Inside totality, where are we, who are we?
– Charles Olson1
We were trying to think of how a more active sense of poetry might be got … We were trying in effect to think of a base, or a different base from which to move … The form an actual writing takes is very intimate to the circumstance and impulses of its literal time of writing[,] … that the modality conceived and the occasion conceived, is a very similar one.
– Robert Creeley2
In contemporary discourse on American poetry, the term “Black Mountain” has come to denote a significant site of literary production undertaken during the first half of the 1950s. First and foremost, it is the name of a college that opened in the isolated environs of southwestern North Carolina in 1933. For literary scholars, in particular, the term marks the era of the college between 1951 and 1956,3 at which time Charles Olson acted as its rector, and a number of poets transformed the institution into a central site of poetic experimentation – in particular, the development of “open form” or projectivist writing. Sharing its namesake with the Black Mountain Review, the term is also a metonym for a “little magazine” edited by Robert Creeley, and a variety of allied publishing venues that include Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Press, Cid Corman’s Origin, and Creeley’s own Divers Press. Yet despite this complex of associations, perhaps the most lasting of its connotations refers to a category in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry, 1950–1965. Hence, these various uses of the signifier in critical discourse speak simultaneously to a set of personal relationships, organizing institutions, and canonical categories. Black Mountain College (BMC) combined elements of a “scene” and a “network” (Silliman’s terms); the physical site occasioned a great deal of interdisciplinary and collaborative practice, while it anchored a network of correspondence and publishing activities through which poets associated with the college theorized their practice.
In an essay entitled “Advance-Guard Writing” composed for the Kenyon Review in 1951, Paul Goodman argues that the role of the avant-garde must shift: “society” has become “‘alienated’ from itself, from its own creative development, and its persons … estranged from one another,” thus “the essential present-day advance-guard is the physical reestablishment of community” (375). It is difficult not to attribute these assertions, at least in part, to the trauma of the world wars, the extent of the Second World War’s horrors still coming into view while Goodman was writing; likely, however, he is also speaking to a specifically American set of socio-political concerns: the explosive suburbanization of culture, the beginning of the Cold War, and a commodity fetishism that Marx could not have fully anticipated. These historical trends lend some context to one of Creeley’s most famous poetic lines of the 1950s: “the darkness sur- / rounds us” (“I Know a Man” [1955] 5–6). The line break bifurcating the word “surrounds” seems to emblematize simultaneously the feeling of being encompassed by binaric ideologies of East and West, Left and Right, Communism and Capitalism. The speaker of Olson’s The Maximus Poems complains similarly:
In the present go
nor right nor left;
nor stay
in the middle[.]
(“The Song and Dance of” [1953] MP 1:54)
Of course, Olson’s declaration begs the question: go where, then? The issue of social organization persists throughout Maximus:
the problem then is whether
a Federal organization
or organization at all except as it comes
the War of the World
is anything[.]
(“13 vessels” [1963] MP 2:198)
Olson’s speaker echoes statements made by those as far afield as Eric Hobsbawm and Jacques Derrida: not only were the democratic institutions of modernity at stake, but the very configuration of the political sphere as such. Suffice it to say, Goodman’s proposed re-vision of the avant-garde speaks to a set of collective concerns among the poets and artists who congregated at Black Mountain: namely, can the avantgarde still be relied upon to forge an alternative society? How might a writing practice respond to this demand?
Several critics claim that BMC is an important predecessor of the counter-cultural movement, a nascent formation growing towards the subversive energies of the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the protest poetics of the 1960s. But what is this nascence exactly, this designation of an “almost but not quite” political status? That Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan adapt projectivist aesthetics to anti-war poetry would reaffirm this trajectory towards counter-cultural activities. The circumstance to which Olson, Creeley, and others respond is more complicated still. Those who worked at BMC during the early to mid-1950s did so during a time in which the (inter-)national was being reconfigured: the establishment of the World Bank (1945) and the International Monetary Fund (1944) inaugurated a new era of capital, the final revisions of the Geneva Conventions (1949) sought to formalize the role of the United Nations, and the convention designating a new “status of the refugee” (1951) was introduced to respond to diasporas across the planet. Olson’s theorization of “polis” in The Maximus Poems and Creeley’s preoccupation with friendship in For Love speak to an emergent politics related to these configurations. It would be more accurate to say of Black Mountain, I think, that it exists in a historical moment “sur-rounded,” as Creeley puts it, not merely by conservative 1950s culture, but by a notion of totalizing governmentality at national and international levels. Community, Olson remarks, “needs now to be as wholly reconceived & newly created as does the concept of Self (& whatever is coming as ‘Society’ – the present Totalitarian State only a stage of passage)” (“West” 47). Olson’s note affords greater optimism than in his poem cited above; it also clarifies the historical and philosophical context for the literary-artistic experiments at Black Mountain. The multi-authored development of field composition, the early writings that emerge from these developments in poetics, in addition to the interdisciplinary experimentation undertaken at the college are consciously conceived within this milieu of a new collectivity responding to totality.
It is for this reason, and perhaps a bit ironic, that one should begin a study of Black Mountain with a reference to Paul Goodman. Goodman had written his essay on the renewed demand for advance-guard community shortly after teaching at Black Mountain College during the 1950 summer session. He had also just completed a book with his brother Percival entitled Communitas (1947), a study of American urban space, which endorses a “commune” model of social organization as an alternative to modern utopian city planning.4 Reading the book in conjunction with his essay, it is clear that he considered experimental artists’ enclaves as possible testing grounds for his vision of community; hence, there is good reason to suspect that he had hoped the place would be a concrete expression of the “communitas” he had theorized in his book on the subject. Although Black Mountain was by the standards of 1950s America a quite radically progressive institution, there were questions about Goodman’s “ostentatious” bi-sexuality.5 Olson’s own attitude to homosexuality is not entirely certain, but Edward Halsey Foster records that the poet, in addition to being active in the anti-racism Common Council for American Unity during the 1940s, was also amenable to gay liberation, and forged friendships with gay teachers and writers like F.O. Matthiesen (Understanding 39). Ultimately, however, like many cultural and political movements of the 1960s, BMC members often combined radical critiques of capitalist society with predictably conservative attitudes to gender equality and sexual orientation.
It is along these lines that a schism separates criticism of Black Mountain, and, in particular, Olson’s work. Scholars such as Don Byrd, Paul Christensen, Donald Allen, Stephen Fredman, Robert Von Hallberg, and Charles Altieri tend to read the Black Mountain poets as a crucial component of a counter-canonical trajectory of writers united in opposition to the New Critics. Versions of this literary history typically begin with Pound and Williams, Zukofsky and the Objectivists, and then on to the mid-century open form practices of the New York School, the Beats, and the San Francisco Renaissance. A broad tendency exists among these critics to highlight a correspondence between poetic process and cognitive, psychological processes. (Altieri, for instance, defines a neo-Romantic poetics of epiphanic disclosure in opposition to Eliot’s “objective correlative.”) If this approach to projective forms is at odds with the consciously social approach to the production of literature among the Black Mountain poets, then perhaps one should also ask why open form poetry should be understood as the lone subject’s “true voice of feeling” when its principles were conceived to define “polis” in Olson’s Maximus, to investigate friendship in Creeley’s For Love, and as the platform for Levertov and Duncan’s intensely dialogic anti-war writing? In recent years, critics such as Michael Davidson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Libbie Rifkin have examined open form poetics in relation to heterosexist concepts of gender and the relationship between masculinity and the Cold War – indeed, Eve Sedgwick’s critique of “homosociality” lends itself readily to such a project.
Certainly the women at Black Mountain recognized in its social structure what DuPlessis aptly observes in Olson’s poetry: “a radical critique of humanist logos” expressing simultaneously a “subtext filled with conventional gender ideas” (“Manifests” 44). Assessments of the college by female artists, students, and staff persuasively challenge the sentimentalizing and celebratory recollections typical of their male counterparts. Hilda Morley describes mixed feelings about “Olson’s boys,” an apt phrase that would form the gendered exhortation in “Projective Verse”: “go by it, boys” (240). Francine du Plessix Gray recounts that Olson and the milieu he cultivated at the college was at once “iconoclastic and dictatorial.” Yet Olson’s “militant” rebellion against traditional literary forms involved a demonstrably altered stance towards literary history in contrast with the early twentieth-century avant-gardes; she discerningly remarks, “he did not so much engage in Oedipal rebellion against contemporary fathers,” but instead conveyed a “gigantic, archeological curiosity for all forms of ‘immediate’ discourse, past and present.” Yet she too found herself deeply disappointed with the college’s male bravado, finding “much redneck yahoo posturing in this Harvard-educated scholar” who routinely sermonized that one could not attain “freedom” until cleansed of all Western bias (302). Olson had undoubtedly influenced countless women writers of the past half-century. This is a point I will return to briefly in relation to Levertov, and then again in chapter 4; poets like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Robin Morgan, and Judy Grahn will appropriate open form technique, putting it to work for feminist aesthetics and politics. Yet we should say unequivocally – and not apologetically – that Black Mountain was both an advancement and a failure of egalitarian politics and art. Open form poetics signals a collectivist social project in opposition to the possessive individualism of 1950s consumer culture, while it failed to extend its principles of self-determination, local autonomy, and collective organization to women. Anticipating Morgan’s probing criticism of the American New Left, poets of the Women’s Liberation Movement will build upon this radical critique with the aim “to go further” (Going Too Far 61). Olson is fond of saying that the living and the writing are one. If indeed open form writing comes directly from a social theory of radical equality, then it will be necessary to document this connection with rigorous historical context, all the while carefully recognizing precisely where, along the way, these poets both succeed and fail to install this hypothesis into the writing and the living of community.
There is no question that the poets who worked at the college at mid-century found it a productive environment. By 1950, Olson and Creeley had already begun one of the most significant correspondences in American letters, an exchange that would ultimately bring Creeley to the college; and as I will argue in the next section of this chapter, the method of “field composition” detailed in Olson’s famous “Projective Verse” essay emerged from these letters as a theory co-developed by both poets. It was at BMC that Olson composed the first twenty sections of The Maximus Poems, in addition to several of his most important early works collected in Archaeologist of Morning.6 He also wrote a copious number of his most significant manifestos and essays, including his lectures entitled The Special View of History, “The Present Is Prologue,” and the majority of essays compiled in Human Universe. For Creeley’s part, between the time he first began writing to Olson and his eventual sojourn at BMC from 1954 to 1956, he would pen the majority of small volumes and chapbooks assembled in For Love – two of which involved collaborations with painters also working at the college (Dan Rice and Fielding Dawson). He also acted as editor of the Black Mountain Review, producing the first volumes from Mallorca, Spain, before arriving in North Carolina. Robert Duncan, too, engaged in fruitful correspondence with various members of the BMC community, arriving at the college first in 1955, and then again a year later to teach in the spring and fall terms. It was at this time that he worked on several poems later published in Letters and The Opening of the Field, two volumes whose titles reflect his growing interest in projectivist methods. Although scholars often make mention of Creeley’s interest in abstract expressionism, other critical instances of interdisciplinary experimentation at BMC frequently go unnoticed. Olson’s exposure to dancers like Katherine Litz and Merce Cunningham, and his participation in several theatrical productions, renewed his interest in these art forms. The intimacy of the college facilitated several important intermedial collaborations, including an early adaptation of Olson’s poem “Glyphs” for a performance piece with Litz, Ben Shahn, and Lou Harrison. John Cage, however, organized the most significant example of intermedial performance; indeed, the first prototype of the Fluxus happening took place at the college, and Olson, along with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, pianist David Tudor, and a host of others, took part in its demonstration.
John Andrew Rice and several of his former colleagues founded the college in 1933, after Rice was dismissed from his position as Classics professor at Rollins College for unconventional teaching methods. From the beginning, the institution’s opposition to mainstream pedagogy shaped its key principles of organization: there was no system of accreditation, no board of trustees, and the instructors themselves voted democratically on all issues pertaining to educational policies and procedures. A rector was elected among the faculty to administrate and lead meetings, but he received a single vote like all other members. In exchange for creative and pedagogical freedoms, however, there were severe monetary constraints, since the faculty received little compensation for their teaching, and students who attended the college did so with full knowledge that they would receive no degree for their work. During the era of the college in which Olson served as rector, the administrative structure that John Rice had envisioned at the height of the Great Depression was largely similar, yet Olson, Creeley, Duncan, and others increasingly conceived of the institution as an alternative to a condition of 1950s consumer culture and post-war nationalism. Just as the GI Bill had extended post-secondary education to working-class Americans, it had also swelled university enrolment to numbers that threatened to homogenize approaches to creative learning. Black Mountain thus sought to combine the accessibility of the post-war public institution with the intimate setting of a small arts community. Significantly, Olson had worked during the war as an Associate Chief in the Office of War Information (OWI) and then later accepted a potentially lucrative job in the Roosevelt administration. He resigned from the first position apparently in protest of the government’s censorship of war reporting and abandoned the second after concluding that the artist could make no social impact in the modern democratic state. In a letter written to his former colleague at the OWI, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, he admits, “I regret we are not city states here in this wide land. Differentiation, yes. But also the chance for a person like yourself or myself to be central to social action at the same time and because of one’s own creative work” (“Letter to Ruth Benedict” n.p.).7 It is enticing to interpret Olson’s choice to become a poet commensurately with his retreat from the political sphere, but Olson refutes this notion of writing as being divorced from social action. In an early poem announcing his departure from government, he makes the point concisely: “[t]he affairs of men remain a chief concern” (“The K” [1945] 8). Elsewhere, in one of Olson’s last poems, the speaker of Maximus echoes this project: “the initiation / of another kind of nation” (“I live underneath” [1969] MP 3:228). The proclamation here and Olson’s letter to Benedict bears a striking resemblance to Goodman’s concept of the avant-garde.
