Saturday, March 20, 2010

Wisdom of the Master



Charles Olson to Robert Creeley, 8 March 1951

(from C.O. & R.C. : The Complete Correspondence, Vol. 5)

Ez [Pound]'s epic solves problem by his ego: his single emotion breaks all down to his equals or inferiors (so far as I can see only two, possibly, are admitted, by him, to be his betters -- Confucius, & Dante. Which assumption, that there are intelligent men whom he can outtalk, is beautiful because it destroys historical time, and

thus creates the methodology of the Cantos, viz, a space-field where, by inversion, though the material is all time material, he has driven through it so sharply by the beak of his ego, that, he has turned time into what we must now have, space & its live air


((secondary contrast is Joyce [...] he trie
d to get at the problem by running one language into another so as to create a universal language of the unconscious [...] Joyce, the Commercial Traveler: [...] this internationalizing of language is more relevant to commerce, now, than it is to the aesthetic problem[...]

the primary contrast, for our purpose, is, BILL [Williams]: his Pat[erson] is exact opposite of Ez's, that is, Bill HAS an emotional system which is capable of extensions & comprehensions the ego-system (the Old Deal, Ez as Cento Man, here dates, is not. Yet

by making his substance historical of one city (the Joyce deal), Bill completely licks himself, lets time roll him under as Ez does not, and thus, so far as what is the more important, methodology, contributes nothing, in fact delays, deters, and hampers, by, not having busted through, the very problem which, Ez, has, so brilliantly faced, & beat


First, a moment to acknowledge the incredible brilliance of Olso
n's understanding of (I argue) three of the greatest practitioners of the project of the Modern Epic.

A note: Olson goes on to examine the problem of approaching the Epic from a single perspective (ego, locality, emotion, history) & comes to the conclusion that all three of the Greats fail in that their progress is collectively tied up in a stagnant history. Olson's working toward
an active history, post-Marxian, which is what sets him apart.

A professor, an Important Pound Scholar, told me that my choice to tackle
Maximus before the Cantos was courageous & overly ambitious, as "Pound is much easier than Olson." I countered by pointing out that Olson, while dense, experimental & almost impenetrable in his referential poetics, gave us an epic in English (or more precisely, American). Call me lazy, but I much prefer the Maximus project, Butterick always at my side, than the monumental task of deciphering Chinese ideograms, ancient Greek & Italian. What I did not say, & would have sd had I the newly acquired vocabulary, is that Olson manages to leap out of that stagnant history, rooting his epic in a multi-lingual collage of voice, moving from a Patersonian locality in Gloucester to a global consideration of identity with fluidity & poetic grace, cementing the theories he laid out in ProVerse & Human Universe & wrestling, without apology or hesitation, with the problem of Ego that all poets inevitably confront. & that's why he's readable, because he admits his struggle.

Pound, Joyce & Williams are masters, & it's my contention that Olson dismisses Paterson somewhat unjustly, as Williams manages with his epic (in my reading) to create a poetics both in- and outside-of-time. The only thing rolling, to me, is the Passaic. But aside from that, Olson outdoes his predecessors as a cultural archaeologist. Where the Fathers scratch the surface, Olson goes strip-mining. He's learned the lessons hidden inside of Ulysses, the Cantos, Paterson, the lessons the Fathers were likely unaware they were teaching, & through experience (both on the page & on the ground) has formulated a new approach to the epic, an approach that allows, simultaneously, an examination of LANGUAGE, HISTORY, CULTURE, LAND, EGO, TIME, ECONOMICS, POLITICS

... all of which Pound, Joyce & Williams tackled, but which Olson approaches without privileging a single problem over another. This is where he steps outside, digs deeper, gives us something more comprehensive, less limiting. The Olsonian dogma, much like Mao's, was rooted in a fierce anti-dogmatism. And that's the key: the palpable paradox, the weight of history & inheritance informing each & every defiant, innovative choice. The ambivalence of the great revolutionary.




