State/Meant of Purpose

As I approach the fateful moment of Stating My Purpose as a prospective Ph.D. candidate at various east coast institutions of so-called higher learning, I'm revisiting those texts that pushed me toward my current preoccupations, ones that manifest themselves poetically and politically, the ideas that will likely shape my research & work as a professional intellectual (whatever that means).

My last year at the (sometimes) illustrious Gallatin School was a period of independent research, guided at times by my two intellectual & personal heroes, Rebecca Karl & Antonio Lauria, both of whom offered a way into the dense & fascinating work of some very important dead Communists, who spent several hours on Monday afternoons and Tuesday evenings discussing the tensions and truths of Maoist and Gramscian dialectics with me, and who showed me that intellectual pursuits are not always masturbatory, that a close-reading of a single turn of phrase could break open a new world of thought never before considered. With RK, I learned how to Read the Revolution, so to speak -- to investigate the ways in which the theory and practice of national liberation, cultural re-formation, & consciousness-raising were reflected in the form and content of the work of Marx, Lenin, Mao & Brecht. With Antonio, there were conversations about the function of language as a living part of the Revolution itself, the process (always process) through which Gramsci constructed and de-constructed his (and the collective) understanding of People as readers, speakers and actors of the Revolution. RK offered a structured, faithful reading of Great (Revolutionary) Books; Antonio was a friend & comrade with whom I could work through my own difficulties, academic or otherwise, with the Revolution as an idea and a living thing.

Their influence affected my personal out-of-classroom readings of the so-called 1st- and 2nd Generation Modernists, & allowed me to draw connections between their theoretical and practical exercises in the development of an American Voice & the Revolutionary work of my Marxist-Leninist influences. Almost every week, Antonio would remind me of Gramsci's famous emphasis on "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," the dialectical relation between criticism and hope, and I would excitedly paraphrase a line from Williams, a paragraph of Olson. When I crossed the stage at Lincoln Center, my fist thrown in the air in acceptance of my B.A. in Poetics and Revolution, I was thinking of Gramsci, of Mao, of Williams & Olson, of my comrades, alive & dead, in the always-changing & constant Struggle, unnamed & waiting for a new Voice.

Now, revisiting those ideas that shaped my concentration at Gallatin -- ideas that earned me a reputation as a shouting Maoist, a chain-smoking & rambling poet, an anachronism in an intellectual community emphasizing post-structural theorizations of prose & the unspoken & insurmountable coercion of a monolithic System -- I'm reassured that structure is necessary, and that we as Americans have a language with which to speak, a language that is our own, and that we must reclaim in the face of fragmentation & institutionalized decentralization of thought and identity. These are the lessons I learned as an undergraduate, lessons I'm beginning to recall at a crucial and necessary moment:

Language is ALIVE. It is not a mediator or a mirror. It is as much a participant in the construction of our cultural consciousness as the breath that manages to keep us living among each other and ourselves.

and BREATH, that is the key: the rhythm, the space, the silence that's full, always, of what's been said, what will be said, what IS said. (Curse the passive voice, inherited & emphasized)

INHERITANCE is not merely to be accepted, but must be considered critically. We must dig into the past to understand what shaped the things we've inherited. Capitalism. Formalism. The iamb, the trochee. (These rules of poetry extend -- the measured & constrained approach to consumption, the veil that covers the social relations of labor -- ask our President for an answer to rampant unemployment & you'll get a beautiful sonnet in response, an inherited answer to a question that seems to refuse to change.)

Change, which does not simply happen, but is instead MADE. By people. On the ground & on the page. We should not wait for a handsome senator from Chicago to deliver it, nor should we turn to the Mothers and Fathers of our form to offer it in the pages of the Paris Review. The longer we wait, the later it'll come.

I'm also reminded that there are, in fact, very real ties between such seemingly disparate characters as William Carlos Williams and Mao Tse-tung. Evidence:

The truth has to be redressed, re-examined, re-affirmed in a new mode. There has to be new poetry. But the thing is that the change, the greater material, the altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem, in it. Made of it. It must shine in the structural body of it. [WCW]

The supersession of the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe... In each thing there is contradiction between its new and its old aspects, and this gives ruise to a series of struggles with many twists and turns. [Mao]

By repeating an early misconception it gains acceptance and may be found running through many, or even all, later work. It has to be rooted out at the site of its first occurrence. [WCW]

Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas, and thereby completely deny and reverse the normal sequence by which man comes to know truth. Nor do they understand the interconnection of the two processes in cognition -- from the particular to the general and then from the general to the particular. [Mao]

If I succeed in keeping myself objective enough, sensual enough, I can produce the factors, the concretions of materials by which others shall understand and so be led to use -- that they may the better see, touch, taste, enjoy -- their own world differing as it may from mine... That is what is meant by the universality of the local. [WCW]

It is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the universality of contradiction resides. [Mao]

They lack that which must draw them together -- without destruction of their particular characteristics; the thing that will draw them together because in their disparateness it discovers an identity. [WCW]

So to state it. The purpose. Here it is:

TO DIG, to discover the contradictions that propel the motion of history In the American Grain, to unearth the parallels and intersections of individual experience that will give rise to a unified voice, to examine (closely) the victories and failures of the poetic Revolutionaries of the American 20th century, so that we, the inheritors of their language & culture, may move forward with our own contradictory experience and being with a more full & complex understanding of that which came before. Because before we can understand the present, before we can create the future, we must -- MUST -- understand what came before.

It's Sankofa. It's my favorite pome:

If we go back to where
we never were we'll
be there [REPEAT] But

Bacon

I recently visited the Francis Bacon retrospective now showing at the Met, & will be heading back for a second go in a few days. I am by no means an expert on visual art, & am far from qualified to comment with intellectual sophistication on the subject. I can, however, talk without embarrassment about how I feel in front of a beautiful painting. Good art, in my opinion, is art that does something. Just as my poetic tastes draw me toward pieces that are somehow in motion through time, work that refuses to stagnate in its specific context, my eye is consistently drawn to the painters who bring the canvas to life, often with violence. A good friend once had a poetry teacher who placed a rock in the middle of the table during workshops. He challenged his students to "move the rock" with their poems. Some poems made the rock move, & they were the good ones. I like paintings that move the rock. & I love paintings that throw the rock through a plate-glass window, grazing your face, maybe knocking out a tooth or two.

