel a presence. The poets of most concern to me present something quite different from what one has from religion, because the presence is felt in the poem, and then felt and recognized throughout the language. One of their characteristics is to have a lore that they carry, so that when they come upon certain themes they recall gods. And the same gods come in over and over again in poetry. Our time then must be described as being from the Darwinian point forward, gradually coming through, and then more and more extensively a recognition that mankind is one species. That becomes more important than theological propositions. What is enduring about [Frazer’s] The Golden Bough is that it was a vast suggestion that all the cults also were a creative suggestion. Poetry is not anthropology and poetry is not philosophy and poetry is not logic. It may ransack any of their occasions. It spreads a ground of possible engendering of meanings of creation—of a creation itself in a language that we use in most of its occasions and under a whole set of other disciplines. And in its main drive it makes us feel presences because typically it follows rhythm and it follows sound. It may rhyme. Mostly we rhyme at the end of the lines, here, even now when people think of eschewing rhyme. But the most important thing of rhyme is the feeling of a measure, and a measure that’s different from speech and creates what Aristotle found in Parmenides, a sort of hypnagogic state, so he disqualified it as philosophy. And 141

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Pound himself [was] unable to focus on what it was saying because he was in a kind of hypnotized state. But my point would be that poetry certainly is what we feel, and then how we think, and then how we even philosophize, when the primary ground of it must be the changes taking place in our own bodies when we are moved out of the rhythms of our speech and excited by music moving through the language. The music is there moving in the poem. We will properly move forward with The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. We touched upon a passage in which he is turning to Ferrini and saying, you know that the waves are only the waves, and the sea is only the sea, and you can’t put God in the boat. And looking at it again, I was struck how almost absolutely in the first three books in the proposition of Gloucester, he establishes the practices of Gloucester and his keeping of the place. He runs a reassurance that we’re always going to be within what looks like a series of historical levels of Gloucester. This volume has a dedication to a proposition of earth and ocean in which Gloucester, no matter where you place yourself, at a place that’s between land and ocean, gets to be both myth and legend. Charles has a theory of continents that was in the 1930s in geology courses, as I remember, greatly made fun of. Freud points out that denial is the only way to think out certain things. They come up in the geology, and so we actually had heard of this theory that continents were actually floating. What did it mean that the continents were floating or traveling, because there was no picture in that earlier one of tectonic plates that were moving, and no picture of earth as being that fluid? We found ourselves today talking about character and character armor and the ideas that rise in much the same period as the return of sea and earth. What would earth look like? Before we begin to even find out that it’s tectonic plates, or return to the idea that the continents that were one have split, we read [how they] have been wrecked and are returning into another great unified continent. Before we return to that picture we have to begin to see an earth that has character armor, a little like [Wilhelm] Reich was seeing in his step that he took in psychoanalysis, seeing the body as being armored. And this is being the very nature of neurosis and psychosis that was visible in this character armor. That could again be pictured as like the shell of insects that they break out of them, in order to emerge in a new form. The world is felt as a presence. I’ll be giving various pictures of why we go out to know it, to find, to go into the unknown and to know something. We are engaged in knowing the world. And yet, it is known through a series of pictures. It’s known through, we could call them intuitions, but the pictures will be found, not only in how we’re going to proceed to know the world, but how we’re going to

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proceed to know now neurosis and psychosis, and know as in Reich. How we’re going to also proceed to know a feeling of form in the poem. The imperative in form isn’t always understood. Back where Stockhausen sees something, the mind is penetrated and changed, but it’s penetrated and changed, certainly no matter what it is from outside, by its own community of now, the community of thought in which it’s taking place. And today they can search for a field of gravity, because they feel it’s like a field of electricity. As Charles Olson comes forward with a gestalt idea, taken from gestalt painting of how we see a painting, see it as a field, and proposes that we could compose by field. Actually it’s not just an analogy. In poetry there is no proposition of analogy—because if you can make up unicorns nothing has to be analogous to anything in poetry. Everything is proposed then in language; in language you can make a field. Now we feel it as a field. Once we can feel that the earth is moving, then we can discuss, and that may be the problem. It’s like if we’re predisposed after a war to read everything in code and decode, now we look at chemistry differently, and suddenly we see the proposition of genetics in a life we never saw before. And yet that can’t be separated from Joyce taking in all language and treating its tiniest particles as if they were possible units in a chemistry instead of an infinity. All of it viewed as a midden heap, as he calls it, a place in which words copulate and get mixed up, and other messages come out. And there’s το-έν, the unity, the one.1 The one is scratching around in the midden heap, and that gets everything mixed up, and so things start sprouting the wrong way. Our local το-έν this evening is Charles Olson, who on the subject of things getting all mixed up, could also be quite antagonistic to that subject, and who has just straightened this out at the beginning propositions of the Maximus, at least straightened it out, Mr. Ferrini, that he needs him to get on this magic boat, because he knows it’s not magic, not a boat, and I’m not standing here. And you know, Mr. Ferrini, the waves are only waves. And since Ferrini knew they were only waves, it’s a very tricky thing a poet will do. I see a kind of promise that you might turn a poem on so, come on, you know that the waves are only waves, you don’t believe the waves are something else, so don’t start doing that. He’s already built where it can come forward, because once those continents are moving, once the blocks are there, you’ve got an underlying shape under the map you’re looking at. The old changes, the mountain ranges, you now know where they belong. You’ve englobed the scene. The local remains, but what it is a center of—it’s reaffirmed it’s the center of the entire globe. And then it’s a center of exactly the world that is in Hesiod. In this he [Olson] differs from Williams. Preceding Olson, [William Carlos] Williams can build into Paterson an expansion by what’s in the library. He can take the literal facts all the way

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through. He takes the leap at the end of Paterson and discovers he’s not at the end. The sign is on the end.2 Dr. Paterson can go down and see the unicorn tapestry, and various things can come into Paterson that supposedly were confined in the original plan, that had four sections imitating Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake has no possibility of having a mutability canto because it’s got its tail in its mouth. You reach the end over and over again, but more than that, you go back into the beginning, and so it’s an entirely different proposition of the universe. It’s the universe all right, but it’s quite different in shape. So you can’t have that business, coming in and finding that there’s a leftover. And in the same way, in Maximus’s proposition something is left over. In my own poems “Passages” and “Structure of Rime,” it’s impossible to have a leftover. They are entries into what is, and that is not given any possible process. A process could be seen there, but it can’t be taking place there in a sentence. Although when you see a process at a beginning of “Passages,” a process of rhyme, you will find that it rhymes with a poem not “Passages” at all. The chronology will be very strict, the preceding poem may or may not be, but it’s very likely not to be, in many cases, “Passages.” But the rhyme will be running as if it were a continuous process all the way through my poetry, so I’m often delighted that I can recognize the lead rhyme is simply picking up as if threaded to the poem of an entirely different kind before. All the poems belong in a volume, and that already tells you you’re not in a long poem. It [the serial poetry of “Passages” and “Structure of Rime”] proposes that it has an end that you could measure from one end to the other. It doesn’t. This one is out into a place where the end declared proves not the intent. Caught in between these is what happened in Maximus. Charles’s statement to me at the last was that he had finished his work. I remember that decisions have to be made, so the close is both close and not close. When you disclose, when you detect what has actually gone into what is supposedly the last book, or even the numbering in the sequence of books, you find that Olson was himself unwilling to declare or decide about [whether there] would be a close. It’s a splendid close, but it doesn’t go back. My whole adventure of this has always been to say, “it doesn’t do so and so,” and find out it does. And Charles was especially talking about it couldn’t possibly be like Finnegans Wake. If it’s a close, “my wife my car my color and myself ” 3 are so thematic that they may do what Finnegans Wake does, which is thematic. Themes turn back into themselves and are in the ouroboros world returned. The leap one is a leap out of theme, it’s unfinished business.4 The underlying figure here is exactly the circular one that I said it was not going to turn out to be, which is the one that we see also in Finnegan, of a world returning into itself, consciousness returning into itself. At least this is where I

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can permit myself to see where it seems to break through, and it’s “Maximus, from Dogtown—I.” And now remember we’ve had Maximus all along writing letters, part of what lifts the business of a mere chronology, so there are two existing orders within this. The poem itself does not move from letter to letter. The poet feels absolutely into Maximus at times when the proposition is not his. A letter from Maximus, from the poem Maximus, is a special event within it. And “Dogtown” is the discovery of sacred earth within Gloucester.5 This lecture is meant to open propositions about [the] world felt as presence, and in the case of taking Olson, it means working in the world in order to work in the presence. And my picture is not to discover the presence. Charles’s earliest questions in 1947 were: Do you know what temenos is? How do dreams take place in your work? Have you begun to know the magic of temenos? Do you know what it means to cultivate a locality, to have a precinct? Do you know what it is to make a precinct? Now, the precinct is always specific, and what I read to be the first book of the Gloucester and of Maximus is also. You don’t go to a movie set when you’re going to the precinct. In a movie though it may look like you’ve gone to the precinct, the precinct is a movie, you’re in a movie, so you go to a movie set for a movie, although the temple of Delphi may be the scene. But when you go to Delphi, you go to a specific place, and even if a movie company went there, somehow it wouldn’t be a movie. So a movie company might be committing blasphemy there. Declaring the precinct, he then proceeds, and setting certain laws that the precinct is going to be kept, yet the precinct demands this biggest thing of all because he’s in the presence of it. If he had been in the presence of Okeanos when he begins Gloucester, it would have been there. If he had started Okeanos before he was in the presence. We have a million wretched poems that propose being in the presence, and almost any of us can hear that. Like the person that says I love you and absolutely need you and great, great. There really is an immediacy, and the poet knows how to wait for it. And meanwhile, being absolutely prepared with no assurance, I must get across, with no assurance that it’s going to arrive. So that he’s working in faith. And when it bursts through you have a kind of joy that indeed he was not wrong, that Gloucester was going to open. But I mean indeed he was not wrong to be obedient to the first demand of the precinct, and at the same time to know deep things about it, and yet not know of them in the poem ’til the poem began to tell him. And then that goes further than anything you’ve read. The sea was born of earth without sweet union of love Hesiod says But that then she lay for heaven and she bare the thing which encloses

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every thing, Okeanos the one which all things are and by which nothing is anything but itself, measured so screwing earth, in whom love lies which unnerves the limbs and by its heat floods the mind and all gods and men into further nature.6 I wondered in my lecture on the gods why I dipped toward them and talked about the cult and the cultivation and the culture, and at the same time came away. Did I get there in any sense at all? The revelation of Maximus that I would still take as fundamental is the transmission in poetry. When fundamental things come forward in poetry, they’re different than their previous announcements. Keeping the precinct of Gloucester in exactly the way in which Wordsworth describes being in a passionate disturbance, being in an emotional state that is experienced as almost unbearable, then concentrated upon the poem. All the contents of the disturbance are collected in the tension of the poem, and the writing is absolutely tranquil, and in the poem they reappear entirely. The Prelude of Wordsworth is the one place where we have the absolute authoritative voice in poetry, if you are of that transmission, which I hereby be in, and read Charles Olson by. It’s not a catharsis when you’re in tranquility: you’ve become an agency. You’re not expressing anything that was ever in yourself. If you thought you were troubled, that’s because you were just coming into a trouble. The thing you thought was your emotion, or your trouble, or your suffering, was actually coming to know the presence of emotion and suffering. You’re working the music, you’re working the language which is the absolute commonality to which this belongs. Ah, but it doesn’t yet belong there, until you work there. Wordsworth is getting the psychology of this; we see that what we see in the poem is not an expression of something the poet felt, not an expression except as a feeling of his showed that he was in alliance with, sensitive to, and feeling something that belongs to the whole community. Because what he returns to once he’s in language is the community. The poet establishes, within the thing that’s actually properly called languages, differences in speech. He’s not in his own speech when he’s in the poem, although his own speech may enter it. The very same period that produces Maximus produced what’s called the confessional poem, in which the poets can be demonstrated as misreading their own occasion. Many of them have been the vehicles of stupendous human realities. They’ve added it up that they were psychologically disturbed. They carried a message they could guarantee that, by committing suicide to show that they really felt it. They get what the gods do to you when you misuse the occasion, because you want to prove that you really felt it. And there’s no ground in which

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you can prove that. Because it is something that you’re a vehicle of, and the reason it was felt as powerful is because it was in a community. How impertinent to say, “I really felt it.” Yes, you feel something, but that’s an agency, over and over again it expresses something they felt, and the text gets to be that, and we’ve lost this very ground, the very one they were called upon to make. Now let’s go back here. This is close to Hesiod and it’s a theogony, but now it’s a theogony of poetry, of the powers of poetry. Powers the whole nineteenth century did its best to shame poetry out of the Western world. It needed to go through this thing. It needed to go into a powerful repression. Isn’t it nice there was such a repression that we get a burst forward, this sort of bursting through? Now, think not about the part of ocean and earth that’s absolutely there. What you see in it is the purpose in poetry of the heat flooding the mind, and all the gods and men—mind, gods, and men. And this is where the world is presence [writes on blackboard]. If it were like the generations coming forward that produced The Divine Comedy, then that’s a series of generations through romance poetry, with propositions that are kept in a transmission. And there’s a little group that Dante belongs to. I mean Dante then writes his De vulgari eloquentia, in which he actually recites what that tradition is, and gives hints in the Convivio of what are the important parts central to the poetry, which is the transmission in poetry [of] the idea of amour. And that is transformation, but also a fulfillment of five generations. He recites them: from Guillaume of Aquitaine through Languedoc, through Sicily, and up through the circle.7 He knows that the circle, properly, goes forward, and yet when he writes his De vulgari eloquentia the fulfillment will be in this huge poem, which also gives us a world mind image, but it is not. A mind image, I think, is the right one to use for that. But world mind image really is the world we’re talking about. As Charles feels it, that’s why we’re back at the Pre-Socratics, because the creative genius of our time, the creative imagination is the imagination of physics, or in the chemical. The real universe to us is the imagination of the physical, chemical universe. That’s the spirit. That is where we encounter the great imagination of a world. The poem now comes forward with some definite feeling, and my feeling is that my generation, that’s Charles’s and so forth, are midway between Pound [and] the ones of the masters of a craft that open up a possibility. They’re a series, but certainly midway, and out of this mass, and out of the emerging new picture of a new genetics, of a new chemical reality merging. Our biggest thing is to prepare a language, an open language in which an event can take place which will be, and constantly repicture, by the way, repicture the emergence of a world mind image.

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A great problem after the Second World War is the disappearance of the propositions that were going on in the European mind. Today we find the French locked away in a French discourse, we find the Germans locked away in the German discourse, and so forth, and so what would seem to be nationalism has vastly increased. But actually we have the breaking apart of propositions of a European mind that were there before. And we will hardly undertake to have an American mind. Think how strong Williams would have been persuaded that we needed an American language or an American mind. We all know that would be hopeless because the one reality we’ve got is the world mind. If we made an American mind it would already be mixed up with the world’s mind. . . . And Williams knows that there go the African wives, found in the National Geographic, that makes them American.8 Sitting in the doctor’s office in Paterson, that makes them local? But the poem is breaking, breaking its character armory, breaking its precincts. Gloucester looks like a precinct when you begin to keep the precincts. It’s a locality, he says, I think, and I would say, all right, is it temenos? Not temenos? So now I don’t want to go into anything as reprehensible as “the earth is a spaceship.” 9 My trouble with it is not is it or is it not, but if it is a spaceship, that is a very dinky idea of what’s going on. And if it’s a spaceship it’s got the same sandwich machines, and the same dinky costumes, and the same computer driving the damn thing, and the solar system looks much better than that. The spaceship: in the movies it is designed by somebody as dumb as I am. And when you talk about it as if you could husband the tectonic blocks, I mean one of the larger “Bucky” [Fuller] problems would be scolding the blocks, for erupting volcanos, and ruining your recent delusions, man’s happy face. No, we’ve begun to see things that are just a little too big in the dream to pin it back to a wish fulfillment. Not that wish. Now I want to go back and read the same passage. I love Charles’s screwing earth. Actually he never scolded me for being a Freudian, but in that Freud versus Jung thing, when you’re floating in the big stuff, Charles always says, screwing earth into him, and then unite the whole thing. I don’t remember the translation saying it that way in the more august texts. The sea was born of earth without sweet union of love Hesiod says But that then she lay for heaven and she bare the thing which encloses every thing, Okeanos the one which all things are and by which nothing is anything but itself, measured so

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screwing earth, in whom love lies which unnerves the limbs and by its heat floods the mind and all gods and men into further nature.10 So let’s enlarge the mere Duncan proposition. “All gods and men,” in every way they’ve been known, which includes archetypes. Archetypes is one of the domains of gods, I mean, one of the ways in which gods are manifest at all. It may be that in certain circles the only way the gods can be there will be talk about archetypes. In Plato’s case, because he had sort of contempt for things, that’s the only way a chair got there. When you go over what his ideas are, they’re what he thinks he shouldn’t think about, so they have to be archetypes. He doesn’t talk about the gods being archetypes, the Neoplatonists do. But things and gods want to get through. The role of the imagination is to see. To see, to have an image, and it is open and it is amazing what we can have an image of. So we’ve got underworld, okay, world, men, gods. We’re coming very far forward, and yet, we’re not forward at the moment. The young Pound said, of the image, that The Divine Comedy, the entire thing that the finished poem presents, is an image, is one image, is the image. The proposition of this lecture, the basic proposition is Williams: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow,” and let’s just leave it right there.11 Things. No gods unless there is a thing. No man unless there is a thing. No mind unless there is a thing. Where there are no things, [there are no] gods, men, mind, and so forth. And then we’ve got further nature, all of us, not to make this thing, but a further nature I myself introduced into “Passages” [and] the minute I saw it, and it hadn’t yet come into print, swiped it right off. I mean, I swipe nothing but the best lines of other people, and put them in my ice cream, salad, dessert, poetry.12 And so that people just gasped out, my God, you’re going to put that in there too? We need another type of intuition of nation [writes on blackboard]. Briefly as it appeared, but bitterly fought for, and certainly men behaved in relation to nation for centuries with all the fierceness that they had given to polis, and the underlying thing is temenos, isn’t it? Polis has no suburbs. It behaves like a very advanced case that Reich would have liked to sit down by, that walls crack and people are losing their sense of hope. Well, just the fact that we’ve got our friends: it has to have that for an eternal order, and yet some idea is emerging. Charles starts with polis. It’s the place where suddenly Maximus is fully out of bounds. If you can come into what polis is, then you will come slowly into temenos, both back-forward. They’re really one idea that you’re coming to see, and now we’ve got a nature which will be a nation, a nation that will be nature,

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a nation which will be not now a further nature. Now this is the opening of where the tremendum begins in the Maximus. Before that it was out of bounds because people looking at it didn’t want to think about Gloucester. They’d say, is it poetry? Unbelievably they couldn’t hear the movement of the music through it. I had trouble finding the music of Creeley’s poetry: it was quite different, entirely different from mine. I found it all meant that I then had to enormously enlarge my idea of what the music was. I trusted it was going to be there and enlarged my idea of what the music was because the stories had the music all the way through. I knew that they were tremendously moving as I knew only certain stories of D. H. Lawrence’s, a handful of short stories that ever had the passional, contained music of Creeley’s prose of that first book of short stories. So with that I had the faith to know, if the music’s there, the experience was overwhemingly authentic. The picture then was I didn’t get the music in the poetry. So, I simply tried it, tried playing it, tried getting it until suddenly, a music quite different from one I had expected to uncover. You can go very wrong thinking they look like William Carlos Williams, and try playing the piano that way, and it won’t work. And then you suddenly strike it and you find a very unique music that’s on key for me a great deal. Olson heard the sound in the stories [by Creeley] too, I think. It’s there that he heard the space in which he could take place. He had every reason to mistrust entering the poem. As [Call Me] Ishmael shows, already his insight of what the poem potentially was, his insight of what happens in Moby-Dick, sweeps far beyond, and truly disqualified him from being in a school of American studies, because it swept into a tremendum. We couldn’t discuss Melville as a factor of American culture. Charles already is seeing in that a further nature. But he goes, he’s coming from that, and must have mistrusted, and was severely counting the steps. His mind was as huge as what the poem was going to have to be. The poem has to carry you, and when you have a mind like Olson’s, where his own imagination carries him. . . . So now I must, when I said “image,” mean something different from one’s imagination, which is only one’s own imagination. And its freedom or something is about as relevant to the image and the imagination that this involved, and fully, as let’s say one’s physical body, and it has to be the agency of the dance. But it can’t possibly know what will happen when it enters and produces the dance. When you’re entirely involved in the poem, the craft, the place the mind centers is making the poem. He’s saying, brain, realize that it is, and then he recites the ancient doctrine of breath, the breath in the vowel.13 All of those make something very close to a yoga of the poem. The whole body is present in it. But, if it had been a yoga of the poem he would be out with the vegetarian diets. There are many things that appear the minute these things turn into cures instead of adventures out into a further nature.

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I don’t know, is Wordsworth a nature poet? We know he’s in the numinous because he goes into dread when he goes out into nature. I’m back at Wordsworth—his experience throughout is of dread, and then awe. The whole aweful thing has to be filled right to the top, and Charles spells that out, and he spells that out as exceeding exaggeration. There’s only overflow. This is a word that as a child I could see that they were saying that’s awful, and it only meant they were in danger, and it was breaking down the polis of art. And I think that thing is awful, and then you think, yeah, I’m ashamed. I’m in a state of dread. Now do you see why I put him one full generation beyond me, and portray myself, or Charles or anyone, as patient workers midway? And at the same time, if I belong to something that would be inherited by what I’m thinking of, I must be also full and so is this full of warnings. Are the troubadours full of warnings about the very matter of love that was going to be transformed and reach its commanding presence that still stands there, to govern, in the [Divine] Comedy? “Vast earth rejoices, / deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things, / everything.” 14 “No ideas but in things.” 15 Listen to that word as it comes into this passage that gods are there, man is there, mind is there—but. “Then she lay for heaven and she bare the thing.” All right, that one is all right. Another lovely thing to do is go at Olson’s work and find out “thing.” I mean the thing. It’s a beaming light, Okeanos is like, all right. “Which encloses / every thing.” Ah, that thing. “Okeanos the one which all things are and by which”—no thing—“nothing”—no thing—“is anything but itself, measured so // screwing earth, in whom love lies which unnerves the limbs and by its / heat floods the mind and all gods and men.” This whole thing is a flood “into further nature.” Vast earth rejoices, deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things, everything issued from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead, the man awake lights up from the sleeping.16 There is something absolutely there, so that it is not what Plato taught him, I mean it is not the phenomenon of becoming. And we do not yet know but are engaged in finding a further nature. We’re coming into knowing that nature is much more than we ever named it before. If we talk about our nature today, we’re no longer talking about man’s nature. Just at the time when we’re talking about chairpersons, the whole term “man” doesn’t fit because we have got the DNA, and then we’ve no sooner got that proposed, we see it moving. When he’s talking about a further nature, it’s not an ideal, it’s not a great thing. People are

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working away showing that our pictures of the nature we belong to are going into a further one. [Erwin] Schrödinger, in his work that so attracted me,17 was talking about what was the nature of life within the chemical world, and . . . talks about an equilibrium that is within a duration, it’s just a duration. And then he’s hovering right on the place where other chemists are coming forward and talking about the evolution of elements themselves. Evolution. The evolution of hydrogen, the evolution of atoms. The chemical table, which was presented looking exactly like the hierarchies of the Neoplatonic orders. All of a sudden, if you talk about an evolution of elements, doesn’t a suspicion grow? A series of pictures emerge[s] in which everything is essentially living again, and no wonder then the Pre-Socratics rank very well. This is where they proceed from. They proceed from everything that’s living, so life has some special little corner in which it’s not. The essential life is taking place in the world of the particles. This is a Buddhist illusionary universe. It was one mad mathematician’s proposition, in order to have το-έν. If there was one anything, it’s now a particle. So chemical events stream forward no longer from atoms, no longer from molecules, but from a world of particles. And so we see ourselves. In charming theosophical terms, the reason the other species are disappearing is because we’re coming to a horrendous place where they’ll all be reborn as men, of all things, of one species. It’s a picture exactly like all the continents that have been addressed, in a long adventure will come back in. Charles opens this volume with that picture of Gondwanaland in which you’ve got a picture, they’re [the continents] coming into one again.18 The absolutely central theme declared as such is the way in which “my wife my car my color and myself ” reinform the entire poem. Now let’s call it not the close, but the opening. You wake from the dream and don’t know the end of the dream. You wake from the dream and left in your mind is “my wife my car my color and myself.” But this dream now extends all the way throughout the poetry. The car will be there. The central thing. Not of temenos now, but of the central affairs and revelation. You do not get hell. And you do not get heaven. Dante in Purgatory asks Beatrice, “Why do I see my lady here, and do I find a suicide truly here?” “Why do I see people I just saw in hell?” She replies [that] Purgatory is illustrated with scenes of heaven and hell. And Blake will return and do in illustrations what Dante meant. He will also do it in another poem— we see it must be a mystery poem. He will do illustrations of [Thomas] Gray’s work.19 That’s the figure I wanted to get across. The imagination continuously illustrates what we in no way can know. I advance that picture that the unconscious is that which is without content. Man experiences everything as content. The crucial difference is between the

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unknown and the unknowable. There is no boundary to the knowable. So we endlessly go into the unknown, converting it into the knowable, and that is our great adventure of this thing. We go into the unknown through the knowable. The opposite of the knowable is not the unknown. Any archetype we ever mention, and the idea of the unconscious itself, all those are events and propositions of consciousness, or its opposite. At one point, doing a “Structure of Rime,” I went to Charles and said, what is the opposite of rhyme? And he said, what do you mean? And I said, well, the master rhyme came down the ladders of the opposite rhyme, and Charles said, that must be what it meant. And I said, well, yes. I could find no opposite. I could find occasions of rhyme, but measure goes throughout language. With that proposition, now we could draw the ladder of the opposite of rhyme. We can’t manifest [it] in language, but we can speak of it. We can refer to it. Language, no matter what it is doing, is in some degree of rhyme. Let me go back to this. If I have a point in which I would like to think that some part of my poetry was shown to be intimately related with Charles’s, it is this last one. Not the one that he reveals to me, because another kind of nation came thunderously through. In the Pindar poem, there is some proposition about nation. My sense of nation did not propose another kind of nation. It was simply in a kind of agony of knowing that this nation must be experienced as certainly interfering, supposedly. Remember, another kind of nation makes every previous one leading into that, leading on to a bigger idea. [Reads “I live underneath / the light of day”]20 This is my vision when I carry it over in the “Passages.” [George] Butterick showed me this as being the close of the poem, and gave me a xerox of just “the initiation of another kind of nation,” which I have on my wall.21 There certainly seemed to me an instruction which a poet gives to another, a transmission that “Passages” must be what he saw “Passages” must be. In other words, a call to order, the one I experienced. When I say I’m out of history, because I obeyed Charles Olson’s call to order when he did his “Projective Verse,” but now this one you can’t get out of, because it’s not history. We move through a series of faces of a crystal, faces of a figure now existing in dimensions, and with all sorts of passages, and through which eighteenthcentury roads still pass. There is in the notation on the “Passages” of mine, in which, drawing upon Adams’s notations, who imagines worldly gods, [in] Court de Gébelin’s book,22 I build on that, and build how much the eighteenth century came forward with propositions of the gods. And at the bottom Charles Olson scribbled, “stay with your Roman Catholic boys.” This is Charles. Don’t be

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tempted to, always you are, by this hermetic Egyptian, and he leaves an instruction for the hermetic turned around and produced the “Passages” that’s gonna do like the mercury does. Look at this now, Charles, look at this nice eighteenthcentury Adams Road. And if you follow along you’ll find that you’re back in the hands of Hermes Trismegistus,23 and you may end up with that lady who’s annotating Finnegans Wake, that you’re corresponding with.24 All right, in the close I’m going to read this, this place where we come into then, though through this it leaves a really great open world. [Reads “Maximus, from Dogtown—I”]25 After searching and searching, he had at last found in the ground the actual poet he was. Think of the man who went to Mexico where part of it lay in Spain, where he saw the fight, in Mexico, where he wanted to show off, dead in Gloucester where he did. The four hundred gods that drink alone sat with him, as he died, in pieces. There’s no way to get into the poem without showing off. Otherwise you don’t want it, really. You have to show the cards on the table. And this is what Charles Olson got. Not only did I come up against, over and over again—and hear it in every direction, until I was shaking with rage—that the music you just heard was coming out, I suppose, of a man who had no ear in poetry. That was not writing the most stupendous music we have, and you’re just hearing it from somebody whose entire poetry is based on music. Yet the presiding view was, there was no music. The presiding view was, there is no mystery. There were a bunch of somethings. Okay, we’re in geography, no matter where it is. How many pieces do we have to be in before we turn around? Working in the presence of the earth, you cannot come forward. When you come forward you’ve got a hand that unhands you. Dante describes, there is only one thing you can do—that is, fatally wound the poet. Not what can wound his pride, but what can feed it. He said, there’s only one thing. What do you do to a hero—you find the Achilles’ heel. What do you do to a poet—you praise him. You praise the poet, high at Vesuvius. This is a great, actually the most recent, eruption. There’s no way in which you happen to just come in. The poet will suddenly show up. Dante must have known it. He says no, he isn’t talking about turning his head because the poet suddenly shows off in the middle of this work, and his work is not his own. His work is nothing that he gets to do, as a matter of fact, going as far as he can: he’s putting his whole life in there. The dance took place long ago, and you don’t get to show anything until actually the whole nature of your dying, of your going back into all the pieces, has ended that absolute isolate vector that you are of, that one dance.