Thursday, March 4, 2010

Songbirds, Past & Present



My favorite record of all time (yes,
all time) is Hejira, Joni Mitchell's 1976 sprawling & story-driven exploration of travel, love & heartbreak. Each of its tracks, from Coyote to Refuge of the Roads, is a standalone road story; a top-to-bottom listen shows an intricately woven story in 9 chapters of one woman drifting from place to place in search of an elusive truth. This is Joni at her most vulnerable, her most passionate, her most sincere. The voice has deepened in a way that's nearly imperceptible, because she's maintained the soft ethereality of the earlier work, but the change is present, palpable. Simply put, Hejira is the confession of a road-weary traveler, & the weariness appears in the depth of voice. Her songwriting, too, has changed, moved gently away from the brilliant end-rhymes of Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon toward a subtler poetics, one that fits into the Olsonian idea of Composition by Field. The songs occupy space, & the lyrics are actors, space-takers, interactive pieces of the larger sonic project. The song is a field of action, & in the projectivist mode, sound & language extend from one another to create what can only be described as a full experience of voice. The only way to really know is to hear it, & the best illustration is in the album's title track.



Rhyme appears & melts away:

I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone


own, bones, unknown, stone -- these words are all getting at something, a thing deeper than the rhyme, something as lonely & dreamlike as the music itself, which is at once airy & thick. Joni's diction & phrasing play no small part in the construction of the songscape, the slow rising & falling of the heart & the voice. Particularly Olsonian in Joni's work here is the breath & its power to shape the line ("the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE," sd O). In short,
Hejira, in its nine parts, is a folk-pop-jazz exercise in advanced Olsonian poetics. It's proof that the title of singer-songwriter barely scratches the surface of Joni Mitchell's talent.

& with the recent release of Joanna Newsom
's latest record, a two-hour, three-part, 18-track opus, we've found the inheritor of the Mitchell tradition. The thing about inheritance that so many critics forget is the central idea of growth. Of course, Joanna isn't a carbon-copy of Joni. Her choices as both composer & songwriter are considerably more complex & multifaceted. Joanna often departs from Joni's mode of composition, expanding & spinning away to historical & tonal places that her predecessor never quite touched, but the essence of Joni's work is there, & it's important to acknowledge that a young woman, a musician of our generation, is capable of making a post-projectivist album. Have One On Me is just that.

The record's best track is Good Intentions Paving Co., a seven-minute love song that follows, quite literally, the road to the hell. Joni comparisons have already been made, & rightly so, but what the presumptuous folks over at Pitchfork seem to have overlooked are (1) that Joni is far more than her radio-friendly early years, & (2) that musical & poetic similarities & artistic reincarnation are two very, very separate phenomena. That said, imagine a Newsom cover of The Gallery or Judgement of the Moon and Stars. I can think of few contemporary musicians who could do justice to a lesser-known Joni tune, aside from Joanna. But again, doing justice is not the same as doing an impression, or fully replicating the original. It's a project of reinterpretation & reinvigoration that I'm thinking of here, & this is precisely what Joanna does with Good Intentions.



Like Hejira, we have a road story, & like Blue Motel Room, one of Hejira's loveliest tracks, we have a soulful & playful examination of just how a doomed relationship affects the woman at its center. What Joanna accomplishes with Good Intentions Paving Co. is an advanced project of Composition by Field: the motion of the music evokes both a propulsion forward & a circular return to the start. One of the song's loveliest lines, "Like a bump on a bump on a log," condenses this feeling beautifully. There's a sense in Joanna's phrasing that she is interrupting herself -- this statement could be a stutter ("bump on a- bump on a log") or a literal description. Either way, the same thing is articulated, a layered stasis that, musically, pulls the listener forward. Form is content.

Vocally, Have One On Me shows a progression away from a long-dismissed "childlike" tone, with Joanna focusing her voice in a way that, in certain phrases, is absolutely reminiscent of early Joni. That soaring higher register & an uncanny ability to allow descents of melody to articulate a deeper, more heartbroken layer to the love song. Joanna goes high with hope & low with reality. & Lyrically, the same beautiful ambivalence that only the best female songwriter can accomplish:

And I know you meant to show the extent
To which you gave a goddang
You ranged real hot and real cold but I'm sold
I am home on that range


This is what sets the great women apart from the great men. A truly subtle female songwriter gives you the full range of emotion, the hot & cold, & a very clear awareness of just how doomed her great love really is. That multidimensional aspect, the fact that Joanna knows the car's headed straight to hell & she isn't getting out, is so beautifully Joni-esque, is a condensation of the female perspective that I've only once seen in the work of a male poet, & not even in a love poem. What's more, the poem I'm thinking of, "I Know a Man," by the much-celebrated (on this blog, at least) Robert Creeley, is paralleled in Good Intentions. & this is where I'll close, letting, for once, the poetry speak for itself.

Creeley writes:

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.


& from Joanna:

And I did not mean to shout, just drive
Just get us out, dead or alive
A road too long to mention, lord, it's something to see!
Laid down by the good intentions paving company