That's why my favorite Bacon painting is the 1962 triptych titled "Three Studies for a Crucifixion," particularly its central panel. I had never before experienced the painting in person, & therefore had no idea how deeply textured the piece was. The mutilated carcass featured in the center panel literally protrudes from the canvas with such violent grotesquerie that many people walking through the gallery avoided it. Wide-eyed tourists crowded around papal portraits & screaming baboons while I camped out in front of this triptych, captivated by the delicacy of Bacon's violence. This is a startlingly meticulous execution of a human emotion that is anything but delicate. Bacon accomplishes with focused detail what Pollock created with dynamic chaos. Standing in front of this painting, I was struck at once by both panic and arousal. Something about the blood spatters above the carcass is ejaculatory, something about the body's position screams of the post-coital slouch & exhalation. & yet there is blood & horrific mutilation, something like afterbirth surrounding the body's legs. & there's the revelation. Seeing this painting brings me to life. It kills me. And it fucks me senseless. Bacon forces you into a corner, draws your eye up, down, sideways & in, always in, to something so beautifully grotesque that you can't help but want to touch it. It's precisely how I imagine the phenomenon of Crucifixion, & yet the experience of the painting is still startling. Bacon tells the truth you always knew but never wanted to admit. There's something highly projective about his work, something that forces the viewer not only to interpret but to create as she perceives the image. Because of his abstraction of form, & because vibrant blankness is juxtaposed with insistent detail in so much of his work, Bacon gives the viewer the power to experience & not just receive. When you can't keep your mind from racing, when you're faced with the onslaught of not one, but several of the most insistent & consuming physical & emotional responses to phenomena, you are undeniably active. & good art, in my opinion, is art that activates its audience. What draws me to Bacon is what draws me to Brecht, to Olson & Creeley, to Joyce, to Godard. Passivity, when it comes to all of those men, is death. Act, engage, participate always in a process, or fail.

The Bourgeois Blues

What great tragedy is the life of the petty-bourgeois intellectual! What a profound struggle he faces in descent from the ivory tower! To be the tallest among the small, a Man with Ideas among just-plain-men, is to be plagued with the contradictory consciousness that's driven so many to isolation & crisis. O desperate confusion! O woe! Pity the great & privileged thinking man!

In his Between Existentialism and Marxism Jean-Paul Sartre makes the astute observation that class consciousness may only be attained through direct experience of class conflict. That's to say, one cannot identify with the class struggle without first participating therein. This is a clear application of the dialectical method of analysis. Theory & practice are dialectically linked, so that one may not exist without the other. One cannot understand the proletarian circumstance until one experiences it, wholly & directly.

So where, in the equation of class struggle & consciousness, does that place the Thinking Man of Privilege?

Let's consider a hypothetical situation. A young, petty-bourgeois intellectual is exposed, on paper, to the central tenets of Marxist philosophy. He reads excerpts from Capital, he analyses State & Revolution for a week or two. He has some conversations with other, more well-read students of Marxism-Leninism. He has a degree from a prestigious institution of higher education. There is money in his bank account & he has few material responsibilities. Most importantly, he does not have to work for a living. But, in search of experience & adventure, he decides to take a job as an unskilled laborer, a worker in an assembly line. There, he works among the People, whose lives depend upon the meager wages earned with their daily toil. These People among whom he exists are uneducated by comparison, but they are far more practically skilled than the intellectual. He earns, like his comrades, less than a living wage in this position, and he quickly grows frustrated with his circumstance. He believes that the practical skills he is learning are less valuable than the metaphysical lessons of experience learned by his cosmopolitan intellectual predecessors. Materiality, in other words, is subordinated to the pleasures of thought. "My time is worth more than this," he says, "because I have read thick books! I have written long analyses of the meaning of sexual penetration in the Modern bildungsroman! I will no longer exploit my body & waste my valuable time for an industry in which I do not believe!"

He quits his job. His fellow workers, however, cannot quit their own. They have bills to pay, and no other marketable skills. Principles are of secondary concern, because of the material urgency of survival. In short, they are locked into their situation. He is not. He is free, because of his padded bank account & bourgeois mindset, to walk away from the assembly line & devote his time to thought & introspection. He is a lucky man, he thinks, because he has learned the Truth of Class Consciousness, and he goes to sleep with a smile on his face & hope for the future, now armed with an understanding of the Plight of the Worker. He may think of the men who once worked alongside him, but only in passing, & in the context of their proletarian charm, the wisdom they've acquired in their noble savagery. They are footnotes in the novel of his life, anecdotal characters used to add color to the philosophical musings of his autobiographical narrative.

But he has worked, he tells himself, worked hard, for a week or a month, perhaps even a year, and has therefore paid his dues. He believes that he has earned the right to speak of class, when in fact, he knows little of the struggle to which he refers. Someday, when a revolutionary movement develops around him, he will sit at his desk & write long essays on the value of the worker in society. He will sign petitions & organize sit-ins. He will raise his fist at rallies & shout slogans with his fellow intellectuals, but he will not set foot in the trenches of the true struggle. He will not give up his privilege, because he believes he has already given up enough, by working for a moment among those he supports from afar, whose fingers are bleeding from overwork. And he will never sacrifice his luxury, because he cannot let go of his bourgeois intellectualism. His degree is always in the back of his mind, always a reminder of his arbitrary superiority, no matter how sure he is of its meaninglessness. He will never have to strike for shorter work-days or better health benefits. He will never have to look his children in the eye and tell them there will be no food on the table tonight, or any night this week. And because of this, he will never fully understand the struggle, and can never claim a knowledge of that struggle. He has no right to it. It is not his to claim.

And yet we petty-bourgeois intellectuals claim the struggle daily. We understand the ideas, the philosophies, the grand, sweeping generalizations of our thoughtful predecessors who classified & identified the masses to whom they had never spoken. And because of this understanding, we are somehow imbued with a right to speak of the Revolution, though the fight will never be our own. Our sympathy is not empathy. Our interest is not in shared experience, but in analysis & observation. At best, we are anthropologists in the field, taking notes. We live among the natives, always looking through the lenses we've learned to value as tools of comprehension, never stopping to think that dirty hands & callused fingers may actually be the key to understanding.

Those who have the choice to live without are different from those who live without choice itself. No matter how many pages of Marxist-Leninist theory I read, no matter how much research I perform on the experience of the CCP during the Long March, I will never know the truth of struggle until I am forced, without choice, to be exploited. To choose exploitation as a means of enriching one's experience of The World & its processes is to negate the struggle of those who are & will continue to be exploited ad infinitum. It is not noble to sacrifice one's privilege unless it is sacrificed completely, unless luxury and caution are thrown to the wind & the mind is wiped clean of its philosophical clutter.