Because of the college’s stated mandate, and certainly because of its exhausted financial resources as well, the school operated with a relatively small faculty and student body. During its twenty-three-year history, it enrolled approximately 1200 students (a figure that includes those who attended part-time) and graduated no more than fifty-five of those.8 Yet the college attracted some of the most important poets, artists, dancers, composers, and architects of the 1940s and 1950s (most of whom were not yet recognized): among them, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Hilda Morley, Dan Rice, Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Ed Dorn, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Rumaker, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Lou Harrison, Robert Creeley, David Tudor, Francine du Plessix Gray, Robert Duncan, Stefan Wolpe, and Paul Goodman.
During the 1950s, Black Mountain retained the basic structure of a college, but functioned more like an artists’ colony. It was arguably most effective during its “summer sessions,” when artists working in several fields congregated to engage in “short period[s] of intensive work and experimentation … in the setting of the Black Mountain community.” The aim was to build a “co-operative work program” that expresses artistic exchange as a practice of living (“Black Mountain College Bulletin” 12; “Advertising Flyer” 1). In an open letter to the members of Black Mountain, Olson describes this project as “an assembly point of acts,” stressing the convergences of ideas and heterogeneous artistic methods (“A Letter to the Faculty” 28).
Members of the Black Mountain community frequently characterize the college in terms of a changing collective identity. Just as Creeley remarks that “[p]eople were always drifting through, coming back, coming for the first time” (Creeley, “Interview” by Sinclair and Eichele 69), Ed Dorn proclaims that the “value of being at Black Mountain was that very able people and very alive people were there, back and forth and off and on and through it … I always thought of the place not as a school at all, but as a climate in which people work closely together and talk” (The Sullen Art 1–2).9 Comparable sentiment comes from a diverse consortium of attendees at the college. It is compelling that John Cage, for one, believed the aims of BMC were commensurate with his anarchistic principles, citing the college as the most significant experiment in collaboration and experimental pedagogy he had ever encountered.10
A crucial element of the time spent at BMC, Olson tells one interviewer, involved “the struggles to define what is a society of this order” (“On Black Mountain (II)” 73). In fact, Olson makes no objection to the concept of literary and artistic community, just as long as one “put[s] the community as living,” marked not by static sociological categories but as the changing “variation of all the people that were in it” (71, 74). In “Letter to the Faculty of Black Mountain College,” he elaborates with an evocative analogy:
The puzzle in general terms is one of structure. We understand a good deal about the behavior of electrons, neutrons and protons (for BMC, substitute, ‘man’). But we have no structure for them (((Apply, here, BMC & ‘MAN,’ likewise)) …
We are finding out, moreover, that what we are forced to call elementary particles retain neither permanence nor identity. That is to say, they are always capable of change, one into the other. ((DITTO, BMC, ‘man’ – right?))[.]
(“A Letter to the Faculty” 29)
Anticipating a concern he will take up in The Maximus Poems, Olson is searching for a more adequate language in which to engage the collective subjectivity of communities – a language that neither a community of order (gessellschaft) nor a community of lived relations (gemeinschaft) can sufficiently describe. It is clear that Olson is consciously avoiding words like “individual” and “society” to denote the identities and institutions that structure human interaction, attempting instead to speak a language that captures the transformative aspect of collectivity:
…
do not fail to keep
a sort of company[.]
(“Maximus, at Tyre and at Boston” [1953] MP 1:94)
Yet what this “explanation / leaves out,” the speaker insists, “… is / that chaos / is not our condition” (“Letter 22” [1953] MP 1:96). As I will argue later, “polis” is a concept worth holding on to for Olson because the city implies this metamorphosis: the construction, renovation, and demolition of buildings; streets that interconnect; the protean ethos of neighbourhoods that arise and disperse. By describing subjects as elementary particles that fuse and transform, Olson imagines community as having no fixed identity, no predetermined essence. Creeley’s definition of friendship, Levertov’s protest verse, and Duncan’s notion of the poetic as a commune of words each employs a similar idea of an inclusive and changeable sociality.
Yet there is a danger in sentimentalizing the “open community” too greatly. If poets associated with Black Mountain celebrated the constantly shifting milieu of the college, its nomadic and protean quality, this is most certainly also because of the college’s limited resources. The idea of a provisional community is also the consequence of needing to make do. This is an important yet often overlooked element of open form writing. Projectivism emphasizes immediacy, a writing that responds to a continuously changing environment in which the poet works with the resources available within her field of action. “Working in OPEN,” as Olson calls it, does not refer to an infinite expanse, but a makeshift capacity to adapt to the immediate conditions that a given circumstance demands. Duncan derives from Olson: “[t]he poem is … an area of composition where I work with whatever comes into it” (“Preface” BB vi). Open form is local.
Olson’s pursuit of a community without recourse to a totalizing “structure” or permanent “identity” is a concern that permeates his theoretical prose in Human Universe, a collection of essays composed during his stay at BMC. In the title piece of that collection, the author outlines his objection to the “UNIVERSE of discourse,” a concept he associates with the Greeks, and which he uses to describe the separation of knowledge from a world of experience: “[w]ith Aristotle, the two great means appear: logic and classification. And it is they that have so fastened themselves on habits of thought that action is interfered with” (“Human Universe” 4). The purpose of intellectual inquiry, for Olson, is not simply a matter of generating abstractions – not the “thing’s ‘class,’ any hierarchy, of quality or quantity” – but rather to determine a thing’s significance by virtue of its function. That is, “whatever it may mean to someone else, or whatever other relations it may have” (6; my italics). Olson elaborates on his concept of relation in other essays, particularly “The Gate and the Centre,” where he remarks that the “problem now is not what things are so much as it is what happens BETWEEN things” (18). In opposition to the methodologies he associates with “discourse” (the rigid divisions of experience and phenomena into hierarchies), Olson imagines a poetics that investigates the relationality between the elements that compose any local social environment.11
Significantly, as early as 1949, Olson’s call to investigate the relationship “between things” is a mantra he repeats several times in relation to social, institutional, and aesthetic activities at Black Mountain. Two documents aptly express the origins of Olson’s thinking: the “Black Mountain Catalogue,” a mission statement for the college (1949), and Olson’s letter to W.H. Ferry,12 outlining its interdisciplinary possibilities (1951):
At the middle of the 20th century, the emphasis – in painting as well as in political theory – is on what happens between things, not on the things themselves. Today the area of exploration, the premise underlying systematic thinking, is that of function, process, change; of interaction and communication. The universe … is seen, in microcosm and in macrocosm, as the continuously changing result of the influence that each of its parts exerts upon all the rest of its parts[.] (“Black Mountain Catalogue” qtd. in “Letter to W.H. Ferry” 11)
What happens between things – what happens between men – what happens between guest faculty, students, regular faculty – and what happens among each as the result of each: for i do not think one can overstate – at this point of time, America, 1951 – the importance of workers in different fields of the arts and of knowledge working so closely together some of the time of the year that they find out, from each other, the ideas, forms, energies, and the whole series of kinetics and emotions now opening up, out of the quantitative world. (“Letter to W.H. Ferry” 11)13
There is continuity between these passages and Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, a document that similarly evokes the bicentenary (“Verse now, 1950”) and a “stance toward reality” emphasizing a “kinetic” and non-hierarchical “kind of relation” among objects in the world (239). In fact, this emphasis placed on the changeable relations between things over the thing itself applies commensurately to field composition and to the organization of societies. Whether Olson is discussing Black Mountain College, his concept of “polis” in Maximus, interdisciplinary performance as a site of artistic interaction, or the elements that compose the field of a poem, he is interested precisely in how each assembles as a collectivity according to its respective ontological order. Just as the poets and artists at BMC are likened to atoms that amalgamate and transform, the field of the poem is a collectivity of objects that assembles as a social, material, and linguistic constellation. The “underlying systemic thinking” usually associated with open form poetry – “function,” “process,” “interaction,” and “change” – is the premise upon which Olson conceived a much broader social vision. To put it plainly, a concept of community formation informs the development of projective aesthetics. The goal “at this point of time, America, 1951” was a writing that reflected a practice of community stressing the local, the collectively organized, and the autonomous.
Since its initial publication in Poetry New York in October 1950, Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay has become a veritable institution whose influence traverses a broad range of literary activities during the 1950s and 1960s, including the frequently overlapping projects of writers associated with Black Mountain, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and TISH. Also referred to as “open form” or “composition by field,” Olson’s essay introduces some of the most central concerns now associated with mid-twentieth-century North American poetics: his principles of field composition, the function of the typewriter to score the voice on the page, and a stance towards reality that Olson calls objectism. The significant precursors are referenced explicitly: Pound, Williams, Ernest Fenollosa, and Louis Zukofsky.14 This intertextual network of methods is adapted and extended further in the theoretical prose of Olson’s contemporaries.15 Olson’s essay has since, unfortunately, become codified as an individual’s principal declaration of open form poetics, as critics attempt to delineate linear traditions (and the discrete contributions to these traditions), usually in accordance with a counter-tradition from Pound to open form, yet field composition was a generative practice invented and transformed by a community of authors over several years. The practice emerged, not as a set of principles to be adhered to, but as a set of flexible strategies to be adapted.
At the beginning of Olson’s essay, the poet makes an important – if easily overlooked – remark that composition by field (a practice of writing) is commensurate with what he calls an “objectist” stance (a practice of living). From the outset, Olson associates a system of prosody with the social theory he had been conceiving concurrently at Black Mountain. In one of Olson’s early poems, “I, Mencius,” the lines read
that no line must sleep,
that as the line goes so goes
the Nation!
(“I, Mencius” [1954] 31–3)
The micropolitical line of the poem relates to a macropolitics of social organization. Yet such a forceful pronouncement by the speaker of “I, Mencius” begs a series of questions: how does Olson conceive of the line, how does the line operate within the poem, and how do poems relate to nation states, or any other social formation?
One might begin by stating that Olson’s text defines the poetic in direct contrast to the New Critics’ claim for the art object’s autonomy; indeed, the aforementioned lines concisely express Anthony Easthope’s contention that “just as poetry is always a specific poetic discourse, so line organization takes a specific historical form, and so is ideological” (Poetry as Discourse 24). In his landmark study of free verse, Charles O. Hartman claims that its dominant characteristic is the line: “[v]erse, he insists, “is a language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose” (Free Verse 11). Although several critics – among them Marjorie Perloff, Robert Frank, Henry Sayre, and Mary Ann Caws – problematize this assertion in productive ways, one finds general agreement with Hartman’s proclamation.16 Frank and Sayre contend, for instance, that the “postmodern line” performs a defamiliarizing gesture, whereby “the project has become one of rescuing the line from the taming influence of popular practice, of literally freeing up the margin.” “These poetries,” they contend, “all share a sometimes aggressively disruptive character … disrupt[ing] their own practice even as they engage it” (The Line in Postmodern Poetry xvii–xviii). The editors use the term “postmodern” liberally, citing examples such as Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Olson, and the Language Poets. Applying Easthope’s analysis of poetic discourse to the contemporary moment, Frank and Sayre argue that “postmodern” practices articulate a subversive countercultural ideological formation – marked, as they are, by a “convention announcing unconventionality” (xvi). According to Frank and Sayre, postmodern free verse is to traditional forms as noise is to music. Despite the primacy given here to the poetic line, it might actually be more accurate to suggest that “postmodern” poetics privileges the line break. Apparently, such poetries define practice in terms of their refusal of tradition and authority, and in so doing, perform a countercultural politics – a poem like the hipster, outlaw, or hippy, living outside the grid of metrical pattern or predetermined forms.
One might debate the expansive lineage these editors construct, but just as significantly, Black Mountain poets such as Olson, Creeley, Levertov, and Duncan neither afford the line a position of centrality nor indicate that its principal function is only to disrupt. For these poets, the line exists among other elements in a field and the emphasis is on its relation with other variables; Olson explains in “Projective Verse” that “every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense)” act as “participants” within a social field of action (PV 243). Levertov similarly remarks: “writing is not a matter of one element supervising the others,” but a mapping of the “interaction between the elements involved” (“Some Notes on Organic Form” 628). If a writer “works in OPEN,” claims Olson, she must abdicate “inherited line, stanza [or] … form” (PV 239). Yet this does not mean that Olson disavows tradition or advocates a poetics of anti-convention for its own sake; rather, the poet cannot treat poetic form as the privileged “inheritance” of one’s forebears, as one might expect to inherit land or title. The poem is deconstructive and reconstructive; it assembles in the moment of its composition, conditioned by the available elements and contexts that occasion it. Again, Levertov is close to Olson when she describes the act of composition as the “build[ing of] unique contexts” (“On the Function of the Line” 86). More will be said about the concept of field, but it suffices to note at this point that Olson, Levertov, Duncan, and Creeley use the term “field,” and not “page.” This is because the poem operates as a zone within larger social, political, and technological discursive fields. The task at hand, Olson remarks – both in reference to political organization and line organization – is to determine “what happens between things, not the things themselves” (“Letter to W.H. Ferry” 11). Contrary to the claim that the contemporary poetic line articulates a politics of pure confrontation through disruption and dissonance, the question is instead one of relation: how lines behave as “participants,” indeed, how they collaborate, within a field of action. Open form poetics, its process and prosody, needs thus to be read in terms of the social vision that Black Mountain occasioned. It needs also to be read against the poetry that supposedly articulates this social vision.
Early on in “Projective Verse,” Olson advances three principles of open form writing:
1 The kinetics: “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 …. [T]he poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct” (PV 240). The concept of “field” that Olson expounds borrows from a materialist-scientific model. The word “energy” is promptly followed by the word “construct” to refute any assumption that he has in mind a quasi-mystical understanding of creative production. This cautionary point aside, Olson’s claim seems prosaic enough: that “several causations” imbue the poem with energy. But where does the poet get this creative force? Provided one accepts that Olson disputes the idea of the poem as a rarified, complete object, then the energy comes from an external source that animates language, only to be reanimated by another external force – the reader. Olson’s contention that the pressure and duration of breathing can determine the length of the poetic line is often taken to express an organic model of aesthetics, whereby authority is located in voice and/or nature. But for Olson, like the speaker of “The Kingfishers,” “[t]he factors are / in the animal and/or the machine” (90). Notably, Olson, Creeley, Levertov, Duncan, and others prefer the term “open form” to “voice-based”; that it is the typewriter which supplies the poet with the instrument to notate voice upon the page demonstrates the capacity to combine nature and culture as the social-technological-human assemblage that constructs any cultural artefact.17 Meaning is not fixed to a text by an author; rather, poems are the nodal points that receive meaning like electrical currents focalizing energy in a particular physical site. Olson reminds his readers that this “energy is peculiar to verse” insofar as the poem is a particular discursive arrangement of language, but its creation bears the necessary interrelationship between the “energy that propelled” it “in the first place” and the energy supplied in the act of reading (240). The “energy construct” that the poem ultimately comes to be combines material (language, typewritter), semiotic (meaning), and social (authors, traditions, readers) energies in its production.