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That was you, you’re continuously dancing, and this is the one where you’re not the species, the one place where you’re not this eachness, this thing. And Dante calls that: god needs each thing, each dance, each second, each event. And Olson searches for the event. The miracle of this is the faith he was sure was there. He went into every layer until he came upon the event that belonged to the dreams, and told him who he truly was and that he did exist deep in the earth. His work was announced before him. I call attention frequently enough to the first announcement that Gloucester must be the center—he has come into a temenos. It was simply his family domain. And that was the attitude. But it was not a minor miracle in American letters that a great American poet has it in a family domain. That is antagonistic to Eliot’s poetry throughout, that he comes in as a challenger. Right in Eliot’s domain. They own the history. They made the crossing, they made the return. They are the dry salvages26 and so forth and every legitimacy, but legitimacy does not signify when the flood goes forward into the Purgatory. And we know all the poets. Pound went forward to the furthest thing. And H.D. went into the furthest things. And the one who turned back was T. S. Eliot. He always turns back. Even Williams. You’re in trouble in The Waste Land and you have Pound go fix it up, so it fits like a text vision. So we have been making Joseph’s coat, and if I were out in public, it’s a mess, so please, Mr. Pound, you have such a sense of the style of the moment, will you get out your scissors, and in the first place will you cut it down to my size, it’s a mess. And I know the sewing along here is terrible, could you do a good sewing job along here? And Pound says, I just love style. I’m always in a mess but I can see how to do this coat. Joseph!—what we need is not quite so many colors but the right ones that are in this here, the 1924 colors. They’ll be a little envious, but not so envious they’re gonna throw you in the pit. And I’m not going to mention who they are. They’re your brothers and you haven’t met them and don’t want to. So let’s dress you up so you won’t even meet your brothers, and your father won’t know you and the coat. Who would guess that it was made? We’ll trim it up a little, they’ll all notice it, lots of things, that’s still Joseph’s coat. But the things now have been located, and all those silly little other things that Mommy sewed there have been neatly trimmed away. So with that Duncan joke, I’ve reached 9:30.

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S

ometime in 1948 a teeny-weeny monograph of poems arrived—about yea big. And I opened it and read the poems. Or four of them. There might have been three but I’m going to read the three I had right off here. I thought, well, so the jerk thinks he can write poetry, and threw it in the wastepaper basket. That’s the nearest I came to, and the longest I came to, having a first edition of a first book by Charles Olson.1 I had met him, as Charles has given account, and as I think I have given account in interviews, when he was doing work on the West on a Guggenheim. We talked [about] how cities have to invent ways of ripping farmers off in order to get food. All the way through open war and mayhem and everything else, even to selling them refrigerators. Anything they could think of. Improving their standard of living. The perfect examples of such cities would be Moscow off in the snow needing something from the Ukraine that the Ukraine didn’t need back from Moscow, so that the people in cities get adroit at selling furs to wear in hot weather and anything else they could. This was right exactly in the homeland of Charles Olson. And so I had a marvelous time, and met somebody who certainly talked as much as I did. We eventually, I think almost immediately, we discovered how to talk, but certainly as we knew each other over the years we discovered how to talk. We talked at the same time and listened. There were only two of us. The only thing is, Charles is just hanging in there knowing I’m going to fatigue at some point. And then meanwhile I’ve got a few reserves. But that would be about the way we talked. Creeley and Duncan were another thing. In those days that was talking all night and walking all night and sometimes there would be an interchange. The only way I really ever hear a monologue is by 157

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going to My Dinner with André,2 which I think I’ll see about ten times because I discovered I not only liked being a monologist but my unfortunate drive toward being a monologist has deprived me of other monologues around—and now you can go to the movies for two hours and fifteen minutes of hearing one. But I have another reason to start out with these three poems because hidden in them is quite a bit. And thinking about “Projective Verse” and returning to the matter of Olson just for this evening and thinking about us sitting here today, it seems to me that you encounter the shock of the roaring male rapist, that women have been talking about, in an unbelievable way in Olson. You will hear it—and you’ll hear it even in this first one—these fantasies, these male fantasies that nowadays we keep trying to say, “Surely that’s projection on your part. Here are all these nice boys sitting around. What are you talking about?” You’ll hear it in here too. This is really deep. If you had to have a record of our times, Olson has, as only a poet can, a deep record of a hidden man’s house from which this poetry comes. Something more than the picture is that society is patristic, but Olson’s was in an entirely patristic world. I mean, the figure of his father is huge in his mind, and then Maximus and then the huge father figures that appear, bigger than all that, are amazing in his poems. [Reads “The K”]3 Now this is almost the beginning. There’s poetry before this, but let’s say at least this is where this poetry began for me. On that day that I received it, I read the three poems totally without understanding. So I didn’t want them laid on top of me and threw them in the wastepaper basket. But at the end, when we’re actually up against the fact of death that’s projected in the first poem, as they [the images in “The K” of “a bridge, a horse, the gun, a grave”] emerge and define, so this was something more than a first book. Many a first book doesn’t even belong to the poetry. When poetry bursts out, it’s usually at a later date. And if it does belong to the first poetry, as it did with the case of W. S. Merwin,4 then suddenly very often the rest of the poetry will just be holding the office that the first one put the poet into. But a change that I find quite shocking comes in it. In this one, “the night has a love for throwing its shadows around a man / a bridge, a horse, the gun, a grave,” and it may read almost “around a man / a bridge, a horse, the gun, a grave,” but the line is four: “a bridge, a horse, the gun, a grave.” And the Maximus closes with not a wife, a car, a color, and a self, or the wife, the car, the color, and the self, but with my wife, my car, my color, and myself.5 Even larger things in

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the last year. So this is something of the tension of the poem and the projective. Think of this. I mean, this is years and years later, after Charles really holds on and knows the whole course of the thing. He was trained to know it in American studies and to know there were great figures in the nineteenth century that embody that spirit, and to feel that himself. Again, the matter of fathers and sons was filial in the lines of descent. “The night has a love for throwing its shadows around a man,” and we have later, “myself (like my father, in the picture) a shadow on the rock.” 6 But I wanted to find another four here. I come to it anyway with these place marks. They don’t tell me anything until I find this place. When we come back to it you’ll see how much it moves [me]. Unless I decided [it] wouldn’t. “These born again” and towards the end “my” will come in—“my world” or “my time.” Now I will have to find it to see what it was. The second poem, “La Préface,” is really the thing out of which [we will meet another aspect]. I’ll start with it and then read the “Projective Verse” essay itself, and you’ll see it right away, which is a contrast. And the urgency itself which Charles Olson felt about choosing open form at war with closed form. Open and closed. And it’s a proposition of “La Préface.” [Reads “La Préface”]7 It wouldn’t be until Jack Clarke years later that Olson would consent, really, to read Blake.8 The Blake underground there. Not having gone through an English major—although with American studies as a focus, Olson would have been acquainted with Blake—but he kept his distance and argued against the Blake he hadn’t read. Until there was the point when someone made an appointment with Blake. I’m going to get across here the appointment with Blake as I unfold my own picture of the projective. [Here] is a place where I still have a great deal of agreement indeed with the Olson I see. Today, Blake’s in every poem so I wouldn’t worry about styles. It would be a courtesy not to believe you have an appointment. There’s a whole period where it’s one of those things you mention. And it comes in this poem when the man doesn’t want it. It does mean an appointment. And he’s sure to have it. And he will recognize it when it arrives. Underground, by the way, is not only Blake’s underground. It doesn’t enter the poem. But it certainly entered his life and the questions about poetry. The one underground does indeed enter the poem very early. Big Man is in a story Olson wrote fairly early, which is also [about] his father; Olson’s father was also big.9 Olson was [big]—I always think he was seven feet four but—and I was absolutely dismayed at one point when I thought I had been very, very clever indeed. I got Parkinson to introduce Charles Olson,

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and I saw that Tom Parkinson was actually taller than Olson.10 I didn’t believe it, because he was one big man in my mind. But Big Man grows. He is actually a proto-Maximus, and at a level, by the way, that Olson writing me when I assumed that, sort of kidding around, said that it hadn’t occurred to him that Maximus—that’s a big one. I mean, he was an expert at not having it occur to him the very thing he was working on. I mean, of course it occurred to him in the largest way. This is the one [“The Moebius Strip”] where we begin to see other figures. It began to try to come forward again and again in Olson’s poetry. [Reads “The Moebius Strip”]11 And then the fourth. These all precede a poem of his that’s quite well known: “The Kingfishers.” 12 But these are openings, opening poems of the directive. [Reads “The Ring of ”]13 In this account that he gives of Aphrodite, in which she is portrayed in an almost Botticellian way, pink girl and so forth, does come after his reading of “The Venice Poem.” When he came west again, his interest in talking at length, and my pointing out that in Hesiod it’s quite clear in the Homeric hymns that Aphrodite was the penis, or member, as they say in Loeb at the discretion of the English at the end of the century, the member which Zeus had chopped off of his big daddy and thrown upon the sea. The blood became Nereids, and then Eros and Himeros were the two other parts of what was chopped off. What I want to make here is actually this deep image, the one I mean, the one deep in time, with a lot of atavistic elements. He already knew in a poem and came forward in “The Ring of ” with just exactly what later you’ll find him saying no one should do: no one should have anything to do with the Olympian account of the god[s], especially of Aphrodite. He felt sure he wanted to drive back. And back of that to the titanic. Now I’m pretty much going to stay by this proposition of the open-closed projective, and the word “projective”—projectile, percussive, prospective—and use this as an open attack on the verse of the period, but also upon closure itself. And interestingly enough, he feels immediately in another part of it that his real drive against the iamb is that it’s closed, that you step into it and close it. And that it closes the end of the line. So you want something that will come down heavy and open. It must be open at the end of the measure. And he sees that heavy as a closure.

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The first thesis that we have in our MA program, Aaron Shurin’s on the projective,14 makes it quite clear that Olson is hiding from himself and from us a source of the word “projective.” Olson, like Pound and like Williams, found it difficult indeed to admit at all the existence of Whitman. They are filled with dismissals of Whitman. Williams in his old age—Denise Levertov went and read every day to him Whitman, and certainly we have a kind of palinode, a last, a graceful admission of Whitman as a possible ancestor.15 What’s interesting here is that these three—who owed a lot indeed to Whitman, intention and everything else—treated him pretty much the way my generation treated T. S. Eliot. I mean, you owed a lot to The Waste Land, but you put that church mouse in a box and let him wither. I mean, you were careful not to refer [to the poem]. And Olson could be quite mean and felt his malice when he was talking about Whitman. But for those of you who have read Olson, you know he also wants to convey the fact that Maximus is the first one. That’s important actually in the context of the poem that this has to do with first things. Really, there are alarming signs of basic themes that make Maximus, the concept of Maximus, charged with that concept of Maximus having ancestors in both The Cantos and Paterson. Olson does there often try to obliterate them, try to get them moved off and have the Maximus be a first poem. I’m speaking about a needless part of it because there’s one thing absolutely true—Maximus is central for him. I mean, he’s standing where it is, and it was the center, and at the end, we have “my world,” “my time,” and so forth. So there was no contest with any other possible poem. This is the positive position I see of the possessives at the end: “my place,” “my time.” Then there can be many other people, places, and times. And the struggle for multiplicity—although it’s greatly allowed and admired in Olson—he moves towards it, and he knows the cosmos is not the same as the universe though he’s frequently trying to hammer it. I mean, this is one of the tensions in his work all the time: Is there more than one place, or is there only the one place? Now I’m going to take only the three terms that he brings up there [in “Projective Verse”], polemical terms. I must give one more account of this. When this essay appeared in 1950, James Broughton brought it to me. One of the places where Olson would have heard poetry read aloud was Berkeley. We already had an audience going, which fascinated him. We had an audience of about—I think—an audience of about the size we have today [approximately twenty-five people]. We didn’t do it to them every week, but it was sort of seasonal. At least we had an audience, which made us interested in printing, and I have kept that disposition fairly strongly. It also meant that poetry in San Francisco developed so that every time you read, there were new elements; and it developed

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intellectually way out of sorts in a way. I mean, people would come to see what do you now have in a poem, how complex has it grown? It was an arena with a game going on. And the game had to increase. And so the poetry also included an aspect of—a projective aspect—of game rules that the audience began to observe and follow and see what you were going to make of them as you go on. Myth and history were already very much present in it for me, and what brought Olson to me while I was meeting that man and talking to him about cities and farmers and agriculture in history was that he had read the medieval things and he’d seen a poem with footnotes.16 It’s not my favorite poem. I don’t think that I printed it with footnotes finally, but at least that’s what Charles was writing in, footnotes. And I thought, gee, if footnotes can be part of the poem, I’ve got it. Because he didn’t want to desert those footnotes. But I think he was sick of writing the essays you wrote for MLA or whatever, and he put the footnotes into it. And footnotes have a real role in the Maximus as they come in. Now the first one has to do with Charles’s sense of energy. He had the term “field composition,” which I’d seen before and thought about in relation to painting. The gestalt had advanced the field composition of painting [so] that intention does not move pointedly around a painting; the eye actually rediscovers the painting with different paths. You look at a painting somehow in its entirety. Then the great question came up with the gestalt: Don’t we read the same way? Scan the entire area we’re reading and then read into it so that we’re already in an advanced state of recognition without much time passing at all? But the discovery comes from a field scan of whole areas, and knowing where things go. And then as you read more and more—even before you start, you assume this reading belongs to the field of other readings. And the readers who just don’t manage that have real reading difficulties. They have to go from word to word and then redo the whole area. Certainly in working I already was assuming that the poem is never read, never finished, so that the first reading is already a complex reading. And even today, if I grasp a poem the first time—by the way, let’s talk about the mistake. Exactly what I did with Charles’s three poems was assume that I’d read them, and threw them in the wastepaper basket. And so it works that the negative is that you can be caught off by saying that you grasp anything right away. There is no field in which it takes place. I really said, history is field, and what is he doing writing a poem? Yet if he recognizes the poem belonging to the field, the poetry, already everything it does, does something to poetry. And that’s part of what’s going on in the sense of projective—of himself doing something to poetry. And then he goes on to the idea of process. And we find that the strangest thing that comes then, when it comes to the mind and the dance of the mind, it starts with

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a syllable. It’s right at the syllable all the time, and that’s where the entire intelligence of the poem is. So you follow through and it produces masses of rhymes, masses of disrhyme—rhyming and disrhyming. In that field, you follow what the poem says, begins to say. So elements enter. Let’s go back to the poem where they’re projective in a different way because in the poem we have them related to a dream situation. This is why it doesn’t turn up, for instance, to be Kayak surrealism in which you think up some really jazzy thing to go with the last thing. An “INSTANTER” doesn’t mean that. You have to go instanter because you have to go as quick, quicker. If your mind starts thinking up things it can do with a syllable or a rhyme, you’ve already lost it. You’ve got to be going as fast as this thing moves. And Charles is seeing it also in terms of energy, of synapses in a field. The interesting thing is the energy being one of the puzzles in my life. I never knew anybody who had an equal energy to Charles Olson, when he was aroused to the occasion. He was in between inertia and furor. I’m not sure what took place in between. But in furor—I can’t imagine. And yet he was constantly calling for energy. One of his true sicknesses in relation to life was that he felt he needed more power or more energy. And so one place where I get a shock when I go back to the projective essay is the major proposition that there’s this energy that you have to have in poetry. This must ally with Aaron’s picture of the projective. I’ll give you a brief picture of that from Aaron’s thesis. In the first place, Aaron Shurin went through Whitman and built a cunning web for the mind that wants to start saying, “Oh, no, no, that was mine.” And each time you are taking just one more strand and leading on until finally a web has been built of Whitman’s actual uses of the word “projection,” “projective,” and all its families like “ject” and so forth. And in Whitman, the word is surely phallic. It really is. As you catch in the Olson thing here again, the sperm is the primary. And you’ve got “projectile” right after “projective” in Olson. But there are other ideas of the projective that enter. I would have thought before reading Aaron Shurin’s essay that because of Olson’s disallowing Whitman and his dislike of Leaves of Grass, that he probably hadn’t read it very much. But then I keep forgetting that he was an American studies person, or at least he was in a territory where he had to at least read it to put it down. And I’m convinced that [Whitman is] the real ground, the hidden ground, of the word “projective” as it comes forward—because it’s the one place it would have come forward in poetry. And actually, Olson belongs in Whitman’s entire line of development as far as the center of the poem and its movement in many ways goes. Let’s call Whitman his grandfather. Because then he can’t take another grandfather in its most literal terms and have that [be] Melville. And this would give the swing that one needs because you have

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got to have the dark vision in Melville to even pick up the dark vision of Whitman and give it substance. It’s there throughout Whitman, in Whitman’s great desire for completeness, but it does not have the cut that it has in Melville. And in Melville you get a lead that Pound was unacquainted with. A lead to what the interpolated passage of prose, for example, can be. In Moby-Dick, you have hunks of other kinds of prose. In Pierre—Charles’s favorite, always was—he did want some part of anything that he wrote to be like the pamphlets that Pierre picks up in the middle of that novel and reads while he’s on a stagecoach. And I think those of you who know Gunslinger would be aware, that is a sort of sassy feedback: Gunslinger is right back where Pierre was reading the pamphlet on the stagecoach.17 But that was a paramount view. I mean Pound—you’ve got such elements. “I’m reading this so it’s right here in the poem.” And yet Pound has no way of knowing how profoundly American that is. It’s good on Pound’s part that he doesn’t because in every sense Pound needed the isolation. And in a poem that it didn’t know how very much it was part of a tradition that actually I think Pound would not have been able to encounter. The remark I made about Olson, and could he read something like Whitman: it’s Fielding Dawson who opens that. It’s the book on [Franz] Kline, where he says Kline and Olson are the two people he ever knew who could actually be enraged by a book they couldn’t read.18 Not that they couldn’t read but that they wouldn’t read, no matter what. And frame themselves in relation to it. There are two other figures, however. Two other meanings of projective that would have come in so strongly for Olson that he would not have thought of this word and its role in Whitman’s poetry. So that gets to be the hidden element for Olson too. One of them is the one in projective geometry, and that is already present. It’s already present in “The Kingfishers” and it’s certainly present in Maximus. In projective geometry, my eye will remain steady but I will draw this as it is shown here [writes on blackboard]. In all its turns cubism has a little to do with this, but projective geometry will really move a three-dimensional object into all its dimensions, and that will be the final description of the threedimensional object. But Charles Olson’s objects were not three-dimensional; they extend in history. His mind extended in history and his objects did. We’ll come to the fact that he calls them “projects,” but they are also objects and they extend in history. Now we understand why he will find the side that is 2000 BC. He will find the side that’s actually this moment, and like Pound [he] signed a date on many of the Maximus poems. In the last book you’re aware that Butterick and [Charles] Boer had to do the job of putting the book into its order, into a chronological order, into its oneafter-another order, its ordinal order.19 Charles simply refused to. He had come

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to the place where he didn’t want to type the poems; he didn’t want to contact them again; in a sense he didn’t want to interfere with them. He’d bring a mass. There’s a description that Butterick gave me of his arriving in his car—at the end—and opening the door, out tumbled this array of sheets and Charles said, “Just keep ’em the way they fell. Most happily they shouldn’t be bound; they should be able to be in any order.” He had already come into the place where the ordination in examining a poem we so strongly believe in, he let it open. Remember, opening is all right but closing is wrong, so Maximus even designed the opening. He rewrote the opening of the poem. I’ve always wondered if he was imitating, exactly, Pound who after doing six, then entirely framed the poem again by rewriting and arranging the material.20 So many many times in Maximus you will find Charles Olson doing the Poundian thing, and the dates are all doing the Poundian thing. But the dates for Pound and the dates for Charles Olson—I think the significance of them is not that they come one after another, but [what] they mean here. Again they go back to the projective in a geometrical sense. At this time, here, this is the angle [he was] drawing. And the next could be one minute later an account for the turn that you make. Because one thing that had happened that really hit Charles that he couldn’t dodge, and it came in on top of this picture of a projective geometry, is puzzling over how far does that proposition of Heisenberg’s go.21 You could find physicists who would drive him up the wall in horror as he would try—it would sound like he had just gotten the most popular idea, indeterminacy. But what the poet knew is that the point at which Heisenberg had found the indeterminacy meant the presence of all of us as an agent, meant the agent was present. And that is very much what’s always on his [Olson’s] mind when confronted with the Maximus. He’s both confronted with the Maximus in his self, and at the same time Jungian persuasion was very strong—he is already interfering. It can’t be a confrontation because it’s already substance and self; it’s both within himself and larger than self, so he has another kind of indeterminacy. The figure of “my father and my self,” the shadow and the photograph and so forth were all about a double language, another term of projection which was going very strong indeed by the time Charles Olson came of intellectual age. Because Freud had already introduced the term of “projection,” and Charles Olson by the early 1930s knew of Freudianism, and certainly lots of Jung by 1934, 1935, 1936. I’m just going by when my own life changed, and I’m not sure when the Jungian work Modern Man in Search of a Soul, or whatever the title was in those days, came. But first the Freudian idea of projection. That was . . . when things are charged with meaning. Remember that Pound had defined that a poem was language charged with meaning to its utmost extent. I realize this concept of the poem is

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passé today, since linguists have explained to us that you can’t possibly charge language with meaning. It has its charge, its card, which rings up in some bureau somewhere. The word itself ain’t got nothing in its pocket. So we’re dealing with a delusion about language that, well, one that I belong to, so no wonder I need a certain humor about it—that Pound really thought he had distinguished something about the poem. And Olson still goes by it. The “charged with meaning” now for Olson involves the projective, out of Freud. If it’s charged with meaning and charged with emotion, then where does the charge come from? Now in my own thought the charge comes from the community of meaning that I see language as being. In other words, I feel myself going over into language: I mean not myself, but as building in language, and language itself has its meanings. And Olson used the O.E.D. with very much that sense. He had also the magic of the first meaning must be the right one, the one that the projective comes from, and that the project comes from. And so you had to locate the first one, the earliest one, the beginning point, so each word was really thought of as a sperm word. I see I’m dangerously near sperm oil for a man who was looking at MobyDick most of the time. Puns are going to be impossible here. Each word has its authenticity, its secrets, its magic at the point of origins, and the point of origins already also in Olson’s world, post-Darwinian, really is at an unknown. So now the dangerous turnaround of the projective—this was still projective geometry—we see this object and we turn it around, we see this object and we describe it in all its ways, and yet now this same word means that even my doing this is projective on my part. How come you’re doing that? That’s now seen. In Freudianism that was seen as quite negative; that is, they thought first that negative emotions were projected on the world around [them]. The critical use of the term comes first in Freud’s analysis of paranoia. I think that right away Olson would have been involved with that meaning. Think about the rape scene with the elements entranced, with the mind entirely centered on the sound syllable, on the syllable which now is a germinal sound of a multitude of possible words. And it is entranced, so everything that comes from that is in a state of projection. There are some verifications, but on the other hand I do know as a poet if anybody has an interpretation of my poetry and they’re happy they’ve made an extraordinary and intelligent breakthrough but I say, gee, it never occurred to me, but isn’t it wonderful what readers can make of it, no trouble at all. And there may indeed be these moments for Olson—at a point one of the Maximuses is dedicated to “Duncan, who knows what is going on,” 22 which is more than I would have volunteered for. And actually, by the way, it has hidden in it almost that the poet doesn’t know because this is part of Olson’s real relation to the

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poem, not that it would be out of hand but that it must be leading him, so he doesn’t know. But what he meant at that time was that I had come into print with a question: Isn’t Maximus really a large magic formula or chant trying to change the soul in the world? Doesn’t it have that role, too? So it becomes like a mantra, as Pound thought the poem also was. That’s exactly how Pound saw Dante. And at times in The Cantos you find prayers and certain things, and very probably in the most barren areas of The Cantos, in every other sense, like the areas where we go through just paragraphs, letters of John Adams, charged with nothing but the rhythm that Pound arranges from the prose itself—that is, where we don’t encounter glorious thoughts of Adams, but the rhythm itself will be present—isn’t Pound there trying to infect us with the underlying magic of the age of reason, which he and all other unreasonable men worship? I think he really felt that if he got the rhythm of the prose and the feel of it, which is one of the great realizations of the eighteenth century, he would have what he needed in a way that he could have only if he didn’t encounter the actual thought and moved in that rhythm. You can hear that in Pound when he says that in Jefferson or Mussolini neither one would be the answer for America at this time, but both of them are touchstones of a style, or something deeper than style, that he believed in. We can now all hear the danger of the sound; there is a corrective. Along with the magic rhythm, he paid a lot of attention to what John Adams was thinking, and to the frameworks of his thought because they aren’t divorced from these rhythms. His intuition was quite right: they are a mentally powerful framework, that had The Cantos inherited them—yet he had to have just that hubris to get off the picture of The Cantos. In Olson’s case the hubris goes back much further than I think Pound ever proposed it to himself, because it swings from this matter of death and begetting—the one that was right there in the beginning—and its hold on the Maximus is tremendous. Even if in the beginning it’s not entirely proposed, it’s still the flood and so forth. I’ll read the opening “Maximus.” Then I want to go through a series here to give you a feel of what happens in the one called the third volume. You have to put on some emphysema to read this. This is rhapsody as it’s written. I remember in [English] departments a total misunderstanding of Allen Ginsberg saying, “I write by breath”—and it’s about ten miles long. You only can talk about “you write by breath” if you only got enough breath to write out of the top couple of [lines]. The two masters, Olson and Zukofsky, it was always in between [gasps]. And yet this is part of the ritual magic. In their case it surpasses smokers smoking for a quick death, which they both did. Well, Zukofsky was decently in his seventies, but they were really smoking in relation to a kind of magic rite that the poetry came for.