I do not pretend to be strong enough to throw away the books & surrender completely to the circumstance with which I am chiefly concerned. And because of this fact, I have no right to speak of the essence of class consciousness, of great & explosive revelations of Truth. Because of this, I am not dangerous, because I am aware of my inexperience, & embrace it as a challenge that must be faced, a step in the process that leads toward the acquisition of Revolutionary Consciousness. The dangerous ones are those who claim consciousness that is not their own, who assert correctness without first having sought the validation of experience.

In closing, the wise words of two philosophers of experience, one a Chinese revolutionary, the other a doctor-poet from New Jersey.

No ideas but in things / There is no knowledge without practice

VIVE LA FRANCE! [à bas les impérialistes!]

In honor of Bastille Day, highlights from the work of Jean-Luc Godard:

Week-End (1967)



Bande à part (1964)


Pierrot le fou (1965)


La Chinoise (1967)


Tout va bien (1972)


Une femme est une femme (1961)

Maximus, to himself

I've made it to page 57 of Maximus. Distractions & laziness are partly responsible for the slowness of my progress. Mostly, though, I found myself feeling too close to the text & not quite understanding why. Despite its confusing & fascinating references to history & ancient mythology, there was something beneath the surface that felt familiar to me, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. So I walked away for awhile.

A few days ago, I decided to get back into the swing of things by exploring some of Olson's correspondence, particularly his epistolary relationship with Frances Boldereff, a lover who became his muse & literary confidante. Many of Olson's letters to Frances contained the beginnings of some of the best Maximus poems. It was in my exploration of those letters that I discovered the familiarity that had startled me before.

In Frances & Olson's correspondence, I began to recognize myself in Frances' response to the poet. The two of them, the dynamic of their relationship, appeared allegorical to an epistolary relationship of my own. If I saw myself in Frances, I saw my counterpart in Olson. It was the appearance of echoes of this other person in Olson's poems that gave me pause. The letters between Olson & Frances only magnified this parallel. It was painfully clear in one upsetting exchange between the two, in April 1950:

on April 15, Frances writes:

I am very shocked not to have a note from you...
I have no money
I have no work
I have no companionship
I have no library
And I receive from you in the darkest hours I have lived through one small note.
Do you think it is kind Charles?

...The human thing is made of blood. Sometimes what is needed is not words-- it is the sight of a human eye. I need no sex now -- I am far too torn for that. I do need you.

If you cannot come to me now Charles when I need you not out of weakness...but because I need human-- I need to see the eye -- the words are just like thin odorless water to me--

Two days later, Olson writes:

you have made me cold as ice-- by attacking my words, language, this communication between us which i believe in so deeply, as thin odorless water... you must, because you do have the reach in you, understand that i would understand anything you do-- you must protect yourself, darling...

i don't care who the hell olson is or what the hell he says or does, or does not, you just got to take care of yourself... so you don't get this screwed up...

aw, fuck the whole business: you have made imagery and words wry in my mouth, sound like lie

fuck it, frances, just fuck the whole business

And less than 24 hours later, another letter from Olson:

have nothing to do with poets/ they know nothing about human reality as it is some one else's...

in my mouth this morning like ashes is a phrase: image more than person, more syllable than image...

what, from the start, i suppose i could offer you was, the images you invoked in me, both as they took the form of [poems written for you] and as they took the form of letters written to you with all the solids of verse, if not the final shapings such action would... be love

Frances is filled with need, a desperate desire to feel a human connection that cannot be created with letters alone. But Olson is incapable of providing her with his physical presence. What becomes clear in the other letters is Olson's paralysis. His love is sincere, & his connection with Frances is very real. But the relationship is conducted entirely on his terms. In many cases, in fact, Frances' declarations of love & longing are met with requests for advice on his writing, for an editorial eye. This, it seems, does not indicate an imbalance of affection, but instead an unshakable selfishness on Olson's part. He will never, ever meet Frances halfway, no matter how much he knows he should.

While the connection I felt to this situation initially compelled me to distance myself from Maximus, it's now drawn me back in. Because I deal with an Olsonian character in my life outside the poems, I feel a newer & more powerful connection to the text. Personal identification equals investment.

So today, when I returned to Maximus with a newfound stake in the poet & his alter-ego, imagine my surprise at finding a poem that deals directly with the tensions exposed in Olson's letters to Frances.

I have made dialogues,
have discussed ancient texts,
have thrown what light I could, offered
what pleasures
doceat allows

xxxxxxxxxxxxxBut the known?
This, I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world

xxxxxxxxTokens.
xxxxxxxxBut sitting here
xxxxxxx iI look out as a wind
xxxxxxxxand water man, testing
xxxxxxxxAnd missing
xxxxxxxx some proof

I know the quarters
of the weather, where it comes from,
where it goes. But the stem of me,
this I took from their welcome,
or their rejection, of me

aaaaaaaa lAnd my arrogance
aaaaaaaaawas neither diminished
xxxxxxxxl nor increased
llllllllllllllllby the communication

This is Olson's mea culpa, or the closest thing to it, in the first section of Maximus: the admission of failure, the acknowledgement of his fatal flaw. Olson is, admittedly, a Man of Ideas, incapable of creation outside the realm of verse & philosophy. He's trapped in his seaside cabin-equivalent of an ivory tower, "looking out" only when he is alone with nature. (So disillusioned by academia was the poet that he rejected a much-deserved & hard won Ph.D from Harvard.) The most telling stanza, I think, is the one that begins "But the known?," with its clear admission of paralysis. Love, life, even the world itself, must be given, not found. Olson, eternally in search of the meanings of these three words, admits in 1953 that he cannot find them on his own, that he relies on the generosity of others to aid in his pursuit, while he lies back, static in his "arrogance." If his selfish introspection isn't clear enough in the poem itself, its title gives it away: "Maximus, to himself." The Bigman admits his failure, yes, but only to himself. He laments not the suffering he inflicts (however unintentionally) upon others, but his guilt at such egocentrism.