2 The principle: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one R. Creeley … [)]” (PV 240). This principle echoes what I have stated before about open form: that no predetermined form conditions the act of composition. One should clarify, however, that by “content” Olson and Creeley do not have in mind the sense of the poem as a discrete message or contained unity. The poem is an “energy-construct,” and hence “content” refers to the nexus of external forces that bring the poem into being. The act of composition, being free of predetermined forms, is modular rather than formless, responding to the external world within which writing takes place. Olson cites Creeley’s useful formulation, but it is the broader context within which the younger poet makes this assertion that is all the more telling.
The first draft of Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay,18 which he dutifully sent to Creeley, indicates that he was still grappling with a system of prosody to complement the social theory he had begun to conceptualize at Black Mountain. In response, Creeley offers an analogy to jazz: “Miles Davis’s group being delighted with the SOUND of a French horn” (Correspondence 1:39). Creeley would coin his most quotable phrase, that “form is never more than an extension of content,” in a letter nearly two weeks later, but the rudiments of this statement are already present in this earlier letter. That is, Creeley identifies in jazz a similar attempt to compose not according to a “form” that “extends” predictably from a predetermined metre, but rather a musical rhythm composed in “any given instance” (Correspondence 1:39). Creeley invites Olson to think of the participants within the field of the poem as being akin to the ensemble of instruments in a jazz performance. In both cases, spontaneity should not suggest a random production of sounds, but rather the negotiation between musical elements in the instant of composition. “The job,” Creeley states paradoxically, “[is]… systematic disorganization” (1:39) – continuously re-organizing the elements of syntax, line, image, etc. – to reflect the conditions of the present moment.
3 The process: “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (PV 240). The “process” may entice the critic to conclude that Olson’s is a poetics of cognition, documenting the mental activity of a single consciousness. Rosemarie Waldrop rightly observes that the direction of movement is “outward and physical, toward perceptions rather than ideas” (“Charles Olson” 470). Olson remarks in Human Universe that “man and external reality are so involved with one another that, for man’s purposes, they had better be taken as one” (“Human Universe” 9). Perception marks not the continuous movement of interior thought but the continuous engagement with an external realm of experience – and hence, Olson carefully indicates that “one perception” leads directly to another, not “one’s perception.” Levertov usefully extends this thinking in her concept of the “exploratory” line, likening open form poetries to ships that sail without need of charts “that traditional forms provide.” “Risks are part of the adventure,” she explains. “[A]s explorers travel they do make charts, and though each subsequent journey over the same stretch of ocean will be a separate adventure (weather and crew and passing birds and whales or monsters all being variables) nevertheless rocks and shallows, good channels and useful islands will have been noted and this information can be used by other voyagers” (“Technique and Tune-up” 93). Once again, the movement is outward, not inward, traversing the field, negotiating the interaction between emergent variables.
The kinetic, the modular, and the processual combine as the method Olson calls “field composition.” Below, I give Olson’s most candid definition, but the reader should keep a couple of things in mind: the projective is frequently understood by way of social/communal analogies: jazz performance, navigation, etc. As I claim in the introduction to this book, the term “process” is applied very liberally in contemporary studies to denote poetries that refuse an autonomous status to the art object. Process in Olson’s sense clearly does not mean a mapping of the interior thought process of a single speaker. It maps the relations and materials involved in the construction of poems:
It comes to this, this whole aspect of the newer problems. (We now enter, actually, the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other.) It is a matter, finally, of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used. This is something I want to get to in another way in Part II, but, for the moment, let me indicate this, that every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world. (PV 243; my italics)
Critics such as Don Byrd suggest that Olson’s concept of field is indebted to scientific models; in physics, “field” designates a space affected by an electromagnetic force. Waldrop speculates that Olson comes to the idea through Gestalt psychology, which had adapted the concept to designate “a kinetic model of mental states as balances of forces and vectors” (“Charles Olson” 468). But the language Olson employs clearly bears a strong affinity with his descriptions of community at Black Mountain, his statements on interdisciplinarity, his emerging process materialism, and the philosophy of relation that comes to unify these various concerns. The field being defined is also quite certainly a social field – not a psychological one. Olson applies his terms carefully. “Kinetic,” a term repeated in the quotation, refers to the poem as a “high-energy construct,” an assemblage of the material, semiotic, and social elements that constellate in and as the field of the poem: authors, readers, signs, a typewriter all participate, all labour, in its construction. The relationship between the poetic and the social is indicated by Olson’s telling transition: field composition is “something” he “want[s] to get to in another way in Part II” when he discusses objectism. The elements of the poem manifest the same logic of relation “as do those other objects [that] create what we know as the world” (PV 243). The ontological order is specific to the poetic field, but it bears a logic of relation – an ontology of the “between things” – concurrent with a “stance toward reality” that brought it into being. Just as a nexus of “participants” organize relationally in the field of a poem, objectism denotes a commensurate experience of the subject within the field of reality he occupies and shares with a constellation of other objects: “‘objectism [is] a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience … the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (PV 247). In an open form poem, any element that enters the field counts equally. Every element is afforded an unqualified equality among all others.
Olson tells his reader he favours the term “objectism” to “objectivism” if for no other reason than it evades the inevitable “quarrel” with “subjectivism.” More significantly, the term is used to evade the antagonistic logic that the subject/object distinction perpetuates by insisting that a human being “is himself an object” (247). Olson affords the same ontological status to any and all phenomena that populate the world. Indeed, perhaps it is Alfred North Whitehead’s useful phrase “community of actual things” (Process and Reality 214) that resonates most with Olson, who in turn extends the concept of the social to include nonhuman entities. His terminological revision has several implications, not least of which for eco-criticism; for my purposes, I should emphasize that if “Projective Verse” is resituated within the nexus of correspondences and documents theorizing community at Black Mountain, it becomes clear that Olson’s interest in the ontological status of collectivities is related to his understanding of the poem as a communally constructed artefact – indeed, the poem as a community of linguistic elements.
Although it may seem challenging to prove that Olson, Levertov, Creeley, and Duncan share stylistic similarities (for instance, the exhortatory style of Maximus is not the tempered voice of Creeley’s lyrics), no doubt their commitment to this most important consequence of field composition is shared. Levertov’s assertion that no one element in composition should “supervise” the others insinuates a critique of the emerging corporate culture of 1950s America, government bureaucracy, and the military industrial complex. Recalling a passage I cite towards the end of my introduction, Duncan is even more explicit in this regard: since the advent of the Enlightenment, “in poetry as in government or religion, the goal is system or reason, motive or morality, some set of rules and standards that will bring the troubling plenitude of experience ‘within our power’” (“Ideas” 102–3). Excerpted from “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” Duncan brings Olson’s critique of Aristotle to bear on poetic convention. Predetermined metres are governments imposed on poetic writing. One may object that the form of state power and the form of a poem are different enough in the consequences they bring about to warrant a categorical distinction between them, but for Duncan, it is not enough to locate the political among macropolitical discourses of nationalism, geopolitics, justice, and representation; the political must be pursued locally among those practices that do not explicitly advertise their ideological orientations. Duncan’s point is that any and all cultural activities manifest political choices. Whether one is talking of a “minuet, the game of tennis, [or] the heroic couplet, the concept of form as the imposing of rules and establishing of regularities, the theories of civilization, race, and progress, the performances in sciences and arts to rationalize the universe, to secure balance and class” – these practices may share a common logic (“Ideas” 102). The possibilities of projective verse were explicitly linked to an alternative concept of community, “a free association of living things – for my longing moves beyond governments to a co-operation” (“Ideas” 90). In a word, Olson, Creeley, Levertov, and Duncan understand that the form of a poem should reflect this axiom of autonomy and equality.
In this sense, they are getting at an idea of the poetic that foregrounds its own construction as a social artefact, that any institution, individual, or object manifests dynamics of power. The lines of poems are no exception. The following passage from “I, Mencius” is instructive:
we are the process
and our feet
We do not march
We still look
And see
what we see
We do not see
ballads
other than our own.
(“I, Mencius” 75–83)
Words like “process,” “look,” (poetic) feet that “do not march,” and the persistence of the social “we” signal the principles of field composition.19 Olson disperses language across the field of the page by way of a “systematic disorganization” (Creeley’s term) of the “march” of the metred line and the four-by-four formation20 of the ballad stanza:
Mao concluded:
nous devons
nous lever
et agir!
…
not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law
Into the same river no man steps twice
When fire dies air dies
No one remains, nor is, one
Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up many[.]
(“The Kingfishers” [1949] 50–3, 95–101)
The poem gives prominence to three concepts: Heraclitus’s ontology of flux, Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics, and Mao Zedong’s communist directive. Some historical context is necessary to understand this surprising amalgam of associations. The Heraclitian concept of flux is evoked in the very first line of the poem: “what does not change / is the will to change.” Ralph Maud and George Butterick both argue that Olson’s famous line is likely not a direct translation of Heraclitus’s twenty-third fragment,21 but the subsequent reference to the river aphorism clearly indicates that Olson was aware of the Greek philosopher’s crucial intervention into pre-Socratic theories of being and materialism. Given that Olson would not read Whitehead until 1955, it is likely that Heraclitus’s concept of change, that objects are best understood as processes, lays the foundation for Olson’s idea of the poem as energy field. Regarding the second of these allusions, Olson learned of cybernetics at Black Mountain College during a lecture given by Natasha Goldowski in 1949. The principle of feedback – by which some aspect of the output generated by a system is passed back into the input – is used to explain how systems account for modulation and change. Cybernetics seemed a plausible scientific explanation of Heraclitus’s axiom: that the only constant was change itself. As for the third reference, the significance of Mao is potentially more confusing. The phrase “nous devons / nous lever / et agir!” (“we must rise up and act”) (51–3) came to Olson by way of a friend, Jean Riboud. Olson retains the French partly to recognize the debt to his friend and perhaps also to emphasize the proliferation of Mao’s message throughout the industrialized world. The following passage is taken from Riboud’s letter: “Voici l’ère historique dans laquelle le capitalisme mondial et l’impérialisme vout vers leur condamnation, tandis que le socialisme mondiale et la démocratie vout vers la victoire. La lumière de l’aurore est devant nous. Nous devons nous lever et agir” (“Letter to Charles Olson” n.p).22 Olson finished “The Kingfishers” in 1949. The Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward are socio-economic plans yet to be conceived; it would be more than a decade and a half until the Black Panthers encountered Mao’s “red book.” At precisely the historical moment of Olson’s reference, Mao represented to the West both the “red scare” of Soviet communism exported to the world and a generalized xenophobia towards an emergent Eastern-Orientalist threat. Ralph Maud observes that an affirmation of Mao in the poem would have indeed raised eyebrows (What Does Not Change 41). Several of Olson’s friends had either been investigated or blacklisted by the FBI. Although Olson was never so explicitly involved in party politics after his departure from the Office of War Information, Black Mountain regularly received visits from the Bureau.23 For Olson, like Riboud, Mao represented the possibility of a subversive energy in opposition to the totalizing projects of Western capitalism.
So here, then, are the three references that I have addressed separately, but field composition emphasizes that once an element appears in field, its relations with other elements will modify its meaning. Mao is not the communist leader in the poem; Mao is Mao in relation to cybernetic theory and Heraclitean ontology. As Olson puts it, objects do not simply “accumulate,” they “change.” Indeed, according to the cybernetic trope Olson advances, each concept might be thought to “feedback” into the others; each element reorients when encountered by another element. With this reflexive assertion in mind, it becomes apparent that all three allusions foreground multiplicity and change – in ontological, technological, and political arenas, respectively. Heraclitus theorizes the flow of material reality; cybernetics explains the interaction of physical systems; and Mao emphasizes the collective nature of political action. That Olson’s poem blends natural, scientific, and human assemblages reinforces the premise of objectism; that is, Olson’s text exhibits not the interaction between self and other selves (understood in liberal discourse as stable, autonomous, discrete entities) but instead how one is never separate from the social environments of which our subjectivity is an effect – that, indeed, subjects occupy a common world and “we grow up / many” (100–1).
The same could be said of the poetic line. Olson represents these concepts, or rather the relation between them, by amalgamating three variations of open form writing: a triadic line in the mould of W.C. Williams, a sprawling prose-poem line, and an indented verse paragraph. The triadic line, when used to express a phrase from Mao, breaks the directive into discrete actions, the fast-stepping movement of the lines echoing a call for an urgent pace. The continuous flow of the prose-poem line cleverly correlates to the cybernetic theory of feedback, generating the image of a typewriter carriage moving back in order for the composition to travel forward. And finally, the indented verse paragraph burrows Heraclitus into the fabric of this cybernetic allusion, insinuating a contemporary scientific discourse’s reliance on an ancient philosophy of becoming.
Returning to the particular assemblage of concepts the poem constructs, the relation established between Heraclitus and Mao, in a certain sense, expresses what I have argued thus far about the role of community formation and the development of field composition. Olson suggests that the foundation for a political epistemology can be located in a materialist ontology. Expressed in less pretentious language, concrete political action must begin from a social vision emphasizing function, process, interaction, and change. Notably, his theoretical prose almost always names a particular time: “at this point of time, America, 1951,” “Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead” (“Letter to W.H. Ferry” 11; PV 239). The very conception of open form poetics in the contemporary era is tied to these moments, to the calcification of communal relations into nuclear family, universal declaration (of war or of law), the corporation, the suburb – all producing socio-economic divisions, perpetuating the Aristotelian principles of hierarchy and classification. For Olson, Creeley, Levertov, and Duncan, the word “totalitarian” does not refer to America’s enemies; it refers rather to any discourse that seeks to contain and paralyse political thought and creative activity.