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[Reads “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”]23 In 1948, just when I began “The Venice Poem,” Pound sent out to Olson as well as to myself, and to Creeley, and to a small circle of poets who were corresponding with him, a manifesto. He called it the “Cleaner’s Manifesto.” He felt it was terrific and would change the whole world, [and] then [felt] he shouldn’t sign it at all because there he was in St. Elizabeths and they would find out. The three things in the letter I built into the text of “The Venice Poem.” 24 So Charles’s coming to know about my poetry was also because in the period when Charles Olson had volunteered to become kind of a secretary for Pound, he had read and seen correspondence, my correspondence with Pound, and he wanted to see where all that stuff was coming from.25 The three things from Pound were first “to follow the tone leading of vowels”; point number two, “to watch the consonant clusters”; and point number three was “the function of poetry was to debunk by lucidity.” There was no explanation. I think any of us who were having any faith at all in Pound knew that if we had to find out what the tone leading the vowels was, think about it and why, that would be a shift instead of talking about rhyming. I thought first that even when you rhyme, when you go straight through the full rhymes, you have not that many words that are generated by the sound that is begun. If you move by the vowel sound itself, now you’re not worrying about assonance or consonance. If you move from the vowel sound, suddenly the poem can be intellectual because it has a very wide vocabulary. You can’t look up the vowel sounds, but you tune in on all the vowel sounds instead of tuning in on rhymes. You’ll still have rhymes which make very strange sense. That’s one of their great advantages: rhymes sometimes make very pointed sense so that you almost feel in the beginning [like they’re] really grouped together to make these combinations, June and moon and so forth, over-convincing sense, and they also make delightfully ridiculous sense, both in life and poetry. But if you go to the vowel, and Charles Olson starts absolutely to carry that over when he writes the “Projective Verse” two years after that manifesto of Pound’s, [you find] that the mind is centered in the syllable, and the breath is the vowel. But the breath, and it’s as ancient a message about poetry as I know, is the reason poetry and the spirit are identical. The breath moves in the vowel, and that’s where it really is. And yet today one of the major things, one of the great splits, are the ones who consider that sounds or vowels or rhymes are all devices of the poet, something that you learn that’s an art or a craft, and not the spirit. Charles was definitely saying that the presence of breath in the vowel is where it all moves from. And the mind must be obedient to that, not only obedient but already hearing deep into that

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sound, and then it will be entranced. Elements entranced, and the poem of the entranced mind, is already very much where Olson was moving from. When I was first corresponding with Zukofsky, he wrote back, “which Pound is it—is it the good Pound or the bad Pound that you follow?” And I thought, gee, I guess it’s the bad Pound because I realize Zukofsky isn’t talking about the man who’s a fascist or an anti-Semite at all. I think, knowing my Zukofsky and loving his work as I do, that he’s talking about the entranced, enthralled Pound, the fact that Pound listening to the vowel writes in a state of trance. And in relation to Dante’s siren, I’ve written: Isn’t that the false sound of poetry? Isn’t Dante talking about something like that way over on Zukofsky’s side of the question, about just the contrary of where Olson places it, and where Pound is so often enraptured through passages of The Cantos that I still love for this rapture? Remember enthralled, raptured, and enchanted: “enchanted” means to be taken in by the song, but “rapture” is the same word as “rape” and ultimately means to be profoundly violated by the sound. What I’m showing is this very thing in “Projective Verse” is the center it must move from, and the obedience must be in it, is also the most dangerous point of all. [Read] the passage on Dante again about the siren; you’ll see it is that element of the music. Now Dante is close to music but Olson is highly allergic to music. He does have a note that he sides with [Pierre] Boulez against Cage.26 I know that he had his wars against music. Music means Muzak, like it occurs in Paterson. I’m thinking about attention in the poem, in which you go into the sound of the vowel as a trust because of the breath, and the music is very high in Olson. It was the only thing that could get me into the poem. That it looked crazy on the page could never do it, and in a passage like this, elements are entranced. There is a tension against it that goes back to the music, and it’s this music that breaks the trance. So there’s a music that breaks the trance, one that goes forward. Now dream comes very immediate to this. We’re now coming to the aspect of projection that’s very double indeed, and that’s the one that comes from Charles’s lifelong involvement with Jungian thought. And then, out of Jungian thought, in the later part of his life, it’s Corbin’s work in the Sufi that entirely involves Charles’s thought as it goes toward life and death and, again, as the angels appear, in the poem “Angels of the Poem.” 27 It isn’t death that appears in those last passages of the poem, it is an angel of some passage of a kind. And also Olson in his last years becomes hungry for the sources of poetry itself. There are some very powerful passages of suddenly a baby Olson, almost like figures I remember in a canvas of [Peter Paul] Rubens, where the children are not just nursing, they’re tearing at the tits and wildly sucking the substance out of the mother so the whole thing turns into a terrible, violent rape of another

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kind. The whole canvas has to do with eating, and eating becomes this kind of orgiastic rapture, rape of grace. A very shocking canvas indeed, because of the greed. Although Freud shocked the world by speaking of infant sexuality, these figures have been sitting there all the time in Munich—infants that are way out of bounds. Not only are there little sexual monsters but there’s a full cannibalistic picture. And the mother is the most unbelievable mixture of gratification, horror, and fury, all stirred up in one image. A bit of this begins to break through in figures of the underworld in Olson. That figure of Our Lady holding now the ship and not the child.28 When I was teaching at Black Mountain I pointed out to my class that Pound had written a poem containing history with all the gods present except for Yahweh, Our Lady, and Christ. Then I said, “Oh yes, isn’t it interesting that they haven’t appeared in Maximus?” But of course Our Lady had appeared through the poem, and Our Lady really is present, and for all the Jungianism is not mixed up. She is herself when she appears in the poem. But I went to Charles and said, “But where is the Christ?” And he said, “Well, he’s the carpenter.” He appears as a character hidden in the development of the poem, the carpenter. The one who was the carpenter of the ship becomes almost hidden, or he may indeed be the place Christ is hiding in the period of the first colony.29 In one place in the poem Charles does something that establishes a point of recognition between Paterson and this poem. In Paterson, remember, in the third book, the book that has to do with the “divorce” of language—you come to a place where they’re drilling to get oil, shale, and then go down to level after level and it’s dry and doesn’t yield anything. What you’re reading is just the drilling record, but all of it becomes metaphor and again we’ve got the projective present. In the Freudian projective, and then the Jungian one, all built around the first analysis of a case of paranoia, it is not only that the paranoia projects upon the world so that the whole world comes alive with the interior content of the projector. The poet is not just the maker, but also the projector. We begin to intrude upon a third kind of projection going on in the twentieth century, which was the movie camera. All the way through the nineteenth century it had been the magic lantern show, which is central to Goethe and to many contemplations about the nature of the visible world and the nature of imagination. For Freud already the movie theater is there and the projector, and certainly for the analysands and the people drawn into Freudianism in the beginning of the century, the central experience threatening to wipe out theater was the light projection in which a world appeared. That projector is very close on top of this picture. Now in this projection, with the magic intention, the paranoid also feels the world is projecting on him: that’s the paranoid feeling of it. But if we think of the circuit all the

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way through, the art projects into a world and in its projection, wherever it really encounters the world, we’re again in this projective geometrical figure, as it turns it around. Then back from the world streams a transformed world. The world is infected by the projection, and now the world starts to project. We see a Cézanne and for an hour or two we see the world infected with the projection of Cézanne. That’s part of what I meant by the magic intention of Maximus. The poem which is entranced in its base elements, which are projected and tend to entrance the human world and its trees, my car, my wife, its trees, or their trees each one, then “my car,” so even “my mountain.” In the grand dream along this line, the Orphic one of course, the myth says that the poet entrances the trees himself, and the mountains and the rocks and the streams. But certainly art does transform within its own aura: that’s one of its danger points, and also one of its marvels is to transform for a time, in which it has also entranced us, the way we see, the way we feel, the way the world appears to us in the same system of projection. So this carries projection further. I had one mad moment a day or two ago when I thought, gee, should I read all the way through Jung and see how far he got with this theory of projection? I realized, no. But somebody running down that someday may really find something. I know in the feel of it that something like this is turning around over and over again that distinguishes the Jungian level from the Freudian level in regard to the term “projection.” Well the passage here is: [Reads from “The Record”]30 When you finish the list, if you recite it all the way through, you have the actual conditions of their lives. You have every condition, and you have the elements again, entranced. I dodged reading this whole list, not because it would tire me, that’s the first thing you know, but that’s the foreground of the whole business of the hypnagogic state. All you have to do is picture yourself in a job in which you’re calling out this list of materials, and they’ve taken over your head by the time you come to the end of it. So the poem has many presentations of this kind. I feel this goes back to Pound, where he goes in the American cantos, where most critics were only saying, gee, this is the dullest stuff I ever read. But many of them had that response to Ulysses. At the break point I’ll leave you with the idea that what they were saying was not at all imperceptive, they just weren’t driving home to what gave them that very definite feeling. Just beyond this I am getting tired, my eyelids are getting heavy, this is getting tedious—the book takes you over. And the one place it takes people over completely are the stock report pages. I mean they’re totally wiped out for the rest of their lives. They open the paper every day, and this whole column does it to them.

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I had a job in 1940, or 1941, as a distribution agent for Dell Publishing Company.31 At that time they put out fifty-two magazines. A distribution agent is a detective. In Manhattan, Brooklyn, and so forth, you distribute copies of books by putting numbers down for hours and hours and hours, and also, you can use a slide rule. I found out that the only thing that made the job interesting for a little while was that I found I could add four columns without adding one column at a time. And then I’d go home. All I was was a human adding machine. And they call it “pushing”; it’s counterpart for the male push, push, push [that] takes over completely, and I was going down these columns, just out of my head, and suicide would appear in between as all night long you would be going through this operation. To get back to the poem, The Cantos had moments of this, and actually Olson doesn’t plunge into this list, it’s a hint. What I see in this is that this part is telling to Olson, and telling about the underlying poetics and bringing us back to it, but of course also he sees that these were the conditions for two years for these people. Every physical thing that they encountered was theirs: all of the things on this bill of lading are the elements and as they’re named and counted, and counted again and again, and as they disappear, which is part of the thing which goes on in the poem. They are the very basic experience of being entranced. [Duncan calls a break in the class.] I’m going to start in this book by reading a “Stevens Song.” “Stevens” is the carpenter, and so I want to talk about another dimension. Given the projective and Charles’s own understanding as the projective operating throughout, as the happy paranoid poetic discovery, in the Jungian sense, the world is actually your matter. So that everything that happens belongs to your story is the ultimate paranoid picture. I’ll tell for the millionth time the delightful story of [William] Burroughs in London. He was asked, “Aren’t you afraid of your paranoia?” And Burroughs says, “Well, you know what paranoia is, it’s when you know all the facts.” 32 And Charles works back and forth in his philosophy, and in his letters he worried the question about what was history and what word could he use, back and forth. What became more and more the worry was that, again, we’ve got this term of “my”—a term, as I said, I also found myself contending with— where Charles actually opens it up and it becomes a major principle. The world really is “my” world, and now that is a projective world of how something is going to come in. How is something going to enter from out there once they discovered the other? Then it’s your other. The great question is: Are you the other’s other? And the arrangement is a hard ground.

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So in looking in history he knows he’s going to find—as certainly Williams did—that all of history has been there to furnish the matter of the very poem he’s on. And that, as a matter of fact, if a ship has taken the place of Christ, then Christ is hidden in the carpenter who made the ship, and the carpenter will be there, and he uncovers the carpenter who made the ship. The actual, and let’s use the term “actual,” which is very important here. The term “real” won’t tell us anything very important at all, because much of the actual world is not real or realized, and let’s say some people have some dreams that are real and some that are not real. We’ll leave the term “real” there. That it actually happened— that you actually had the dream, that you actually saw it in some other places. Charles looks in history for the actual place where the carpenter is in history. Then what is entirely projective here is that he recognizes the carpenter when he finds him. “This is the carpenter” is a projective decision entirely. And the carpenter meanwhile is in an interior schema that Charles in part experiences as archetypes, as Jung proposes them, of the psyche. And there’s no trouble with archetypes of the psyche any more than archetypes of the mind, providing we’ve got a Platonic mind and a Jungian psyche. That would be okay, that works, and we understand in the context. But now we’ve got a picture that this is a field of poetry that can be entranced and can invent. If it invents, it lets something into it. This is a problem Williams faced in Paterson. If you remember, one of the things he begins to realize [is that] there’s some problem here about invention which is essential. And in a way if you can see that, if in the middle of a projection you can also invent—let something into this schema so that you’re composing instead of entirely entranced or enthralled—this acts as a kind of restorative of the proportions and revivification of the areas of the poem. I think this holds for people looking at these poems and thinking, are these collages? Yes, they’re in a period of people like collages, like things brought in, but it may very well be because in the pressures of overpopulated cities, with vast populations around us, we do form overly strong schemas. We can’t find one we belong to, so we belong to our own and that already has the character of the one Freud was looking at. If we belong to our own pattern, and so do people we know, we know just the way they fit; they belong incidentally to the pattern, and groups. And in a society of that kind, when people are in groups, a Jonestown33 becomes very true of a group, or the patterns of the splitting up of groups, the communist, Stalinist, and Trotskyite split, and splintering in every level of groups that begin to form any kind of grouping. One of the things that is present in the proposition about closed and open, the beginning one, remember, is just that he doesn’t want to die; he does not want the second date to go there at all, and more than that, he’s saying something quite true. No matter what else,

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he does not write that second date. No matter how he does it, he does not really get to write that second date. He doesn’t close the parentheses. He starts out after the first parenthesis has been opened, the first parenthesis is already there. This was so set in his mind that when I went to attend his dying and came in, in the last session, and said, “Well, you’re ten years older than I am, and I’ve always come to see how you do it each time, so I came to see how you would die, Charles.” 34 And he said, “I’m not dying, I’ve got this live-her to attend to.” He had cancer of the liver, and also, in Jungian teaching he’d found that the liver was the anima, and he’d written over and over again, trying to make the formula of “live-her.” And he was in a deep travail of [the] soul because he had come through to a recognition, but a bewildered one, because nothing else he comes to—it certainly doesn’t come in the poem—remember “my wife.” I think Betty [Kaiser] and Connie [Bunker] may occur in the poem. I thought, will I go madly through and see if they occur as persons which they certainly were. But now “my wife” is someone else; [we’re] now back in that schema. And in his world, women so powerfully belonged to the interior schema, to the paranoid place they took; they sustained him, whatever it was that they really were. It was certainly clear that Betty felt more and more isolated. That character that we have when women come up and tell, “I was a housewife for twenty years, and when he died I had no identity at all, I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t anyone, and now I don’t know what to do with the house I used to keep because housekeeping belongs to somebody’s schema.” This is very powerful in Olson, and so the “liveher” was still interior, and he felt he was still talking about his anima, his own feminine character, and at the same time, the hubris was immediate, it certainly could have brought tears to one’s eyes. He was in a bewildered grief when Betty in a little car drove straight into a Mack truck at night, drove between the lights of the truck instead of around them. The news couldn’t get through. I’m giving you the tension in which the energy of this poem moves, and there’s a declaration in this poem. For those of you who know “Against Wisdom as Such,” there’s a warning towards me. If you start thinking a certain way then God does rush in. The Maximus Poems themselves begin to have credos. “I believe in God” comes into the book very early. As a credo again, it can’t go much further off. Let me read this one, in which the carpenter is present as he was found and recognized as being, and we’ve then got a hidden Christ, one that you could recognize but no one recognized. [Reads “Stevens Song”]35

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he Pisan Cantos came out in the ’40s at the end of the Second World War, and they were what Olson was facing when he was talking about Pound. Even as Williams’s Paterson was appearing, it was already a poem written in movements, with closure. So that Olson’s proposition of Pound and Williams is not one about closure/nonclosure. The Cantos were proposed as having closure, but with The Pisan Cantos it was very doubtful that they had, and they didn’t, in the enclosure. Paterson has closure; it simply is incomplete. That’s a very different thing from being open. It was conceived and written in four parts, and the four parts are orchestrated like a symphony with different movement and feel. So let’s say the third part is a dissolution of language—there are symbolic functions all the way through—and then when he came to the end, the four, it’s modeled also after Finnegans Wake, after the major movements of Finnegans Wake, in which the river is a woman, and the city is a man, or the hill is man. And then it also has stages of language that were chartered and had a plan. Pound writing to me: in “The Venice Poem,” the poem I was writing in 1948, [it] is a closed poem, and I realized at the end it was the best I knew at that point to attach myself to the symphonic form as I heard it in Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements.1 There are four movements in “The Venice Poem.” And all of these are closed forms, and they’re also conventions. You know what you’re doing, you know you’re in the third movement, you know you’re in the fourth movement. When Paterson comes to “the end,” a marvelously orchestrated end, then he found he had a fifth book. This does not mean that it was open, because it was a fifth book. It had ordination, in his mind, and it was four books and one more book. In The Cantos’ case, the formal principle itself, Pound was suffering 175

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from it, because it was not allowing him to come to closure. He wrote a closure, though, by the same way Charles did: he wrote the end and put it in a drawer as the hundred and twentieth canto, which was written considerably before many of the last ones. It looks a little like a disaster force as he comes to that. I’ll have to go back over the Butterick notes about “my wife my car my color and myself.” That would be Jungian self, right, Jungian self, all broken down. Go on. Michael Palmer: So we would need, first of all, two volunteers. Student: Would you repeat what you said at the very beginning? Look at three or six in terms of what? Palmer: Let’s say “Letter 6”—“polis is / eyes”—of the first Maximus book, and I think “Canto LXXVIII” from the Pisans would be nice. It’s the one that ends with “there are no righteous wars.” Not to say that one has to present on that case, that’s about seven or eight very dense pages. We are not looking for an explication de texte or paraphrase, but someone to lead the discussion about the kinds of juxtaposition and how perception arises in the poem. Duncan: Is there anybody who has not read The Cantos at all? Student: Um-hm, basically. Duncan: The thing that interests me is whether someone who has not read The Cantos at all could take this Pisan canto, because I’d like to uncover just as facts of the case, what it seems like when you read it. Since it’s numbered LXXVIII, it belongs to, supposedly, a large poem. You’re engaged in imagining the large poem, but you have no other data. This is the experience of a reader who would lift a magazine in that period and find that they’d never heard of Ezra Pound before, but they’re reading this one canto. In the case of Paterson, for instance, we read the first volume before the first volume came out, 1945, 1946. We were all one of our topics, that is we’d meet poems in The Collected Poems [of William Carlos Williams] that came out in 1934, and say from Paterson, and we asked ourselves, what is Paterson, and then what can Paterson be if this is part of it? How is this different from these poems that are just here, I mean, what do they belong to possibly? After the first book of Paterson came out, we had to wait two years before the second book of Paterson came out. Well, it’s as good as Oz books—I used to dream Oz books.2 In between I thought that Oz books only came out at Christmas time. It took me quite a time to figure out that they didn’t. It was my one great occasion of throwing a temper tantrum. We were on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz, this would be 1927, yeah, and eight-year-old me would be

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just about the one to do this, and I saw an Oz book. It was in summer colors and it was sitting in the window, and it suddenly dawned on me that Oz books do not only appear at Christmas time; they appear in the summer. And so I start: I’ve gotta have that, and no one’s going to be paying any attention, so I thought, I will throw a super, colossal, absolute [tantrum]. I got the Oz book. [laughter] It was one of my treasured Oz books; it was never tainted by that, it was absolute victory. Okay, it was like that with the Paterson. Student: Let me volunteer for “Canto LXXVIII.” Palmer: So, in other words, what Robert is saying is that you don’t have to transform yourself into a Pound scholar, in a way, because, first of all, it’s an initial contact, and then we can anyway supply a range of the references. Student: Well, I’ve never read The Maximus Poems, I’d like The Maximus Poems. Palmer: Okay, so you can lead. Duncan: So you can buy a Maximus Poems. Of course there are recordings, I mean there are records of both. I have a tape on which I have Pound, all the cantos that Pound read in sequence, that he read aloud. He caught on early that every time he was to read, he should read a different canto. So he got quite a number of them, by the time you chase down BBC interviews, various things, and get them together in sequence on a tape. I want to locate that early Olson. I also have a tape—that was supposed to be unique, was sold as being unique, but Serendipity sneaked me a copy—of Williams before his stroke.3 Maybe [it was] this early Olson one, yes it was, it was the early Olson one that I’m not supposed to have a copy of. Palmer: The other things were longer-range topics. One that comes up is an investigation of this term “energy” as a metaphor, for someone to take on, and there are numbers of others one would be open [to] as a proposition. Duncan: I think that we absolutely try and get at what you think form and the extension of content means. Robert Creeley maintains that he never said it, but it would be in the correspondence anyway, and then he never phrased it.4 A scholar could industriously find out, did he or did he not in the letters, because this belongs to a period when Olson and Creeley liked to talk together personally. Palmer: In terms of the form/content question, a couple of people could take it on. Someone could trace down that aspect of the relation to

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Creeley, in particular, and Olson and the origins of that; someone else could look at it in Plato and Aristotle, as a question, for example. So maybe at the end of the class we can sort out if anyone is willing to take on those. As we look at this, other terms immediately begin to come forward, which you might think about for something either as a paper or to give in class, with an interest in process. The notion of process is essential. Duncan: The third thing is process and, which he attaches to the nervous system. Any people for process? Student: How much is that to pin him on Whitehead too? Duncan: No Whitehead at this point, none at all, no no no no. He, at the earliest estimate of when he read Whitehead, Butterick thinks he was reading it in ’56, but it would have to be late 1956, because when I was in Black Mountain Olson was, word by word with a French dictionary, going through Rimbaud’s correspondence, and doing those little Rimbaud things, and he was into speculations about Pythagoras, but there would have been Whitehead. We met every day, for an hour or two hours—Olson didn’t wake up ’til noon, and it would usually be about one to two, one to three—and everything was pressed on me, what was going on. The student notes also don’t show any Whitehead going on in there. So no Whitehead at this point. Process is not Whitehead at this point. In the same way that I think he erased the gestalt. You don’t even smell there’s any gestalt back of this, which had been going on at Harvard when he was there. Whitehead had been going on at Harvard when he was there, but Olson is very much a maverick in relation to what’s going on at Harvard. He generally describes himself as trying to get the Harvard out of him. He got out of Harvard and was trying to get the Harvard out of him. But both Whitehead and [Wolfgang] Köhler were Harvard. Harvard never did get out of Olson; in the first place he’s got what we hear as a Harvard accent, Boston. Palmer: Not a Brahmin one. Duncan: What? No, not a Brahmin one. No, just the Kennedy Irish accent, Boston Irish, right. So, anybody for process? Palmer: To deal with Whitehead’s Process and Reality would be a thing that could be done, in relation to Pound too. Duncan: Could you do something in relation to cybernetics, with a focus on how you see it in operation here? I mean it— Student: I’d rather do composition by field because notions like cybernetics and process are a little bit off poetry.

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Duncan: Oh, right. Palmer: It’s interesting because to my mind something like process is very close to, loads right into the question. I don’t mean that it should for you, I’m just saying it’s a funny, different perception of that. Duncan: Yeah, this one on process, process and perception, and so forth, and the problems that come from it. Student: He’s implying there that it is the process that shapes the energy, whatever that is. Yes, no? Duncan: Yeah. That the form is accomplished. Student: One of the things that I have to do to understand Olson is to reword his sentences to hopefully say the same thing, but in a less remote form. Let me just clarify this. Am I correct, is he saying there that the form is accomplished through something that he’s naming “process,” which in fact shapes the energy? Duncan: No, it’s the process of the thing. When I described what I thought process was, it was a psychic process I thought was taking place in the poem. But this is the process of the thing, meaning the poem itself, and he’s just in the previous section described that when you follow through, the poem as a matter of fact in its own energies tells you what it is. If everything is taken to belong to the poem that’s emerging— that’s the kinetics of the thing, not yours, but the kinetics of the thing.5 Remember when we say the “kinetics of the thing,” it’s a referent that can also mean just what we’re doing. There is where it would be hard to locate the kinetics of this thing between me and the poem. Palmer: As a term in both contemporary painting and writing, it can mean it immediately. You do not step back, you stay in touch with the informing nature of the process itself. This would be countered to that notion of strategies, for example, that you keep coming at it with strategies and then you sit back and have a strategy session about the affective devices you’re going to use. A poem of literary distance and contrivance. If you commit yourself in one respect to the processional nature of the thing, you can’t possibly do that. Duncan: From the moment he ventures into “field composition”—and it has to be put in great big quotes because the guy another year from there isn’t going to know what “field composition” is at all—put himself in the open, that’s his other one, “open” equals “field composition.” As I said, it’s a little hard for me to focus that “field composition” implies being open. He can go, as I say, you know, the only door is the exit? I mean, “he

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can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself.” 6 I love “under hand,” puns all the way along the line are really marvelous. But that one I did believe in, that you follow what the poem is doing. In reading it I would read it way over in that direction. Student: And that’s the process! Duncan: And that’s the process, but I believe that was a psychic process, not me. In a way that’s where I took hold of the Hopkins: I am what I do. Not a soul, I’m not, I mean, you can’t say. No matter what you do, I am what I do. Student: But it’s not necessarily out in open possibilities, but out without pretension also. Duncan: Oh, in the open, right, sure. You’re in your invulnerability, but you’re following the poem. And so the corrections and shaping of a poem to a model would all be seen as removing vulnerabilities, because they are judgments. How do you know if you’ve made a mistake in a poem is a gestalt problem; that’s the same one as how do you know that I didn’t remember it right. How do you know that it’s the wrong name, when you remember a name? That was a major problem for the Gestaltists. There must be then a figure that tells you it fits and doesn’t fit. It doesn’t have to tell you what it is that fits. It simply deals; it has to do with fitting and not fitting, a little like a feeling on an iamb. This is less than that, or something, some feeling of contrast. So the name I remember brought up against the blank doesn’t fit the blank. That’s it, right, not because there’s a name sitting there. You’re following what is emerging in the work. Now we’re not in memory at all. We’re working with what’s present. So we’ve got two different possibilities as this goes. In the most open composition where you’re following, you can get it wrong and have to correct it. You’re following what the poem indicates and so you correct out your own intrusion. Now that already, if you thought about a free, open composition, why couldn’t you intrude? You are also happening. The poem’s happening and you’re happening—is it an intrusion? You follow the poem and you don’t, no no you don’t pick up along the way? The picture that Olson gives here of following through the intent of the thing is a very strong command, one I still hold over me, and so I feel obedience when I’m writing, and yet I’m permitted a certain amount of invention. Two terms are very important for me: permission and obedience. And both of those are in reference to the thing itself that’s being made. Whereas the idea of correcting, or [finding] a more just word, to adjust a word, seems already to mean that

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you can devise the thing, to make a judgment yourself, and demand of the thing some effect. This word is not effective. This goes back to the idea you should have two interesting words in every line. Have I an interesting word in this line? No. I should choose an interesting word. Palmer: There’s a way that goes right back to the pre-Renaissance notion— before we come along and intrude on the word “creative,” like we all become creative—goes back to almost that medieval notion of poet/ scribe, where you are obedient to what arrives. Or dictation. The other thing about that “close” thing, Robert. There are a couple of places where it becomes a difficult term, because first of all, yes, field can have closure. If you think of a field, we only arrive at one if it’s bounded in a certain way. Then it becomes a field, or has some circumscription, either natural or whatever. It is discrete, in other words. So we can perceive it as such. The thing that does come into question in the theory of field is, what is the nature of the boundedness, since it’s not going down a one-way street where you have a beginning and you have an end. What does come into play is, how is it bounded? How do the boundaries function, if they are not simply to close the thing off, if it’s to remain, for example? Duncan: My own field is that, let’s say in composition the poem is composed and complete when the resonances are all present. In the beginning there are propositions of resonance, and certain thematic resonances will seem over-resonant. But this is already moving toward every note as principal thing, and that itself defines the economy. This is a territory that certainly is hard to speak about, because my absolute feeling of a poem being finished, or of any canto, for instance, being a poem in itself—and this will hold also for the Maximus—seems to be an aesthetic recognition that since you can’t turn there, often in a conventional poem you’ll say: “My God, the last four verses are doing nothing but counting out four verses.” In my own feeling of it, Eliot, when he neither in The Waste Land, nor in the Four Quartets did he have a sufficient sense of form not to have to borrow some, and he had to borrow Pound’s forming for the first one—which would have been a conglomerate form—but he seems to shy away from any decision of meeting this feeling. Then the Four Quartets, they’re determined by the same way I did “The Venice Poem.” You fill out a sonata form and you know where you are all the time, and it’s got an outline form. Now that is a conventional form. The great help of a convention—it means, is it charged? Are all the sections of it charged, or are some of them just

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present because they’re supposed to be functionally present? The Four Quartets seems charged, but since it’s charged in relation to its quartet form, sonata form, well, it did not seem to me compelling. It isn’t compelling. Your term is “propelling.” When you were talking about projectives and then you said “propels,” something “propels” something, right, moving something forward. You’re propelled and on your way. That was a force that wasn’t present in the Four Quartets. It was not doing that and it wasn’t inhabiting its form. It still was a form that Eliot was not contacting form itself. You go again and again to wonder about this experience of the formal. I think Eliot probably didn’t have it. When he talks about poems, it’s not the formal that strikes him in poems; it’s not that they’re a form, but other aspects of the poem. Anybody who can write back and forth as [Paul] Valéry did, and Eliot, about prose and verse, when you’re talking as if verse equals poetry and prose equals something else, their minds [are] not even dealing with the formal character of something. Palmer: The other thing about the question of closure, before we move off of that—it represents a dilemma that is never really answered. Most dramatically present among the New York painters, for example in the ’50s, where they’re trying to figure out, now that, okay, we’re outside of the world of the entirely mimetic and so on, where the thing is finished when it’s completely the painting: How do we then know when a painting is finished? This is something, for example, [Willem] de Kooning is wondering over and over and over again, and finally comes to a kind of hazy notion of it’s finished when everything has emerged that is in [it], a feeling of it being done. But this is not like something acquiring a finish. Student: Right. But it is akin to this idea of energy. Palmer: Yeah. Absolutely. Duncan: Ah, yeah, right. It’s felt throughout Palmer: And it has almost a mystical aspect to the form’s emerging from the thing, rather than your imposing. If you’re imposing there comes a point where simply there’s no more room for the process. Not to say that the question of when it’s finished is not always a problem, but it’s much less of one when you’re working within a greater degree of finitude. It’s significant what finish is applied, whether it’s a varnish or whatever it may be; that “finish” per se becomes a value. One of the things that has been most obvious since the point where the early cubists were trying to get rid of the damn varnish on the surface is that we’re trying to get away from this notion that finish is a mark of acculturation.

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Duncan: If you’re concerned with presence, then you have no problem of closure or openness. That a poem is always present can be true of either an open or a closed poem. If you had to continue working in order for it to be present, then obviously you don’t have a sense of presence. You’re working for it to be present, and that might involve corrections, it may involve a whole series of things. And there’s an entirely different thing if you are perfecting a form. You couldn’t perfect a field, it’s not in your hands. When we get to it, the field concept in composition, there is a process going on. You’re not inert to it, so in the transfer of energy you can tell in your nervous system when it’s all there, even if it’s mysteriously all there. That’s all the more mysterious as Charles describes this, and yet he’s influenced I think in that description of transfers of energies and so forth by the communication thing you notice because cybernetics has come into it with a problem of its own. How can we tell when a message is finished? Same problem with the DNA: How does the DNA finish itself? It doesn’t do it by using every single “letter” (in quotes) as belonging to its code. What is a code emerging here? Since Maximus explores the possibility of fragments, of freeing itself from its compelling forces it moves through, I think that Olson’s calls for energy are that he had unleashed a poem that demanded all of his, and then he could see more energy that he would have ahead. There is an economy in which a poet does or does not apprehend the energy that’s going to be required and does or does not have a realistic picture of what that energy’s going to call on from his body. And also listening to the body, getting the message. I see this at an almost clairvoyant level. I’ve gotta start listening to what goes on in the breathing, and I’ve got to start listening to what goes on in the heart. I’ve been taught the energy was in my head. I’ve been taught I have intellectual energy, and no matter what intellectual energy I have, I have only one thing to come from, my heart and my breath. The brain itself is not going to come from something else but your heart and your breath is very strong in Charles.7 And at the same time he’s thinking of it physiologically. Oh, that’s the other thing he was reading in 1956. He had been doing morphology for two or three years, he was into morphology. Stacks of medical morphologies. Meanwhile he was using his body, like he used his car, his wife, and his color. I mean his color is his body— bloodless by that time—he was burning them up. I mean he was simply using all the fuel present for what he had to do. Palmer: When does Carl Sauer arrive for Charles?