Little more than halfway through the first of Maximus' three parts, Olson's tragedy has become achingly clear. It's not so much the selfishness that saddens me, but Olson's simultaneous acknowledgement of it & refusal to change. Until he died, people came to him to offer assistance & love, never asking anything in return. When, on those few occasions when someone actually did require some sort of reciprocity, Olson retreated & let them disappear. His first wife, Connie, grew tired of the dance & walked away. His second wife died (in what may have been a suicide) after following him, unquestioningly, to the barren cold of Buffalo, New York. He accepted countless loans that were never repaid. And in the last years of his life, he relied on the kindness of his sister-in-law, without whose help he would have likely starved to death, as he never learned to cook for himself. Olson's life, though filled with occasional adventures & striking accomplishments, was little more than a series of unreturned favors & one-sided relationships. How can a man find love if he isn't willing to express it himself? The poems are beautiful, but as Frances said, sometimes words just aren't enough.

Joni

I didn't really find Joni Mitchell until I was 19. I had a wonderful roommate who must've sensed something in me that I hadn't noticed before, & after a long conversation about a very disappointing young man, she sat me down & played "My Old Man." My life was changed. (Incidentally, she also introduced me, in an earlier conversation about the same young man, to Bob Dylan's "Buckets of Rain.")

From that point on, I was hooked on Joni. Over the last three years, my appreciation of her music has only grown. Anyone who's ever lived with me can attest to the fact that her voice, along with Dylan's, is a constant in my home.

As my life changes, as chapters begin & end, I relate to different Joni records. That's the beautiful thing about her work: each album is a cohesive exploration of a moment in her life, functioning like a well-written novel. Blue was my 20th year. Now, it's a mix of Clouds & Hejira; what the two albums share is the thematic centrality of wanderlust. Joni writes beautifully about the effects of travel on the human heart, the longing for an absent lover, the impact of place on the perception of circumstance. A really wonderful songwriter makes you feel like she wrote the song about you. That's how I feel about Joni. Take, for example, "Coyote," a track from Hejira.




She creates a character in that song with such complexity, & all of it's revealed through her paradoxically reluctant & exuberant love for him. By animalizing her womanizing lover, she gives us a clear & beautifully poetic story of their relationship. He wakes her from a long sleep, and you can see it in the performance. That smile when she sings "flame" in the last verse? I know that feeling.

& another beautiful exploration of a relationship with a far-traveling lothario, "The Gallery," from Clouds:



The song's reportedly about Joni's affair with another favorite poet-musician of mine, Leonard Cohen. With that in mind, the track becomes much more powerful. Echoes of Cohen's own style are clear in the arrangement of the song, as well as the poetry itself:

"Lady, don't love me now, I am dead
I am a saint, turn down your bed
I have no heart," that's what you said
You said, "I can be cruel,
But let me be gentle with you."

That quotation of the lover has a clearly Cohenesque structure, & his character in this song can be found as an admission of self in a song like "Chelsea Hotel No. 2" It takes a great poet to adopt the voice of another while maintaining her own tone. Joni accomplishes it seamlessly.

What's especially lovely about "The Gallery" is that it exhibits the top of Joni's exquisite soprano range. Even in the early stages of her career, her smokey low register appeared on tracks like "Blonde in the Bleachers," from For the Roses. A close examination of her catalog reveals that, before smoking killed her range, her soaring high soprano was used for very specific emotional evocations. That sweet, songbird tone speaks to her innocence. (On a track like "Chelsea Morning," it's joy & playfulness.) The Joni of "The Gallery" is a virginal victim of a womanizer racking up notches on his bedpost. The point where her voice noticeably dips into the lower register is at the end of the chorus: "...cruel,/ But let me gentle with you." That's such a telling line, and the descent is even more powerful with the turn, when Joni claims the lover's cruelty for herself. Her assertion of power comes with a lower voice. But she still has that sweetness, the gentleness of love, that offers him forgiveness, whether he deserves it or not. For as long as she maintained her range, these subtleties are apparent in her work.

Aside from the fact that she's so much fun to read closely, what draws me back to Joni is the fact that I see myself in her work. To have a musical presence in one's life who accomplishes that with her work is a gift. It makes the world feel smaller, & gives a voice to experiences that would otherwise go unspoken.

Modernists in Conversation

In 1922, Ulysses was published for the first time in its entirety by Sylvia Beach. Prior to that release, the novel had been serialized in the American journal The Little Review between 1918 and 1920. When the Nausicaa chapter was published, serialization ended because of an obscenity charge.

One year after the publication of Joyce's novel in Paris, William Carlos Williams released a novella titled The Great American Novel, a 125-page experiment in prose-writing outside the traditional conventions of the form. Also first published in Paris, Williams' piece is a gem: the plot is centered around a love affair between a female Ford car & a Mack truck. Novel was published the same year as Spring and All, which was, until Paterson, Williams' masterwork (it contained, among others, the iconic untitled poem now referred to as "The Red Wheelbarrow").

Williams and Joyce were literary contemporaries, linked by a shared relationship with Ezra Pound, whose clout in the publishing world aided in the dissemination of the work of both writers. It's arguable that without Pound, neither Williams nor Joyce would have ascended to the levels of fame that both men achieved. For a long time, I've been intrigued by the thematic parallels in Williams' and Joyce's work, specifically the centrality of the river, with its multiple metaphorical meanings. The possibility for a collaborative study of Finnegans Wake and Paterson has been raised between a friend and I, and its realization is an event I'm looking forward to.

Aside from that ambition, I've always been interested in drawing ties between Irish and American literature, both of which, in their most powerful incarnations, work along parallel tracks in their exploration of new forms & the philosophical problems of self & nation (which are major preoccupations of mine). The Irish/American aspect is especially interesting to me because of the decidedly post- (and sometimes anti-) British voice that is exhibited, particularly in the early to mid-20th century. (See, for explication, Williams' brilliant 1939 essay "Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist," which served as the core text in my undergraduate study.)

Despite their ties to Pound, it's my belief that Williams and Joyce managed to sever ties to the British voice in their respective contexts more successfully than their comrade. This may be due, in part, to their simultaneous dedication to cosmpolitanism and locality, while Pound's work was, in my reading, strictly cosmopolitan. The treatment of locality, in my opinion, is the key to the creation of a truly original and universal work. Before generalization comes specificity. More on that in another blog.

Today, my task is to explore a parallel drawn by none other than Pound in a 1928 essay called "Dr. Williams' Position," which is chiefly concerned with an analysis of Williams' novel A Voyage to Pagany, and the 'American' nature of the Williamsian voice. The most interesting aspect of the essay, however, is a brief comment made by Pound, drawing a direct connection between Novel and Ulysses:

In the genealogy of writing it [Pagany] stems from Ulysses, or rather we would say better: Williams' The Great American Novel...was [his] first and strongest derivation from Ulysses, an 'inner monologue' stronger and more gnarled, or stronger because more gnarled at least as I see it, than the Pagany.