It is upon this ground that Olson defines polis in Maximus, Creeley maps desire and the bonds between friends in For Love, and Duncan and Levertov develop a poetry of protest. It is also on this ground that one might begin to think of the “Black Mountain poets” as a group affiliated not by stylistic affinity per se (though similarities do exist), but instead by the mutual and transformative construction of a practice characterized by a reworking of the linguistic elements that bind poetic language and representation – that is, a poetics of relation that seeks to redefine the social. It is also precisely this desire that led Olson, John Cage, and other writers and artists to experiment with inter-artistic activities at the college.
During the late 1940s, John Cage and Merce Cunningham had written to several colleges offering guest lectures in exchange for modest payment. Cage recalls that Black Mountain eagerly accepted their invitation but had no money to pay – a financial arrangement they accepted nonetheless.24 Both Cage and Cunningham returned to the college to participate in the highly successful summer workshops during Olson’s tenure as rector of the college. The faculty comprised an eclectic group of dancers, poets, composers, and visual artists; so many skilled individuals working across diverse fields of artistic practice created prime conditions for interdisciplinary experimentation. Many scholars note that abstract expressionism would influence Robert Creeley’s work, but artists such as Josef and Anni Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Motherwell worked primarily at the college during the 1940s. (In fact, Creeley’s first encounter with abstract art occurred at a Jackson Pollock exhibition in Paris during the early 1950s; he later collaborated with Dan Rice [All that is Lovely in Men (1955)] and Fielding Dawson [If You (1956)] at Black Mountain.) Some of these artists were still present by the time Olson arrived, but a regrouping had occurred: the college had come under the influence of artists and dancers like Cage, Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Katherine Litz. The arrival of Cage, in particular, had prompted increasing interest in intermedial experimentation.
In 1952 Cage invited members of the BMC community to participate in what has since been called a prototype of the Fluxus “happening” (although Allan Kaprow is credited with inventing this term).25 Dada is clearly a precursor to Cage’s activities – most notably the soirées at the Cabaret Voltaire and their simultaneous poem-events.26 But whereas a critic like Richard Kostelanetz argues that the happening belongs to a tradition of “mixed-means theatre,” Allan Kaprow and Michael Kirby link the practice to collage, assemblage, and environmental art.27 Despite these debates about the artistic lineage of the happening, most critics generally agree that Cage’s event at BMC constitutes the first known example. Cage recalls that the event “came about through circumstances of being at Black Mountain where there were a number of people present … many people and many possibilities” (Kostelanetz, Conversing 110). Two of the most influential artistic practices to emerge at mid-century – projective verse and Cage’s intermedial performance – did so from a common context of collaborative artistic production. A former student at BMC, Francine du Plessix Gray recounts that Olson championed Cage’s happenings “as one of the glories of the twentieth century” (“Black Mountain” 303). Yet the entangled history of these cultural activities remains largely unexplored. In the same letter to W.H. Ferry of 7 August 1951 cited earlier, Olson makes the following assertion: “PROJECTION, with all its social consequences, is the mark of forward art today.” He continues, “it is one of the best ways we find out the kinetic secrets of projective art – the very way we do it – is to put art in action, to join the arts in action, to break down all stupid walls, even the wall of art as separate from society!” (“Letter to W.H. Ferry” 13). Cage would not stage his performance until a year after Olson wrote this letter, but clearly the poet had, by at least 1951, determined that if the projective was to have “social consequences,” it should extend beyond the poem as such.
Notably, Cage’s performance was not the first of its kind at Black Mountain. A significant interdisciplinary event at BMC precedes it – one involving Olson with the dancer Katherine Litz, the artist Ben Shahn, and the composer Lou Harrison. On 22 July 1951 Olson wrote to Creeley that Shahn had painted “A Glyph for Charles” in return for a poem he wrote for the artist also entitled “Glyphs.” Five days later, Olson wrote again, describing “a GLYPH show, Shahn, Litz, & Harrison, taking up, somehow, and using, the little verse, on the Negro boy, and the auction show” (Correspondence 6:177, 211). The young African American in question, to whom the poem is dedicated, is the nephew of Malrey Few, one of two cooks at Black Mountain:
“Glyphs”
(for Alvin,& the Shahns)
Like a race, the Negro boy said
And I wasn’t sure I heard, what
Race, he said it clear
gathering
into his attention the auction
inside, the room
too lit, the seats
theatre soft, his foot
the instant it crossed the threshold
the whites’ eyes off
the silver set New Yorkers
passed along the rows for weight, feel
the weight, leading
Southern summer idling evening folk
to bid up, dollar by dollar, I
beside him in the door[.]
(“Glyphs” [1951] 1–17)
The poem depicts an outing to the nearby North Carolina township that borders BMC, where Olson and the young boy unintentionally stumble upon an auction in progress. Daniel Belgrad, in The Culture of Spontaneity, astutely observes that the poem begins with Alvin’s rather innocent analogy of the auction to a foot race, yet the implications of “race” quickly intimate “a more sinister connection” to social Darwinism, Southern segregation, and echoes of slave auctions (92–3). Olson’s formal cleverness further confirms Belgrad’s analysis. Several phrases feature caesuras that disrupt the natural flow of the lines with unexpected pauses, imparting a sense of hesitancy as the pair walk into the auction. The slick and airy “silver set New Yorkers” alliteratively juxtaposes against the “weight[y]” procession of “Southern[ers],” their eyes striking the boy like a jury’s. The following lines offer further evidence:
/ x
leading
/ x / x / x / x /
Southern summer idling evening folk[.]
(“Glyphs” 14–15)
Five consecutive trochaic feet, each ending with a suffix or gerund, slow the line to a slur, abruptly ended by a monosyllable (perhaps even an onomatopoeic pun on a racial slur). Yet the poem ends by disrupting such a concept of race. Belgrad insists, “Olson and Alvin establish a communion based on their resistance” (The Culture of Spontaneity 93) to the imagined community of Southern white nationalism: “I / beside him in the door” (“Glyphs” 16–17). Their companionship, Belgrad imparts, juxtaposes segregationist ideology with an altruistic conception of the “human race.” Yet it is instructive to inquire further: how might this analysis apply to the collaboratively produced “Glyph Show,” of which the poem was a single component?
The performance piece set around this text featured Ben Shahn’s painting as a backdrop (see Figure 1), Litz performing a dance to a piece composed by Harrison, set to the words of Olson’s poem. Thus, the event sought to represent a fluid conduit interlinking each genre. Olson’s poem initiated Shahn’s painting, which in turn inspired Litz’s recital, and so on back to the poem itself. It clearly depicts a human body – likely a black body – whose skeletal and muscular features imitate the structure of a house. This may in turn function as another pun, mirroring the various connotations in Olson’s poem: that is, Shahn juxtaposes the auction house (and its implications of a slave auction) with the body as one’s own temple. Such a reading would reinforce Belgrad’s interpretation of the poem, insofar as Olson’s text solidifies a community of difference in opposition to white, Southern nationalism. The performance substitutes the exploitation of the slave economy with an economy of ethical exchange; interdisciplinary cooperation, in a sense, performs this exchange, as several “bodies” of work occupy a common space of action.
Olson’s attitude towards the event is difficult to gauge. His celebratory claim “to break down all stupid walls” through inter-artistic collaboration aside, he confesses to Creeley regarding his first experience with the “Glyph show” that he did not “now know words’ place in all this” (Correspondence 6:178). Between these extreme instances of exuberance and reticence, Olson offers a more reflective account:
despite the wearing closeness of everything and everybody – the isolation and the common meals, the all-too-aesthetic compression … despite that (and a little because of it?), Shahn teaches Olson one hell of a lot about his verse, Kathy Litz picks up clues for pushing her own important advance in dance, Harrison makes music for Abby Shahn and others, Bernarda comes to listen to Olson when she can and shoots in shots of perception about the stuff he reads to the students which opens the eyes of sd students and lets them find out how to hear[.] (“Letter to W.H. Ferry” 9–10)
In chapter 5 I discuss the Four Horsemen, whose members make uncannily similar assertions about their performances: that once one demystifies the process of collaboration, refusing to sentimentalize a scenario of complete cooperation, collaborative activity can often generate productive conflicts, in which dispute, agreement, unity, and disruption are all part of a single arena of artistic exchange. The ad hoc collaboration between Olson, Shahn, and Litz, if nothing else, demonstrated to the BMC community the sort of intermedial opportunities available to a diverse range of artists and writers working closely together.
Fig. 1. Ben Shahn, “A Glyph for Charles,” 1951, tempera on paper. Used with permission. Art © Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Cage’s proto-happening took place during the summer session of 1952. Accounts of the performance differ considerably. This is, in part, due to the lack of documentation of performances such as these, but despite such problems, at least a few facts are likely. The performance took place in the dining hall and Cage chose a seating arrangement composed of four triangles, “with the apexes of the triangles merging towards the center, but not meeting” (Cage, “Interview” by Kirby and Schechner 52). Cage had sought to undermine the logic of the proscenium stage – the idea that all audience members should look in the same direction, at the exact same action: “[O]ur experience nowadays,” he asserts, “is not so focused at one point. We live in, and are more and more aware of living in, the space around us.” Cage acknowledges the theatre in the round, claiming that it is likely to “produce more interesting conversation afterwards or during intermission because people didn’t see the same side” (“Interview” 52), but complains that it never adequately subverts the perceptual function of the proscenium stage, since it similarly fixates attention on a central set of actions, differing only by the angle one perceives an event. The triangle structure of Cage’s stage creates an intersection of traffic that integrates audience and performer. Like the theatre in the round, audience members are visible to one another, but unlike its predecessor, the main action of the performance takes place outside the central space of the stage, making it unlikely that any two audience members will have an identical experience of the performance.
That Cage had chosen the dining hall as his location for the mixed-media event is not without significance. The room had social import for faculty and students at the college as a meeting ground for artistic exchange, and Cage himself had befriended several students who regularly met with him in the hall: “[w]hat I think was so important at Black Mountain was that we all ate our meals together … I would sit at a table three times a day (laughs) and there would be conversations. And those meals were the classes. And ideas would come out, what McLuhan called the ‘brushing of information.’ Just conversation” (Held Jr qtd. in Kostelanetz, Conversing 266).28 Cage managed to integrate this aspect of Black Mountain’s communal culture into the performance: empty styrofoam cups were placed on each seat and it is recorded by him and others that coffee was served (although some chose to use the cups as ashtrays). Cage claims to be indifferent about the significance of this gesture; he merely notes that no explanation was given as to its import, only that “the performance was concluded by a kind of ritual, pouring coffee into each cup” (Cage, “Interview” by Kirby and Schechner 53). Given his meticulous attention to context and his emphasis on the dining hall as a communal space (and elsewhere his interest in mushrooms), it is fair to argue the stimulant serves as a catalyst – encouraging audience members to “wake up.” But, more importantly, coffee’s “ritual” function serves to encourage conversation. Indeed, one of the central functions of stage organization and the larger context of a performance, Cage remarks, is to elicit “conversation afterwards” (52).
If the historical accuracy of the stage structure and space of the performance is relatively dependable, the number of participants involved in the piece and their individual contributions is somewhat less certain.29 Based on numerous interviews and memoirs provided by participants and audience members, it is likely that the performance included the following: (1) John Cage read from his Juilliard lecture; (2) Robert Rauschenberg’s “white paintings” were suspended from the ceiling above the audience; (3) he also played records on a gramophone during the performance; (4) Charles Olson and M.C. Richards read their poetry from a ladder; (5) David Tudor played a prepared piece on the piano; (6) Merce Cunningham and an undisclosed number of his troupe danced in the aisles; and (7) a film played against one of the walls of the dining hall. In addition to these seven components, a dog in attendance decided to participate in the festivities, barking and chasing Cunningham as he danced. All accounts suggest that the audience members enjoyed themselves, except for the composer Stefan Wolpe, who left mid-performance in protest. The most remarkable aspect of the various accounts of the event is a tendency to recall form but not content. Every record of the performance cites Olson’s reading from a ladder but no one is exactly sure which poem he read. Several attendees mention the gramophone, yet there is disagreement about the music played. For instance, Francine du Plessix Gray was confident that Edith Piaf records were played at increased speed, while David Weinrib insists that they were popular records from the 1920s and 1930s. Audience members tend to fixate on the intersection of multiple registers of data, rather than the content of information conveyed. The simultaneity of these different actions, coupled with a stage set-up that both utilizes multiple surfaces of the room and integrates performers and audience members, resists a totalizing impression of the event. Instead, the audience must fixate on partial elements of the performance, which might include focusing on the verbal-visual-tactile aspect of one element or a cluster of elements. To use Cage’s apt phrase, a given artistic form “brushes” against another, generating unexpected points of connection.
Cage’s performances, and subsequent happenings by artists such as Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg, often elicit the misinterpretation that such events lack structure. Although the raucous dog seems emblematic of the seemingly chaotic show, Cage devised a series of overlapping “time brackets” within which individual contributors were permitted to perform. He generated these “brackets” aleatorically, and then assigned each discrete practice a number of segments during the event when the performer was free to play. Cage likens this framing structure to “a green light in traffic,” creating indeterminate connections between artists within relatively broad and flexible limitations (Cage, “Interview” by Kirby and Schechner 53). Martin Duberman criticizes this decision, suggesting that such constraints compromise the total spontaneity that happenings ostensibly seek to achieve, but Cage and other practitioners of Fluxus events insist that the happening never promises total freedom, if what is meant by this notion is the complete absence of structure. Instead, Cage seeks to eliminate any model of organization that arranges the elements of composition into a complete, unified work; the aleatorically generated time brackets create zones within the happening in which a given combination of objects, agents, and instruments might produce unexpected inter-artistic results.