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Duncan: Sauer, we just met Sauer in 1947, or 1948, because he was doing the work on his Donner Party, moving west. Do you want to hand me the second Butterick.8 I think there is something on Sauer here, it locates the time. Sauer was certainly there by 1965, Olson took me to visit him, but he was there earlier I’m pretty sure, when Olson was working on the West. He was very much there at the time of the Maximus letters, which is also in 1949 or so, because Robert Barlow—the poet who had just committed suicide before Olson went to Yucatan—had been a Sauer student.9 He had another connection from his college days at Harvard, from Matthiessen’s project of American studies. American studies were not literature at all separated out from other things, so there were sociologists in that group, and in the group were the beginnings of new geologists, and the new geologists went and were the main line, first main line of students of Sauer. And they would have led him to Sauer for sure when he was there. It’s [the Butterick book] still filled with lots of material that’s unearthed since then. It’s a remarkable piece. You might pass it around. Especially pass it around to look at what they were coping with when looking at a page of Charles Olson’s own. There were facsimiles of manuscript pages where they couldn’t decide about words, and Olson himself by the way couldn’t decide about his own handwriting.10 He was in total dismay; he would stare and not know what in the world to do. Gerard Malanga wrote something about not being able to make out something that was on a postcard of Olson’s and that caused great Olson scandals. An outbreak of anger from Charles, but Charles never designed his handwriting for anybody, including himself, to read. Palmer: We got a postcard from him with [what looked like] forty thousand words on it, and I mean all talk about field, I mean they were up, down, around, and in circles and then he’d run out of space so he’d start circling the edges, dripping over onto the address side. One summer on Wordsworth, it was on the question of recollection and tranquility, which always gave me emotion recollective and tranquility, which Charles was always going for, and I could never picture it in relation to Charles. I didn’t see any recollection. Duncan: Oh, but he must be going for the passage. Keats has a few insights, but Wordsworth has a remarkable one. He says that a violent emotion will be recollected in tranquility—this is when you’re writing it, you don’t feel violent when you write it—and will reemerge, a violence in the writing. And he’s not talking about tranquility in writing at all. It’s

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another proposition. How the world as tranquility reemerges. Most of the Victorian period had an idea that you sat down in a foyer, but Wordsworth experienced it—looking at his Prelude—a violent emotion in there. It isn’t like the mimetic of violence of Howl, for instance. We imagine the person writing it was writing it in a foyer, and more than that, the poem tells us he was writing in a foyer. But most people just stop, tranquility meaning you’re very near sound asleep and there is no disturbing emotion in the writing, or was none. Palmer: The reason is that I still picture Charles writing in somewhat of a furor. Duncan: Oh, he was writing in a furor, right, we can see that by the way the writing goes. Student: You can even in a certain way, I mean, in a certain way you can hear him admonishing everyone to do everything in a furor. If you just read this paragraph here where— Duncan: Well, actually, physically, to get that great hulk of Olson moving was—if it was moving by noon, it was something. And it had to be somewhat warm before it would be moving at all, it just does. Frozen. Palmer: This is a sort of suffering, the self-consuming passion of Franz Kline and others too. It was very much one of the artistic models of the ’40s and ’50s. Duncan: It was the model for breaking through our friends’ sensibility. It was really co-opting it because via these critics it was scolding every poem that made a threatening picture. Later Olson becomes more acceptable to the academic in a way, because once he’s taking drugs he doesn’t present the problem he presented early when it was his own energy. To the academic it’s quite understandable that if you weren’t teaching at Princeton or Harvard and you weren’t guaranteeing that poetry was an avocation—it should become a vocation—you would actually be a screaming, raving degenerate like Poe or Whitman or Emily Dickinson. Think of all the various pictures they have of those very neurotic poets. And immediately the projection is that’s where I would be; if I were a poet of any different order I would be mad, locked away, carted off in a little wagon. And Howl is a perfect projection of what every good student at Columbia believes would happen to you if you went bohemian. I mean, the best minds of my generation are nuts, and screaming and buggered by mad motorcyclists, you should have such a chance! [laughter] I mean, the outside of Columbia is that. So it was a poem understandable to Columbia, totally understandable to the

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world that Allen Ginsberg came from. It was the one his father believed you’d be in if your verse wasn’t appearing in the Atlantic Monthly. Think about where it would be appearing: on latrine walls or somewhere. Palmer: Columbia was the most conservative of the Ivy League schools, which is a hard proposition to imagine at that point, traditionally so because of its church affiliations and so on, its origins. The reason, by the way, that Dwight Eisenhower for a while was chancellor of Columbia was that the boobs were sitting around—the board of directors of Columbia—and they were wondering who was going to be available to be chancellor, and one of them said: “Well, let’s get Eisenhower,” meaning Milton Eisenhower, famous educator and educational philosopher. So they said: “Great idea!” and so they got the other one! [laughter] Anyway, that wanders a bit, but significantly, when Allen [Ginsberg] came along with [Jack] Kerouac and so on as angry young men, there was a category for that. What’s his name, longtime professor of English, they were immediately friendly now, and giving advice? Duncan: Lionel Trilling.11 Palmer: Trilling isn’t surprising. He was sympathetic to a whole range of things not with poetry, which is a washout—and then also [Karl] Shapiro, who was a great supporter of artists of whatever persuasion anyway. They were mainly trying to get Allen not to get himself put in jail for the next twenty years. But it was interesting; they were not trying to get him to change his work or his orientation or his enthusiasm, they were just trying to say, you’ve got to survive at this. He was immediately having paternal presences in that world that were to some degree saving presences. Duncan: Let’s go back to the Wordsworth proposition about a violent emotion, one that’s disturbing. We’ve talked about distancing, and that’s an Eliot proposition. I think that Eliot’s proposition of distancing, which was one of the reasons that he wasn’t confronted with form, that he simply became confused and let somebody else take care of it—or borrowed a form to con-form to. What I don’t find in Four Quartets is the kind of charged wrestling with the conventional form that you find in somebody who believes that it’s going to get him into trouble, and at the same time protect him. The Wordsworthian descriptions seem to me very much like the one I went through in “The Venice Poem.” Charles Olson seems to have had a real need to have a poem that would project him into an emotion, because as a physical human being his emotions are really very bottled up. That seems quite clear. And frequently in

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poems you’ll find that poems address the subject of love when it’s hard for him to get together with where that was. So grief and loss he feels very intensely. Poems of bonding are almost as if you had it in your hands. You either do or don’t is one of the surprising poems about love: you do or don’t bond.12 But the Wordsworth one was much more like what I experienced in “The Venice Poem,” except that I wasn’t very cool when I was writing it. I would have loved to have had tranquility. Instead I was quite the opposite when writing that poem. But the poem was a protective form, because when you were writing it you became engrossed in the poem and lost yourself in writing it, so that you could unfold things and they both seemed to reveal, but everything you called yourself now was in the poem. You were not actually expressing something you felt in that way. It was right there in the poem. And so things that I didn’t even have any permission to feel and, oh, “cocksucking breeds enmity.” 13 I mean not even an Augustan—I don’t mean that they don’t use words like that—but it was a judgment on homosexuality and specific acts that is much more sinister than the most rightist idea of all, compacted within about ten properly angry little lines. I remember staring at them as I wrote them. I didn’t say, “Do I feel this?” I was actually being rather liberal in my own mind. I thought, I ought to take these illiberal sentiments out of here. Except that I was obedient to it. I knew that I can’t take them out of here because they belong in here, they were experienced like they would be in a drama. This is the thing that in recent years certainly the linguists have been fascinated about— that when you write, you just sit down to write a letter and write, “I love.” Now how do you get away from that? How do you even get with it, which is even more? Can you add some guarantee when you hand it to somebody? It’s already written there on the sheet of paper. When Olson’s talking about an energy getting over there, Wordsworth was talking about—what is it that, does somebody remember what it is he’s talking about?—it’s violence. I said “violence,” but [I mean] a violent emotion. What is it that he’s talking about? I had never myself thought of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins outside of his writing about poetry and his letter. I never looked at the poems and realized that there were, there’s an ars poetica having to do with the nature of identity, as that passage does. Well then to say: I am what I do—and you suddenly see, all right, I’m not a psychology, I’m not a person, I am what I do—that leads forward to Gertrude Stein’s. All of these are running terms on “I am because I think.” Stein’s real one is “I am

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because my little dog knows me,” “I am I because my little dog knows me,” which is a turn that does as remarkably much as “no ideas but in things.” I wouldn’t, I’m too many persons, but my little dog does single me out. Nothing in me singles me out. First of all, it’s Gertrude Stein being—her entire horizon is my guess, an ego too huge to ever notice itself—but the little dog can single her out. Palmer: Which is in a continual crisis of identity all, even with that enormous ego. What’s fascinating is the second turn on that, when she becomes famous in America with The Autobiography of Alice [B. Toklas] and so on, best seller, to her astonishment and delight. All of a sudden everybody knows her, and the question of how I am I arises once again: because if everybody knows me, who the hell am I? Duncan: Well, we all know a little dog knows you in a different way. You’re a local famous! In The Pisan Cantos—which we can look at separated from the other cantos—in an original canto it’s very hard to locate what the “I” is. Is it a poem at all of a person, “I”? Just as a drama, you don’t find the person “I” right away in the Shakespeare plays, and the poet Robert Browning has been harshly criticized and thought of as nonexistent because there’s no “I” present. He’s always being somebody else, in a series of personae, that don’t yield their masks. You can’t take the dramatis personae of Robert Browning and call them masks, in the idea that they’re kind of masks to a counter-person. We’re going back to that word “thing.” You’re following a thing, and things will appear— and an also interesting thing is that in Maximus there’s a struggle back and forth, Olson’s solidly there. No one dreamed of watching Olson walking around Gloucester. Pound begins to be, is solidly there in The Pisan Cantos. That’s the place where The Cantos, where the (in quotes) “distance” of The Cantos had been posited on a distance. There’s a fallacy in positing a distance when it’s impossible to distance. Somebody is distancing and then you read it out by its not being there? I mean the distancing itself already is the presence, and in The Cantos, Pound was dealing only with the ideas of the persons that were present, as if they weren’t present, as if he were not also himself projecting these ideas, along with them. So, for instance, an anti-Semitism not his could occur. But as a matter of fact, an anti-Semitism occurs when he’s present. And yet he is also haunted in the beginning with them, as if they were reincarnations. He wondered: Are these reincarnations? Are these memories back for a project? We’ve got an open project about approaching the question of memory: Is this something I once knew that comes back?

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When the poem is a field, if it appears, it’s in the field. So you aren’t concerned with where did it appear from? Its presence in the field is the thing, and the composition by field—the Gestaltists are really talking about a field—the field may not be, as a matter of fact, the poem. In the Gestalt case, if there are specters that are present because there’s a figure in the mind, and the mind is the field, and the field in the mind tells why this figure and that figure isn’t the field—by the way, the figure gives us hints about how things behave because there’s a field in which this figure is present, in which these figures are projected, missing or not missing and so forth, immediately imprinted. They wouldn’t tell us about the boundary of a work of art. Those Gestalt figures don’t look like works of art. I mean, they no more look like works of art than the psychoanalytic drawings of Jung’s patients look like works of art. That’s not what they are. They’re not even advanced as such. But they are picturings of something that we then draw upon as language. So that in its theory The Cantos, everything in it would be neutral in one case, but how everything in it is present is the message. They coexist. And Pound had already an “I” in this case, because when he talks about the ideogram, what he’s struck by is that the things in my world are me. This is different from “I am what I do” of Hopkins. And Pound, who so strikingly does what he does, doesn’t say, “I am what I do,” nor does he say, “I am what I think.” He says, “I am the things of my world, and they are here, lo and behold, as I find them,” so they’re found like a found object. It’s like [Marcel] Duchamp. When we talk about Duchamp we talk about the series of his objects.14 And they are in turn found objects, so they’re the upside-down urinal, the bottle dryer, in a series, and there are several layers. And the characteristic Pound thing remains. The scholars may turn and wonder about how these go together and why, but that’s excluded from Pound’s method, because the poem is a process of these things emerging. And not thought of as a psychic process. Now, he had a map. I mean he had more than one thing present in his mind. But one was a constellation. The other one was, however, that he thought he would arrive at an intellectual description of hell, purgatory, and heaven, as we know them, present in the present world. There are even hints—with a little bit of [Emanuel] Swedenborg, in the early cantos—that he could have realized, like Swedenborg, that hell, purgatory, and heaven are the nature of your true desire, and defined by your desire realm, and so forth.15 He would entertain briefly such flashes, and he himself had defined one thing about his poetry only, well: “what

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thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross” 16—that’s a paradise. It seems at first to be paradise because the credence we give to love as being a positive force, but if we put desire in its place as Swedenborg did and as Blake did following that, what Swedenborg realized was nobody’s punished in hell; they’re dwelling in their secret desire. So the people living a virtuous life, but being hypocritical, secretly desiring, will land up in the things they secretly desire. And we’ll see them in what we would call hell. The difficulty in Swedenborg is there’s no hypocrisy over there, and then you wonder by what principle is there hypocrisy over here! How come you can’t be hypocritical when you’re sitting in hell, but can be when you’re sitting in this hell, right? Little difficulty about that formula. It’s worth looking at in Olson’s projection. In the total Maximus you find this big energy that he expresses. Think about it the other way around. He’s feeling this energy, he’s talking about an energy getting from here over to there. Now he’s already not distanced at all, and the energy’s outside of himself; it gets from here to there. By projecting into the poem, he becomes a servant carrying it forward. You could catch it in a poem, I mean. It’s over to the reader, and it’s a person almost, and a self, different from the poet. Palmer: And different from the energy, as he says, that the reader takes away. Which is interesting in relation to what they call “reception theory” now, where more people realize that part of the openness of any poetic construct has to do with the fact that the reader’s energy, and the reader’s complex of emotions and intellect and perception, changes from reader to reader, and affects the text itself. The text is not fixed. And it doesn’t matter how closed or how open the composition, so to speak. We have that profound variability built into the only place in which the poem exists, which is in the reading of it. Well, Charles makes a kind of step over to that, but significantly he says the energy that you bring to it and then the energy—the different energy—that a reader takes away. He doesn’t say anything about energy the reader brings, actually, which would be the next step in the recognition of the lovely vulnerability of any text you make, and of the limits of inscribing yourself in a text, too, because you also are inscribed in, fortunately, the occasion of endless other people. Duncan: Or as I do with my hand in “Passages,” hold them in suspension. Because it isn’t just a signal that you’re still in the poem but since the significance of silences is an area of actual suspension, so that you don’t

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get to be at the conclusion or the beginning of anything, and you don’t get to be in a meditative state. I just go from feeling about whether it’s going to be suspended here? or suspended there? or suspended interiorly? It seems to increase, where Anne-Marie Albiach and French, and France reading her lyric poems, which are not epic at all in their movement, but there are only two poets who actually in their reading, oral reading, of the poem registered there. They were showing in French poetry great gaps or stops or distances between lines, which we would take, would be such silences. And the silences were in excess of spoken parts, by far. Two words would be on a page. Palmer: How would she register that? Duncan: And when I was reading to [R. B.] Kitaj I took a stopwatch and started. I simply zapped out, the room disappeared, and, I mean, the clock, the stopwatch hand disappeared before it got around to one second. I tripped out completely! But the effect of Anne-Marie [Albiach], who seemed to consult an inner psychic space, psychic time. I was very struck that my time was physical. It was necessary for me to have my hand present, and same thing, heart and breath present, so that the silence was body silence, body measure moving through silence. And with this psychic silence, her reading advanced tremendously in power. Although I’m conscious that “Passages” does too. Silence is where power advances. A thing that Olson, with his “INSTANTER” isn’t quite yet on to.17 There’s energy discharged throughout all areas. Sound as such would not necessarily be a discharge, but it is a discharge because you’re entertaining it, you’re hearing, you’re dividing it up right away with tone and so forth and so on. And more than that, since it’s words, now you’re hearing barrages of words that you do or don’t—let’s forget content—you do or don’t understand them. So you’ve got a lot more going on discharging the energy of what you’re subjected to. Your mind is busy saying, “I do or I don’t understand, too fast or too slow.” And now words begin to appear, and immediately there’s a diversion of how do those words belong to a possible statement? What are they doing in this energy construct? All right, this is the thing that Olson was very worried about. All of these are losses of energy, and when you take the silence, my God, I mean here your mind has nothing to take ahold of at all. It is in the full energy charge. It isn’t getting recharged. It’s got the same energy as the corresponding verbal phrase. By talking we are discharging energy which, if we didn’t discharge it, we would be feeling increased pressure. The pressure would be one of the signs. And Olson’s

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impulse, the pro-pulsion, the pro-jection, tells us about a pressure, back of everything, that throws him forward. And he’s really saying, “ride it”—he’s got a polemic of a kind—but he also is very nervous about having the energy at all. About even having this kind of a stress. Yet he spoke explosively and also would be under high stresses when he was thinking.

Notes

Introduction 1. While both Duncan and Olson, along with those in the Black Mountain tradition, contributed to postwar experimental literature, Duncan, writing as a self-described “derivative” modernist, addresses the legacy of modernism directly in these lectures and elsewhere. 2. Eagleton, “Idealism of American Criticism,” 53. 3. Bertholf and Smith, An Open Map. 4. See Burke, Rhetoric of Motives; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric; Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem; Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity; and Jost, Rhetorical Investigations. 5. Perelman, Realm of Rhetoric, 35. 6. See Anastas, Maximus to Gloucester; and Smith, “Dear Gloucester,” in his Poets beyond the Barricade, 22–47, for a consideration of Olson’s civic and rhetorical uses of poetry. 7. See Duncan, Charles Olson Memorial Lecture. Additionally, a version of the first New College lecture appeared as “Projective Project: Charles Olson” in Sulfur. 8. See Phelan, Unmarked, 149: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction, it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ideology.” Philip Auslander takes a less ontologically rigid stance in Liveness. 9. See Gunn, “Mourning Speech,” 107. 10. Richard Schechner, quoted in Gunn, “On Recording Performance,” 2. 11. Dorn said, “I hear an awful lot of what I repeat just on the air. That would be: radio, conversations on the corner, in a café, things my children tell me, reports of all kinds coming in from many many sources” (Dorn, Interviews, 101).

Vancouver Lecture This lecture without a title was delivered in Ellen and Warren Tallman’s house in Vancouver on July 23, 1961. Duncan used a blackboard for writing down dates and groups of names, like

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Notes to Pages 19–29 the poets in the imagist movement and those in the vorticist movement, or a comparison of the activities of 1912–1915 and 1950–1954. As he spoke, he would indicate a place on the board with “here” or “there.” We’ve indicated this procedure with insertions or endnotes. 1. Duncan actually says “1946,” which is wrong. All of the following references and dating have been adjusted in the text using the accurate date of 1947. 2. Olson, “Pacific Lament.” 3. Olson was born in 1910, Duncan in 1919. 4. Ezra Pound’s original statement was published as “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” 5. Drew, Discovering Poetry; or Drew and Condon, Discovering Modern Poetry. 6. Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. See Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music, which contains Pound’s reviews and essays on music. 7. “This anthology” refers to Allen, The New American Poetry; the other is Zukofsky, An “Objectivists” Anthology. 8. For example, Pound, Des Imagistes. Amy Lowell also edited three anthologies with the title Some Imagist Poets. 9. Pound, “The Tree.” 10. Malraux, Psychology of Art. 11. Lowell wrote “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces: ‘Grotesques’ for String Quartet.” 12. Duncan is mistaken: Ezra Pound’s original statement was published in 1913 as “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” 13. The lines from the fifth section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are “For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand batterd books” (Personæ: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound, 188). 14. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 6. 15. Williams, “March.” Other early poems by Williams also appeared in the Egoist, for example, “The Wanderer.” 16. Duncan was mistaken: A Voyage to Pagany was published in 1928. 17. Duncan is quoting from memory. Whitehead wrote: “The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assemblage, but it has only one possible hall of meeting, and that is the present” (Whitehead, Aims of Education, 3). 18. Duncan is mistaken; Olson left Harvard without a PhD. 19. Carolus Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist and the founder of the modern classification of plants and animals. His major contribution Systema Naturae went into thirteen editions, 1735–1770; the tenth edition (1758) is considered a major turning point in Linnaeus’s system of classification. 20. The following passage appears in James, “The Perception of Reality,” in his Principles of Psychology, 293: The various supernatural worlds, the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology, the world of Swedenborg’s visa et nudita, etc. Each of these is a consistent system, with definite relations among its own parts. Neptune’s trident, e.g., has no status of reality whatever in the Christian heaven; but within the classic Olympus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believe in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not. The various worlds of deliberate fable may be ranked with these worlds of faith—the world of the Iliad, that of King Lear, of the Pickwick Papers, etc.

Notes to Pages 29–47 21. Buchenwald was a German concentration camp in World War II. 22. “Lear and Moby-Dick,” reprinted in Olson, Collected Prose (hereafter CPR), 165–89. 23. While he was writing Call Me Ishmael, Olson discovered the three-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays that Melville had owned and annotated. At that point he decided that Melville had changed his ideas about Moby-Dick and rewrote the novel. Howard Vincent was also working on the same idea and demonstrated it in The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick. See Bertholf, “On Olson, His Melville.” 24. Ellmann, James Joyce, is the standard biography of Joyce. 25. “Maximus, from Dogtown—I,” in The Maximus Poems (hereafter MP), 172–76. 26. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu. 27. “Letter, May 2, 1959,” MP, 150–56. 28. Duncan read John Livingston Lowes’s book on Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu, in the spring of 1955 when he was living with Jess on Majorca. At that time he introduced Creeley to Coleridge. An unpublished manuscript of poems by Duncan, with Jess’s illustrations from the period, is called “Homage to Coleridge.” 29. Swinburne, Swinburne: A Selection. 30. Pound, ABC of Reading. 31. William Butler Yeats and his wife experimented with automatic writing. In the introduction to A Vision, Yeats says that the unknown voice of the writing said, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry” (8). 32. “Letter 3,” MP, 13–16. Tansy is a wild herb in Gloucester. Olson traced its origin in Cape Ann to “the mouth of the Wey” in Dorchester, England, from which the strong-smelling plant had migrated across the Atlantic attached to European cargo. Olson celebrated tansy’s weedlike properties over the mowed and managed landscapes popular in the region. See Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems, 22–23. 33. “Projective Verse” and “Letter to Elaine Feinstein” are collected in Olson, CPR, 239– 49, 250–52. 34. “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” in Duncan, Opening of the Field, 62; also in Duncan, Collected Later Poems and Plays (hereafter CLPP), 56. The book in typescript was called “The Field.” 35. Euripides and Aeschylus were Athenian dramatists in the fifth century BCE. Sophocles was the author of Oedipus, the King (ca. 429 BCE). 36. Olson read and annotated Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy. 37. See Williams, “Work in Progress.” Vico’s New Science (1725) was a main source for James Joyce. 38. Jarrell reviewed the first and fourth books of Paterson (along with other books of poems) in “The Poet and His Public” and “A View of Three Poets.” 39. Duncan refers to “Letter 5,” MP, 21–29. 40. For further explanation, see Seelye, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound. 41. In this discussion, Duncan is drawing lines on the blackboard to indicate the left margin and then internal margins. He distinguishes his use of internal margins from Williams’s use of the tripart line in Paterson, which he explains as a single line running across the page. 42. Duncan, Collected Early Poems and Plays, 673–75. 43. Igor Stravinsky wrote the dance drama Histoire du soldat (1918). Duncan could be referring to Arnold Schönberg’s Suite for Piano (1924) or Suite for 7 Instruments (1926).

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196 Notes to Pages 47–54 44. Duncan, CLPP, 4–5. 45. In the summer of 1948, John Cage presented twenty-five concerts of Satie’s music at Black Mountain College, and he delivered a lecture that was published later as “Defense of Satie” in Cage, John Cage, 77–83. See also Harris, Arts at Black Mountain College, 154–56. 46. See “Letter 22,” MP, 101: “‘Satie, enough’ / was what it said / Satie enough / And I wear it, / as my blazon.” 47. Olson had a small role in a Léonide Massine production, Bacchanale, in Boston in April 1939. Dalí designed the sets. 48. Olson’s “Song 6,” MP, 20, was one of the songs later published as Oliveros, Three Songs for Soprano and Piano.

Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson’s Work This lecture was delivered at the University of Iowa on November 7, 1978, during a conference on Charles Olson sponsored by Sherman Paul, who was a professor of English at the university. Duncan used blackboards during his lecture, so when he says “here” or “there,” he is usually marking his ideas out on the boards. 1. Charles Olson died January 10, 1970. 2. Olson read and annotated Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. 3. Adams, New Empire. This book was reprinted with Olson’s introduction in 1967. 4. In a letter to Duncan, Williams wrote that he found “the lines monotonous.” He noted that the language of the poems “is heavy with reminiscence but the wrong kind of reminiscence, the reminiscence of older manners—not perceptions—in the language itself.” William Carlos Williams, letter to Robert Duncan, June 2, 1947, Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. 5. In February and March 1957 Olson gave lectures in San Francisco and a reading sponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College. 6. Maximus, as the voice of the poems, surveys and creates the place Gloucester and the idea of the city as polis, especially in the first volume of The Maximus Poems. Toward the end of “Letter 9” Maximus offers this assessment of his activities: I measure my song, measure the sources of my song, measure me, measure my forces. (The Maximus Poems [hereafter MP], 48) 7.

I am caught in Gloucester. (What’s buried behind Lufkin’s Diner? Who is Frank Moore? (“The Librarian,” in Collected Poems, 414)

8. Sherman Paul’s book Olson’s Push, which offers a full explanation of Olson’s views, was published before this lecture.

Notes to Pages 54–62 9.

Paterson, book 4, 202, ends with the lines: This is the blast the eternal close the spiral the final somersault the end.

10. Duncan is referring to his first conversations with Olson in Berkeley in September 1947. 11. The first sentence of Call Me Ishmael: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now.” 12. The Vancouver Poetry Conference in August 1963. 13. Duncan delivered a lecture during “A Walt Whitman Celebration,” April 13–25, 1969, at New York University. It was later published as “Changing Perspectives in Reading Walt Whitman.” He was preparing the Whitman lecture for publication during the time of this talk. 14. The cave of Niaux is above the Vicdessos River in Ariège in the Pyrenees Mountains, and Lascaux is a cave at Montignac, Dordogne, both in France. The latter was closed to tourists in 1963. See Leroi-Gourham, Dawn of European Art; and Eshleman, Juniper Fuse. 15. In “Canto LXXXVII” Ezra Pound wrote: “Mont Ségur, sacred to Helios.” He considered the castle there to be the center of sun worship. See Kenner, The Pound Era, 333–36, for an account, with a photograph, of Pound’s visit to Montségur. 16. “Credo” is a section of “A Retrospect,” an essay in which Pound brings together his early statements about poetry. See “A Retrospect,” in Pound, Literary Essays, 3–14. 17. Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems. 18. Duncan is quoting Olson from the opening of Call Me Ishmael, republished in Collected Prose (hereafter CPR), 17. Olson refers to the archaeological site near Folsom, New Mexico, where chipped flint points and other stone tools were discovered in 1927 along with the remains of large mammals, including now-extinct bison. The tool findings at Folsom and Clovis, New Mexico, until very recently were considered the earliest evidence of humans in North America, placing human activity on the continent starting around 13,000– 10,000 years ago. See Cordell, “The Folsom Site in Retrospect.” 19. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology, was one of Olson’s major sources. 20. “Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar”: Charles Olson quotes this line from Heraclitus at the beginning of his lectures published as The Special View of History. The line also appears in the poem “Maximus to Himself ” (MP, 56). 21. Olson, Call Me Ishmael (in CPR), 18. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Olson was the rector of Black Mountain College 1951–1956. 25. See the essay “[The Matter of the Bees],” in Duncan, Selected Prose, 51–60. 26. In 1971, Duncan began publishing an informal report on the present state of his writing and issued reproduced typed pages under the title “Ground Work.” An edited volume, Ground Work before the War and in the Dark, appeared in 2006. 27. Olson, CPR, 18. 28. We have been unable to find any information about this story, which may be apocryphal. 29. Ibid.

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198 Notes to Pages 62–69 30. Ibid., 17. 31. Pound, Section: Rock-Drill. The Milan edition Duncan refers to was actually published in 1955 by Vanni Scheiwiller; the text appeared with New Directions in 1956 and then with Faber in 1957. 32. “The Dry Salvages,” the third of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, has a headnote that explains, “The Dry Salvages . . . is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.” The location is close to Gloucester. 33. Williams, Collected Earlier Poems. 34. Duncan’s poem “Orders: Passages 24” contains the following lines: and now that Eliot is dead, Williams and H.D. dead, Ezra alone of my old masters alive, let me acknowledge Eliot was one of them. (Bending the Bow, 78 ; and Collected Later Poems and Plays [hereafter CLPP], 364) 35. MP, 633. 36. In “Canto LXXXV,” Pound associates the year 1616 with Galileo’s description of heliocentrism. Terrell observes that while Copernicus’s heliocentric view had been established by 1564, no records for Galileo in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum existed in 1616. Pound’s heliocentric reference correlates with Duncan’s earlier discussion of Helios in this lecture. The measure, or count, Duncan suggests, is in part established through the revolving of the earth around the sun. See Terrell, A Companion to “The Cantos” of Ezra Pound, 466–68. 37. “Letter 5”: “Limits / are what any of us / are inside of ” (MP, 21). 38. The quote that Duncan attributes to Pound cannot be located. Duncan visited the poet in 1947 during his incarceration in Washington, DC, at St. Elizabeths. He may be referring, therefore, to an oral statement made at that time by Pound. 39. MP, 633. 40. Olson, CPR, 240. 41. MP, 635. 42. Olson, CPR, 240. 43. Duncan draws attention to the dynamic climate of the “Projective Verse” essay, observing here the correlation of “must must must” to the eye-catching textual capitalization of “MOVE INSTANTER.” 44. Beginning with Bending the Bow, Duncan published in his books thirty-seven numbered and serially linked poems called “Passages” and seventeen unnumbered contributions to the series. Another series, “Structure of Rime,” which was initiated in The Opening of the Field, was sustained in twenty-six serial movements; the final poem in that series appeared in Bending the Bow. See CLPP. 45. MP, 5. 46. Ibid., 633. 47. Jean Paul Getty was an American oil executive who amassed a huge fortune as well as collections of art and antiquities. The first Getty Museum was located at Getty’s home in Malibu, California. A new Getty Center opened in Los Angeles in 1997.