The Great American Novel is simply the application of Joycean method to the American circumjacence... if one read it often enough, the element of form emerges in The Great American Novel, not probably governing the whole, but in the shaping of at least some of the chapters, notably chapter VII, the one beginning 'Nuevo Mundo'.

My first grievance with Pound is that he labels Williams' work as Joycean, rather than simply identifying parallels in the texts. Yes, Williams appreciated the work of Joyce, and was inspired (as many were) by his approach to prose. To imply, however, that Williams' prose is derivative of the Irish writer's, is to negate the originality of the American's product.

The "Joycean" label, in fact, appears to be assigned to any writer who explores an alternate form of prose writing that's even slightly rooted in stream of consciousness, that challenges the traditional conventions of form. Some writers are derivative of Joyce. Williams is not one of them. This becomes especially clear when we consider Spring and All, a long book of prose and verse which exhibits much of the experimental quality that appears in Novel. Pound's assertion implies that Williams read Ulysses & followed Joyce's lead. The fact was, however, that the two writers were writing & publishing extracts of these major works simultaneously. Aside from this, Williams' style is decidedly un-Joycean, and indicative of a very clear departure from any literary precedent. His work from the early 1920s shows the birth of a new American voice, somewhat rooted in Whitmanesque investments in the natural world, tied to European/American imagism & anomalously minimalistic. It's this short-lined, free-verse style that opens the door to Olsonian postmodernism, the experimentation of the Beats & the experiential experimentation of the New York School. I assert that Williams is responsible for the birth of American poetics as we know it, and Spring and All is the Mother-text. From its Chapter VI:

Now, in the imagination, all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth for ten million, billion years. The bird has turned into a stone within whose heart an egg, unlaid, remained hidden.

It is spring! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place during these seemingly wasted eons. Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

Good God!

and from the first poem in the sequence:

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

[see, for 2nd-generation echoes & expansions upon this sentiment, George Oppen's Of Being Numerous]


What Joyce managed with Ulysses was the revolutionization of the long novel as a form, the creation of the Modern Epic. Not until Paterson did Williams attempt the epic, and his work from the early 20th century was entirely unconcerned with that sort of large-scale production. In fact, Novel and Spring and All are both texts of precise locality. Williamsian prose is direct & meticulous in its execution, focused closely upon the minutiae of human experience. While Ulysses masterfully employs the exploration of such minutiae to create a broad & expansive narrative of experience, Williams creates a mosaic of specificity that illuminates a broader world as a whole made up of pieces. Ulysses is a text that looks out & away from itself. Williams' work is unflinchingly introspective.

My other problem with Pound's assertion is his reluctance to acknowledge Novel as a text that's governed by form. The point to The Great American Novel was (1) to make a satirical comment on the eponymous idea (2) to violate the conventions of traditional prose-writing (3) explore the idea of American "Greatness" in a short, unorthodox textual format, thereby formally contradicting the very idea with which the novella was concerned.

If, in his assertion, Pound meant to say that Williams is not guided by the form of his outdated predecessors, then, by all means, hats off to Ezra. I doubt this is the case, however, because Pound harbored barely-secret resentments toward Williams after the latter's admission of a partially-Jewish lineage. An earlier section of the essay makes reference to the impurity of Williams' voice, as though distant Jewishness somehow undercuts Americanness:

Dr Williams has laid claim to a somewhat remote Hebrew connexion, possibly a rabbi in Saragossa, at the time of the siege. He claims American birth, but I strongly suspect that he emerged on shipboard just off Bedloe's Island and that his dark and serious eyes gazed up in their first sober contemplation at the Statue and its brazen and monstrous nightshirt

At any rate he has not in his ancestral endocrines the arid curse of our nation.

Because Pound is reluctant to celebrate Williams as truly American, because he actually goes so far as to claim the American identity is a cursèd one, any praise given to the Dr's work is necessarily backhanded. (Let us not forget Williams' lifelong dedication to the establishment of a voice that is American, rooted in American experience, & dependent upon the rhythmic curiosities of American speech.) This is classic Pound, the same bigoted pettiness that pushed Olson away some twenty years later. There's also an arrogance in Pound's critical essays that leaves a funny taste in my mouth. While I have admitted biases toward Williams and against Pound, my most objective self tells me that Pound's assertions about Williams as a formal writer are entirely unfounded. Like it or not, Williams was a writer of form. As early as 1923, formal changes occur in Williams' writing that signal a movement toward the American voice that takes precedence throughout the second half of his career. From The Great American Novel:

O America! Turn your head a little to the left please. So. Now are you ready? Watch my hand.

... And this is romance: to believe that which is unbelievable. This is faith: to desire that which is never to be obtained, to ride like a swallow on the wind -- apparently for the pleasure of flight.

Leave it to the good Doctor from Rutherford to do these things with language. We receive nothing but clarity from Williams, a philosophical directness & formal containment that will go on to define several decades of American poetics & influence American voices emerging at this very moment.

To close, my favorite poem from Spring and All:

No that is not it
nothing that I have done
nothing
I have done

is made up of
nothing
and the diphthong

ae

together with
the first person
singular
indicative

of the auxiliary
verb
to have

everything
I have done
is the same

if to do
is capable
of an
infinity of
combinations

involving the
moral
physical
and religious

codes

for everyting
and nothing
are synonymous
when

energy in vacuo
has the power
of confusion

which only to
have done nothing
can make
perfect

Rolling Thunder Redux?

In 1975, a young man named Bob Dylan rounded up some of his most talented pals & went on tour. That tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue, extended through 1976, & was little more than a traveling jam session between a group of musicians with marvelous chemistry. In the opinion of this Dylan fan, it was one of the greatest rock tours the world will ever see. Here's proof:

Now, before I ever really discovered Dylan, there was another singer-songwriter in my life: Omaha's most celebrated native son, Conor Oberst. Lifted..., the 2002 release that sent Bright Eyes into the mainstream, was for me, as for many others of my generation, the soundtrack to an as-yet unwritten bildungsroman. Not only that, but its introduction of Oberst's folky roots opened the door in my life to such beautiful discoveries as Neil Young's Harvest &, of course, comrade Dylan. If Conor Oberst sang me through adolescence, Young & Dylan welcomed me into adulthood. Without Lifted... & I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, I'm not sure I would have found the Fathers when I did. & God only knows what kind of person I'd be without those musical influences.