Cage, therefore, jettisons the typical conventions of traditional theatre such as linear progression or narrative closure.30 That is, the BMC performance presents a nexus of simultaneous practices with no predetermined relationship to one another, nor a unifying framework to which they are subordinate. The “composition” of a happening, Kaprow remarks, involves a “collage of events in certain spans of time and in certain spaces”; “The field” of a happening “is created as one goes along” (Assemblage, Environments, & Happenings 198, 159). Its materials may be pre-chosen, but no formal organization that would predetermine the relationship between these elements should be employed. It is better, remarks Kaprow, “to let the form emerge from what the materials can do” (202). The audience member, therefore, is free to generate connections between the various events, objects, and tasks that populate the space of action.
Despite agreement among critics as to the origins of the happening at Black Mountain, debates regarding the definition of the practice and its historical formation tend to ignore the role of the BMC community – despite Cage’s own claim that the happening was a consequence of Black Mountain itself: an aesthetic materialization of the community’s resources, as it were. Kaprow studied with Cage at the New School for Social Research in New York during the late 1950s; his practice and theorization of the happening overlaps significantly with Cage’s work and teachings. It is for this reason that Kaprow’s use of the word “field” to describe the interaction of elements in the happening deserves pause. There is no evidence that Kaprow borrows this term directly from Olson, and of course, there are striking differences between Olson’s and Cage/Kaprow’s aesthetics. For instance, although Olson advocates a radical collapse of disciplinary boundaries in his letter to W.H. Ferry, in the “Projective Verse” essay, he maintains that the field of the poem and the field of reality are homologous but ultimately separate ontological orders. Thus, he never attempts the radical conflation of art and life that Cage does in a piece like 4’33” (1952). Moreover, Olson is suspicious of Cage’s mode of aleatoric composition, which, although it seemingly reflects Olson’s call for a non-egoistic poetics, requires an abnegation of authorial control that Olson is not prepared to relinquish.
Yet if one accepts my claim that open form’s principal function is social, and if Olson’s expressed desire for projection to join the arts in action is to be believed, then similarities between these cultural practices seem more plausible. In fact, Olson’s operative concepts of process, interaction, and change are also the ideas that guide the happening, its refusal of hierarchy, unity, and completion. Field composition is a practice that explores the kinetic relationship between things, between the “participants” that compose the area of the poem as a field of forces: “every element in an open poem … must be managed in their relations to each other” (PV 243). “Work[ing] in OPEN,” as Olson calls it, refers to the makeshift capacity to adapt to the immediate, continuously changing conditions that a given circumstance demands. Levertov’s assertion that no single element in the process of composition should supervise the others and Duncan’s claim that the poem’s area of composition determines its elements cohere with Kaprow’s description of the happening as a “field” whose parts assemble in the process of a work’s unfolding. The poem/happening is an “energy construct” of material, semiotic, and social flows, whose intelligibility, recalling Latour’s assertion, the reader/viewer must discern by tracing the “associations between heterogeneous elements” (Reassembling 5). Cage’s final sentence in his Julliard lecture, read as part of the BMC happening, is telling: “a piece of string, and a sunset, possessing neither, each acts” (“Julliard Lecture” 111). Not only does the happening jettison any totalizing structure, it permits dissimilar objects, agents, materials, and modes of signifying to occupy and interact within a common zone of action. Both cultural practices emerge within a common milieu at Black Mountain, where poets and artists were attempting to conceive a politics of open affiliation in opposition to the dominant communal paradigms of capitalism and nationalism. Both art forms underscore a makeshift, local community of things that Olson states must be forged “inside totality.”
[F]irst I tell you their names and places, to indicate how I am of the heterogeneous present and not of the old homogeneity of the Founders, and the West.
– Charles Olson31
In 1959 the poet and editor David Ignatow wrote to Charles Olson soliciting a poem for inclusion in a special issue of Chelsea. The purpose of the issue: to bring “together the best political poetry being written today” and thus resume the “prominence” given to political themes “in the early 20s & 30s” (“Letter” n.p.).32 The context for such a statement is not difficult to decipher. A vast industry of anecdotal lyricism had dominated the poetic landscape for the better part of a decade. Presumably, Ignatow would have expected a like-minded statement from the writer who admonished “the-private-soul-at-any-public-wall” (PV 239). Yet his request elicited the following response by Olson:
Right off the top don’t quite get what you propose as ‘political’ … [A]re [you] talking abt. the drop, since the ’30s, of the social subject – like the old ‘Left’ … I lead to you, simply that both Duncan and myself, say, have been for years doing nothing but poems almost of – in his case, polity, in my own polis (the Maximus, now coming out as Volume 3 in March etc) … I see no reason not to think that exactly the ‘political’ is what is … conspicuously corrupt as in present existence (both scale-wise: bipartisanism; world-wise: universalism[.] (Selected Letters 267–8)
Olson adds the following marginal note in longhand: “the conception & the creation of a society is the act of politics, is it not?” (267). This objection cuts to the core of Olson’s understanding of writing, both as a method of composition and as the construction of a social theory: in order to imagine a different configuration of the political, one would have to reconfigure the social formations through and in which politics is practiced. For Olson, the question of politics is inexorably bound to issues of subjectivity and collectivity.
The first twenty sections of Olson’s long poem were first published in two runs by Jonathan Williams’s Jargon press: The Maximus Poems / 1 – 10 in October 1953 and The Maximus Poems / 11 – 22 in the fall of 1956. The first four poems were written between May 1950 and January 1953, either at his Washington residence or at Black Mountain, and would undergo more substantial revision than most of the subsequent poems, while sections five through twenty-two were mainly written between the period of March and May 1953 at the college. Composed mainly as “letters,” Olson would read the first twenty-two poems at BMC in August of that year. The remaining fifteen poems, which together make up the first volume of The Maximus Poems, were written during the last years of the decade in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the setting for Olson’s verse epic.
The first and all subsequent editions of the text feature a dedication and an epigraph on a single page at the beginning of the volume:
for ROBERT CREELEY
– the Figure of Outward
All my life I’ve heard
one makes many[.]
The dedication to Olson’s friend excerpts an unpublished poem entitled “For R.C,” while the second epigraph is yet more cryptic. Olson appropriates the phrase from Cornelia Williams, one of the cooks at Black Mountain. He describes the following scenario to Creeley in a letter dated 1 June 1953:
(this bright Cornelia, the cook,
says today:
all my life I’ve heard, “One
makes many”
and it sounded
like the epigraph fit to go with the
Figure
Or to be
IT! …[.]
(“Letter to Robert Creeley” 4)
George Butterick notes that Olson would repeat this phrase in several other contexts. In his copy of Whitehead’s Process and Reality, he highlights the following statement: “the term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one,’ and the term ‘one’ presupposes the term ‘many,’” adding in the margin: “exactly Cornelia Wms, Black Mt kitchen, 1953.” Elsewhere in his notebook, Olson calls the epigraph “‘the dominating paradox on which Max complete ought to stand’” (qtd. in Butterick, A Guide 4–5). Butterick thus concludes that Williams’s statement was for Olson a quintessential expression of “the fundamental problems of thought and politics, the problem of ‘the One and the Many’” (4). In Williams’s dictum and the passage that Olson underlines in his copy of Process and Reality, however, it is not simply a matter of the relationship of the One to the Many but that the One makes Many. The relationship between subject and other is co-dependent, and thus irreducible to stable categories of either the individual or society.
As I have argued, Olson was far more engaged with issues of community during the early 1950s than is typically acknowledged. His collaborative approach to poetic method, his writings about Black Mountain as an institution, and his interdisciplinary practice all suggest that issues of social collectivism preoccupied the poet. The early poems that make up the first volume of The Maximus Poems, which were largely composed at BMC, indicate a similar point of focus. A cursory glance at the text confirms this: Olson advances his concept of the “polis” in the form of a sequence of letters addressed to the citizens of Gloucester. That said, although Olson’s reference to a statement made by the cook at BMC and his anticipation of Creeley’s arrival at the college frame the first volume of Olson’s long poem, it would be an error to read this text biographically. Rather, the epigraph and dedication both suggest that The Maximus Poems emerge amid a growing debate about the nature of community, and it is within this context that one should assess the text.
As early as 1945, Olson indicates in various notebooks that he wished to write a long poem on the subject of the West. In its earliest manifestations, this was a poem that would encapsulate an expansive and detailed survey of civilizations from the “earliest man in Am[erica]” to his own epoch.33 Olson gradually abandoned this project; increasingly, he would question whether such a poem was even feasible, or whether “American experience [is] too stiff, historical, unfabled for use?” (“The Long Poem” 38). Between 1948, when Olson first records these concerns in his notebook, and 1953, at which point the first volume of Maximus evolves into a poem with a recognizable structure, Olson’s approach to the long poem would undergo a radical transformation: towards a notion of the epic as local and a genealogical method intended to demystify history. In so doing, Olson modifies a significant convention of the epic by adapting a genre usually reserved for proclamations on the nation or the genesis of a civilization to an experience of immediate and tactile community.34 Hence, the majority of the first twenty sections of Maximus are “letters” addressed from Maximus to the city. As an extension of localism, the epistolary genre conflates the private and public, using a personal form for a public address. Readers of The Maximus Poems observe that by 1948 the author’s consternation with the yet “unfabled” history of America indicates that he still conceived of his planned epic in mythological terms. Just as Olson reframes his epic as an examination of the local, by 1953, in notes entitled “West” and “Post-West,” Olson’s distrust of abstraction leads him to reject a poetic economy of “Symbols”: “not even the Virgin … [is] more than a wooden statue” (“Post-West” 54). In Maximus, the speaker echoes this sentiment:
Venus
does not arise from
these waters. Fish
do.
(“The Song and Dance of” MP 1:57–8)
The poet must proceed by “precise FACTS … thus, flatly, ‘historical,’ the flattest, literal substances, persons, names, places, things, dates” (“Post-West” 54). Symbolism functions like “Money,” insofar as symbols “stand in the place of” and thus obfuscate the material labour that brings a society into being (“West” 47). To write a history of Gloucester – indeed, to record the formation of any community – one must proceed by presenting such a process as the collective, material production of its citizenry. Against the depth of metaphor, Olson’s technique involves the “flatness” of metonymy. Complementing the practice of field composition, Maximus traces a nexus of connections among the constellation of persons, places, and things that compose its relations.
Just as field composition is meant to express a particular stance towards reality, Olson’s changing approach to methodology and genre reflects his philosophy of collective being. The following passage is taken from his notebooks in preparation for Maximus: “[t]hus the personal (which is intimate, & where desire moves personal over to another … one must speak of a third place, force, engagement to the modern dualism of Individual & Society.” This “3rd being,” he tells us, “what used to be called Family, previously was Gen[eration]s (?), and needs now to be as wholly reconceived & newly created as does the concept of Self (& whatever is coming as ‘Society’ – the present Totalitarian State only a stage of passage)” (“West” 47). Echoing the epigraph he borrows from Cornelia Williams, the poet’s task is not simply to elucidate the relationship between the one (individual) and the many (society), but rather to overhaul these categories by contesting their antithetical foundations. In The Special View of History, Olson complains that “it is a lie of discourse” to generate this distinction (25). The “personal,” in Olson’s lexicon, should not be confused with an inward-turning narcissism. Quite the opposite in fact: the problem, he states, is that the “personal” – the desire to move “over to,” to connect with others – is enclosed and contained within rigid unities such as the “Family” or “Generation.” Like Creeley, Olson rarely addresses war explicitly, but his reference to totalitarianism suggests that he was painstakingly aware of the dangers of nationalism. Olson resists equally narcissistic declarations of individualism and homogenizing ideologies of nationhood. The project of The Maximus Poems, then, is to present the “personal” energies of Gloucester – that is, to investigate how a particular social space, a community, comes to be the social formation of geography and individuals, institutions and discourses that it is. But against the tendency to abstract a unity from such an investigation, and thus present a static vision of community, Olson endeavours to preserve the multiplicity of affiliations that emerge.
His refusal to impose static sociological categories on the citizens of Gloucester bears an uncanny similarity to his discussion of Black Mountain as a permeable, social environment. Of course, Gloucester is not Black Mountain, and the social space of the college is not the textual space of Olson’s poem. Rather, Olson argues that the discursive field of the text can also function as a site of social exchange. The response by the speaker of Maximus to Vincent Ferrini regarding the social function of the little magazine demonstrates the point:
A magazine does have this ‘life’ to it (proper to it), does have streets,
can show lights, movie houses, bars, and, occasionally,
for those of us who do live our life quite properly in print
as properly, say, as Gloucester people live in Gloucester
you do meet someone[.]
(“Letter 5” [1953] MP 1:24)
The little magazine and Gloucester each consists of an ontology quite “proper to it”; that is, each functions as a distinct social field of action. Olson means by “polis” a “meeting place” – a site of communal exchange that can take place in a correspondence, a geographical location, a little magazine, or a poem. Polis, then, is mobile and can adapt to the changing conditions of contemporary life.
The poet’s most candid definition of his term appears in an essay entitled “Definitions by Undoings.” Referring to the ancient Greek notion of the ideal city, in its baldest sense, Olson uses it to denote “the community or body of citizens, … [their] being as group with will” (11). Elsewhere in an essay written in 1952 he elaborates that the “State,” “The System” was beginning to envelope “the very whole world,” threatening total homogeneity and concentration of power. The stated function of “polis” is “to invert totality – to oppose it” (qtd. in Butterick, A Guide 25). If one recalls Olson’s preferred metaphors for articulating the constitution of a social subject – the amalgamation of atoms, the intersection of city streets, or the rhizomatic character of weeds – the emphasis has been on a protean collective irreducible to the static opposition of the One and the Many. The possibilities of a social theory emphasizing process and change, for Olson, is a community evading totality – but, importantly, this is both the totality of “Society” and the totality of the “Self.”