Timing and the Creation of Time in Charles Olson’s Maximus This lecture was delivered at the University of Iowa on November 8, 1978, during a

Notes to Pages 69–78 conference on Charles Olson sponsored by Sherman Paul, a professor of English at the university. Duncan used blackboards during his lecture, so when he says “here” or “there,” he is usually marking his ideas on the boards. 1. Duncan’s digressive preamble to this lecture mentions the businesslike nature of American literature and culture. For Duncan, Olson’s sense of the “primordial” actualized new possibilities for their poetry even as it included the understanding of literary tradition of a modernist like T. S. Eliot. Duncan suggests that he and Olson necessarily take poetry in new directions. 2. The second and third sentences of Olson’s book Call Me Ishmael are “I spell it [SPACE] large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy” (Collected Prose [hereafter CPR], 17). 3. This is probably Thomas Fitzpatrick, a trapper and guide on nineteenth-century expeditions to California and Oregon. 4. Collected Poems (hereafter CP), 597. 5. The lines in “The Venice Poem” are Buggery stirs enmity, unguarded hatred. Cocksucking breeds self-humiliation. (Collected Early Poems and Plays, 221) 6. Whitehead, Aims of Education, 3: “The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assemblage, but it has only one possible hall of meeting, and that is the present.” This passage is cited a second time by Duncan in these lectures. 7. This refers to H.D.’s sessions with Freud in Vienna from March 1933 to December 1934. See H.D., “Writing on the Wall,” in her Tribute to Freud; and “The Master,” in her Collected Poems, 451–61. 8. Duncan probably means to refer here to Crane scholar Brom Weber, not Harriet Shaw Weaver, who was the editor of the Egoist and a patron of James Joyce. See Lidderdale and Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver. 9. Olson wrote in Call Me Ishmael: “We are the last ‘first’ people” (CPR, 19). 10. The lectures, which were published as a book with the same title, were delivered at Berkeley in the fall of 1949 when Duncan was enrolled in the university and taking courses in medieval civilization. 11. Weaver, William Carlos Williams. 12. Keats’s description of “negative capability” appears as an epigraph in Olson, The Special View of History, 10: Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. 13.

This is wordplay on the Hippocratic oath.

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Notes to Pages 79–95 14. “Near-Far Mister Olson.” 15. The Shekinah represents the idea of the immanence of divine spirit and also the transcendence of God. 16. Georges Alphonse Fleury Izambard was a French schoolteacher at the Collège de Charleville, where he taught Arthur Rimbaud. 17. Duncan met Borges in November 1969 at an international poetry festival in Austin, sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas. The Argentine poet and short story writer had won an international audience for Ficciones (1962). See Williamson, Borges: A Life; and Boldy, A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. 18. The title of H.D.’s poem is “Hermetic Definition,” so Duncan has the title wrong here and even in his own poem “After Reading H.D.’s Hermetic Definitions,” collected in Duncan, Roots and Branches, 81–84; and Collected Later Poems and Plays, 169–72. 19. Duncan is condensing events here. Jaime de Angulo died on October 26, 1950. 20. A September 1966 segment of Poetry: USA featured Olson in Gloucester; it was broadcast by the National Educational Television and Radio Center, KQED-TV, San Francisco. 21. Duncan again confuses Weaver with Brom Weber, whose biography of Crane was published in 1948; Weber also edited Crane, The Letters of Hart Crane. 22. “Tyrian Business” is the title of a poem (The Maximus Poems, 39). 23. Róheim, Eternal Ones of the Dream. 24. Olson, CP, 396–400.

The Power of Imagining Persons This lecture was given as part of the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures sponsored by Robert Creeley, the Gray Chair of Poetics at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, March 20, 1979. 1. Duncan taught at Black Mountain College March–August 1956. 2. The reference to American roots is to Alex Haley’s novel Roots. William Blake’s poem is “America: A Prophesy.” 3. In his play All for Love (1678), John Dryden rewrote Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. 4. Hermes Thoth combined the power of the Hellenistic god who invented the lyre and was known as the god of communication with the Egyptian god of wisdom, magic, and astrology. 5. Stevens, “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” (Collected Poems, 296). Chocorua is the name of a mountain in New Hampshire. 6. Cézanne used Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain in the south of France, as a subject in many of his paintings. 7. William Carlos Williams in his introduction to his book of poems titled The Wedge, writes: “There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” (Collected Poems, 1:54). 8. Ezra Pound wrote in “How to Read”: “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (Literary Essays, 23). 9. Mead, New Lives for Old. 10. William Wordsworth wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): “I have said that

Notes to Pages 95–108 poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility” (Complete Poetical Works, 707). 11. Welch, The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings. 12. Hartman and Duncan were participants in a conference at the State University of New York at Binghamton titled “The Bible and Secular Imagination,” April 9–11, 1978. 13. The correct title is “The Comedian as the Letter C,” in Stevens, Collected Poems, 27. 14. Stevens, Collected Poems, 66. 15. Mead, “Pœmandres, the Shepherd of Men,” in his Thrice-Greatest Hermes, 2:3–4. The punctuation, including the parentheses and square brackets, follow the text by Mead. 16. “The Door,” in Creeley, Collected Poems, 199–201. 17. John is the author of the New Testament book of Revelation, which he wrote down on the island of Patmos. 18. “Entretien avec Robert Duncan.” 19. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy. 20. The “Dante Études” is a sequence of poems derived from Duncan’s reading of Dante. See especially “Everything Speaks to Me,” Collected Later Poems and Plays, 541–43, where Duncan writes, “demanding / a hearing. I overhear / tides of myself all night in it” (542). 21. See, for example, chapter 2, “The Extensive Continuum,” in Whitehead, Process and Reality, 76–99. 22. The quote is from Olson, Collected Prose, 240. 23. Joyce actually writes, “Silence, exile, and cunning.” See A Portrait of the Artist, 291. 24. Creeley, Collected Poems, 199–201.

The Fatefulness of Ongoing Identifications This lecture was given as part of the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures sponsored by Robert Creeley, the Gray Chair of Poetics at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, March 22, 1979. 1. “Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy discharge” (Olson, Collected Prose, 240). 2. Ezra Pound published what became known as the “Cleaner’s Manifesto” in Four Pages. The third point of the manifesto was “we must be vitally aware of the duration of syllables, of melodic coherence, and the tone leading of vowels” (3). Duncan quotes the manifesto in “The Venice Poem” and refers to the three principles in his poetry and prose from 1948 onward. 3. Duncan reads from a definition of the word “interface.” The source of that definition has not been found. 4. Williams, Collected Poems, 2:54. 5. Pound, “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer,” in his Literary Essays, 249–75. Andreas Divus (discussed later by Duncan) comes into Pound’s discussion in this essay. 6. Duncan had read George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation when it was published in 1975. 7. “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” in Duncan, Opening of the Field, 63; also in Duncan, Collected Later Poems and Plays [hereafter CLPP], 56: In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty

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Notes to Pages 110–116 the glittering youth of the god retains—but from this threshold it is age that is beautiful. 8. “Three Cantos” first appeared in Poetry in June–August 1917. The first canto began, “Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello.” The line “And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers” appeared as the first line of “Canto II” when the poems were collected in A Draft of XVI Cantos. “Canto III” in Poetry began with a reference to John Heydon, a seventeenth-century British alchemist. Heydon comes up later in this lecture. 9. Duncan hitchhiked from California to Washington, DC, to visit Pound in St. Elizabeths in 1947. 10. In 1208, the pope declared a crusade against the Albigensian sect in southern France, which believed in a strict, ascetic spirituality and avoided eating meat. The crusade went on for more than ten years and accomplished little beyond slaughter and pillage. 11. See Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, from which Duncan probably derived this anecdote. 12. “Canto III” as it was published in Poetry, 248, began with a reference to John Heydon, not Heywood: Another’s a half-crocked fellow—John Heydon Worker of miracles, dealer in levitation, In thought upon pure form, in alchemy, Seer of pretty visions (“servant of God and Secretary of nature”). Heydon also returns later in “Canto XCI.” 13. Duncan discusses Róheim’s book Eternal Ones of the Dream in The H.D. Book, 162– 72. 14. Duncan probably has in mind Plato’s dialogue the Ion and possibly the Sophist at 242c. There, several Pre-Socratics, including Parmenides and Empedocles, are taken to task for writing myths rather than explanations and so, presumably, like the poets and rhapsodists of the Ion, not comprehending their own inspired utterances. See Katz, “The Use Value of Robert Duncan,” for Duncan’s reading of Plato. 15. Williams in The Autobiography, 146, writes: “Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics.” 16. Heydon, The Holy Guide: Leading the Way to the Wonder of the World (1662). 17. Waite, Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. 18. Weaver, William Carlos Williams. 19. In late September or early October 1911, Pound delivered a lecture sponsored by G. R. S. Mead and the magazine he edited, Quest, on troubadours, which was subsequently published as “Psychology and Troubadours” in Quest. It was reprinted in The Spirit of Romance. 20. Pound, The Cantos, 5. 21. H.D., Helen in Egypt. Duncan is referring to the “Pallinode” of book 1, which he reads later. 22. See Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music, 497–98, 326–27, and 496, which also contains the texts of Pound’s reviews and essays on music.

Notes to Pages 117–133 23. Duncan attended Dodds’s lectures, which became the book The Greeks and the Irrational. 24. Duncan is conflating a landmark and a lecture series. The Sather Gate at the University of California, Berkeley, was donated by Jane K. Sather; it was constructed in 1910. The Sather Classical Lectures are sponsored by the Classics Department at the same university. Dodds was a visiting Sather professor there in 1949–1950. 25. D. H. Lawrence’s poem “The Ship of Death” contains the line in its second stanza: “Have you built your ship of death, O have you?” (Complete Poems, 717). 26. “Osiris and Set,” in Duncan, Roots and Branches, 67–69; and CLPP, 159–61. 27. Duncan is probably referring to H.D.’s Magic Mirror, which remained unpublished in her lifetime, appearing only in 2012. 28. Pazig and Goldsmid, Treatise of Magic Incantations. 29. H.D., Helen in Egypt, 1 (italics in original). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 1–2.

“Forth on the godly sea” This lecture was given as part of the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures sponsored by Robert Creeley, the Gray Chair of Poetics, at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, March 27, 1979. 1. Collected as “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” in Pound, Selected Prose, 21–43. 2. Creeley, “Robert Creeley on Art and Poetry.” 3. Duncan could be referring to Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure. 4. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. 5. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. 6. The Shekinah in Jewish mystical writings means “divine presence.” 7. The Sephiroth in the Zohar and commentaries about it designate ten forces or emanations of the spiritual life and indicate a life path of the soul’s progress to spiritual perfection. 8. The Maximus Poems, 28. 9. “Smith also got shoved aside” (“Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter II,” ibid., 49). 10. Ibid., 29. 11. Tamalpais is a low mountain on the California coast north of San Francisco. 12. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition; Yates, Art of Memory. 13. Martha Graham produced Cave of the Heart (1946), which included music from Samuel Barber’s ballet Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance (1955). 14. Banyalbufar is a town on the northwest coast of Majorca, where Duncan and Jess lived from March 1955 to March 1956. 15. Presumably, Madeleina was Duncan’s local contact in Banyalbufar. 16. In “[The Matter of the Bees]” in Selected Prose (54), Duncan quotes Rilke’s letter to Witold von Hulewicz dated November 13, 1925: “We are the bees of the invisible” (Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 2:374) and then other passages relating directly to the Duino Elegies. 17. Potiphar was the Egyptian who purchased Joseph after his brothers had sold him. Potiphar’s wife tried several times to seduce Joseph but was unsuccessful.

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Notes to Pages 134–147 18. Faas, “Interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen.” 19. Spicer, “Poetry and Politics.” 20. Stimmung (1968) is a choral composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen based on vowel sounds and meditations on holy themes. 21. Malraux, Psychology of Art. 22. See Bateson, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity. 23. H.D., Helen in Egypt, 78. 24. Ibid., 81–82.

The World Felt as Presence This lecture was given as part of the Charles Olson Memorial Lectures sponsored by Robert Creeley, the Gray Chair of Poetics at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, March 29, 1979. 1. The ancient Greek term το-έν appears in Parmenides and is, according to Leon Marvell, a representation of “reality (The One) considered as a giant unitary, all-encompasing sphere” (Transfigured Light, 152). This image of unity corresponds with Duncan’s reference later in the lecture to the ouroboros, the snake that consumes its own tail. 2. Book 4 of Paterson, 202, ends with the lines: This is the blast the eternal close the spiral the final somersault the end. 3. 4.

The Maximus Poems (hereafter MP), 635. Charles Olson ends his poem “Maximus, to Himself ” (ibid., 57) with these lines: It is undone business I speak of, this morning, with the sea stretching out from my feet

5. Olson wrote three poems that drew on sources associated with the local history of Dogtown, an abandoned settlement near Gloucester. He derived the first “Dogtown” poem from a bullfight and ritual sacrifice while in the second he overlaid Mediterranean, Nordic, and North American mythic forms onto his personal and contemporary precinct. See “Maximus, from Dogtown—I” (MP, 172); “Maximus, from Dogtown—II” (MP, 179); and “Maximus, from Dogtown—IV” (MP, 333). 6. Ibid., 172. 7. Languedoc is a region in southern France where Occitan was spoken and was a region of Gnostic heresy; in Sicily a group of poets gathered in the thirteenth century around Frederick II; the “circle” refers to the growing prominence of the vernacular tradition identified by Dante in Purgatory (1472), canto 24.

Notes to Pages 148–158 8. Williams wrote: “I remember / a Geographic picture, the 9 women / of some African chief semi-naked / astraddle a log” (Paterson, 13). The photograph is reproduced in Weaver, William Carlos Williams, between pages 180 and 181. 9. Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. 10. MP, 172. 11. “So much depends” is section 22 of “Spring and All,” in Williams, Collected Poems, 1:224. 12. Duncan often uses lines from source materials in his poems. “The Concert: Passages 31” begins with lines from Jacob Boehme’s Aurora; “Jamais: Passages” quotes a line from Heraclitus; “Ancient Reveries and Declamations: Passages 32” quotes John Adams’s annotations to Court de Gébelin’s Monde primitif. Such borrowings reveal Duncan’s poetics; he is a self-described “derivative” poet. See Collected Later Poems and Plays (hereafter CLPP), 442, 445, and 593. 13. In his essay “Projective Verse,” Olson writes: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE” (Collected Prose, 242). 14. MP, 172. 15. Williams, Paterson, 6. 16. MP, 172. 17. In “Towards an Open Universe” and elsewhere, Duncan cites two books by Schrödinger: My View of the World and What Is Life? 18. The cover of Olson’s Maximus Poems IV, V, and VI includes a graphic of Gondwanaland with the continents joined. 19. See the modern editions: Blake, Blake’s Illustrations of Dante; Klonsky, Blake’s Dante; and Blake, William Blake’s Water-Color Designs for the Poems of Thomas Gray. 20. MP, 633. 21. The poem Duncan describes receiving from Butterick appears in The Maximus Poems and begins, “I live underneath / the light of day.” The final lines of the poem are “the initiation / of another kind of nation” (MP, 633). 22. See “John Adams, marginalia to Court de Gébelin’s Monde Primitif,” in “Passages 32” (Ground Work, 14; and CLPP, 445). 23. Hermes Trismegistus represents the Hellenistic figure Hermes in an Egyptian religious context. By tradition he is the author of the main principles of Egyptian religion. See Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes. 24. Boldereff, Reading Finnegans Wake. See Maud and Thesen, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence. 25. MP, 172–76. 26. “The Dry Salvages,” the third portion of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, has a headnote that explains, “The Dry Salvages . . . is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.” The location is close to Gloucester.

Projective Project This lecture was given as a class presentation at the New College of California, San Francisco, on February 17, 1982. It was first published in Sulfur (1995). 1. Duncan is referring to Olson’s booklet Y & X. 2. Shawn and Gregory, My Dinner with André. The film version was directed by Louis Malle.

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Notes to Pages 158–169 3. Collected Poems (hereafter CP), 14. 4. William Stanley Merwin’s early books A Mask for Janus and The Dancing of Bears attracted the attention of both Duncan and Olson. 5. The final line of the final Maximus poem: “my wife my car my color and myself ” (The Maximus Poems [hereafter MP], 635). 6. Olson, MP, 473. 7. Olson, CP, 46. 8. John Clarke and Albert Glover published the pamphlets that made up Curriculum of the Soul. Clarke’s contribution to this series is Blake. 9. See Olson, The Post Office. Duncan would not have known the poems “Bigmans” and “Bigmans 11” from 1950, which were first published in Olson, CP, 149–54. 10. The reading took place at the San Francisco Museum of Art on February 10, 1957. 11. Olson, CP, 54–55. 12. Ibid., 86. 13. Ibid., 243. 14. Shurin, “Out of Me.” 15. This incident has not been verified. 16. Duncan is referring to his series of poems Medieval Scenes. 17. Edward Dorn released Gunslinger serially in books published by Black Sparrow, Fulcrum, and Frontier Press between 1968 and 1972. Slinger, containing Gunslinger, books 1–4, and The Cycle, appeared with Wingbow Press in 1975. Gunslinger, with an introduction by Marjorie Perloff, was published by Duke University Press in 1989. 18. Dawson, An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline. 19. Olson, The Maximus Poems, vol. 3, was edited by Boer and Butterick. 20. Ezra Pound published “Three Cantos” in Poetry in 1917, and then rewrote and rearranged them for the book A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925. 21. Butterick in Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, vol. 3, does not list Heisenberg among the authors that Olson read. But Duncan read and knew Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy. 22. One of the Maximus letters is dedicated by Olson, “For Robt Duncan, / who understands / what’s going on / —written because of him / March 17, 1961” (MP, 207–9). 23. Ibid., 5–12. 24. The “Cleaner’s Manifesto” as sent out by Ezra Pound was published in Four Pages. Duncan cites it in “The Venice Poem”: “We must understand what is happening”; watch “the duration of syllables, “the melodic coherence, “the tone leading of vowels.” “The function of poetry is to debunk by lucidity.” (Collected Early Poems and Plays, 221–22) 25. See Seelye, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound. 26. Boulez is a French pianist, composer, and conductor known for serialist experimentation and electronic compositions. He received the Glenn Gould Prize in 2002. 27. Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. “Angels of the Poem” was not written by

Notes to Pages 170–177 Charles Olson. The precise title and author are unidentified. 28. “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” contains the lines: (on my Lady of good voyage in whose arm, whose left arm rests no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner! a delicate mast, as bow-sprit for forwarding. (MP, 6) 29.

The opening lines of the first section of “Letter 7” of The Maximus Poems are That carpenter is much on my mind: I think he was the first Maximus. Anyhow, he was the first to make things. Not just live off nature. (MP, 35)

30. Ibid., 121–22. 31. From February through April 1941, Duncan worked for Dell in Boston. 32. The statement by Burroughs is from a 1970 interview in London’s short-lived Friendz Magazine. It actually reads: “A paranoid man might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on” (Burroughs Live, 161). 33. Jonestown, Guyana, was the location of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project. On November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred people died after Jim Jones, the leader of the temple, induced them to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. 34. See Duncan, “Letter to Jess.” 35. MP, 399.

On Projective Verse This lecture was given as a joint class presentation with Michael Palmer at the New College of California, San Francisco, on October 18, 1983. 1. “The Venice Poem” appears in Robert Duncan’s Poems, 1948–49, 21–52; and in Collected Early Poems and Plays (hereafter CEPP), 211–40. Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements was first performed by the New York Philharmonic on January 24, 1946. 2. Duncan had been an avid reader of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books since childhood; they informed his personal mythology and creative outlook. 3. Serendipity was the name of a bookstore in Berkeley, California, which was owned and operated by Peter Howard. 4. In a letter to Olson dated June 5, 1950, Robert Creeley wrote: “An attitude that puts weight, first: on form / more than to say: what you have above: will never get to: content. Never in god’s world. Anyhow, form has now become so useless a term / that I blush to use it. I wd imply a little of Stevens’ use (the things created in a poem and existing there . . . ) & too, go over into: the possible casts or methods for a way into / a ‘subject’: to make it clear: that form is never more than an extension of content” (Butterick, Charles Olson

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Notes to Pages 179–189 and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1:78–79). This is the first statement of the principle that appeared in Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” (Collected Prose [hereafter CPR], 240). 5. Olson writes in “Projective Verse”: “(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader” (CPR, 240). 6. Olson, “Projective Verse” (CPR, 240). 7. Olson wrote in “Projective Verse,” talking about the delivery of a line in a poem: the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE. (CPR, 242) 8. Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems. 9. Barlow wrote The Extent of the Empire of the Culhua Mexica. 10. The reference here is to the poem “I Have Been an Ability” (The Maximus Poems [hereafter MP], 495–99), part of which Olson wrote out by hand in circular swirls. 11. Trilling took an interest in Ginsberg when the latter was a student at Columbia. 12. Duncan may have had in mind the following stanzas from “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”: one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born love is not easy but how shall you know, New England, now that pejoracracy is here, how that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter in the afternoon offend a black-gold loin? (MP, 7) 13.

“Imaginary Instructions,” a section of “The Venice Poem,” contains the lines Buggery stirs enmity, unguarded hatred. Cocksucking breeds self-humiliation, Pride, helplessness. (CEPP, 221)

14. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) appeared in the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Later, he used commonplace objects in his art, like the urinal in his famous Fountain (1917). He was a cofounder of the Dada group in New York.

Notes to Pages 189–191 15. For Swedenborg, the incarnate God overcomes the powers of evil. The heavenly world corresponds to the physical world, so there is a strong emphasis on the spiritual life of the New Church after death. See Sigstedt, The Swedenborg Epic. 16. Pound, “Canto LXXXI,” The Cantos, 534–35. 17. “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” Olson writes, explaining the third rule in “Projective Verse.” “And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all, points, must MOVE INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!” (CPR, 240).

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Glossary

Albiach, Anne-Marie (1937–2012), was a contemporary French poet, and the author of many books of poems, some of which have been translated into English: Vocative Figure (1986); Etat (1989); and A Discursive Space: Interviews with Jean Daive (1999). Albigensians were members of a Catharist religious sect based in the south of France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; they were eliminated during a twentyyear military campaign conducted by Pope Innocent III, accused of heresy against the Church of Rome. The Albigensians advocated a Manichaean dualism, spiritual rigor, austerity, and direct resistance to the authority of Rome. Simon de Montfort led a crusade of slaughter against them in 1209–1229. When a final battle ended with the siege of Montségur, 210 Albigensians were burned on March 1, 1244. Aldington, Richard (1892–1962), was a British poet, novelist, critic, and one of the original imagist poets, along with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), whom he married in 1913 and divorced in 1938. His poetry collections include Images of War (1919) and Collected Poems, 1915–1923 (1933). His fiction includes Death of a Hero (1929), Roads to Glory (1930), and Rejected Guest (1939). Angulo, Jaime de (1887–1950), was a widely published anthropologist, linguist, and historian of the American West and of Native American history and lore. Duncan rented a room in his house in Berkeley from the summer of 1949 through October 1950, and Duncan typed manuscripts and looked after Angulo when he was dying of cancer. See Duncan, “The World of Jaime de Angulo” (1979), and Duncan, A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan, 1960–1985 (2012). Barlow, Robert H. (1918–1951), was an American, poet, anthropologist and historian of pre-Columbian Mexico, specializing in the Nahuatl language. He served as the literary executor of the novelist H. P. Lovecraft (several publications of Lovecraft’s work were edited by Barlow and appeared posthumously). His scholarship is exemplified in The Extent of the Empire of the Culhua Mexica (1949).

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212 Glossary Barzun, Jacques (1907–2012), associated early in his career with the Partisan Review and took part in the socialist/intellectual debate in the later 1940s and early 1950s. Some of his many books on a range of subjects include Of Human Freedom (1939), Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941), Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964), The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going (1968), The Use and Abuse of Art (1974), From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2001). Black Mountain Review, edited by Robert Creeley, published seven issues from the spring of 1954 to the autumn of 1957. With Origin, the Black Mountain Review was central to the emergence of the New American poetry, especially the branch inspired by the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (1831–1891), was a Russian spiritualist who claimed spiritual wisdom from ancient sources in Tibet, Egypt, and India. She was one of the founders of the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1975. Her principal publication is Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (1877). See also Cranston, HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement; and Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. Broughton, James (1913–1999), was a Bay Area poet, playwright, and filmmaker. He and Duncan became friends in Berkeley in 1947, and in 1957 he was one of the poets in the Maidens group, a small coterie of poets that included Duncan, Madeline Gleason, Helen Adam, and Eve Triem. Broughton’s Zen-based poetry is ecstatic, visionary, and erotic. His poems are collected in A Long Undressing: Collected Poems, 1949–1959 (1971); his films are listed in Seeing the Light (1977). Bunker, Constance (Connie) Wilcock (1919–1975), was Charles Olson’s first common-law wife, beginning in 1941. They had a daughter, Kate Olson Bunker (1951–1998). The marriage ended while Olson was at Black Mountain College in 1956. Connie married George R. Bunker (1923–1991) in 1959. Burckhardt, Jacob Christoph (1818–1897), was a Swiss historian best known for his long study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Duncan usually cites that book, but in these lectures he cites Burckhardt’s essays in Force and Freedom: Reflections on History (1943). Butterick, George F. (1942–1988), was one of Olson’s students at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1960s. He came to be a tireless editor of Olson’s work: The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, Excluding the Maximus Poems (1987) and Olson, The Maximus Poems (1983). He is also the author of A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (1978) and The Collected Poems of George F. Butterick (1988). Cage, John (1912–1992), was an American avant-garde musician and writer who taught at

Glossary Black Mountain College (1950–1952). He invented the prepared piano and experimented with the function of noise and silence in music, with chance in composition and performance, and with electronic music. In the summer of 1948, Cage presented twenty-five concerts of Satie’s music at Black Mountain College and delivered a lecture that was later published as “Defense of Satie” in John Cage: An Anthology (1991). Clarke, John (1933–1992), was a poet and student of Olson’s at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1960s. With George F. Butterick, Albert Glover, and Fred Wah, he published the pamphlets that made up Curriculum of the Soul, a series inspired by Olson; Clarke’s contribution to this series is Blake (1973). He is also the author of poetry and essays, including From Feathers to Iron (1987) and In the Analogy (1991). Creeley, Robert (1926–2005), was a poet and fiction writer who became a close friend of Denise Levertov in 1949 and of Olson and Duncan in the 1950s. He established the Divers Press (1950–1954), taught at Black Mountain College (1954–1955), edited the Black Mountain Review (1954–1957), and taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Brown University. He lived for a time with his first wife, Ann McKinnon, on Majorca, which is the setting for his novel The Island (1963). Daemon(ic) is from Greek myth: a spirit or entity between humans and gods. It is not associated necessarily with the sense of evil that accompanies the more wellknown spelling “demon.” In “‘Forth on the godly sea’: The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry” and elsewhere in these lectures, Duncan uses “daemonic” to indicate a realm of nonhuman invasion in the creative process. For a discussion of the daemonic in American literature, see Bloom’s The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (2015). Dawson, Fielding (1930–2002), attended Black Mountain College as a student; authored more than twenty collections of short stories, novels, and poetry; and worked as a collagist and painter. His memoir, The Black Mountain Book (1970), recalls his experiences at the college; his works of fiction include Krazy Kat and 76 More (1982), No Man’s Land (2000), and The Land of Milk and Honey (2001). Dee, John (1527–1608), was a British mathematician and alchemist. He was the astrologer to the court of Elizabeth I, an early translator of Euclid, and a man much interested in occult matters. He claimed to have found the process for changing base metals into gold. He appears in Duncan’s “Transgressing the Real: Passages 27”: “(The poet-magician Dr. Dee in his black mirror / calls forth his spirits from their obscurity)” (Collected Later Poems and Plays, 400). de Kooning, Willem (1904–1997), was a Dutch painter who came to the United States in 1926. After years of working as a house painter, with grants from the Works Progress Administration he emerged as a leader of the New York world of abstract expressionism. He is best remembered for his free gestures of color, and specifically his “Woman Paintings” series.

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214 Glossary Dewey, John (1859–1952), was an American philosopher and teacher who formulated a method of pragmatic thinking that rejected the European models based on Aristotle and Kant. He was one of the founders of the American philosophic movement called pragmatism. Of his many books and essays, Duncan read and used his Experience and Nature (1929) and Art as Experience (1934). Dodds, Eric Robertson (1893–1979), was an Irish classicist who succeeded Gilbert Murray as the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, on Murray’s own recommendation. A longtime member of the council of the Society for Psychical Research, his work includes The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), which Duncan heard delivered in lecture format at the University of California, Berkeley. Dorn, Edward (1929–1999), attended Black Mountain College where he studied with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and others. He is known for his distinct early lyricism in books like The Newly Fallen (1962) and Hands Up! (1964), while the mock-epic first called Gunslinger, collected as Slinger (1975), intensified a more satiric and playful poetic imaginary. His later work is presented in Collected Poems: Edward Dorn (2012). Dromena, literally “things enacted,” was an aspect of the rites performed in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, associated with a dramatic encounter with the Demeter/Persephone myth. It forms a part of a dramatized sacred show, theatrical performance, or public spectacle of these rites. Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917), is known as one of the founders of the modern study of sociology. He studied suicide and based his ideas on anthropological and statistical studies. Two important books are The Rules of Sociological Method (1938) and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1961). The Egoist was a British journal of literature and opinion that began in January 1914 and published its final issue in December 1919. It was first edited by Dora Marsden, with Richard Aldington and Leonard Compton-Rickett as assistant editors. In the July 1, 1914, issue, Harriet Shaw Weaver replaced Compton-Rickett, and she later became the editor. Both Aldington and H.D. were replaced as assistant editors by T. S. Eliot in the June 1917 issue. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, in the final issues, Ulysses were serialized in the journal. The journal published poems and essays by major modernist writers, including Joyce, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Marsden, Remy de Gourmont, Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Aldington. Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns] (1888–1965), was an American poet, critic, dramatist, and publisher who lived most of his life in England. In these lectures, Duncan draws attention to Eliot’s collaborative work with Ezra Pound on The Waste Land (1922) and to his formal structuring of the sonata-based movements in Four Quartets (1943). His influence on poetry, and William Carlos Williams’s resistance to that influence, required Duncan, Olson, and others working outside the New Critical paradigm at mid-century to explore the tension of formalist literary gesture and open forms.