It wasn't until two years ago that I saw Oberst perform as Bright Eyes, at Radio City, and it was that experience that changed my perception of him as a rockstar. I went to that show at a low period in my dedication to Bright Eyes. By 2007, I'd been a fan for five or six years, and I'd seen what I thought was the best of Oberst (the explosively successful double-release of I'm Wide Awake & Digital Ash in A Digital Urn in 2005). The tour that brought him to Radio City followed the release of Cassadaga, a mediocre album with few memorable tracks. It felt like a sell-out record, & I'd begun to dismiss Oberst as a false prophet. Why waste time on an imitator when I could devote my precious hours to the Truth of Dylan?

The Radio City show changed all of that. Oberst was magnetic. He was sincere. His performances that night reminded me why I started listening to Bright Eyes in the first place: it felt like he was telling a truth that no one else could at that point in our shared cultural history. When, at the end of that show, Oberst took to the stage with the Felice Brothers & quite nearly brought down the house with a Tom Petty cover that still rattles my brain, I was flushed with joy. Whenever I talked about that night with friends, I couldn't help but compare it to my idea of Rolling Thunder. "Just you wait," I said, "He's going to blow your mind with his next project. I promise. I think he really might be our Dylan."

Those comparisons to Dylan are old & tired. Possibly even too generous. Time will tell. But in spite of my hesitations to draw those parallels, there's some truth to them. Rather than rehash the vocal comparisons, the poet-prophet labels & all of that other horseshit you've already seen in every entertainment magazine on the shelf, I want to talk about this cat as a live performer. (But seriously. Listen to "Get-Well-Cards" & tell me that's not neo-Dylan.)

Yesterday was the second time I'd seen Conor Oberst & The Mystic Valley Band in the past year. The first was at a festival late last summer, where Oberst shared the bill with none other than Bob Dylan. Over half of the crowd had no idea who he was (the Saratoga Springs demographic is more along the lines of the burned-out suburban dad than hip neo-folk rocker), but the band's rendition of "Corrina, Corrina" turned quite a few heads. A Dylan cover. I'm just saying.

The chemistry between the band members, the polished quality of their performance, & Oberst's newly established showmanship was terribly exciting for me. I'd purchased his self-titled solo release on both vinyl & CD, had been listening to it almost non-stop for about a month, and seeing the songs performed live only reinforced my faith in Oberst as a genius of his medium.

Yesterday, at Battery Park, Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band reentered my life as live musicians, & with the added gift of Jenny Lewis as an opener, the Rolling Thunder parallels once again surfaced in my mind.

First, let's acknowledge the genius of Jenny Lewis. Years as the sweet & sassy frontwoman of Rilo Kiley (the indie band to end all indie bands) give way to the self-actualized Rabbit Fur Coat period, where our heroine finally acts on the twang in that sexy voice of hers & offers the one-two punch of country-infused atheist gospel & a Traveling Wilburys (ahem, Dylan...) cover, featuring Mr. Oberst (again, ahem...) & other luminaries of the increasingly mainstream indie scene. Then releases an infectious (if desperately overproduced & somewhat obnoxiously danceable) pop-rock record with Rilo Kiley. Then comes Acid Tongue, one of the most beautiful records I've ever had the privilege to experience.

Starting with the Rabbit Fur Coat period, Jenny starts duetting onstage with her (Neil Young-looking) lover, Johnathan Rice, evoking those beautiful moments shared between Bob & Joan in the early 60s. And at Rolling Thunder.

Yesterday, Jenny called Oberst out to join her for "Handle With Care." Already looking pretty drunk at 4 pm, Oberst sidles onstage in a big ol' hat & some tight jeans, picks up a tambourine & shares a mic with the angel-voiced Lewis, missing cues & making up for it with the charming & self-deprecating slouch of an overly self-aware & reluctant rockstar . My first thought: "Holy shit. Bob Dylan. What is this,The Last Waltz?" (I'll save that one for another day, another blog.)

Jenny blows the roof off my libido with the rest of her set, hot shorts & hair-tossing too much for even the most heterosexual of women. The highlight? A rousing & raucous performance of the best track from Acid Tongue, "The Next Messiah."

There are women with beautiful voices, women who rock, women with stage presence, but few are capable of occupying a stage like Jenny. Part lounge singer, part old-school belter, part folk goddess, all rock star, she's one of the best live performers I've ever seen. Period. I walked away from Battery Park more impressed by Jenny, despite the fact that Oberst drew a significantly larger crowd.

There was something curious about Oberst's stage presence. Generally speaking, the subject matter of his writing hasn't changed. He's still chiefly concerned with love, sex, politics & the metaphysical questions that plague most twenty-somethings. But his demeanor didn't match the material, a fact that made his performance all the more interesting. He's a long way from the swagger of Ms. Lewis, but something new is coming alive in him that I can't quite put my finger on.

Here's the thing about the new material: it's not interesting. Lyrically, it packs the same punch I've always counted on when it comes to Conor, but the production falls short. Compare "Ten Women" from the new release to last year's "Eagle on a Pole" or "Train Under Water" & lyrically, the beauty's still there. Somehow, though, the arrangement & execution of the track leave me wanting more. I don't walk away feeling much, and that's disappointing. And that's the problem with the performance as well. Conor & the Mystic Valley Band rocked my face off. No doubt about that. But the diction of his performance was less than stellar, reducing the lyrical power of the new material to sometimes-intelligible mumbles. Conor's at his best with a guitar & limited accompaniment. It lets the poetry speak for itself. And in that capacity, he's got an Olsonian quality, where his body becomes a vessel for the larger purpose of music & poetry. With the band, it's a sonic experience & little more.

(Of course, he performed the most beautiful tracks from the last record, including "Eagle," "Cape Canaveral," & "Lenders in the Temple," all of which were fantastic. When he played those songs, I felt it. Really and truly felt it. I'm sorry I couldn't say the same for much of the rest of the set.)

All of this leads me to a big question that a lot of great musicians face: how to balance the poetics of the art with the spectacle of a rock show? Dylan not only managed it, but mastered it, with Rolling Thunder. The newly forged persona, the expanded backing band, the rearranged material: all of it added up to a beautiful, chaotic mess of rock brilliance. When Conor Oberst swaggers onto the stage in those tight jeans & that big, black hat, he's playing the part of a poet-showman. And I think that's the problem. He's still playing a part, to a certain extent. The challenge now is to become that figure. He's still young, & has a lot of beautiful art to make in the future. He has the potential to create a new Rolling Thunder. His collaborators & comrades have the skill & stage presence to accomplish it, and so does he. It's just a matter of bringing it all together in the right place. & at the right time.