In the early poems collected in Maximus, Olson promptly introduces two alternative models of collectivism: “polis” and “pejorocracy.” The latter term is borrowed from Pound’s Pisan Cantos (LXXIX); derived from Latin, it loosely means “worse-rule.” First appearing in “The Kingfishers,” the speaker of the poem hints at the socio-economic policy of post-war America: “with what violence benevolence is bought / what cost in gesture justice brings” (“The Kingfishers” 162–3). In The Maximus Poems Olson elaborates, describing pejorocracy as the discourse of all financial and political exploitation: “the trick / of corporations, newspapers, slick magazines, movie houses” – what Olson refers to as the “musicracket of all ownership” (“Letter 3” [1952], “The Songs” [1953] MP 1:10, 14). Although this list of offenders initially seems like a somewhat vague denunciation of all capitalist motives, Olson is specifically concerned with the role of language in strategies of capitalist-state control. Olson’s poetry is rarely topical, but it is indeed political, particularly when government or corporate coercion infiltrates the practice of everyday life. For instance, the first mention of “pejorocracy” is in reference to the “twitter” of the streetcars in Oregon; contemporary readers would have identified this allusion to the music piped into public transit to pacify commuters (“I, Maximus” [1950] MP 1:3). The “mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick” (1:3) of government seeks to produce “docile bodies,” as Foucault would suggest, achieved through a “gentle way of punishment” (Discipline and Punish 104). The discourse of worse-rule is a function of a state whose incipient strategies are to train habitual compliance among its citizenry.
“Mu-sick” is thus the language of a community dispossessed of the right to govern itself. Although commentators such as Michael Bernstein question the capacity of such “code-words to carry … [the] weight of concrete analysis and emotional conviction” (The Tale of the Tribe 260), the concept elsewhere yields more awareness of the erosion of civic politics by the amalgamation of state and corporate power. The following passage from “Letter 15” provides an example of Olson’s mode of investigation:
The American epos, 19-
02 (or when did Barton Barton Barton Barton and Barton?
To celebrate
how it can be, it is
padded or uncomforted, your lost, you
found, your
sneakers
(o Statue,
o Republic, o
Tell-A-Vision …[.]
(“Letter 15” [1953] MP 1:71)
An “American epos, 19- / 02” likely refers to Brooks Adams’s study, The New Empire, which offers 1902 as the inaugural year of America’s emergence as a world power. Olson thought enough of the book to review it in the summer 1954 issue of the Black Mountain Review, where he summarizes its thesis: “in civilization nothing is at rest, the movement is trade, the necessity is metal and the consequent centralization of power also moves” (“Rev. of The New Empire” 63). The humorous repetition of “Barton” in the next line refers to a founding member of Batten, Barton, Durnstine, and Osborne, one of the largest advertising companies in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Olson makes no causal connection between these allusions, but instead arranges a nexus of names and objects paratactically across the field of the poem. The reader is invited to investigate the associations between American imperialism and the emergence of advertising, while the “Statue” and the “Tell-A-Vision” enjoy an equivalent status as artefacts that advance a nationalist ideology. The indented column of text bears the trace of a more cryptic allusion. An earlier version of the poem reads: “your lost, your / found, you / seekers,” which, given the following reference to a statue, is likely an allusion to the famous poetic inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breath free.”35 Not unlike Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Statue of Liberty homologizes the social body of the nation, while its inscription gives voice to that collective body that promises a place for the disenfranchised. America as an assembly of the lost undergoes a cynical revision, becoming a “lost and found” where one goes to retrieve misplaced valuables. Olson concludes this section of “Letter 15” with a mangled jingle for Coca-Cola: “is for Cokes by Cokes out of / Pause.”
Butterick observes that Olson’s syntactically odd phrase may parody typical slogans from the time period. Compare the line again with these examples:
“Busy people pause for Coke.
The Pause that Refreshes.”
(qtd. in Butterick, A Guide 108)36
The first example reads as a four-beat line, with the slight chance of a minor variant in emphasis:
/ x / x / x /
Busy | people | pause for | Coke.
/ x / x / x /
Busy | people | pause | for Coke.
Either the line reads as three trochees in succession with a final stress on the monosyllabic noun, or, alternatively, the reader could pause on the word “pause,” making the final foot an iamb. In each case, the apparent sing-song quality of the line is precisely what Olson wishes to disrupt:
is for Cokes by Cokes out of
/
Pause[.]
(“Letter 15” MP 1:71)
Indeed, the speaker of the poem deliberately convolutes any assignable rhythm to the line. Isolation of the word “Pause” should encourage the reader to interpret the term in its poetic context. A pause in metre can organize and regulate rhythm, but it can also disrupt it. In the example of the Coke jingle above, uniform pauses divide poetic feet and regiment the duration of speech; in Olson’s parodic culture jam, a line break upsets an expected metre, causing one to pause at the word “pause” – hence, Olson teases out yet another of the word’s connotations as a contemplative act, a self-reflexive gesture that invites the reader to interrogate the implications of sound in the production of sense. The phrase “Cokes out of” puns on “coax,” reinforcing a reading of the poem as a disruption of rhythm and what Olson perceives as the function of the jingle to lull the community into a habitual pattern of control. When Olson elsewhere proclaims that “as the line goes so goes / the Nation” he has in mind a relationship between the syntax of a language, the organization of words into larger units of meaning, and community, the mode of social organization by which human beings structure human interaction. It is this relationship between discourse and action that frames the underlying dilemma announced at the beginning of the text: how does one proceed by “the / ear” and “where shall you listen / when all is become billboards” (“I, Maximus” MP 1:2)? Ultimately, Olson’s point is that any resistance to the coercive rhetoric of government and corporate power requires that one be able to “listen,” to read the rhythms of nationalism and fiscal exploitation as those “who use words cheap.”
In opposition to the community of worse-rule, Olson offers his concept of the “polis” or “ideal city.” Clearly it is not Olson’s contention that Gloucester has achieved such a status, but rather he imparts that laid buried in any city is the capacity for polis to exist. Assertions like these risk accusations of utopianism, but the concept of community advanced in Maximus is, in fact, decidedly anti-utopian, if what one means by this notion is a pre-conceived definition of the perfect society. After Olson left the Roosevelt administration, he refused any allegiance to a political party. As I cite at the beginning of the chapter, Olson advises that one accept neither the Left nor the Right of political discourse, nor “stay / in the middle, where they’ll get you, the ‘Germans’ / will” (“The Song and Dance of” MP 1:54). Olson refers in his Berkeley lecture to the Cold War politics of “America and Russia,” and the rise of the military industrial complex during the 1950s, as that “Great Business Conspiracy” (Reading at Berkeley 14) whose polarizing strategies merely recapitulate strict adherence to a pathological xenophobia. Michael Bernstein observes that Olson is “equally dismissive of monopoly capitalism and state socialism,” and hence the impracticality of Olson’s polis, which, according to Bernstein, is therefore a “utopian dream” (The Tale of the Tribe 263). Bernstein’s frustration is understandable, but if the complaint is that Olson does not supply the prescriptive political program to replace monopoly capitalism and/or statist socialism, then perhaps this is too much to ask of the poet. Olson’s quite prescient suspicion of an emergent world order of government and corporate collusion aptly characterizes the late twentieth century. But Bernstein’s criticism also reveals a more endemic problem of representation: if Olson were to circumscribe a concrete vision of an ideal society then he will generate precisely the sort of rigid truths that utopianism engenders. One should keep in mind that the eradication of “non-Germans” and the erection of an Aryan state were conceived by its proponents as a utopian project. That Olson’s renunciation of the left/right political opposition occupies the field of the poem with an allusion to Nazism invites the reader to identify the polarizing ideological manoeuvres common to each historical moment and political circumstance. It is Olson’s contention that both advance notions of community predicated on foundational myths of ethnic purity or national superiority. Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams make this point: “we can, after all, describe the future only in terms drawn from the past or present; and a future which broke radically with the present would have us straining at the limits of our language” (Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right 74); ultimately, our actions can only be guided by an axiomatic commitment to unqualified equality, a commitment “to ensure the means of life, and the means of community. But what will then, by these means, be lived, we cannot know or say.” (Williams, Culture and Society 321). In chapter 4 we encounter a feminist poetics that revives a prescriptive, even universal conception of the political (albeit one very different from a liberal-humanist notion of universalism). For Olson and his collaborators, their project is to identify the conditions that would bring a community of equals into being. That every element counts, that every element bears an equal status in relation to any other, applies equally to the textual field of the poem and the political field of social life. It is in this sense that the epigraph to Maximus is most instructive because it imagines a community that is irreducible either to the “One” of atomistic selfhood (i.e., I am the only one that counts) or the Many of homogenous nationalism (the Many that makes itself a One).
In “Letter 3” of Maximus, the poet comments: “As the people of the earth are now, Gloucester / is heterogeneous, and so can know polis” (1:10). In “The Present Is Prologue” he contrasts the “heterogeneous present” to the “old homogeneity of the Founders, and the West” (39). Olson’s statement in this essay precedes an autobiographical note about his mixed Swedish-Hungarian parentage, but in light of the evolution of his long poem – his rejection of the West as a model for an epic – it is clear that Olson is increasingly suspicious of any notion of community that begins from homogenous foundations (the nation, the volk, the party, etc.). As a prerequisite for polis to occur, “heterogeneity” disrupts originary myths of racial supremacy or geographical entitlement by insisting that the “group with will” is from the beginning always already a multiplicity. Maximus’s address to his city in the same letter illustrates this point: “o tansy city, root city / let them not make you / as the nation is” (“Letter 3” MP 1:11). It is enticing to read the first line of this passage as a nostalgic vision of a pre-industrial “city of nature,” but further consideration of the allusion suggests otherwise. Tansy is a rhizomatous herb, which Olson recounts “‘was brought on the bottom of bags in cargoes’” by early settlers of Gloucester (qtd. in Butterick, A Guide 22). Hence, the plant’s proliferation bears testimony to patterns of migration. Olson will make this assertion explicitly later in Maximus: “we who throw down hierarchy, / who say the history of weeds / is a history of man” (“Maximus, at Tyre and at Boston” MP 1:94). Significantly, this phrase is appropriated from botanist Edgar Anderson’s study, Plants, Man and Life. The original context of Anderson’s assertion is instructive:
Fennel, radish, wild oat, all of these plants are Mediterraneans. In those countries they mostly grow pretty as they do in California, at the edges of towns, on modern dumps and ancient ruins, around Greek temples and in the barbed-wire enclosures of concentration camps. Where did they come from? They have been with man too long for any quick answer. They were old when Troy was new. Some of them are certainly Asiatic, some African, many of them are mongrels in the strictest technical sense. Theirs is a long and complicated story, a story just now beginning to be unraveled but about which we already know enough to state, without fear of successful contradiction, that the history of weeds is the history of man. (15; my italics)
By virtue of their common lineage, Anderson contends, a given weed might reveal the origin and development of human societies. But perhaps as well, Olson would have taken notice that most weeds are hybrids, their material bodies heterogeneous “mongrels” of multiple plant forms, having the capacity to adapt to diverse ecological environments. Applied to the “history of man,” the passage aptly characterizes Olson’s genealogical method in tracing the “tangled history” (16) of Gloucester as a rhizomatous assemblage of individuals and events, social formations and migratory routes.
Localism for Olson is hence not antithetical to cosmopolitanism exactly. It is not, to use Creeley’s predilection for deictic elements, the xenophobic preservation of a here and now from external factors threatening its present constitution. The “heterogeneous present” marks a collective will to know its own mongrel history, a function of polis that demystifies myths of cultural purity; but it also marks an economy of use – not unlike the way I have argued “working in OPEN” involves a localist capacity to adapt to the immediate conditions that a given environment demands. In Maximus, the “tansy city” is a collectively organized, self-managed community in contrast to the state’s top-down rule of law. The nation is that multiplicity forfeiting its “heterogeneity,” becoming a singular, reducible entity:
I speak to any of you, not to you all, to no group, not to you as citizens …
… Polis now
is a few, is a coherence not even yet new (the island of this city
is a mainland now of who? who can say who are
citizens?
(1:11)
The word “few” typically designates an immediate and intimate group of individuals. But Olson fixates on the term as a numerical quantity. Frequently assigned an indefinite article, “a few” is not a fixed number. It names an intimate yet unquantifiable sum that resists atomized selfhood and the totalizing “you all” of nationhood. It is a newly formed “coherence” or provisional unity and its citizens possess no fixed properties: “who can say who are citizens?” (1:11).
Yet this is a selective reading, one that certainly gives Olson the benefit of all doubts. The women of Black Mountain routinely asked who counts as a citizen. It was said previously that a patently gendered call to arms features prominently in Olson’s “Projective Verse”: “there it is, brothers … go by it, boys.” More insidiously, however, the title’s militaristic evocations signal an often aggressive and exclusionary masculine posture. Rachel Blau DuPlessis acutely observes that the projective suggests both a violent and a phallic thrust of “(projectile (percussive (projective” movements, penetrating the space of the page by way of a ballistic image. “These words,” she explains, “(re)claim poetry for masculine discourse, making poetry safe for men to enter, making poetry a serious discourse of assertive, exploratory, and sometimes aggressive manhood” (“Manifests” 45). Consider as well that the metaphor of the missile – its planned launch and predetermined descent towards a selected target – grossly contradicts the purpose of projective verse as a content determined in the act of composition.
One finds this compromised vision of an open form community elsewhere in Black Mountain’s cultural work. Olson’s speaker insists adamantly in Maximus that a magazine, like Gloucester, can have polis, yet Olson’s overbearing personality could sometimes undermine his commitment to co-operative publishing. The founding of Origin is instructive in this regard. At approximately the same time “Projective Verse” first appeared in 1950, Olson and Creeley had each begun an important correspondence with an upstart editor by the name of Cid Corman. Creeley had tried and failed months earlier to start his own magazine called The Lititz Review; although he was forced to abandon the venture, he had solicited a substantial number of poems, many of which Corman would later use to launch the first volume of Origin. In turn, Corman’s magazine would act as a central meeting place for a network of poets who later contributed to the Black Mountain Review. A triadic relationship evolved between the three men, since Olson sent many of Corman’s letters to Creeley with his comments. The three men planned a collaborative special issue that would introduce Olson’s theories of open form writing. Corman, for his part, was adamant that although the magazine would provide an alternative to the post-war lyric endorsed by the New Critics, it would not advance a dogmatic agenda. His letters indicate that he was wary of Olson’s dismissive attitude to mainstream publications like the Hudson Review, insisting that his “program … will be a positive one,” foregoing the usual “vindictive attacks” (29).37 A little magazine, he insists, should function “[n]ot as competition, but as community,” establishing “the continuity and relation of writers” (244–5).