Glossary Fabre, Jean-Henri (1823–1915), was a French entomologist whose observations of insects in natural settings won him fame as a scientist and as a writer. His principal works in English are The Social Life of the Insect World (1912) and The Life of the Spider (1913). Ferrini, Vincent (1913–2007), was an American poet who lived in Gloucester (where he owned a framing shop) and edited a poetry magazine titled Four Winds. Olson addressed Ferrini and the magazine in “Letter 5” in The Maximus Poems. He helped bring together Charles Olson and Robert Creeley in the early days of the New American poetry. His early poems centered on social and political themes, but after moving to Gloucester he became passionately focused on the preservation of old Gloucester as a site of American heritage. Ferrini’s collected poems are titled Know Fish (1979), The Navigators: Know Fish (1984), and The Community of Self: Know Fish (1986). Flint, F[rank] S[tuart] (1885–1960), was a British poet who began his career under the influence of Shelley and Keats, as seen in the lyrics of In the Net of the Stars (1909). He soon began a study of contemporary French poetry and published an influential article in the Poetry Review (1912) on that subject. He became an active member of the imagist group in London and was a close friend of both T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. He appeared in Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914) and then published his own volume, Cadences (1915). His final book was Otherworld (1920). After 1920 he moved away from writing poetry and became a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Labour. The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems (2007) gives a selection of his works and a summary of his period of writing. Frazer, James George (1854–1941), was a Scottish classicist and anthropologist whose The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, published in multiple volumes (1890–1915), was a protracted study in comparative mythology, folklore, magic, and religion. An abridged single-volume edition was published in 1922. See also Vickery, Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough.” Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), was the Austrian-born founder of psychoanalysis. Duncan was a serious reader of Freud’s books, especially The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. 4 and 5 (1953). Gaudí, Antoni (1852–1926), was a Spanish architect who worked mainly in Barcelona and won international fame for his startling structures. He began the Expiatory Church of the Holy Family in 1882; it is still under construction. Duncan and Jess visited Barcelona and saw the church in late July 1955. Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri (1891–1915), was a French-born sculptor who experimented with abstraction and participated in London in the vorticist movement with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the author of Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), published after the sculptor’s battlefield death in World War I. Gestalt psychology developed from the views of Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), an

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216 Glossary Austro-Hungarian psychologist, who maintained that the mind perceives objects as whole within contexts or environments. The relationship of one object to another is crucial in perceiving the whole object, as opposed to its separate parts. This general view is close to Olson’s idea about the poem as a field of action in which words, ideas, and images interact to produce a field of composition. Duncan cites Wolfgang Köhler’s books Gestalt Psychology (1929) and The Place of Value in the World of Facts (1938). Ginsberg, Allen (1926–1997), was a key figure in the Beat movement in New York and San Francisco. His poems combine anxiety, exaltation, radical politics, and a drive toward sexual and visionary ecstasy. He came to prominence following the Six Gallery reading in 1955 in San Francisco, where he performed with Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. In the 1960s, his political stances focused on resistance to the Vietnam War and to nuclear proliferation, and he vocalized and embodied many of the objectives of countercultural activism, especially gay rights. His books include Howl (1956), Kaddish (1961), The Fall of America (1972), Collected Poems (1984), White Shroud (1985), Death and Fame (1999), and Deliberate Prose (2000). Gnosticism was a pre-Christian religious movement with origins in the Near East from Babylonia to Egypt. The movement’s central belief is the division of existence into dualities: light and dark, matter and spirit. The goal of the believer is to seek freedom from the evil of matter, which is the fallen world, and capture fully the awareness of the eternal light that exists in the soul of the believer. The movement produced several stories about the origins of humanity, the coming of a redeemer, and an individual’s cycle of living, suffering, dying, and rising set against a larger historical drama. See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (1958). Guillaume IX (1071–1126), the earliest troubadour and vernacular poet in the Occitan language, was the Duke of Aquitaine and the seventh Count of Poitou. Ezra Pound compares him to Odysseus in “Canto VI,” and in “Canto VIII” credits him for “[bringing] the song up out of Spain / With the singers and veils.” In The Spirit of Romance (1952), Pound refers to “Guillaume de Poitiers” as “the most ‘modern’ of the troubadours” and associates him with “the poetry of a democratic aristocracy.” See Terrell, A Companion to “The Cantos” of Ezra Pound. Harrison, Jane Ellen (1850–1928), was a pioneering British classical scholar, an anthropologist of classical culture, and a professor at Cambridge University. Her major publications changed the nature of classical studies: Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1921), and Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (1925). Her books were read with enthusiasm by Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson. H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] (1886–1961) was an American writer who lived most of her life in

Glossary Europe. She is well known for her poetry, novels, and memoirs and is recognized for her contributions to the imagist movement in modernist poetry and for her lyrical investigations of ancient myth, anthropology, occult metaphysics, and Freudian psychoanalysis. Duncan corresponded with her and based his study of modernism, The H.D. Book, on his encounter with her writing. In his lecture “The Fatefulness of Ongoing Identifications,” he discusses H.D.’s Helen in Egypt. Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BCE) was a Greek thinker who first proposed the idea of logos, his perception of order and the principles of order in reality. He thought fire was the most important element; he also thought that constant change was part of the universal order. He was the first philosopher to state a clear idea of soul or psyche. Both Duncan and Olson read and used Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments (1954). See also Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Herodotus (ca. 484–ca. 425 BCE) was a Greek historian whose Histories had a great influence on Olson. In “Letter 23” (Maximus Poems, 104–5), he writes, “I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking / for oneself for the evidence of / what is said.” The processing of historical evidence in the kinetic activity of the poet-scholar appealed to Olson’s sense of field composition, where a subjective encounter with historical material was preferred to objective analysis and description. Hesiod (ca. 750–650 BCE) was a Greek poet. He is the author of Theogony, which concerns cosmology and the origins of the gods and serves as a foundation for Greek religions and myths. Hesiod also wrote Works and Days, a long poem that glorifies human labor as the source of all variety of benefits for humankind. Both books were read and used by Duncan and Olson. Imagism was a literary movement that began in London in 1912 among a group of poets, mainly Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint. Pound’s formula included direct treatment of the thing in the poem, condensed writing, and composition according to the musical phrase. The poems should present an image and not allow elaborate description, or copia, the expansive development and stylistic amplification of romantic literary invention. The first large collection of poems was Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914). In the movement’s later stages, Amy Lowell edited three anthologies with the same title, Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917). By 1917, imagism had lost is original impact, but its principles had changed the nature of avant-garde poetry in Europe and the United States. James, William (1842–1910), was an American philosopher whose Principles of Psychology (1890) introduced his pragmatist ideas and redirected philosophical thinking. His other major works developed ways of pragmatic thinking and “radical imperialism”: The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Jess [Collins] (1923–2004), a Bay Area visual artist who went solely by the name “Jess,” met Duncan in 1950 and remained his romantic partner until the latter’s death in 1988.

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218 Glossary He was a well-known collagist who explored occult and hermetic themes, and he experimented with diverse media in his intricate and detailed collage work and figurative paintings. Joyce, James (1882–1941), was an Irish writer best known for the influential novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and especially his radical challenge to language of all kinds. Olson owned an annotated copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and a copy of Dubliners (1914). His copy of Finnegans Wake is lightly annotated. Ideas and news about Joyce would have come from his correspondent Frances Boldereff, who was the author of several books on Joyce, including Reading Finnegans Wake. Duncan was a serious, lifetime reader of Joyce. As a student at Berkeley in 1936–1937, he gave informal lectures on Joyce, and he lectured on Joyce at Throckmorton Manor in Berkeley around 1947. Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), was the Swiss founder of analytical psychology. He is known for his theories of the creative unconscious and the collective unconscious and for his ideas about individuation as an achieved wholesome balance between consciousness and unconsciousness. Two of his books, Psychology and Alchemy (1953) and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959), were read by both Duncan and Olson. Duncan remained a Freudian while Olson was a Jungian. Charles Stein has studied Olson’s uses of Jung in The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum. Princeton University Press has published the Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1953– 1979) as part of the Bollingen series. The Kabbalah is a collection of Jewish mystic lore and occult interpretations of the Bible. A central theme is the nature of the deity, and it contains seemingly endless explications of the language of the Bible, down to word and letter, with the goal of uncovering sacred meanings. In Kabbalistic thinking, the Shekinah is the divine presence, while the Sephiroth define the ten spheres of spiritual awareness, arranged as a tree of life, which lead to illumination. Of the many books on the subject, see Waite, The Holy Kabbalah; and Knight, A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism. Kaiser, Augusta Elizabeth (Betty) (1925–1964), was Charles Olson’s second common-law wife. She was killed in a car accident on March 28, 1964, in Wyoming, New York. Kantorowicz, Ernst (1895–1963), was a German professor of medieval and Renaissance history at the University of California, Berkeley, who became an inspiring mentor to Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser in the late 1940s. He lost his academic position when he refused to sign a loyalty oath during Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch-hunt of the 1950s. His acclaimed books are Frederick the Second, 1194–1250 (1957) and The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957). Kayak was a magazine edited by George Hitchcock (1914–2010), a poet Duncan knew at Berkeley in 1936–1938. Sixty-two issues of Kayak were published between 1964 and 1984.

Glossary The Kenyon Review was begun by John Crowe Ransom in 1939. During the period 1940– 1970 it published the major poets, critics, and short story writers; it was one of the central journals that supported the traditions of T. S. Eliot, the New Criticism, and the Southern Agrarian movement. The journal is still published by Kenyon College in Ohio. Kitaj, R. B. (1932–2007), was an accomplished American artist who was a longtime friend of Duncan and Jess, a painter who was very sympathetic to the New American poets. After World War II he studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts on the GI Bill, and then lived and worked in England for many years. He was much influenced by Paul Cézanne and was dedicated to figurative art when abstraction was the rage and fashion. When his 1994 retrospective at the Tate was abused by the London art critics, he moved to Los Angeles. Kline, Franz (1910–1962), was an American painter who came to prominence in the abstract expressionism movement during the 1940s and 1950s in New York. He developed a distinctive style of large black gestures on a white field. His paintings were included in the show The New American Painting, which toured Europe in 1958. He taught at several schools and universities, including Black Mountain College. Kramer, Samuel Noah (1897–1990), was a Russian-born authority on Sumerian history and literature; he had a long and prolific career as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Charles Olson was an enthusiastic reader of the scholarship of Kramer in his Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium (1947), Sumerian Literary Texts from Nippur in the Museum of the Ancient Orient at Istanbul (1944), “The Epic of Gilgamesh and Its Sumerian Sources” (1944), and, as editor, Mythologies of the Ancient World (1961). Levertov, Denise (1923–1997), was a British-born poet who met Duncan for the first time in New York City when he was on his way to Europe. Her writing grew out of the concerns for poetry developed by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, even as she took strong feminist views and an even stronger political position against the Vietnam War. The influences of her political views appear in the poems in To Stay Alive (1971). She and Duncan maintained an intense and serious correspondence that has been collected in Bertholf and Gelpi, The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004). For Levertov’s views on the correspondence, see “Some Duncan Letters—A Memoir and a Critical Tribute,” in her Light Up the Cave (1981). Lowell, Amy (1874–1925), was a member of an old New England family. Mainly selfeducated, she read H.D.’s poetry and then went to London to meet Ezra Pound, H.D., and other poets involved with imagism. Her first book of poems, A Dome of Man-Colored Glass (1912), launched her career. She appeared in the first imagist anthology, Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914); later, she edited three collections with the same title, Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917). Her book Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) helped define the writing emerging after imagism. Her later books include Men, Women and Ghosts (1916) and the biography John Keats (1925).

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Glossary Mac Low, Jackson (1922–2004), was an American poet, performance artist, and composer. His creative practice was based on aleatory methods of composition, following John Cage and others. An example of his approach to writing can be found in “Night Walk” (1960) in his Representative Works, 1938–1985 (1986). Malanga, Gerard (1943–), is a poet, photographer, and filmmaker who worked as Andy Warhol’s assistant in the 1960s, appeared in Warhol’s films, and edited with Warhol the journal Interview. See Malanga and Warhol, Screen Tests: A Diary (1967), and Malanga’s Ten Years After (1977) and Mythologies of the Heart (1996). Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884–1942), was a Polish-born British cultural anthropologist who became famous for his studies of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific: Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926). Matthiessen, F. O. (1902–1950), was a widely published Harvard professor who helped shape liberal views about nineteenth-century American literature and culture. He wrote books about Sarah Orne Jewett, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser, but is best remembered for The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). Olson was his student in the American studies program at Harvard in the 1930s. Mead, G. R. S. (1863–1933), was an English scholar and the author of many books on occult traditions. He was a member of the Theosophical Society in London and after 1907 served as the editor of the society’s journal. In 1909 he broke away to found the Quest Society, which published Quest: A Quarterly Review (1909–1931). Duncan cites Mead’s book Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1949) in these lectures. Moore, Marianne (1887–1972), was a distinguished American poet who won praise and admiration with carefully crafted, uniquely configured poems that explore the relationship between the known and the unknown. Her first book was Poems (1921), and her second was Observations (1924). As the poetry editor at the Dial between 1925 and 1929, she corresponded with the full range of American and British poets, including Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and Amy Lowell. After Observations, she published four well-reviewed and well-read volumes, but Collected Poems (1951) won major prizes and brought Moore fame as a poet. There were several small, distinguished books in the following years, all of which appeared, some with revisions, in The Complete Poems (1981). The strength of her poetics and the insights of her criticism are everywhere apparent in The Complete Prose (1986). Murray, Gilbert (1866–1957), was a British classical scholar known for his translations of Greek plays, mainly those of Aeschylus and Euripides. He published many books in a long and distinguished career, including The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927), Euripides and His Age (1913), and Five Stages of Greek Religion (1930). Numen and numinous are terms Duncan uses to indicate the presence of the holy or the

Glossary divine, or the perception of the gods. He cites Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1923), as a source. Okeanos was believed by the Greeks and Romans to be a huge river encircling the earth. The river was a divine image of the world ocean, as well as the source of the world’s fresh water. See Hesiod’s Theogony. Origin was a journal edited by Cid Corman (1924–2004), which appeared in five series beginning in the spring of 1951. Origin and Black Mountain Review were the two most important journals for the emerging New American poetry. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov both published in its pages. Duncan wrote to Levertov for the first time after reading her poems in the spring 1953 issue. Palmer, Michael (1943–), is a Bay Area poet and translator with close ties to Duncan and other Black Mountain poets. He attended the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference and coedited with Clark Coolidge three issues of Joglars, published between 1964 and 1966. As a teacher at the New College of California in the 1980s, he invited Duncan to speak to his classes (see the lecture “On Projective Verse” in this volume). Palmer has been recognized with literary prizes, grants, and awards, including a Guggenheim and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. His books of poetry include The Laughter of the Sphynx (2016), Thread (2011), Company of Moths (2005), Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (2001), The Promises of Glass (2001), The Lion Bridge (1998), and At Passages (1995). Parkinson, Thomas (1920–1992), was a poet and professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He and Duncan at times were friends beginning when Duncan returned to Healdsburg and Berkeley in 1946. Parkinson was a scholar of Yeats and a friend to many poets. His books of poetry include Poems: New and Selected (1988), Thanatos: Poems for the Earth (1965), and Homage to Jack Spicer (1970). Parkinson edited Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence (1978) and wrote several books of criticism, including W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry (1964). The Partisan Review began in 1934 as “A Bi-weekly of Revolutionary Literature,” without an editor, but with a large editorial board. From the start, the magazine provided a forum for liberal political views and radical social views; it welcomed discussions of new movements in art, literature, and music. In the 1940s it published articles against World War II, about the Stalinist policies of Russia, and on French writing and abstract expressionism. William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and many other poets published there. The Partisan Review gained a reputation as a center of Jewish intellectual thought, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was the most distinguished liberal magazine in America. Patchen, Kenneth (1911–1972), was an American poet and artist. Duncan knew him in New York City in the early 1940s and again in San Francisco beginning in the 1960s.

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Glossary Awash with Roses: The Collected Love Poems (1991) is a selection of his love poetry. Selected Poems (1957) represents a spread of his writing. Pearson, Norman Holmes (1909–1975), was a professor of American studies at Wesleyan University and Yale University. During World War II, he worked for US counterintelligence in London and became acquainted with H.D. Pearson offered financial assistance and other support to H.D. for the rest of her life. He was responsible for establishing her literary archive at Yale. He published several critical studies, and his collaboration with W. H. Auden in editing Poets of the English Language (1950) was recognized as a major accomplishment. Pearson commissioned Duncan to write a tribute to H.D. for her birthday in 1961. The tribute developed into a series of essays that was later published as The H.D. Book (2011). Pindar (ca. 518–ca. 438 BCE) was a lyric poet from Thebes. Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” opens with Wade-Gery and Bowra’s translation of “Pythian I” in Pindar, Pythian Odes (1928): “The light foot hears you and the brightness begins.” Pound, Ezra (1885–1972), was an American poet, critic, and advocate of modernist writing. He lived most of his life in Europe, returning to the United States in 1945 to face charges of treason for his World War II radio broadcasts in Italy. In 1946, he was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, where he remained until 1958. Olson attended his trial for treason and visited him at St. Elizabeths early in his sentence; Duncan visited Pound in 1947. Throughout these lectures, Duncan cites the influence of Pound on Olson and himself, drawing particular focus to the opening of The Cantos in the lecture “‘Forth on the godly sea’: The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry.” The Pisan Cantos (1948) are also cited for their contribution to Olson’s development of projective verse. Ransom, John Crowe (1888–1974), was an American poet, educator, and literary critic. He was one of the poets in the Fugitives group at Vanderbilt University, was associated with the Southern Agrarian movement, and contributed to I’ll Take My Stand (1930). His best-known poem is “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” (in Poems and Essays [1955]), though he is better known for his critical writing, including The World’s Body (1938) and The New Criticism (1941). These books deeply influenced the writing and teaching of poetry for decades. He was the editor of the Kenyon Review (1939–1959), and in that capacity first accepted Duncan’s “The African Elegy” and then rejected it as a “homosexual advertisement.” Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957), was an Austrian psychiatrist who came to the United States and then founded the Orgone Institute in New York in 1942. He propounded that the release of sexual energy was the key to health. See, for example, his Sex-pol: Essays, 1929–1934 (1972) and Selected Writings (1960). Rosicrucians are adherents of a spiritualist movement said to have been founded by Christian Rosencranz around 1420; however, the group claimed origins tracing back to

Glossary ancient Egypt and the Middle East. As a mystical society, the Rosicrucians valued the symbols of the rose and the cross, and they folded into their belief system hermetic, Kabbalistic, and alchemical writings. Frances Yates has discussed the importance of occult learning in modern science in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Rothenberg, Jerome (1931–), is an American poet who has been dedicated to exploring poetry and cultures beyond dominant European and North American literary institutions and traditions. He championed ethnopoetics before the term was fashionable. See his edited volume, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia and Oceania (1968). Sauer, Carl Ortwin (1889–1975), was an American geographer. As Duncan explains in the Vancouver lecture, he taught at Harvard in the “sciences of man” American studies program, and then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he created a distinguished graduate program in geography. Duncan also mentions Olson’s reading of Sauer’s work in the first New College lecture. See Sauer, “The Road to Cibola” (1932) and “The Morphology of Landscape” (1925), both in his Land and Life: Selections from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (1963). Schrödinger, Erwin (1887–1961), was an Austrian theoretical physicist whose work in the field of quantum theory won him a Nobel Prize in 1933. He also wrote philosophical works about the relationships of science and human life, including What Is Life? (1956), which Duncan quotes in his essays and letters. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (Seneca the Younger) (4 BCE–65 CE), was a Roman philosopher, statesman, and playwright. Duncan refers in these lectures to his play Oedipus. Shapiro, Karl (1913–2000), was an American poet and critic who rejected the principles of high modernism and New Criticism. His books Essay on Rime (1945), In Defense of Ignorance (1960), and The Bourgeois (1964) defined his positions. Collected Poems: 1940–1978 (1978) contains his poetry. Spicer, Jack (1925–1965), was a California poet associated with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser in Berkeley in the late 1940s and with the San Francisco poetry scene of the 1950s and 1960s. His surreal and anti-poetic poems are self-conscious experiments testing the power and limits of language: After Lorca (1957), Billy the Kid (1959), The Holy Grail (1964), Language (1965), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (1975), and My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2010). Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), was an American writer, an early student of William James, and a central figure of high modernism, hosting a salon in Paris, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. As a writer she rejected the linear narrative of traditional prose, developing a style in which language circulates around an object or idea. Instead of giving an image of the object or idea, she uses language to participate in a process that discloses physical and psychological phenomena. She developed the notion of the continuous present to avoid the predication of former statements and events,

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224 Glossary and she considered everything in her writing to be part of a field perception. She and her brother Leo were important collectors of art, especially work by Picasso and Cézanne. Some of her works are The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914), and The Making of Americans: The Hersland Family (1925). Duncan was an avid and eager reader of Stein’s work. Steiner, Rudolf (1861–1925), a distinguished German scholar of Goethe, was the founder of the German Theosophic Association and the author of many books, including The Four Seasons and the Archangels (1947), which Duncan cites as a source for his poem “Earth’s Winter Song.” Steiner is also the author of The Occult Mysteries of Antiquity and Christianity as Mystical Fact (1961) and Eleven European Mystics (1971). Stesichorus (632/629–ca. 555 BCE) was a Greek lyric poet who was highly regarded in antiquity. He wrote poems for and against Helen of Troy that are said to have cured his blindness. H.D. quotes him in her long poem Helen in Egypt and relies on his accounts for various parts of her story of Helen. Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), was an American modernist poet whose work had a tremendous influence on mid-century poetics. Duncan acknowledges a shared “American roots” connection with Stevens in the lecture “The Power of Imagining Persons”; he remained critical of Stevens, however. Duncan saw Stevens as a poet of mind when compared to the projective, creative encounter proposed by Olson. Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1771), was a Swedish scientist who claimed to have experienced visions of the divine world. His Vera Christiana Religio (1771) set forth his theology of humans’ freedom to choose between good and evil. Tallman, Ellen (1927–2008) and Warren (1921–1994), held teaching positions at the University of British Columbia and were influential in introducing the projective poetics of Duncan, Olson, Creeley and others to western Canada. They invited Duncan to give a lecture on Charles Olson in 1961—the first lecture in this collection. In 1963 they helped organize and sponsor the Vancouver Poetry Festival, which brought together new American and Canadian poets. In the 1970s, Ellen Tallman shifted her interest to psychology and taught at Simon Fraser University and the Cold Mountain Institute. She invited Duncan to participate in several of the institute’s seminars and retreats. Warren Tallman coedited (with Donald Allen) Poetics of the New American Poetry (1973) and a collection of literary criticism, In the Midst (1992). The Tallmans inspired the TISH movement, a group of UBC students who were influenced by the Black Mountain and New American traditions of poetry exemplified in the work of Duncan, Olson, and others. Tate, Allen (1899–1979), was an American poet, novelist, essayist, and social commentator. He was a primary contributor, along with John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and others, to the Fugitive (1922–1925) from Vanderbilt University. He is chiefly associated with the Southern Agrarian movement and contributed to the volume

Glossary I’ll Take My Stand (1930). He was the editor of Sewanee Review in 1944, and in his reviews and essays was a champion of the poetry and the social views of T. S. Eliot. His first book of poems was Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928); his Selected Poems (1937) won him high regard as a poet. On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928– 1948 (1948) contains his major essays, literary and political. Temenos is a term used to describe a cultivated locality or “precinct,” the area or ground of one’s immediate attention. For Olson, Gloucester served as the formative fixture of his poetic experience and historical study. transition’s first issue appeared in Paris in April 1927, with Eugene Jolas (1894–1952) as the editor. From the start the journal featured the new literary and artistic movements of the European avant-garde. Articles on German expressionism and French surrealism appeared alongside new writing by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Laura Riding. Jolas was much influenced by the writing of Carl Jung, which also was published in transition, as were selections from James Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” which became Finnegans Wake. See Williams, “Work in Progress: A Note on the Recent Work of James Joyce” (1927). Tremendum is a term used to describe the tendency toward fear and trembling in the encounter with the holy that together with the tendency to attract and fascinate comprises the numinous experience. See also numen and numinous. Trilling, Lionel (1905–1975), was a widely published Columbia University professor who, from Allen Ginsberg’s perspective, held conservative opinions about literature and culture. Two of his many books are The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744), was an Italian rhetorician and political and humanistic philosopher. His principal work is Scienza nuova (1725). Vico advocated the geometric method against Cartesian rationalism. Vico thought that a person could find the truth in what he made. The ability to create was therefore more powerful and insightful than restrictive rationalism. This principle also applied to social and civic institutions, which he viewed as changing as a person’s methods of thinking changed. He firmly supported the rhetorical theories of antiquity, while he championed the power of the imagination. His work advocated on behalf of poetic wisdom as part of the wider philosophy of humanism. Vorticism was a literary and artistic movement in England that was based on essays by T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. Gaudier-Brzeska, a French sculptor, and Jacob Epstein, a British artist, were the two principal artists associated with the movement. The magazine Blast (two issues, 1914–1915) was the central publication. Pound thought of London as the vortex of a new avant-garde where the energy and even violent ideas about art and literature could be concentrated. He and Lewis advocated the destruction of the sentimental and traditional conceptions of form in the arts and urged a vigorous adoption of a kind of geometric abstraction as a

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226 Glossary response to the mechanized, urban society. The pages of Blast were filled with typographic experiments, essays, and manifestos against the stale conventions of art and literature. The movement was subsumed in the violence of World War I. Welch, Lew (1926–1971), was an American poet from Phoenix, Arizona, who is most closely associated with the Beats and West Coast writing. He lived and worked for a while in New York City, but settled in San Francisco for most of his career. At Reed College and in San Francisco, he knew Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Welch was influenced by Gertrude Stein and wrote lyrical poems with emotional depth and beauty. He contributed rich language and images, even when addressing intense social issues. In 1971, he disappeared in the Cascade Mountains. Aram Saroyan wrote about Welch’s poetry and literary milieu in Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. Welch’s poems are gathered in Ring of Bone: Collected Poems (2012). Weston, Jessie Laidley (1850–1928), was a British scholar who wrote two books that influenced Eliot’s The Waste Land and other twentieth-century poetry: From Ritual to Romance (1920) and The Quest for the Grail (1913). Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947), was a British mathematician and philosopher. His book Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) was central to Olson’s poetics. He introduced the book to Duncan when he gave lectures in San Francisco during February–March 1957. Duncan also read and cited The Aims of Education (1929) and Modes of Thought (1938). Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963), published Paterson book by book with New Directions (book 1, 1946; book 2, 1948; book 3, 1949; book 4, 1951; book 5, 1958); the complete Paterson was published in 1992. Duncan frequently uses the story of Marie Curie’s discovery of radium from pitchblend as a metaphor of the poetic process (Paterson, book 4, part 2); he also maintains that Williams borrowed the structure of Finnegans Wake for use in Paterson. Williams’s novel A Voyage to Pagany (1928) is also mentioned in these lectures, and Duncan brings up several times Williams’s review essay on Joyce: “Work in Progress: A Note on the Recent Work of James Joyce” (1927). Zukofsky, Louis (1904–1978), was a poet born in New York of Russian Jewish parents. Zukofsky was a friend of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and he was a central figure in the objectivist group of the 1930s, which included George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. He edited An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932). His shorter experimental poems were collected in All (1966) and Complete Short Poetry (1992). His long poetic sequence “A” (1978) was influenced by Pound and Williams. His prose includes Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963); Propositions: Collected Critical Essays (1967); and Collected Fiction (1990).

Bibliography

Robert Duncan’s library, now housed in the Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, contains some of the volumes listed below; their presence in his library can be checked with searches at http://p8991-bison.buffalo.edu.gate.lib.buffalo.edu. Adams, Brooks. The New Empire. 1902. Introduction to the reprint by Charles Olson. Cleveland, OH: Frontier, 1967. Albiach, Anne-Marie. A Discursive Space: Interviews with Jean Daive. Translated by Norma Cole. Sausalito, CA: Duration, 1999. ———. Etat. Translated by Keith Waldrop. Windsor, VT: Awede, 1989. ———. Vocative Figure. Translated by Anthony Barnett and Joseph Simas. Paris: Moving Letter, 1986. Aldington, Richard. Collected Poems, 1915–1923. London: Allen and Unwin, 1933. ———. Death of a Hero. London: Chatto and Windus, 1929. ———. Images of War. London: Beaumont, 1919. ———. Rejected Guest. New York: Viking, 1939. ———. Roads to Glory. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove, 1960. Allen, Donald, and Warren Tallman, eds. The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove, 1973. Anastas, Peter. Maximus to Gloucester: The Letters and Poems of Charles Olson to the Editor of the Gloucester Daily Times, 1962–1969. Gloucester: Ten Pound Island, 1992. Auden, W. H. Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Barber, Samuel. Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance. New York: G. Schirmer, 1956. Barlow, Robert H. The Extent of the Empire of the Culhua Mexica. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949. Barzun, Jacques. The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. ———. Darwin, Marx, Wagner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1941.