To close the post, the closing number from Conor's set, "Roosevelt Room," a song that feels like a long-lost Desaparecidos track. Pay close attention to the phrasing at the end of the first verse (Brand. New. Da-aaaaay.). Feels like Dylan on "Isis."

Michael Gets Hard

Last night, conversation with one of my best friends turned, as it often does, to music. The topic at hand was, of course, Michael Jackson. Specifically, the vocal & performative subtleties of the Bad era.

It's a little known fact that Michael capitalized on his acquisition of the Beatles' catalog for Moonwalker, recording a fantastic cover of "Come Together," which reinterprets the classic by substituting Lennon's Abbey Road-period sexy funk with the almost disturbingly abrasive sexuality of Bad-period Jackson. The original is a track defined by its nuances, & the tightly-wound surface under which Lennon moans and wails with beautiful subtlety. Michael uses the track to introduce a new dimension of his persona. This is the first incarnation of a Michael we'll see in 1992, grabbing his crotch and breaking car windows in the banned, extended version of the "Black or White" video (watch it here). Michael never leaves his natural range except in his ornaments, leaving us with the sexy, raspy tone of a voice that, despite clear evidence of strain, is still fresh enough to rock. That's the key with "Come Together." Michael isn't giving you straight pop or a rhythm & blues hybrid track. In terms of production, this is a pop track, but that voice ain't pop. Put it together with the video & we've got a goldmine:



That guy will fuck you senseless and never call you. Ever. I'd deconstruct it further, but I think the proof is in the pudding.

Now, compare it with "Dirty Diana," Michael's (somewhat creepy) No-Means-Yes number 1 from 1988.



This is the other side of the hypersexualized Michael we receive in the late 80s. There's nothing about this track, or the video, that isn't contradictory. It's that same raspy pop star-cum-rock star voice, the same Mick Jagger meets Robert Plant meets James Brown stage presence, but it feels like Michael's giving it away with some very real hesitation. The look on his face in a lot of those close-ups is saying "please don't touch me," but the two stars of this video are his crotch & ass. & at 4:10, when he rips off his t-shirt, the message is fairly clear. The video is littered with arched backs, guitars as phallic symbols, & gyrations that sort of make me want to cross my legs. And this violent sexuality is weirdly complicated by the content of the song. Rock Star meets Groupie, Groupie wants to fuck, Rock Star's got a lady at home, Rock Star says No (over & over) & finally gives in to the Groupie's advances. What's so interesting about the song, though, is the undertone that tells us Michael is essentially being raped by Diana. One of the layers of the track sounds like Michael weeping & moaning in resistance. This isn't your typical groupie-fucking narrative, and that's why you know it's Michael Jackson.

The key to mid-period Michael Jackson is this Look But Don't Touch message. I'm not going to take that assertion where many critics do, because I'm not concerned with the controversies surrounding Neverland Ranch.

This is an especially fascinating moment in Michael's career, not only because of the contradictory nature of his performances, but because of the increasing femininity of his image. His skin is smooth, his body is lithe like a ballerina's, and his face is beautiful. Like a woman's. And here's the irony: Michael begins looking like a woman after moving as far away from his androgynous falsetto as possible. He was a sex symbol in the early 80s, but the majority of his recordings featured the beautiful gender ambiguity of a high tenor that only Michael could pull off. The moany hiccups of "Billie Jean" are replaced with guttural sounds from the throat in the Bad period. By Dangerous, the two styles will be blended into an even more confusing androgyny, but for now, we're dealing with a clear departure from the iconic image forged in 1983. & somehow, he manages to accomplish his masculinization while feminizing his appearance. Genius.

Maximus & Minimus

One of the most powerful aspects of Projective Verse is the transformation of text through reading. Olson's emphasis, in the 1950 essay that named his (& Creeley's) method, was on breath. Always breath, so that space on the page equals time in the reading:

Because breath allows all the speech-force of language back in (speech is the "solid" of verse, is the secret of a poem's energy), because, now, a poem has, by speech, solidity, everything in it can now be treated as solids, objects, things; and, though insisting upon the absolute difference of the reality of verse from that other dispersed and distributed thing, yet each of these elements of a poem can be allowed to have the play of their separate energies and can be allowed, once the poem is well composed, to keep, as those other objects do, their proper confusions.

This is magnificent. Space becomes Time in the translation of text to speech, and with Creeley, this aspect is beautifully clear. Take this reading of "The Dishonest Mailmen," an early poem that never fails to astound me:

They are taking all my letters, and they put them into a fire.

I see the flames, etc.

But do not care, etc.

They burn everything I have, or what little
I have. I don't care, etc.

The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness - this is the courage

necessary. This is something
quite different.

All the space is there in his reading. There was a time when hesitation at enjambment would frustrate me, as it interrupted the continuity of the text & resulted in my distraction from content & a subsequent focus on form. As I've developed as a reader & writer, however, it's become quite obvious that FORM, as Creeley sd, IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT, & those hesitations are just as vital to an understanding of a poem as is the close analysis of a single word & its etymological roots. When I consider Creeley's body of work as a whole, the hesitation at enjambment is not only important, it's necessary. Those forced silences are what his poems are struggling against, the voice against the void. His reading style, even toward the end of his life, is beautifully indicative of that tension.

Olson, however, is a reader in the performative vein. If Creeley whispers, Olson shouts (to borrow a metaphor from a comparison once drawn between my work and that of another, v. talented writer). They're fighting against the same void, but their delivery is fantastically different. Here, Olson reads "The Librarian," an exquisite poem, the text of which I won't quote here, considering the length of the piece:



Listen to that voice! Watch those gestures! Olson is a whiskey-swilling force to be reckoned with, a giant of poetry with Things to Say & a voice with which to say them. But, just as we saw with Creeley, rhythm & breath are paramount to his reading style. There are moments in so many Olson readings where he stops the poem, mid-line, to begin again, with a better voice, clearer breath, stricter rhythm. The loyalty to the text is clear, and what makes Olson's style so captivating is the palpable strength of his connection to the language & the shape it takes as it leaves his body. He isn't just reading that poem. He's feeling it, along with all of the source tensions that gave birth to it. Speech, as he said, gives verse its solidity. Nowhere is verse more solid than in an Olson reading.

[Hit the UPenn archives for audio files of both Olson & Creeley reading their work, including the poems cited here.]

Michael.