A sense of proprietorship on Olson’s part invariably infiltrated what had begun in earnest as an attempt to document the gradual emergence of a literary network. Recalling Francine du Plessix Gray’s deft assessment, Olson seemed always both more “iconoclastic and dictatorial” than his collaborators. For instance, at Corman’s suggestion of a forty-page section in the magazine devoted to Olson alone, he has this to say:
what would be much better than this one man (what could almost be anonymous, the work issuing in its course, and, by that work alone the men be known) is this hot:
50 pages to be a movement, a composing fr the shifting correspondence of two writers, poems and stories coming up in the progress of that correspondence, the nature of it also representing examinations of what key points on the whole front of life & work today that correspondence get to[.] (58)
Such an assertion testifies not only to Olson’s emphasis on process, but also the degree to which field composition should be understood as a co-production between Creeley and himself. Any attempt at simulating the evolution of Olson’s poetics would be more accurately represented by a synthesis of he and Creeley’s work, by “50 pages of woven stuff from the heads & hands of two men” (60). Elsewhere in a letter composed on 3 May 1951, Olson expands on this notion of the magazine as a nexus of communal expression:
… any given issue of ORIGIN will have maximum force as it is conceived by its editor as a FIELD OF FORCE …
that is, that, as agent of this collective (which ORIGIN is going to be) the question is larger than, yr taste, alone: it is the same sort of confrontation as – in any given poem – a man faces: how much energy has he got in, to make the thing stand on its own feet as, a force, in, the fields of force which surround everyone of us, of which we, too, are forces: to stand FORTH. (139, 141)
Olson conceives of the little magazine in projectivist terms, wherein editorial collectivism eschews the “individual ego” and positions the selections within an issue as “participants” in a field of force relations. Between the subjective (egoistic) program of a single editor’s personal taste and the flimsy eclecticism of magazines that claim non-partisanship is a possible conception of the magazine volume as a unit of composition born from an objectist stance towards reality, in which “units are juxtaposed” to “declare” a communal aesthetics (141).
Olson advances an exciting idea, but the focus on him and Creeley alone indicates a desire for control on Olson’s part that understandably prompted Corman’s suspicion.38 Indeed, if Olson’s suggestion that their work remain anonymous seems half-hearted, the word “movement” seems to slip from its emphasis on the fluid aesthetic interchange between two writers into a more programmatic “movement” as an advance-guard ideology. By the end of this passage in Olson’s letter, he reminds the young editor that such an approach is merited by the implicit assumption he attributes to Corman: “that, the two of us, are central to, your conception of, the MAG” (59). The first issue of Origin: A Quarterly for the Creative appeared in April 1951. Given the range of its contents, it would seem Corman agreed with Olson that a magazine should include letters, essays, and other supporting materials that contextualize the poetry and chronicle the development of a literary community. He opted, however, for the initial plan of forty pages devoted to the work of Olson, with a similar feature section in the second issue allotted for Creeley. Corman jettisons Olson’s plan for a magazine that charts the integrated poetics of two writers; he chose instead to expand this community of correspondents.
The decisions of Olson and Corman each have their benefits and limitations. Had Corman documented the emergence of open form as a practice developed between Olson and Creeley, as the former encouraged him to do so, then from the outset field composition’s social function might have been better understood. Yet, by playing Amy Lowell to Olson’s Pound, Corman rightly made a democratic “beer garden” of a poetic practice that would no doubt have come under Olson’s sometimes possessive authority. Which, in the final analysis, aptly analogizes both the impressive contribution and the ultimate limitation of Olson’s cultural poetics. He insisted that poetry should embody an emancipatory vision, that indeed literature can propose to politics a different configuration of its space. The poem, he insists, is a “polis” awaiting enactment. Yet his poetry and his cultural work at BMC fulfil this project only partially. No doubt this makes him human, but one should not apologize for the sexism and occasional elitism that pervades both the poetry of Maximus and the political project of Black Mountain. In a sense, what remains of this chapter, and then taken up again in the fourth one, pursues this tension between field composition as a masculine discourse and as a poetics “woven” by a litany of hands. That is, how open form poetry originates is only part of the story; how others adapt and transform it is another.
In an undated poem likely written some years after Robert Creeley’s tenure at Black Mountain, the poet reflects on his experience at the college:
“An Ode”
(for Black Mt. College)
There is this side of it.
…
And why not. One is much too
repentant. The secrets are
to be shared.
Why go to college. Or, as a man said, it
is too far away.
Why go.
(“An Ode” 1, 6–11)39
The question “[w]hy go” has several connotations. Creeley had attended Harvard during the early 1940s, opting to leave the university before completing an undergraduate degree.40 Moreover, he had visited Black Mountain before accepting a teaching position at the college. Creeley travelled there during the mid-1940s to visit his partner and eventual first wife, Ann, who had enrolled at BMC to study art and music. Apparently, he disliked the college and its students, later complaining to Olson in a letter dated 28 September 1950 that “there was no quiet, or no root in any of it” (Buttrick, Correspondence 3:43). The additional reference to an unnamed “man” provides another possible explanation. Creeley had said famously about Olson that their friendship was “a practical college of information and stimulus” (Creeley, “Interview” by Ossman 7). To “go to college” would mean Creeley’s first physical encounter with a friend with whom he had corresponded for the better part of five years.
Biographer Ekbert Faas notes the “constantly regrouping friendships and literary allegiances” (Robert Creeley 156) that dominated the poet’s social life during the early to mid-1950s, yet this is an observation one might also extend, more properly speaking, to his literary practice. The years Creeley spent composing the several volumes collected in For Love were marked by intensive literary, editorial, and artistic collaboration. By the time he arrived at Black Mountain in 1954, he had already begun invaluable correspondences with several writers, including Olson, with whom he elaborated the purpose and possibility of projectivist poetics. He established the Divers Press while living in Mallorca a few years earlier, and later became the editor of the Black Mountain Review, publishing the first of seven issues in 1954. And although the relationship between abstract expressionism and Creeley’s evolving poetics is well documented,41 few consider that three of the books collected in For Love originally featured intermedial collaborations with artists René Laubiès, Dan Rice, and Fielding Dawson. Citing Pound’s dictum that “whenever a group of people begin to communicate with one another, something happens,” for Creeley, Black Mountain was “as viable and as momentary and as moving as the fact that people moved around in their lives … [P]eople were always drifting through, coming back, coming for the first time” (Creeley, “Interview” by Ossman 7; “Interview” by Sinclair and Eichele 69). His impression of the college had not changed since his initial visit. There was still no “root in any of it,” but such a sentiment was now understood affirmatively.
The relationship between For Love and Creeley’s various collective endeavours is intriguing if, for no other reason, themes related to failed romantic love and alienation have come to dominate the critical reception of Creeley’s early poetry. One contemporary reviewer of For Love observes that “the best of [Creeley’s] poems are those dealing with the intricacies that exist between men and women” (Davison, “The New Poetry” 85). Taking issue with several reviewers’ tendencies to ignore formal innovation in Creeley’s work, a critic such as Arthur L. Ford seeks to demonstrate how desire operates at the level of form, but retains a focus on heteronormative desire. Charles Bernstein, on the other hand, makes no excuses for Creeley’s sexism; he is rightly “put off by … the oppressiveness of sexual role stereotyping … in his talk of ‘fair ladies,’ of the pervasive image of women as set apart, objectified” (“Hearing ‘Here’” 91):42
Were I myself more blithe …
I would marry a very rich woman
who had no use for stoves,
and send my present wife
all her old clothes.
(“Song” 1, 9–12)
Give thanks to love in homes.
Without them all men
would starve to the bone.
(“The Wind” 5–8)
Like a river she was,
huge roily mass of water
carrying tree trunks
and divers drunks.
Like a Priscilla, a feminine Benjamin,
a whore gone right over
the falls,
she was.
(“The Memory” 1–8)
A quick assessment of For Love uncovers predictable instances of clichéd complaints by a jilted male lover and the sort of gendered exhortations found in Olson’s Maximus – a machismo element at Black Mountain documented by writers like Francine du Plessix Gray and Hilda Morley. Noting Creeley’s developing relationships with Michael Rumaker, Ed Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and John Wieners while he taught at BMC, historian Martin Duberman observes that his friendship and artistic collaboration with Dan Rice was decidedly more “complex”:
Not only did Creeley and Rice fall in love with the same student, and the three of them pull each other apart in an agony of shared concern and confusion, but also he and Dan all but interchanged identities, mixing their emotions and intelligence to the point where some thought the only way to describe these two wholly heterosexual men, was as ‘lovers.’ (Black Mountain 394; my italics)
Readers should take note of Duberman’s qualification of Creeley and Rice as “wholly heterosexual men” and the accompanying citation, tucked away in the book’s notes, indicating that the details he obtained regarding their friendship comes from a “variety of sources, which must go uncited” (491n.23). Amid so many regrouping allegiances, interchanging identities, mixed emotions, mutual confusion, and shared concern, the temptation to separate out – like a good Aristotelian category – the wholly heterosexual men of Black Mountain should not go uncited.
A comparable erotic mixture can be found in For Love, in which misogynistic lyrics like the ones excerpted above appear alongside odes to male friends, family members, and an intertextual network of writers and artists associated with Black Mountain – indeed, a test case for Eve Sedgwick’s homosocial critique. Preoccupations with friendship, hospitality, and erotic love are found at every turn in a collection whose interplay of pronouns, mêlée of bodies and names, connections and disconnections, create a frenzy of potentially misplaced sexual identifications. As a variety of passages below will indicate, many of the poems in For Love adopt what Christopher Nealon calls a “camp-posture toward the ‘damage’ of late capitalism” (“Camp Messianism” 579). Let me say here unequivocally that any queering of Creeley’s work is done against the grain of intention; it would be wrong to attempt the sort of reading that sets out to “redeem” Creeley in light of the gender stereotypes his poems sometimes perpetuate, or the homophobia implied by Duberman’s account of Creeley’s relationship to Dan Rice. Better, I think, to recognize the poet’s shortcomings in this respect, observing, in turn, that if open form writing purportedly advances a radical equality “between things” in the poem, then Creeley, like Olson, will require the Women’s Liberation Movement’s discerning intervention. With this important caveat in mind, the Marxist-inflected definition of camp that Nealon dutifully borrows from Andrew Ross gives pause: “camp ‘is the re-creation of surplus value from forgotten forms of labor,’ … a polemical affection for waste, which animates not just camp in its queer subcultural matrix but also in its migrations beyond subcultural boundaries” (580). Nealon locates this tendency in late twentieth-century poetry, yet this polemical revivification of the “obsolete, misguided or trivial” from an immanent position within capital is undoubtedly much on the minds of Olson and Creeley as well. The latter finds in the disused language of forgotten forms, the throwaway lines of a friend’s letters, or the repurposing of poems in artistic collaborations just this sort of erotics of friendship.
The following excerpts from a poem entitled “Hart Crane” (1952) provide a useful point of departure:
He had been stuttering, by the edge
of the street, one foot still
on the sidewalk, and the other
in the gutter …
The words, several, and for each, several
senses.
‘It is very difficult to sum up
briefly …’
It always was.
(Slater, let me come home.
The letters have proved insufficient.
The mind cannot hang to them as it could
to the words.
…
He slowed
(without those friends to keep going, to
keep up), stopped
dead and the head could not
go further
without those friends
… And so it was I entered the broken world
Hart Crane.
Hart[.]
(1–4, 7–15, 39–47)
The poem is dedicated to Crane’s close friend, Slater Brown, who, by the time of composition, had become an intimate of Creeley’s. The text is a woven amalgam of Brown’s recollections of Crane, Creeley’s parenthetical observations, and quotations taken from Crane’s own poetry. Creeley’s method involves a movement in and out of the (inter-)textual space of the poem into a social space of kinship; the paratextual epigraph, in effect, enters the field of the text to participate in the construction of a collective portrait. The conclusion of the poem suggests that Crane’s dissolution is augmented if not caused by abandonment, ending with an italicized line quoted verbatim from Crane’s last poem, “The Broken Tower.” Taken independently, Creeley/Crane’s line seems a typical expression of modernist isolation, yet this is not the case when viewed in its original context: “and so it was I entered the broken world / to trace the visionary company of love” (17–18). The following passage appears at the end of the last poem in Creeley’s For Love, for which the collection is titled: “that face gone, now. / Into the company of love / it all returns” (“For Love” [1962] 61–4; my italics).43 Crane’s lines frame, indeed erotically envelope, Creeley’s text. The speaker of For Love may “enter the broken world,” but it is to trace a populous “company of love.” Though it may initially seem inexplicable, “Hart Crane” was originally titled “Otto Rank and Others”;44 Butterick points to a letter Creeley sent to Jacob Leed on 21 June 1948, in which Creeley endorses the psychologist’s “‘rejection of Freud’s idea of the artist as a thwarted neurotic whose basis of creativity depends on the sexual’” (qtd. in Butterick, “Tradition” 122–3). A reading of Creeley’s essay on Crane confirms Butterick’s astute observation that the title is meant to refute reductive biographical assessments of Crane’s homosexuality.45 In any event, Creeley recreates Crane’s poem, such that the “friend” may “go further”; the company of love is thus theme and formal technique.