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228 Bibliography ———. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. ———. Of Human Freedom. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. ———. Science: The Glorious Entertainment. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. ———. The Use and Abuse of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Bateson, William. Mendel’s Principles of Heredity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909. Baum, L. Frank. The Emerald City of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1910. ———. The Road to Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1909. ———. The Scarecrow of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1915. ———. Tik-Tok of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1913. ———. The Tin Woodsman of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1918. ———. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1908. Bertholf, Robert. “On Olson, His Melville.” Io 22 (1976): 5–36. Bertholf, Robert J., and Albert Gelpi, eds. The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Blake, William. “America: A Prophesy.” In The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Rev. ed. Edited by David V. Erdman, 51–59. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. ———. Blake’s Illustrations of Dante. Clairvaux Jura, France: Trianon, 1978. ———. William Blake’s Water-Color Designs for the Poems of Thomas Gray. London: Eyre Methuen, 1972. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. 2 vols. New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877. Bloom, Harold. The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. “Bob Bertholf: 1940–2016.” Austin American-Statesman (February 21 and 22, 2016). http:// www.legacy.com/obituaries/statesman/obituary.aspx?pid=177793787. Boehme, Jacob. The Aurora. Translated by John Sparrow. Edited by C. J. Barker and D. S. Hehner. London: J. M. Watkins, 1960. Boldereff, Frances Motz. Reading Finnegans Wake. Woodward, PA: Classical Nonfiction Library, 1959. Boldy, Steven. A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2009. Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Edited by Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove, 1962. Broughton, James. A Long Undressing: Collected Poems, 1949–1959. Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1971. ———. Seeing the Light. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1977. Browning, Robert. Sordello. London: Edward Moxon, 1840. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay. 1860. Translated by S. G. C. Middlemore. 3rd ed. New York: Phaidon, 1950. ———. Force and Freedom: Reflections on History. Edited by James Hastings Nichols. New York: Pantheon, 1943. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Burroughs, William S. “Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police.” Friendz 5 (April 14, 1970). Reprinted in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960– 1997, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 158–62. New York: Semiotext(e), 2001.

Bibliography Butterick, George F. The Collected Poems of George F. Butterick. Edited by Richard Blevins. Buffalo: State University of New York, Poetry/Rare Books Collection, 1988. ———, ed. Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives 1 (Spring 1974). ———, ed. Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives 3 (Spring 1975). ———, ed. Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1980. ———. A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Cage, John. “Defense of Satie.” 1948. In John Cage: An Anthology, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 77–83. London: Allen Lane, 1991. Clarke, John. Blake. Canton, NY: Institute of Further Studies, 1973. ———. From Feathers to Iron: A Concourse of World Poetics. Bolinas, CA: Tombouctou, 1987. ———. In the Analogy. Buffalo, NY: Shuffaloff, 1991. Clarke, John, and Albert Glover, eds. A Curriculum of the Soul. Canton, NY: Glover, 2010. Corbin, Henry. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. 1960. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Dallas, TX: Spring, 1980. Cordell, Linda S. “The Folsom Site in Retrospect.” New Mexico Geological Society TwentySeventh Annual Fall Field Conference Guidebook (1976): 83–86. Court de Gébelin, Antoine. Monde primitif: Analyse et compare avec la monde moderne. Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1777. Crane, Hart. The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932. Edited by Brom Weber. New York: Hermitage House, 1952. Cranston, Sylvia. HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement. New York: J. P. Tarcher, 1993. Creeley, Robert. Collected Poems: 1945–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. ———. The Island. New York: Scribner’s, 1963. ———. “Robert Creeley on Art and Poetry: An Interview with Kevin Powers.” Niagara Magazine 9 (1978). Reprinted in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work: A Sense of Increment, edited by John Wilson, 347–69. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Culler, Jonathan. Ferdinand de Saussure. New York: Penguin, 1977. Dawson, Fielding. The Black Mountain Book. New York: Dutton, 1970. ———. An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline. New York: Pantheon, 1967. ———. Krazy Kat and 76 More. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1982. ———. The Land of Milk and Honey. Gambier, OH: Xoxox, 2001. ———. No Man’s Land. Ojai, CA: Times Change, 2000. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Putnam, 1934. ———. Experience and Nature. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929. Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Philadelphia: Carey, Leah and Blanchard, 1836. Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. Dorn, Edward. Collected Poems: Edward Dorn. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2012. ———. Gunslinger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. ———. Hands Up! New York: Totem Press in association with Corinth Books, 1964. ———. Interviews. Edited by Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons 1980. ———. The Newly Fallen. New York: Totem Press in association with Corinth Books, 1962. ———. Slinger. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow, 1975.

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230 Bibliography Drew, Elizabeth. Discovering Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. Drew, Elizabeth, and George Condon, eds. Discovering Modern Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. Duncan, Robert. Bending the Bow. New York: New Directions, 1968. ———. “Changing Perspectives in Reading Walt Whitman.” In The Artistic Legacy of Walt Whitman: A Tribute to Gay Wilson Allen, edited by Edwin Haviland Miller, 73–102. New York: New York University Press, 1970. ———. Charles Olson Memorial Lecture. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay, Meira Levinson, Bradley Lubin, Megan Paslawski, Kyle Waugh, and Rachael Wilson. Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative 2.4 (Spring 2011). ———. The Collected Early Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. ———. The Collected Later Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. ———. “Entretien avec Robert Duncan.” Le bulletin: Centre national d’art et culture Georges Pompidou 3 (June–September 1977): 16–18. ———. The First Decade: Selected Poems, 1940–1950. London: Fulcrum, 1968. ———. Ground Work: Before the War and in the Dark. Edited by Robert J. Bertholf and James Maynard. New York: New Directions, 2006. ———. The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ———. Heavenly City, Earthly City. Berkeley, CA: Bern Porter, 1947. ———. “Homage to Coleridge.” Unpublished manuscript, Poetics Collection, State University of New York, Buffalo. ———. Letters: Poems, 1953–1956. 1958. Edited by Robert J. Bertholf. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2003. ———. “Letter to Jess after His Last Visit to Olson in New York Hospital, 1970.” Olson: Journal of the Charles Olson Archives 1 (1974): 4–6. ———. Medieval Scenes. San Francisco, CA: Centaur, 1950. ———. “Near-Far Mister Olson.” Origin (1954): 210–11. ———. The Opening of the Field. New York: Grove, 1960. ———. Poems, 1948–49. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Miscellany Editions, 1949. ———. A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan, 1960–1985. Edited by Christopher Wagstaff. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2012. ———. “Projective Project: Charles Olson.” Sulfur 36 (1995): 25–43. ———. Roots and Branches. New York: New Directions, 1964. ———. Selected Poems. 1993. Edited by Robert J. Bertholf. New York: New Directions, 1997. ———. Selected Prose. Edited by Robert J. Bertholf. New York: New Directions, 1995. ———. “Towards an Open Universe.” In Collected Essays and Other Prose, edited by James Maynard, 127–38. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. ———. The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography. New York: House of Books, 1968. ———. “The World of Jaime de Angulo” [a conversation between Bob Callahan and Robert Duncan]. Netzahualcoyotl News 1 (Summer 1979): 1–5, 14–16. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Collier, 1961.

Bibliography ———. The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by Sarah A. Soloway and John Henry Mueller. Edited by George Edward Gordon Catlin. New York: Free Press, 1938. Eagleton, Terry. “The Idealism of American Criticism.” New Left Review 127 (May–June 1981): 53–54. Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. ———. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943. ———. The Waste Land. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Eshleman, Clayton. Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Faas, Ekbert. “Interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen Held August 11, 1976.” Journal of New Music Research 6 (1977): 3–4. Fabre, Jean Henri. The Life of the Spider. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913. ———. The Social Life of the Insect World. Translated by Bernard Miall. London: T. F. Unwin, 1912. Fellini, Federico. Fellini Satyricon, a cura di Dario Zanelli. Bologna, Italy: Cappelli, 1969. Ferrini, Vincent. The Community of Self: Know Fish. Books 4 and 5. Storrs: University of Connecticut Press, 1986. ———. Know Fish. Books 1 and 2. Storrs: University of Connecticut Press, 1979. ———. The Navigators: Know Fish. Book 3. Storrs: University of Connecticut Press, 1984. Flint, F. S. Cadences. London: Poetry Bookshop, 1915. ———. “Contemporary French Poetry.” Poetry Review 1.8 (August 1912): 355–414. ———. The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems. Edited by Michael Copp. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. ———. In the Net of the Stars. London: E. Matthews, 1909. ———. Otherworld. London: Poetry Bookshop, 1920. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 1890. 12 vols. London: Macmillan, 1915. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4: The Interpretation of Dreams [1st pt., 1900] and vol. 5: The Interpretation of Dreams [2nd pt., 1900–1901] and On Dreams. Edited and translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953. ———. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901]. Edited and translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1960. ———. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21: The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works [1927–1931]. Edited and translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961. Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. ———. Death and Fame. Edited by Bob Rosenthal, Peter Haler, and Bill Morgan. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1999.

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Bibliography ———. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995. Edited by Bill Morgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. ———. The Fall of America. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1972. ———. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1956. ———. Kaddish. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961. ———. White Shroud. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Gunn, Joshua. “Mourning Speech: Haunting and the Spectral Voices of Nine-Eleven.” Text and Performance Quarterly 24.2 (July 2006): 91–114. ———. “On Recording Performance; or, Speech, the Cry, and the Anxiety of the Fix.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 7.3 (Autumn 2011). http://liminalities.net/7-3/ thefix.pdf. Haley, Alex. Roots. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Harris, Mary Emma. The Arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Harrison, Jane. Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921. ———. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 1903. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908. ———. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth, 1925. ———. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” In his Mosses from an Old Manse. 1846. New York: Modern Library, 2003. H.D. Collected Poems: 1912–1944. Edited by Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1983. ———. Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions, 1961. ———. Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn Thicket: A Tribute to Erich Heydt. Edited by Nephie Christodoulides. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2012. ———. Tribute to Freud. New York: New Directions, 1974. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New York: Harper, 1958. Heraclitus of Ephesus. The Cosmic Fragments. 1954. Edited by G. S. Kirk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1954. Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. New York: Putnam’s, 1926. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, 1909. ———. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, 1907. ———. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt, 1890. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans, Green, 1902. Jarrell, Randall. “The Poet and His Public.” Partisan Review 13 (September–October 1946): 488–500.

Bibliography ———. “A View of Three Poets.” Partisan Review 18 (November–December 1951): 691–700. Jonas, Hans J. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon, 1958. Jost, Walter. Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Joyce, James. Dubliners. London: Grant Richards, 1914. ———. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1939. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1916. ———. Ulysses. London: Egoist, 1922. Jung, Carl Gustav. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. ———. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. 20 vols. Edited by Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953–1979. ———. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Translated by W. S. Dell and Carl F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1933. ———. Psychology and Alchemy. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 12 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. New York: Pantheon, 1953. Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Kantorowicz, Ernst. Frederick the Second, 1194–1250. Translated by E. O. Lorimer. London: Constable, 1957. ———. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Katz, Adam. “The Use Value of Robert Duncan.” In his “Parallel Inquiries into Metaphysical Content-Structures in 20th Century and Contemporary American Avant-Garde Lyric.” PhD diss., State University of New York, Buffalo, 2017. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Kilmer, Joyce. Trees and Other Poems. New York: Doran, 1914. Kinsey, Alfred Charles. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953. ———. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948. Klonsky, Milton. Blake’s Dante: The Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy. New York: Harmony, 1980. Knight, Gareth. A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, vol. 1: On the Spheres of the Tree of Life. Cheltenham, England: Helios, 1969. Köhler, Wolfgang. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright, 1929. ———. The Place of Value in the World of Facts. New York: Liveright, 1938. Kramer, Samuel Noah. “The Epic of Gilgamesh and Its Sumerian Sources: A Study in Literary Evolution.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 64 (1944): 7–23. ———, ed. Mythologies of the Ancient World. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961. ———. Sumerian Literary Texts from Nippur in the Museum of the Ancient Orient at Istanbul. New Haven, CT: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1944. ———. Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C. 1947. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1948. Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Poems. Edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. New York: Viking, 1971.

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234 Bibliography Leroi-Gourham, André. The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Paleolithic Cave Paintings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Levertov, Denise. “Some Duncan Letters—A Memoir and a Critical Tribute.” In her Light Up the Cave, 196–232. New York: New Directions, 1981. ———. To Stay Alive. New York: New Directions, 1971. Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1876–1961. London: Faber and Faber, 1970. Lowell, Amy. A Dome of Man-Colored Glass. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912. ———. John Keats. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. ———. Men, Women and Ghosts. New York: Macmillan, 1916. ———, ed. Some Imagist Poets. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915–1917. ———. “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces: ‘Grotesques’ for String Quartet.” In her The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, 148–49. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. ———. Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds. New York: Macmillan, 1917. ———. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. Mac Low, Jackson. “Night Walk.” In his Representative Works, 1938–1985, 52–61. New York: Roof/Segue Foundation, 1986. Malanga, Gerard. Mythologies of the Heart. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1996. ———. Ten Years After. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1977. Malanga, Gerard, and Andy Warhol. Screen Tests: A Diary. New York: Kulchur, 1967. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge, 1922. ———. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926. Malraux, André. The Psychology of Art: Museums without Walls. 3 vols. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Pantheon, 1949–1950. Manuel, Frank Edward. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Marvell, Leon. Transfigured Light: Philosophy, Cybernetics, and the Hermetic Imaginary. Palo Alto, CA: Academic, 2007. Matthiessen, F. O. The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Maud, Ralph, and Sharon Thesen, eds. Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. Mead, G. R. S. Thrice-Greatest Hermes. 3 vols. London: John M. Watkins, 1949. Mead, Margaret. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation—Manus, 1928–1953. New York: William Morrow, 1956. Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” In his The Piazza Tales. New York: Dix, Edwards and Co., 1856. ———. Billy Budd, Sailor. London: Constable, 1924. ———. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. New York: Putnam, 1876. ———. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper, 1851. ———. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. New York: Harper, 1852. Merwin, William Stanley. The Dancing of Bears. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954. ———. A Mask for Janus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952. Moore, Marianne. Collected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Bibliography ———. The Complete Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1981. ———. The Complete Prose. Edited by Patricia C. Willis. New York: Viking, 1986. ———. Observations. New York: Dial, 1924. ———. Poems. London: Egoist, 1921. Murray, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition in Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. ———. Euripides and His Age. New York: Holt, 1913. ———. Five Stages of Greek Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Oliveros, Pauline. Three Songs for Soprano and Piano. Baltimore, MD: Smith, 1980. Olson, Charles. “Against Wisdom as Such.” Black Mountain Review 1 (Spring 1954): 35–39. ———. Call Me Ishmael. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. ———. The Collected Poems of Charles Olson Excluding the Maximus Poems. Edited by George F. Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ———. Collected Prose. Edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. ———. Human Universe and Other Essays. Edited by Donald Allen. San Francisco, CA: Auerhahn Society, 1965. ———. The Distances. New York: Grove, 1960. ———. “Lear and Moby-Dick.” Twice a Year 1 (Fall–Winter 1938): 165–89. ———. The Maximus Poems. 1960. Edited by George Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ———. The Maximus Poems. Vol. 3. Edited by Charles Boer and George F. Butterick. New York: Grossman, 1975. ———. Maximus Poems IV, V, VI. London: Cape Goliard Press and Grossman Publishers, 1968. ———. “Pacific Lament.” Atlantic Monthly 77 (March 1946): 102. ———. The Post Office: A Memoir of His Father. Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1975. ———. “Projective Verse.” Poetry New York 3 (1950): 13–22. ———. The Special View of History: Lectures at Black Mountain. Edited by Ann Charters. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1970. ———. Y & X: Poems. Washington, DC: Black Sun, 1950. Otto, Rudolf W. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923. Palmer, Michael. At Passages. New York: New Directions, 1995. ———. Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988. New York: New Directions, 2001. ———. Company of Moths. New York: New Directions 2005. ———. The Laughter of the Sphynx. New York: New Directions, 2016. ———. The Lion Bridge. New York: New Directions, 1998. ———. The Promises of Glass. New York: New Directions, 2001. ———. Thread. New York: New Directions, 2011. Parkinson, Thomas. Homage to Jack Spicer. Berkeley, CA: Ark Press, 1970. ———. Poems: New and Selected. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1988. ———. Thanatos: Poems for the Earth. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1965. ———. W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Parkinson, Thomas, ed. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

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Index

Atlantic Monthly, 186 Atlantis, 52, 77 Attis, 14 Auden, W. H., 51 Augustan, 187 Augustine (saint), 71 Auslander, Philip, 193n8 Australia, 53, 82–84, 94–95 The Autobiography (Williams), 202n15 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), 188 automatic writing, 195n31 “A View of Three Poets” (Jarrell), 195n38

Achilles, 137, 154–55 Adam, 59 Adams, Brooks, 52, 196n3 Adams, John, 14, 127, 167 adventure, of self, 103–22 Aeschylus, 195n35 aesthetics, 1–18, 181 Africa, 90, 97 Africans, 22, 148 “After Strange Gods” (Eliot), 123–24 “Against Wisdom as Such” (Olson), 52, 174 “Ahab” (fictional character), 39 Aims of Education (Whitehead), 72, 194n17, 199n6 Albiach, Anne-Marie, 191 Albigensians, 56, 110–11, 202n10 Aldington, Richard, 6–7, 20–21 Alexandria, Egypt, 52, 131 Allen, Donald, 7, 45–46, 47, 194n7 All for Love (Dryden), 200n3 Amen, 137–39 “America: A Prophesy,” 200n2 “Angels of the Poem,” 206n27 “Angels of the Poem,” 169–70 Angulo, Jaime de, 80–81, 200n19 anthropology, 75–76, 127, 130–31 anti-Semitism, 169, 188 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 200n3 anxieties, 12–13, 77, 91–92, 103, 128, 130–31 Aphrodite, 64–65, 115, 160 Aquinas, Thomas, 22, 26, 30 Ariège, 56, 197n14 Aristotle, 75, 83, 96, 102, 141–42, 178 Athena, 118 Atlantic. See The Maximus Poems

Bacchanale (Massine), 196n47 Balzac, Honoré de, 114 Banyalbufar, Spain, 132–35, 203nn14–15 Barber, Samuel, 203n13 Barlow, Robert H., 184, 208n9 Barzun, Jacques, 36 Baum, L. Frank. See Oz books “Beatrice” (fictional character), 111, 152–53 Bending the Bow (Duncan), 73, 198n44 “Benefice: Passages 23” (Duncan), 198n34 “Benito Cereno” (Melville), 53–54, 69 Berkeley, California, 6, 16, 19–20, 52–53, 197n10, 207n3 Bible, 35, 89, 100, 101, 106–8 “The Bible and Secular Imagination,” 201n12 “Big Man” (fictional character), 159–60 “Bigmans,” 206n9 “Bigmans 11,” 206n9 Bill of Rights, US Constitution, 55 Billy Budd, Sailor (Melville), 53–54, 69 birth, 194n3

241

242 Index Black Mountain, 53, 77, 88–89, 170, 178, 197n24; Cage at, 48, 196n45; Duncan teaching at, 200n1; literary tradition threatened by, 9, 60–61 Black Mountain Review, 25 Blake (Clarke), 206n8 Blake, William, 33, 79–80, 90, 114, 152, 190, 200n2; Milton found by, 112; Olson reading, 159–60 Blavatsky, Helena, 60 Boer, Charles, 164–65, 206n19 Bolsheviks, 32 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 89 Borges, Jorge Luis, 80, 200n17 Boulez, Pierre, 169, 206n26 Brancusi, Constantin, 24 British Columbia, University of. See Vancouver lecture British empire, 75–76 Brontë, Charlotte, 107–8 Brooklyn, New York, 172 Broughton, James, 161–62 Browning, Robert, 119, 188 Buchenwald, 29, 195n21 Buddhists, 96–97, 131, 152 Buffalo, University at. See Buffalo lectures Buffalo lectures, 1, 11–16, 85–102 Bunker, Connie, 174 Burckhardt, Jacob Christoph, 89 Burroughs, William, 172, 207n32 Butterick, George F., 153, 164–65, 176, 178, 184; Guide to the Maximus Poems, 57; in The Maximus Poems, 205n21, 206n19; Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, 206n21 Cage, John, 48, 72, 134–35, 169, 196n45 California, 49, 52, 70, 94, 176–77, 198n47. See also Berkeley, California; San Francisco, California; Tamalpais California, University of, 28, 117 Call Me Ishmael (Olson), 19, 28, 30, 44, 66, 195n23; on first people, 199n9; later Melville works discounted by, 53–54, 69, 150; opening of, 197n18; space concerns, 9, 54–55, 58, 197n11, 199n2 “Canto II,” 202n8 “Canto III,” 202n8, 202n12 “Canto LXXVIII,” 176–77 “Canto LXXXV,” 198n36 “Canto LXXXVII,” 197n15

The Cantos (Pound, E.), 54, 63–64, 71, 104–22, 123–29, 167–72; conglomerate influencing, 23; Ferrini and, 43; fragments, 80; as The Maximus Poems’ ancestor, 161; modern conveyed by, 61; Pisan, 62, 175–77, 188–92; Poseidon opening, 14 “Canto XCI,” 202n12 Cape Ann, Massachusetts, 195n32, 198n32, 205n26 Carroll, Lewis, 100 Catholicism, 26, 69–70, 105, 110–11, 153–54; image unease, 22; Our Lady gotten by, 79 cave of Niaux, 56, 197n14 Cave of the Heart (Graham), 203n13 Cézanne, Paul, 92–93, 171, 200n6 “Changing Perspectives in Reading Walt Whitman” (Duncan), 197n13 Charles Olson Memorial Lectures. See Buffalo lectures Chocorua, 200n5 “Chocorua to Its Neighbor,” 91–99, 102 Christendom, 22–26 Christianity, 10, 35–39, 41–45, 58–59, 71, 110–12; Bible, 89, 100, 101, 106–8; God in, 92–93, 125; kingdom, 75; time in, 58–59, 71, 79–84, 92–93. See also Judeo-ChristianIslamic tradition Christians, 132–33 Christmas, 57, 63, 176–77 Circe, 113, 119 circles, 51, 113–14, 204n7 cities, 19–20, 54–55, 111 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 14, 134 Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (Melville), 54 Clarke, John, 159, 206n8 “Cleaner’s Manifesto” (Pound, E.), 168–69, 201n2, 206n24 Cleopatra, 115 closure, 54, 99–100, 102, 175–76, 181–83. See also projective; “Projective Verse” Clovis, New Mexico, 197n18 CLPP. See Collected Later Poems and Plays Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 33, 74, 195n28, 199n12 Collected Later Poems and Plays (Duncan) (CLPP), 201n7 Collected Poems (Olson) (CP), 206n9 Collected Poems (Stevens), 201n13

Index The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (Williams), 176–77, 200n7, 205n11 Collected Prose (Olson) (CPR), 197n18, 199n2, 201n1 Collins, Jess, 105, 132–34, 195n28, 203n14 Columbia University, 25–26, 185–86, 208n11 “The Comedian as the Letter C,” 96–97, 201n13 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 105 community of meaning, 17, 166 Confucius, 118, 122 content, 101, 152–53, 177–78 Convivio (Dante), 147 Cook, Albert, 85 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 198n36 Corbin, Henry, 169 CP. See Collected Poems CPR. See Collected Prose Crane, Hart, 73, 81, 199n8, 200n21 “Credo” (Pound, E.), 20–21, 57, 197n16 Creeley, Robert, 11, 57, 77–79, 83–102, 150, 157–58; on art, 34, 125–26; “Cleaner’s Manifesto” received by, 168–69; Coleridge influencing, 33, 195n28; on content, 177–78; correspondence of, 45, 177; “The Door,” 97, 103, 106–7, 109, 120–22; form and, 55–56, 177–78; lectures sponsored by, 203, 204; in “Projective Verse,” 207n4 Crete, 31 Cronus, 64–65 cults, 14, 36, 38, 107, 123–39, 146–47; of Isis, 100; mystery, 12, 95–97, 115 culture, 22, 135–39 Cummings, E. E., 31 Curies, 40, 42 Curriculum of the Soul (Clarke and Glover), 206n8 daemonic, 123–39. See also “‘Forth on the godly sea’: The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry” Dalí, Salvador, 48, 196n47 “The Dance,” 47–49 The Dancing of Bears (Merwin), 206n4 Dante, 42, 111, 134, 167, 169; on angels, 105; on circles of hell, 51, 113–14; Convivio, 147; De vulgari eloquentia, 48, 147; The Divine Comedy, 53, 147, 149, 151; Purgatory, 152–55, 204n7 “Dante Études” (Duncan), 101, 201n20 Darwin, Charles, 15, 24, 28, 35, 141, 166–67

dating, 194n1 Dawson, Fielding, 164 death, 55, 112, 127, 173–74; of Angulo, 200n19; gods and, 108; of Olson, 196n1; ship of, 117–22, 125–26, 203n25; violent, 36–37 Dee, John, 106 “Defense of Satie” (Cage), 196n45 Dell Publishing Company, 172, 207n31 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), 60–61, 136, 151–52, 183 Depression, 25–26, 44 derivative, 193n1, 205n12 Derrida, Jacques, 100 De vulgari eloquentia (Dante), 48, 147 Dewey, John, 35–36, 41 Dickens, Charles, 29 Dionysus, 116 The Distances (Olson), 7 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 53, 147, 149, 151 Divus, Andreas, 115, 201n5 DNA. See deoxyribonucleic acid Dodds, E. R., 75–77, 117, 203n23 Dogtown, Massachusetts, 145, 204n5 Donne, John, 75 Doolittle, Hilda, 25, 62, 117–22, 133–34, 136–39, 155, 203n27; credo made by, 20–21; Freud in, 73, 199n7; “Hermetic Definition,” 80, 200n18; pagan world went to by, 26–27; presence influencing, 80; rhyme worked on by, 104 “The Door” (Creeley), 97, 99–100, 101–3, 106–7, 109, 120–22 Dorn, Edward, 12, 164, 193n11, 206n17 A Draft of XVI Cantos (Pound, E.), 206n20 A Dream of Love (Williams, W.), 27–28 Drew, Elizabeth, 20 dromena. See what was done Dryden, John, 90–91, 200n3 “The Dry Salvages” (Eliot), 62, 198n32, 205n26 Dublin, Ireland, 41 Duchamp, Marcel, 189, 208n14 Duncan, Robert. See specific topics Durkheim, Émile, 137 Eagleton, Terry, 1 Eden, 58–59, 71 Egoist, 25–27, 194n15, 199n8 Egypt, 52, 89, 115–17, 120–22, 131, 137–39 Egyptians, 100, 131, 200n4, 203n17, 205n23 Eisenhower, Dwight, 186 Eisenhower, Milton, 186

243

244 Index Eliot, T. S., 25, 30–31, 62–63, 69–74, 115–16, 123–25; form and, 186–87; Pound, E., influencing, 181–82; primordial including, 199n1; The Waste Land, 66–67, 112–14, 155, 161, 181; Williams, W., influenced by, 114, 202n15. See also “The Dry Salvages”; Four Quartets Ellmann, Richard, 30, 195n24 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 116 Empedocles, 96, 102, 113, 202n14 Engels, Friedrich, 105 England, 52, 76, 90, 126, 160 The Enlightenment, 7, 9, 11–12, 14 Episcopalian faith, 26, 69, 123–24 Eros, 64–65, 160 Euclid, 53 Euripides, 27, 38, 115–22, 195n35 Europe, 125, 134 Europeans, 21–22, 25–27, 62, 75–76, 148; North America arrived to by, 16, 94; world, 124 events, 14, 18, 77, 96–99, 114 “Everything Speaks to Me” (Duncan), 201n20 experience, 10, 23, 24 The Extent of the Empire of the Culhua Mexica (Barlow), 208n9 Ezra Pound and Music (Schafer), 202n22 Fabre, Jean-Henri, 137 fairies (fadas), 90–91, 132–34 Fall, 79–80, 87–89, 98, 121–22 farms, 4, 19–20, 38, 39, 157, 162 fatefulness, of identifications, 103–22 “The Fatefulness of Ongoing Identifications: The Poem as the Recall and Adventure of Self in Projection” (Duncan), 12–16 Faye (aunt), 112–13 feeling, 11, 45–49, 65, 87–88, 128, 190–92 Fellini, Federico, 124–25 Fellini Satyricon, a cura di Dario Zanelli (Fellini), 124–25 Ferrini, Vincent, 43, 51, 70, 129–31, 142–43 “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (Pound, E.), 194n4, 194n12 Ficciones (Borges), 200n17 “The Field,” 37–38 field composition, 162–63, 178–92 field poetics. See projective Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 41, 54–55, 144–45, 154, 175 first people, 199n9 fishing. See The Maximus Poems

Fitzpatrick, Thomas, 70, 199n3 Flint, F. Cudworth, 23 Folsom, New Mexico, 58, 197n11, 197n18 forms, 18, 47–49, 103–4, 110–11, 142–43, 177–87; as closed, 159, 175–76; content and, 101; Creeley and, 55–56; Doolittle influencing, 119; life invested in, 7–8; in locus, 42; as meaningful, 32–33, 46; of music, 72; mythic, 204n5; Olson giving, 23; as open, 159, 175–76; as radical, 39; of sculpture, 21; as symphonic, 175–76; weaving borrowing of, 34 “‘Forth on the godly sea’: The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry” (Duncan), 13–14, 203 Four Quartets (Eliot), 18, 66–67, 123–24, 181– 82, 186–87. See also “The Dry Salvages” Four Winds, 130–31 France, 29, 56–57, 79, 191, 197nn14–15, 200n6; Languedoc in, 204n7. See also Albigensians Frazer, James, 14, 38; on gods, 7, 25, 124–25, 130–31; The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 25, 124–25, 130–31, 141–42 Frederick II, 204n7 French, 94, 97, 100, 114, 126, 178; Albiach and, 191; discourse, 148 Frenchmen, 33 Freud, Sigmund, 71, 105–6, 120, 124–25, 142, 173; Civilization and Its Discontents, 14, 134; in Doolittle, 73, 199n7; on fancies, 74; Oedipus complex described by, 14, 117; subconscious talked about by, 127–28; unconscious used by, 77, 127–28. See also Freudians Freudianism, 133–34, 165–67, 170–71 Freudians, 82–83, 106, 148 From Ritual to Romance (Weston), 25 Galileo, 198n36 “Gathering the Limbs of Osiris” (Pound, E.), 125 Gaudí Cathedral, 135 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 24 Gébelin, Court de, 153–54 Germans, 125, 148 Gestalt theory, 17–18, 66, 180–81, 189 Getty, Jean Paul, 67, 198n47 Ginsberg, Allen, 81, 167, 185–86, 208n11 Gloucester, Massachusetts, 4, 20, 125–26,