As a child, there were few things that could keep me in front of the television. Most of them were Michael Jackson videos.

I wasn't allowed to watch MTV until I was in middle school, so my music video consumption was limited to the offerings of VH1. Luckily, Michael Jackson was a regular on both stations, and VH1's dedication to airing the cinematic full-length versions of his videos offered me extended exposure to his image. It was on VH1 that I first saw Moonwalker, the feature-length film composed of long-form music videos from the 1988 release Bad, which were held together by what, in retrospect, was a terribly weak narrative. To this day, I'm not sure I understand it. Something about drug lords, precocious children & Michael's ability to morph into a sportscar. It was bizarre, but I loved it.



My favorite segment from the film was the video for "Leave Me Alone," a beautifully animated exploration of Michael's disdain for the tabloid press & invasive paparazzi. Looking back, that video's statement on Michael's position as a walking spectacle still resonates. As a little girl, I saw it as an embodiment of Michael as I imagined him: larger than life, endlessly colorful, exciting, fantastical. Now, the image of a gigantic Michael, dressed in his iconic middle-period Ringmaster jacket, breaking the scaffolds of a rollercoaster that's been built around him is more powerful than any of the video's other imagery. In a way, it breaks my heart to see his self-awareness so clearly and paradoxically presented on film.

Michael, a modern-day Gulliver in Lilliput, is the center of a spectacle that has grown beyond its original intentions. The very composition of the video, its absolutely overwhelming detail, parallels this distraction, drawing the viewer's attention away from the song and toward the images, the animated representations of tabloid myth & Jacksonian legend. The song & its associated images are a desperate and blatant call to the world outside to step back from the circus. Throughout the video, Michael's literally along for the ride, floating through the absurdity in a rocket with Bubbles the chimp. At one point, he's nothing but a sideshow attraction, dancing with the skeleton of the Elephant Man, a ball & chain attached to his ankle.

With all of this commentary in mind, the fact of the form becomes even more powerful. Here we have a brilliant artist begging, literally, to be left alone - by upping the ante & taking his spectacular persona to an entirely new level. Let us not forget the context in which Michael released the video: a feature-length film that was, essentially, a monument built to himself. No matter how lost Michael becomes in the chaos of his persona, he still towers above it all, the illustrious master of a three-ring circus. That Michael in the rocket? Not the same guy who breaks the rollercoaster. It's that paradoxical bipolarity of his persona -- the paralyzing shyness & spectacular showmanship, the playful child & the King of Pop, the man & the myth -- that defines Michael Jackson as a cultural figure.

It was after Bad & Moonwalker that the circus grew to epic proportions: the allegations of child molestation, the almost freakish changes in his appearance, the strange public outings. "Leave Me Alone" (along with the vast majority of Michael's body of work) was swallowed into a sea of tabloid stories and legal documents. The art, for the last 15-20 years of his career, was secondary to the spectacle. So many of us forgot what drew us to Michael Jackson in the first place -- that voice, those moves, that electric on-stage persona -- and focused only on the circus.



Now, in the wake of his death, we've all been inundated with iconic images from his 40+ years as an entertainer. People are sharing stories of their favorite Jackson moments, dancing and singing together in honor of his impact on our lives. People who would never have considered themselves fans while he was alive have crawled out of the woodwork to sing his praises. The icon still towers above us all, but that little man in the rocket is gone. It's for him I'm mourning. I only have to wonder, after revisiting this watershed moment in his career, if I'm 20 years too late.

Maximus (Letter 1)

After several years as a reader & writer of poetry, I have begun what may become the great study of my young life. I have embarked upon a journey through the life and work of Charles Olson, American poet & father of the postmodern. The study is centered on The Maximus Poems, widely considered Olson's masterwork, a series of over 300 poems composed over the space of twenty years. I had initially intended to tackle the Cantos of Ezra Pound, but fear & a stronger interest in Olson led me to Maximus (whether I was dissuaded by Pound's violent fascism or the impenetrability of the text is unclear; it's likely a combination of the two). After several readings of Paterson, William Carlos Williams' own epic of the American experience, Maximus seems like a logical next step. Olson is something of an inheritor of the Williams tradition; his theory of Projective Verse & general approach to poetics are both reflections of and expansions upon Williams' idea of the American Idiom & poetics of the variable foot. While Olson owes a great deal to his poetic predecessors (Pound & Williams both), Maximus asserts itself as a text of true originality, an exploration in fragments & full compositions of the questions of self & nation that characterized Olson's life.

Following a surface reading of the text during a quiet weekend in Vermont, I returned to Brooklyn armed with George Butterick's Guide to The Maximus Poems & Tom Clark's comprehensive (if somewhat biased) biography of the poet, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life, with the somewhat daunting goal of close-reading & annotating Maximus. The project involves an examination of as much related textual material as possible, including other poems, supplementary biographical accounts, correspondence and Olson's prose writing. Because Maximus nearly consumed Olson's life during the twenty years of its creation, and because Olson was one of the most intellectually curious figures of his time, the project has grown in scale since it began a few weeks ago. Inspired by Olson's own research methods as a young academic writing his analysis of Moby-Dick, the book-length essay Call Me Ishmael, I am interested not only in the text of Maximus itself, but also as much of the material surrounding the poems as is accessible. Following my completion of the annotative process, I'll have more clear ideas about the direction the study will follow, but at present I am primarily interested in one of Olson's most pervasive assertions: that of the power of the individual, both within & outside the collective consciousness. Note this excerpt from "Letter 6," which begins (beautifully) "polis is/ eyes":

And the few-- that goes, even inside the major
economics. It is not true that the many,
even in fishing, say, Gloucester,
are the gauge

Truth, for Olson, lies in the subjective perception of the individual. The collectivization & universalization of experience, the generalization of image in pursuit of "accessibility" are abhorrent to the poet, whose entire poetic (and, according to Clark, personal) life was devoted to the assertion of Self, & the surmounting of influence.

But Olson is far from solipsistic, & continuously asserts a consciousness of the World outside the Self:

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of

So each individual has the capacity to See, to reflect the experience of his polis in his own perception of the world outside.

Thirty-five pages in, this is what stands out. We'll see where the study leads, but at this precise moment in my experience of Olson, these assertions of the power of individual perception are terribly influential. Each day is another challenge to live to the fullest in the Olsonian "Human Universe," to absolutely surrender the self to its surrounding particulars, to experience the world through always-open eyes, and to reject, persistently, all generalization. Ambitious? Maybe. Exciting? Absolutely.