Index 198n32, 200n20, 205n26. See also The Maximus Poems Gloucester Daily Times, 4 Glover, Albert, 206n8 Gnostic, 79–80, 92, 119–20, 204n7 godly sea, 97, 113–15, 122–39. See also “‘Forth on the godly sea’: The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry” Gods, 13–14, 25–29, 73–75, 89–92, 98–99, 146–55; belief in, 174; in Christianity, 92–93, 125; death and, 108; as devices, 105–6; Frazer on, 7, 124–25, 130–31; on good, 35–37; higher intensities sought by, 101; man ruled by, 52; in The Maximus Poems, 174; Olympian account of, 160; poets recalling, 141–42; Pound influenced by, 57, 170; search, 86–87; sons of, 79–80; suffering borne by, 41; for Swedenborg, 208n15; transcendence of, 200n15; in Whitehead, 44–45. See also cult; Poseidon Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 120, 170 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Frazer), 25, 124–25, 130–31, 141–42 Goldsmid, Edmund, 119 Gondwanaland, 152, 205n18 Graham, Martha, 203n13 Gray, Thomas, 152 Greece, 27, 137 Greeks, 7, 25, 32, 121–22, 124–29, 131–32; chorus, 38–39; drama, 38–39; lectures, 75–77, 117 The Greeks and the Irrational (Dodds), 75–77, 117, 203n23 Gregory, André, 158, 205n2 “Ground Work” (Duncan), 61–62, 197n26 Ground Work before the War and in the Dark (Duncan), 197n26 Guide to the Maximus Poems (Butterick), 57 Gunslinger (Dorn), 164, 206n17 Guyana, 173, 207n33 Haley, Alex, 200n2 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 99 Harrison, Jane, 25, 38, 133–34 Hartman, Geoffrey, 96, 201n12 Harvard University, 28–30, 178, 184, 185, 194n18 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 133–34 H.D. See Doolittle, Hilda heaven, 189–90

Heavenly City, Earthly City (Duncan), 9 Heisenberg, Werner, 100–101, 165, 206n21 Helen in Egypt (Doolittle), 118–22, 136–39 Helen of Troy, 115–22, 136–39 Helios, 56–57, 64, 197n15, 198n36 hell, 51, 113–14, 189–90 Hellenistic period, 131–32, 200n4, 205n23 Heraclitus, 59, 197n20 Hermes Thoth, 91, 200n4 “Hermetic Definition,” 80, 200n18 Herodotus, 115–16 Hesiod, 8, 38, 59, 143–49, 160, 196n2; Theogony, 118; Works and Days, 51–53, 118 Heydon, John, 111, 114–15, 202n8, 202n12 “Heywood” (fictional character), 111 Hieroglyphic Monad (Dee), 106 Himeros, 160 Hindu world, 124, 135 Histoire du soldat (Stravinsky), 47, 195n43 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 89 Hollywood, California, 52 “Homage to Coleridge” (Duncan), 195n28 Homer, 96, 106–8, 115–22 The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Hesiod), 196n2 homosexuality, 79–80, 90–91, 187 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 48–49, 180, 187–89 Howard, Peter, 207n3 Howl (Ginsberg), 185–86 “How to Read” (Pound), 200n8 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Pound, E.), 23, 194n13 Hugo, Victor, 79–80, 112, 114 “Human Universe” (Olson), 20, 44–45 “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” 45–49, 168, 207n28, 208n12 The Idea of the Holy (Otto), 35–37, 125 ideas, 26–27, 42, 51–67 “Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson’s Work” (Duncan), 8–9, 196 identifications, 103–22 “I Have Been an Ability,” 208n10 Iliad (Homer), 121–22 “I live underneath / the light of day,” 153 images, 21–33, 149–50 “Imaginary Instructions,” 208n13 imagined mind, 131–32 imagining. See specific topics imagism, 20–33. See also vorticism Des Imagistes (Pound, E.), 194n8

245

246 Index Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Roman Catholic Church), 198n36 Indians, 22, 94, 112 “INSTANTER” (Olson), 2 interfaces, 18, 101, 109, 112, 125–26, 128; conglomerate as, 117; definition, 13, 105–6, 201n3 interior play, 85–102. See also “The Power of Imagining Persons: The Poem as an Interior Play” internal margins, 195n41 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 124 Ion (Plato), 202n14 Iowa, University of, 8–10, 51–82, 196, 198–99 Iowa lectures, 8–10, 51–82 Ireland, 41 Isis, 100 Italy, 52, 62, 197n31. See also Pisa, Italy Ivy League, 186 Izambard, Georges, 79–80 Izambard, Georges Alphonse Fleury, 200n16 James, William, 25, 29, 77, 108–9, 127–28, 134– 35; “The Perception of Reality,” 194n20; Principles of Psychology, 194n20 James Joyce (Ellmann), 195n24 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 107–8 Jarrell, Randall, 41–42, 195n38 Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 127, 167 Jehovah, 89 Jenkyns, John, 116 Jersey, 112 Jesus Christ, 24, 29, 75–76, 106–7, 112, 122; in The Maximus Poems, 170, 173–74; Orpheus and, 79; Passion of, 35–36, 38–39, 132; in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, 39; reality of, 14, 124; Satan and, 79–80 Jews, 25–26, 100, 111 Joan of Arc, 133 John Cage (Cage), 196n45 John of Patmos, 99, 201n17 John the Baptist, 107 Jones, Jim, 207n33 Jonestown, Guyana, 173, 207n33 Joseph, 133–34, 135, 155, 203n17 Joyce, James, 31, 41–42, 54–55, 94, 102, 143; biography of, 195n24; Ellmann writing book on, 30; Finnegans Wake, 144–45, 154, 175; Lewis hating, 114; New Science as source for, 195n37; Ulysses, 171; Weaver, H., as patron of, 199n8

Judaic mysticism, 79–80 Judas, 35–36 Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, 71, 92–93, 110–11, 139 Judeo-Christian-Roman Catholic time mythos, 58–59 Jung, Carl Gustav, 14, 36–38, 53, 124, 148–49, 189; collective unconscious seen by, 128; Europe looked at by, 134; imagined mind influenced by, 131–32; Psychology and Alchemy, 40, 195n36 Jungianism, 128, 169–74 Jungians, 40, 77, 82–83, 117, 165, 176 “The K,” 158–59 Kabbalah of God, 73 Kaiser, Betty, 58, 174 Kaiser, Charles, 58 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 55 Kayak, 163 Keats, John, 34, 184, 199n12 keeping the seed, 133–34 Kenner, Hugh, 56 Kerouac, Jack, 186 Kilmer, Joyce, 113 kinetics, 208n5 “The Kingfishers,” 160, 164 Kinsey, Alfred Charles, 106 Kitaj, R. B., 191 Kline, Franz, 164, 185 Köhler, Wolfgang, 178 Kooning, Willem de, 182 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 197n19 Kulchur, 135–39 language, 11–13, 14–15, 17, 170–71 Languedoc, 204n7 Lascaux, 56, 197n14 Latin, 106, 115 Lawes, Henry, 116 Lawrence, D. H., 21, 22, 88, 117, 123–25, 150; cult fought against by, 36; “The Ship of Death,” 203n25; war fought by, 36 Lear, Edward, 29, 100 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 163–64 lectures. See specific topics Leningrad, Soviet Union, 54 “Letter 5,” 44–45, 198n37 “Letter 6,” 176 “Letter 7,” 207n29 “Letter 9,” 196n6

Index “Letter 22,” 196n46 Letters: Poems, 1953–1956 (Bertholf), 73 “Letter to Elaine Feinstein” (Olson), 37 Levertov, Denise, 45, 78–79, 161 Lewis, Wyndham, 114 “The Librarian,” 196n7 Linnaeus, Carolus, 28, 194n19 Liveness (Auslander), 193n8 Loeb, H., 160 love, falling in, 79–80, 87–89, 98 Low, Jackson Mac, 77 Lowell, Amy, 22–23, 32–33, 194n8, 194n11 Lowes, John Livingston, 31–32, 195n28 Lucifer, 79–80 lure for feeling, 11, 65, 87 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 200n10 “Madame Sosostris” (fictional character), 112 Magic Incantations (Pazig and Goldsmid), 119 Magic Mirror (Doolittle), 203n27 Magic Name (Doolittle), 118 Majorca, 195n28, 203nn14–15 Malanga, Gerard, 56, 184 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 130–31 Malle, Louis, 205n2 Malraux, André, 22, 25, 26, 136 man, 24, 52, 58, 139, 197n11, 197n20 Manhattan, New York, 172 “March,” 26 Martians, 134–35 Marvell, Andrew, 66–67 Marvell, Leon, 204n1 Marx, Karl, 71–72, 105 A Mask for Janus (Merwin), 206n4 Massachusetts: Cape Ann in, 195n32, 198n32, 205n26; Dogtown in, 145, 204n5. See also Gloucester, Massachusetts; The Maximus Poems Massine, Léonide, 196n47 Matisse, Henri, 39 Matthiessen, F. O., 184 “Maximus” (epic character), 4, 42–49, 145, 158, 160, 196n6 “Maximus, to Himself,” 204n4 “Maximus, from Dogtown—I” (Olson), 145, 154 “Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter II,” 203n9 Maximus of Tyre, 43 The Maximus Poems (Olson) (MP), 35–49, 51–57, 129–31, 142–55, 176–77, 188–92, 206n5; aesthetic recognition, 181; Boer

editing, 206n19; Butterick in, 205n21, 206n19; The Cantos as ancestor of, 161; car in, 152, 158–59, 171, 176, 183, 206n5; Christ in, 170, 173–74; color in, 152, 158–59, 176, 183, 206n5; credos, 174; diagrams in, 31–32; Duncan dedication in, 206n22; footnotes’ role in, 162; fragments explored by, 183; god in, 14, 174; “The K” compared to, 158–59; “Letter 7,” 207n29; “Letter 9,” 196n6; “Letter 22,” 196n46; magic, 30–31, 62, 167, 171; mantra as like, 167; opening, 165, 167–68; place in, 161; poet influencing, 67; projective geometry in, 164, 166–67; Sauer and, 184; self in, 152, 158–59, 176, 206n5; “Song 6,” 196n48; strategies connected to, 7; time in, 9–10, 69–84, 161; wife in, 152, 158–59, 171, 174, 176, 183, 206n5. See also “Maximus”; “Timing and the Creation of Time in Charles Olson’s Maximus” Maximus Poems IV, V, and VI (Olson), 205n18 “Maximus to Himself,” 197n20 Mead, G. R. S., 97–99, 201n15, 202n19 Mead, Margaret, 94–95 Medea, 38–39, 131–32 Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance (Barber), 203n13 Medieval Scenes (Duncan), 206n16 “Medieval Scenes,” 19, 38–39, 52 Melville, Herman, 8, 29–34, 53–54, 60–62, 69, 163–64. See also Moby-Dick; or, The Whale Mendel, Gregor, 136 Mercury, 70 Merwin, William Stanley, 158, 206n4 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 26 Mexico, 31, 154 Middle Ages, 4, 15, 19, 65, 71–72 Milan, Italy, 62, 197n31 Miller, Henry, 126 Milton, John, 79–80, 112 mind, 24, 26, 131–32, 148 MLA. See Modern Language Association Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Melville), 39, 69, 150, 164, 166, 195n23; push of, 53–54; sales of, 29–30 modernism, 193n1, 199n1 modernist writing practices, New Americans receiving, 6–18 Modern Language Association (MLA), 162 Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Jung), 165 “The Moebius Strip,” 160

247

248 Index Montségur, France, 56–57, 197n15 Moore, Marianne, 46 Mormons, 70, 112 Moscow, Soviet Union, 32, 54, 157 Moses, 101, 107 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 72 MP. See The Maximus Poems Murray, Gilbert, 25 Musee [de] l’Homme, 29 Mussolini, Benito, 114, 167 My Dinner with André (Shawn and Gregory), 158, 205n2 mystery cult, 12, 95–97, 115 myths, 11–12, 95–97, 130–31, 133–34, 204n5 My View of the World (Schrödinger), 205n17 negative capability, 199n12 Neoplatonic system, 113, 115, 116–17, 120, 152 Neptune, 117 Nereids, 160 Nerval, Gérard de, 114 The New American Poetry (Allen), 7, 45–46, 47, 194n7 New Americans, modernist writing practices received by, 6–18 New College of California lectures, 16–18, 157–92, 193n7, 207 New Criticism, 1–2 The New Criticism (Ransom), 1–2 New Empire (Adams, B.), 196n3 New Guinea, 94–95 New Hampshire, 200n5 New Mexico, 58, 197n11, 197n18 New Science (Vico), 195n37 New York, 112, 182 New York City, New York, 26, 76, 172 New York University (NYU), 25–26, 197n13 Niaux cave, 56, 197n14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 127 Nixon, Richard, 60 North America, 16, 94, 112, 197n18 North Atlantic. See The Maximus Poems numen, 35–39 numinous, 22–30, 33, 35–39, 125, 132–33, 151 NYU. See New York University Oakland, California, 70 An “Objectivists” Anthology (Zukofsky), 194n7 Odysseus, 106–8, 109–10, 111, 118–20, 125–39 Odyssey (Homer), 115–22 O.E.D. See Oxford English Dictionary

Oedipus, 38–39, 137–39 Oedipus (Seneca), 117, 124–25 Oedipus, the King (Sophocles), 195n35 Oedipus complex, 14, 117, 124–25 Ojai, California, 52 Okeanos, 15–16, 145–55 Old Testament, 89, 100, 107–8 Oliveros, Pauline, 49, 196n48 Olson, Charles. See specific topics Olson’s Push (Paul), 196n8 Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives (Butterick), 206n21 Olympian account of gods, 160 The Opening of the Field (Duncan), 7, 45–49, 65, 73, 198n44, 201n7 An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (Bertholf and Smith, D.), 6 Origin, 25 Orpheus, 79 Orphic, 59–62, 171 Osiris, 100 Otto, Rudolf, 35–37, 125 Our Lady, 79, 122, 133, 170 ouroboros. See snake tail eater “An Owl Is an Only Bird of Poetry,” 47 Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.) (Oxford University Press), 73, 76, 126, 166 Oxford University Press, 73 Oz books, 16, 176–77, 207n2 Pacific, 60 Pagany (Williams, W.), 26–27 “Pallinode,” 119–21, 202n21 Palmer, Michael, 17–18, 176–92, 207 Pan, 124 Paris, France, 29 Parkinson, Thomas, 159–60 Parmenides, 113, 141–42, 202n14, 204n1 Partisan Review, 25–26, 36 “Passages,” 66, 86–87, 97, 98, 144, 149, 153–54, 190–91, 198n44 Passion, 35–36, 38–39, 132 Patchen, Kenneth, 31 Paterson (Williams, W.), 40–49, 62, 143–44, 161, 169–71, 173–74; Book 4 of, 204n2; closure of, 175–76; Duncan’s enthusiasm for, 16; end, 54, 197n9, 204n2; Jarrell reviewing, 195n38; Oz books compared to, 176–77; third book of, 31–32; tripart line in, 195n41; wives in, 148

Index Paul (saint), 71, 88 Paul, Sherman, 196, 196n8, 198–99 Pazig, Christianus, 119 Pearson, Norman, 118–19 “The Perception of Reality” (James), 194n20 Perelman, Chaïm, 3 performance, 3–6, 193n8 Phelan, Peggy, 193n8 Phoenicians, 132, 136 Physics and Philosophy (Heisenberg), 206n21 Picasso, Pablo, 22, 39 Pickwick Papers (Dickens), 29 Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Melville), 30, 39, 69, 164 Pindar, 37, 38, 108, 153 Pisa, Italy, 61, 110, 114 The Pisan Cantos (Pound, E.), 62, 175–77, 188–92 place, 15–16, 27, 58, 161 Plato, 75, 113, 128, 135, 151, 178; Ion, 202n14; Sophist, 202n14 play, as interior, 85–102 Plotinus, 114 Plutarch, 127 “Pœmandres, the Shepherd of Men,” 97–99, 109, 201n15 “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (Duncan), 201n7 poetics. See projective Poetics (Aristotle), 96 poetry. See specific topics Poetry, 202n8, 202n12, 206n20 poetry, margins in, 195n41 Poetry Center, 196n5 Poetry: USA, 200n20 poets, 11–13, 65–67, 116–17, 154–55, 208n5, 209n17; derivative, 205n12; gods recalled by, 141–42; myth searched by, 130–31; as obedient, 181; Sicilian, 42, 204n7 Poland, 111 A Portrait of the Artist (Joyce), 102 Poseidon, 14, 110, 117–22, 125–39 Potiphar’s wife, 133–34, 203n17 Pound, Dorothy, 44 Pound, Ezra, 6–7, 8, 27, 41–45, 61–64, 93–94; “Canto LXXXVII,” 197n15; “Cleaner’s Manifesto,” 168–69, 201n2, 206n24; coat done by, 155; Coleridge and, 33, 74; “Credo,” 20–21, 57, 197n16; documents of, 30, 37; A Draft of XVI Cantos, 206n20; Eliot influenced by, 181–82; “A Few

Don’ts by an Imagiste,” 194n4, 194n12; first instructions of, 13; “Gathering the Limbs of Osiris,” 125; Gaudier-Brzeska influencing, 24; generation after, 147; gods influencing, 57, 170; on Helios, 56–57; “How to Read,” 200n8; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 23, 194n13; in hypnotized state, 142; on image, 23, 149; Des Imagistes, 194n8; incarceration of, 198n38, 202n9; Melville compared to, 164; on music, 202n22; Olson and, 161, 164–72, 175–77, 178; “A Retrospect,” 197n16; on 1616, 198n36; theosophical connections known by, 25; “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer,” 201n5; as tree, 21; on troubadours, 202n19; vagueness objected to by, 58; in vorticism group, 23–25. See also The Cantos “The Power of Imagining Persons: The Poem as an Interior Play” (Duncan), 11–12, 200 Powers, Kevin, 125–26 precincts. See temenos “La Préface,” 159 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 95–96, 146–47 Pre-Raphaelites, 111 presence, 3–6, 10, 15, 72–84, 141–55. See also “The World Felt as Presence” Pre-Socratics, 147, 152, 202n14 primordial, 51–67, 71–82, 95, 199n1. See also “Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson’s Work” Princeton University, 185 Principles of Psychology (James), 194n20 process, 178–92 Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Whitehead), 37, 65, 72, 77, 101, 178 projection, 103–22, 192 projective, 1–18, 157–92, 207. See also “Projective Verse” “Projective Project: Charles Olson” (Duncan), 193n7, 205 “Projective Verse” (Olson), 16–18, 28, 45–49, 51, 87–88, 158–66, 205n13; call to order, 153; Creeley in, 207n4; on delivery, 208n7; dynamic climate of, 198n43; experience shaping, 10; field, 23, 37–38, 66–67, 87–88; on form, 42; imperatives of, 65–66; on kinetics, 208n5; on line, 208n7; misinformation about, 20; New Criticism challenged by, 2; on poetry’s

249

250

Index “Projective Verse” (continued) necessity, 53–54; third rule explained in, 209n17; vowel, 168–69; writing brought by, 1–2, 7–8 projects, 157–74 Protestant, 22, 26 Proust, Marcel, 76, 78 Provençal poets, 42 Psychology (James), 29 Psychology and Alchemy (Jung), 40, 195n36 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud), 124 purgatory, 189–90 Purgatory (Dante), 152–55, 204n7 Pythagoras, 53, 178 Quest, 115, 117, 202n19 Ra boat, 117–18 Ransom, John Crowe, 1–2 rape, 158, 169–70 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne), 133–34 real, 7–16, 173 recall, of self, 103–22 reception theory, 190–92 “The Record,” 171 redemption, 10, 74–75 references, 193n1 Reich, Wilhelm, 142, 149 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust), 76 Renaissance, 43, 111, 115, 136, 181 “A Retrospect” (Pound, E.), 197n16 rhetorical presence and performance, 3–6 rhymes, 104–5, 108, 144, 153, 163, 168–69; feeling lured by, 11, 87–88; outside reception, 13 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 133, 203n16 Rimbaud, Arthur, 79–80, 178, 200n16 “The Ring of,” 160 The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Lowes), 31–32, 195n28 Rochester, New York, 112 Roman Catholic Church, 69–70, 105, 110–11, 153–54, 198n36 Roman Catholic time mythos, 58–59 Romans, 117, 124–25, 132 Roots (Haley), 200n2 Roots and Branches (Duncan), 73 Rosicrucians, 111, 114–15, 125, 131–32 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 111 Rothenberg, Jerry, 94–95

Rubens, Peter Paul, 169–70 Russia, 111 Sacramento, California, 52 St. Elizabeths, 198n38, 202n9 Salt Lake City, Utah, 70 Sandburg, Carl, 23 San Francisco, California, 16–18, 49, 91, 157– 92, 161–62, 196n5 San Francisco Museum of Art, 206n10 Santa Cruz, California, 176–77 Satan, 79–80 Sather Gates Lectures, 117, 203n24 Satie, Erik, 48, 196nn45–46 Sauer, Carl Ortwin, 28, 183–84 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 126 Schafer, R. Murray, 202n22 Scholem, Gershom, 111 Schönberg, Arnold, 47, 195n43 Schrödinger, Erwin, 152, 205n17 sciences of man, 28–30, 34 sea, godly, 97, 113–15, 122–39, “‘Forth on the godly sea’: The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry”. See also The Cantos; The Maximus Poems séances, 35, 108–18 Section: Rock-Drill (Pound, E.), 62–63 Selected Prose (Bertholf), 203n16 self, 103–22, 176 Seneca, 117, 124–25 Sephiroth, 128, 203n7 Serendipity, 207n3 Set boat, 117–18 sex, 87, 110 sexuality, 65, 170 Shakespeare, William, 29–30, 33–34, 61, 99, 188, 195n23; Antony and Cleopatra, 200n3; Brontë finding in, 107; crisis, 75–76; Dryden rewriting, 90–91; negative capability possessed by, 199n12 Shapiro, Karl, 186 Shawn, Wallace, 158, 205n2 Shekinah, 79, 128, 200n15, 203n6 ship of death, 117–22, 125–26, 203n25 “The Ship of Death,” 203n25 Shurin, Aaron, 161, 163–64 Sicilian poets, 42, 204n7 silences, 58, 102, 190–92 Sitwell, Edith, 33 Slinger (Dorn), 206n17 Smith, Dale M., 1–18, 6

Index Smith, John, 129–31 snake tail eater (ouroboros), 144, 204n1 Some Imagist Poets (Lowell), 194n8 “Song 6,” 196n48 Sophist (Plato), 202n14 Sophocles, 195n35 “Sordello,” 119 Soviet Union, 32, 54, 157 Spain, 132–35, 154, 195n28, 203nn14–15 The Special View of History (Olson), 197n20, 199n12 Spicer, Jack, 13, 70, 134–35 “Spring and All,” 205n11 State University of New York at Binghamton, 201n12 Stein, Gertrude, 77, 80–81, 100, 187–88 Steiner, George, 107, 201n6 Steiner, Rudolf, 107–8 Stesichorus, 115–22 Stevens, Wallace, 91–99, 102, 201n13, 207n4 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 31–32 “Stevens Song,” 172–74 Stimmung (Stockhausen), 135, 204n20 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 134–35, 143, 204n20 Stravinsky, Igor, 23, 47, 48–49, 175, 195n43, 207n1 “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces: ‘Grotesques’ for String Quartet” (Lowell), 194n11 “Structure of Rime,” 86–87, 144, 153, 198n44 Sufi, 169 suicide, 152, 172, 184 Suite for Piano (Schönberg), 195n43 Suite for 7 Instruments (Schönberg), 195n43 Sumerian, 59 Sumerian Mythology (Kramer), 197n19 “Sunday Morning,” 97 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 189–90, 208n15 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 33, 111 symbolism, 23; vorticism preceded by, 24 Symphony in Three Movements (Stravinsky), 175, 207n1 Systema Naturae (Linnaeus), 194n19 Tallman, Ellen, 78. See also Vancouver lecture Tallman, Warren. See Vancouver lecture Tamalpais, 95, 131, 203n11 “Tannhäuser” (fictional character), 48 tansy, 195n32 Tartarian-Erojan, 64–65 Tate, Allen, 1–2 temenos, 15–16, 131, 145–50, 152, 155

temple of Delphi, 145 “[The Matter of the Bees],” 203n16 Theogony (Hesiod), 118 theosophy, 24, 25, 60, 107–20, 152 “The Poet and His Public” (Jarrell), 195n38 things, 26–27, 74, 179–92, 208n5 Thoth-Amen, 137–39 “Three Cantos,” 202n8, 206n20 Three Songs for Soprano and Piano (Oliveros), 196n48 “Thrones,” 111 time, 9–10, 51–67, 69–84, 92–93, 102, 161. See also “Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson’s Work” “Timing and the Creation of Time in Charles Olson’s Maximus” (Duncan), 9–10, 198–99 Titian, 67, 136 το-έν. See unity “To His Coy Mistress,” 66–67 “Towards an Open Universe” (Duncan), 205n17 “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer” (Pound, E.), 201n5 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 31–32 tree of Sephiroth, 128 “Trees,” 113 tremendum, 91, 96–101, 125, 129–32, 135, 150 Trilling, Lionel, 186, 208n11 tripart line, 195n41 Trismegistus, Hermes, 154, 205n23 The Trojan Women (Euripides), 120–21 Troy, Helen of, 115–22, 136–39 The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Vincent), 195n23 “Tyrian Business,” 82 Ukraine, 32, 39, 54, 157 Ulysses (Joyce), 171 United States (US), 30–31, 51–53, 54, 67, 72, 133–34; Blake on, 90; as businesslike, 199n1; man born in, 58, 197n11; mind, 148; postwar, 2, 7; roots, 97; Stein becoming famous in, 188; wars, 89. See also Black Mountain unity (το-έν), 143, 152, 204n1 University of California, Berkeley, 199n10, 203n24 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Phelan), 193n8 Upper Sepik, 94–95

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Index US. See United States Utah, 70 Valéry, Paul, 182 Vancouver lecture, 3–4, 6–8, 19–49, 56, 193–94 van Gogh, Vincent, 21 “Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele,” 84 Venice, Italy, 52 “The Venice Poem,” 71, 160, 168, 175, 181–82, 186–87, 199n5, 207n1; “Cleaner’s Manifesto” cited in, 206n24; “Cleaner’s Manifesto” quoted in, 201n2; “Imaginary Instructions” in, 208n13 Vico, Giambattista, 41, 42, 195n37 Vincent, Howard, 195n23 violence, 24–25, 36–37, 46, 169–70, 184–87 Virgil, 113 Virgin, 26, 135 A Vision (Yeats), 195n31 von Hulewicz, Witold, 203n16 vorticism, 7–8, 23–25 vowels, 17, 104–5, 150, 168–70, 204n20 A Voyage to Pagany (Williams), 194n16 Waite, A. E., 114–15 “A Walt Whitman Celebration,” 197n13 “The Wanderer” (Williams), 194n15 wars, 36, 89 Washington, DC, 198n38, 202n9 The Waste Land (Eliot), 66–67, 112–14, 123–24, 155, 161, 181 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 73, 81, 199n8, 200n21 Weaver, Mike, 77, 114–15, 205n8 Weber, Brom, 199n8, 200n21 Webern, Anton, 48 The Wedge (Williams), 200n7 Welch, Lew, 95, 96–97 West, 52–53, 60, 147, 157, 184. See also Black Mountain Weston, Jessie, 25 What Is Life? (Schrödinger), 205n17 what was done (dromena), 38 Whitehead, Alfred North, 10, 29, 42–45, 65–67, 71–73, 76–84; Aims of Education, 194n17, 199n6; lure for feeling advanced

by, 87; on mind’s role, 23–24; Olson locus from, 36–37; on place, 27; primordial time’s definition in, 52–53; Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, 37, 101, 178 Whitman, Walt, 43, 56, 64, 97, 161, 163–64; lecture, 197n13 Williams, William Carlos, 25–28, 62, 80, 93–94, 148–50, 155; on American English, 52; The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 176–77, 200n7, 205n11; Eliot influencing, 114, 202n15; modern proposition heard by, 61; Olson differing from, 143–44, 161, 173; on reminiscence, 196n4; stroke of, 177; tape of, 177; A Voyage to Pagany, 194n16; “The Wanderer,” 194n15; Weaver, M., influenced by, 114–15, 205n8; The Wedge, 200n7; on words, 106. See also Paterson witches, 37, 40, 132–33 wives, 174; in Paterson, 148; of Potiphar, 133– 34, 203n17; of Williams, 27–28. See also The Maximus Poems Worcester, Massachusetts, 4 words, 72, 76, 77, 91, 106 Wordsworth, William, 95–96, 97, 146–47, 151, 184–87, 200n10 Works and Days (Hesiod), 51–53, 118 “The World Felt as Presence” (Duncan), 14–16, 204 worlds, 22, 24, 26–27, 89, 141–55, 172–74; European, 124; Hindu, 124, 135 World War II (WWII), 27, 62, 126, 148, 175 Yahweh, 122, 170 Yale University, 118–19 Yates, Frances, 131 Yeats, William Butler, 24, 25, 35, 97, 111–17, 119; automatic writing experimented with by, 195n31 Y & X (Olson), 61, 205n1 Zeus, 160 Zionist world, 89 Zoroasters, 107–8 Zukofsky, Louis, 33, 104, 167, 169, 194n7