Creeley is most suspicious of those institutions that impose ethical generalities and regulate social bonds. His objections to marriage, organized religion, and consumer culture are hardly cryptic: “The church,” the poet states, “is a business, and the rich / are the business men” (“After Lorca” [1953] 1–2). The concluding remarks of “I Know a Man” (1955) – “shall we & / why not, buy a goddamn big car” (8–9) – ably portends a practice of community formation through conspicuous consumption and brand loyalty that would come to dominate American culture in the years after the Second World War. Yet it would be incorrect to suggest that Creeley opts instead for solipsistic isolation – for, “if you never do anything for anyone else / you are spared the tragedy of human relation- / ships” (“The Immoral Proposition” [1953] 1–3). In For Love, the diverse and malleable forms that friendships take afford alternatives to the preconditioned bonds that such institutions impose. This is an assertion applicable to the poems in Creeley’s collection and the condition of its publication.
Indeed, the publication history of Creeley’s early poetry provides a significant – if frequently ignored – context for the author’s work. First published in 1962, For Love assembles seven prior books published between 1952 and 1959: Le Fou (1952), The Kind of Act of (1953), The Immoral Proposition (1953), All That Is Lovely in Men (1955), If You (1956), The Whip (1957), and A Form of Women (1959).46 The last two collections republish a substantial number of poems from the other five, and several of the poems were first published in little magazines such as Origin, Fragmente, and the Black Mountain Review. Creeley ultimately decided to organize For Love chronologically, dividing the anthology into three sections according to the time of composition: 1950–5, 1956–8, and 1959–60. The effect of this decision, according to Arthur L. Ford, allows the reader to document key psychological shifts in Creeley’s work (Robert Creeley 73–6), but it also potentially obfuscates critical information about the original conditions of publication.
Most notably, three of these smaller volumes feature collaborations with visual artists, two of whom were affiliated with Black Mountain College. René Laubiès provided drawings for The Immoral Proposition and Dan Rice illustrated All That Is Lovely in Men, while If You contains linocuts designed by Fielding Dawson. Creeley’s collaborations with artists total more than forty projects, spanning every decade of the poet’s life. In addition to the artists who contributed to his early books collected in For Love, some of Creeley’s most significant work would bear the mark of such artists as Robert Indiana (Numbers, 1968), Arthur Okamura (1°2°3°4°5°6°7°8°9°, 1971), Martha Visser’t Hooft (Window, 1988), and Cletus Johnson (Theaters, 1993).47 The art includes a broad range of media: sculpture, photography, lithography, linocuts, screen-prints, photogravures, and Xeroxes. Art historian Elizabeth Licata astutely comments that although Creeley’s early work certainly features the influence of abstract expressionism, his long and complex career “has since performed successive mutations, creating a continuum of relationships with artists that is uniquely transformational … always com[ing] from the symbiosis between poet and painter” (“Robert Creeley’s Collaborations” 11). Collaboration itself is of course a social gesture that bears testimony to the importance of artistic community. And if the volumes collected in For Love exclusively depict an isolated, dejected lover – as some critics insist – then Creeley’s mode of publication suggests a contrary scene of social interaction.
Creeley’s first three collaborations mark his initial exposure to abstract expressionism. The Immodest Proposal was begun in 1953, just after Creeley had encountered the work of Jackson Pollock at the Fachetti Gallery in Paris (the same gallery that featured Laubiès’s work). The next two were prepared at BMC, during Creeley’s tenure as a faculty member at the college and as editor of the Black Mountain Review. In each case, the nature of the collaboration is similar, although there is evidence of a growing interest in the sequential order of the poems and artwork. In The Immodest Proposal and in All That Is Lovely in Men, poems and drawings appear alternately on facing pages, so that the reader encounters image and text simultaneously. In the tradition of the livre d’artiste, both volumes contain poems and drawings that were conceived independently, and then subsequently arranged to elicit certain connections between them. Interestingly, the title of the second volume, All That Is Lovely in Men, appears as the title of the last poem in the collection, and features an ironic and embittered declaration of love’s failure, yet given Creeley and Rice’s intense personal relatonship, it aptly describes the literary-artistic partnership in entirely different terms. Wayne Koestenbaum’s assertion in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration that “collaboration is always a sublimation of erotic entanglements” (4) is equally applicable to interdisciplinary partnerships as well, and the infatuation both men had with the same woman might arguably be read as displaced desire for one another. In any case, within the larger context of Creeley’s publishing ventures during the 1950s, it is intriguing that poems devoted ostensibly to heteronormative relationships should involve collaborations with male artists, each attempting an intimate union of text and art.
As early as 1956, while working at BMC, Creeley was beginning to think seriously about the function of collaboration as an integral part of his poetic practice. Olson’s remark to W.H. Ferry that “the emphasis” at the college “is on what happens between things” is equally applicable in Creeley’s case. Nor would it have been lost on Creeley that inter-disciplinarity and collaboration challenge the New Critical conception of the poem as an autonomous artefact. What is more, these activities problematize Altieri’s contention that Creeley’s poetics “is a matter of individual not collective experience” (Enlarging the Temple 44). Collaboration involves an artistic process that mixes the subjectivities of its participants, disrupting the mythic autonomy and stability of the author as a solitary figure. Practical concerns involved in the publication of For Love would have prevented Creeley from including these collaborations, but since his subsequent participation in several intermedial projects suggests that this was not merely a passing curiosity, there is no reason to downplay their importance to the reception of these three smaller volumes. In regards to the art itself, these texts in particular – and his exposure to abstract expressionism more generally – introduced Creeley to a non-referential practice that would gradually influence his own writing. Upon seeing the work of Jackson Pollock, Creeley recalls that he “was attracted to the fact that this painting was not verbal, that it’s a whole way of apprehending or stating the so-called world without using words as an initiation … a way of stating what one feels without describing it” (Licata, “Robert Creeley’s Collaborations” 11).
With reference to For Love, there appears to be an irreconcilable contradiction: the collaborations Creeley undertook with artists at Black Mountain complement the central themes of friendship and community in the poems, yet his formal technique indicates a shift away from biographical documentation and referential writing. Notably, it is Charles Olson who first comments on this nascent tactic in Creeley’s work. In response to “For Rainer Gerhardt” (1952), Olson remarks that Creeley has developed a poetic approach that advances by way of the “conjectural as its hidden methodology” (Butterick, Correspondence 9:68), one that gradually vacates the poem of imagistic content. But what is more, Olson is clearly aware of the paradox involved in such a procedure: it is, as he states, by absenting “image and drama” from verse that Creeley more forcefully engages a “sense of the physical world” (9:67–8). Despite Creeley’s experiments with unconventional modes of representation, none of his collections attempt the radical semantic indeterminacy of the Language poets. Perloff makes this point succinctly: “Creeley’s poetics is not quite that of In the American Tree. What Bruce Andrews has called deprecatingly ‘the arrow of reference’ is still operative in Creeley’s lyric, his collocations of words and morphemes are never as non-semantic or disjunctive as those of later Language poets.”48 Perloff’s “not quite” arrives at a significant problem with the reception of For Love. Many of the collection’s poems occupy an interstitial zone between anecdotal reference and resistance to referential writing, combining a mode of description that constructs relationships between subjects and a technique of abstraction that resists the fixture of meaning. Why is it, for instance, that Creeley oscillates between poems such as “Hart Crane,” which evoke an intertextual and paratextual network of quotations, epigrams, and proper names, and texts like “The Names” (1959) and “The Place” (1959), which feature Creeley’s signature combination of abstract noun and deictic speech act? It is enticing to characterize this development as a shift towards an increasingly non-referential practice, yet both formal strategies persist throughout Creeley’s later collections of verse.
Instead of taking the lyric to be a discursive mode, the purpose of which is the construction of one’s singular, autonomous identity, Creeley uses it to map relations between a multiplicity of singular beings. By foregrounding relationships, the permutations of these relations, and the provisional nature of their connection, what is being “conjectured” or “defined” is an emergent bond between singularities – the ways in which they encounter, entangle, and disperse. Everywhere in the collection pronouns collide in a “gro- / tesquerie” of “form”: “I to love / you to love: syntactic accident” (“The Place” 1–2, 23–4). By way of conjecture and subsequent explication, Creeley sets out to define the formation of social bonds:
You send me your poems,
I’ll send you mine.
Things tend to awaken
even through random communication.
Let us suddenly
proclaim spring. And jeer
at the others,
all the others.
I will send a picture too
if you will send me one of you.
(“The Conspiracy” [1954] 1–10)
The poem was first published in a small volume of occasional pieces entitled A Snarling Garland of Xmas Verses in 1954, approximately seven months after arriving at BMC. The “wallet pocket-book” contains only five poems and was published anonymously by the author. According to the editorial note supplied by Creeley’s bibliographer, Mary Novik, it is likely that Creeley arranged the volume “mainly for friends,” given the relatively few number of copies published (approximately one hundred) (An Inventory 5).49 But then, why would Creeley choose to publish the volume anonymously if it were intended for close friends? “The Conspiracy” is an occasional poem that marks no specific occasion, an anecdotal lyric that evades biographical certainty. Forgive the anachronism, but Creeley here rewrites O’Hara’s person-ist “Lunch with LeRoi” without particular reference to place or person. Formally, the five-stanza, ten-line poem with its final couplet and period create a sense of closure. Thematically, too, the poem advances the sort of agonistic closure indicative of avant-garde manifestos. The evidence of an “us” in opposition to “all the others” (“The Conspiracy” 5, 7) chimes with numerous declarations resounding with similar calls “to stand on the rock of the word ‘we’ amidst the sea of boos and outrage” (Burliuk et al., A Slap in the Face 223). Yet the tone and rhyme scheme’s playful flirtatiousness undercuts the seriousness of such proclamations. The poem announces an “awakening” reinforced by the image of spring, but Creeley’s concept of innovation as the hallmark of their clandestine encounter is prompted by “random communication” (“The Conspiracy” 4). Indeed, the speaker declares: “Let us suddenly / proclaim spring” as though the sequence of seasons did not matter (5–6). This is not the programmatic aesthetic of a movement but instead the spontaneous possibility of an intimate encounter and the eruption of unforeseen possibilities that such moments can generate. And though the poem seems to “close” unequivocally, the word “you” is both the first and final word of the text, creating not so much an end point in time as a network of return. The poem also begins with a contemplation of writing that ends with the promise of a physical encounter. Since the poem lacks a dedicatory epigram (a device Creeley uses frequently), it is enticing but ultimately problematic to read the poem as a commentary on the correspondence he shared with Olson, in particular, his stated desire for their correspondence to result in a meeting between the two (Butterick, Correspondence 1:118).50 The photograph ironically promises a visual representation of author and recipient, yet the poem remains indeterminate. By refusing a precise reference to the external world, the reader is left with something like a map or blueprint of an emergent correspondence; echoing Pound’s dictum that “whenever a group of people begin to communicate with one another, something happens,” the poem inaugurates a poetic based on networks of exchange.
Even in texts that reference the proper name of the friend, the intent is never to essentialize an identity but to map a relation between singularities. “For Rainer Gerhardt” (1952) is likely the first of Creeley’s poems to employ a logical structure in which the poem “define[s]” its initial conjecture, in this case, the “conditions / of friendship” with the German writer to whom the poem is dedicated. Yet from the outset the poem announces the impossibility of its own intention:
Impossible, rightly, to define these
conditions of
friendship, the wandering & inexhaustible wish to
be of use, somehow
to be helpful
when it isn’t simple, – wish
otherwise, convulsed, and leading
nowhere I can go.
simple, convulsed, and feeling
(this night)
petulance of all conditions, not
wondered, not even
felt.
I have felt nothing, I have
felt that if it were simpler, and
being so, it were a matter only of
an incredible indifference
(to us)
they might say it all –
but not friends, the
acquaintances, but you,
Rainer. And likely there is
petulance in us
kept apart.
(“For Rainer Gerhardt” 1–25)
Friendship, for Creeley, is determined by a tension between the “inexhaustible wish to / be of use” and the unavoidable “conditions” that establish the limits of one’s hospitality (3–4, 2). It was Pound who first instigated a correspondence between the two poets, after which Gerhardt invited Creeley to join the editorial board of his magazine Fragmente. It was Gerhardt’s magazine that had exposed Creeley to a cultural project for writing that surpassed what he felt were the myopic agendas of magazines he had encountered in the United States. Together with his wife Renate, the poet and editor had undertaken the daunting project of publishing German literature and other Western literary traditions after years of Nazi rule and economic turmoil.51 Creeley grasped the importance of their work: “[t]heir conception of what such a magazine might accomplish was a deep lesson to me. They saw the possibility of changing the context of writing” at a moment in which the political left in Germany found itself in profound despair (“On Black Mountain Review” 254).52 Towards the end of August 1951, while Creeley and his wife Ann were living in Mallorca, he decided to make the trip to Freiburg, Germany, to visit his friend.53 Creeley recalls the experience:
I felt very close to this man – selfishly, because he gave me knowledge of a world I had otherwise no means of knowing. We were of the same age, but the life he had been given was far from that I knew. When he spoke of growing up in the Hitler Jugend, of the final chaos of his feelings and sense of possibility after he had been drafted into the army – of his desertion, then, to Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia – finally, of all the world of chaos after the war, of his marriage and his two young sons who had to go daily through the streets of collapsed buildings[.] (“Rainer Gerhardt: A Note” 221)
Creeley was understandably shaken by what he saw during his visit to post-war Germany. To be sure, Gerhardt’s most crucial lesson was not lost on him: “[h]e spoke to me of what he felt to be the community, the complex of people any city or town describes. He felt that a writer was not distinct from such a unity, but rather helped very literally in its definition” (222). For the speaker of Creeley’s poem, to “be of use, somehow / to be helpful” indicates not only a personal wish to be hospitable to his friend, but also his dissatisfaction with the political circumstances that conditions such a friendship. Though the poem appears to chronicle the disintegration of a personal bond between friends, Creeley’s precise phrasing is meaningful: it is the “petulance of all conditions” that compromises their friendship. The inevitable sanctions binding an “inexhaustible wish” foreground an aporia framing the speaker’s unconditional desire to be available to the other, and, for survival’s sake, the conditional necessity to organize one’s hospitality and to quantify one’s responsibilities to the friend.
Of course, none of this historical contextualization or Creeley’s quite candid recollections of his friend can be found in the poem beyond the evocation of a proper name. Gerhardt is indeed a German friend, an editorial colleague, and a like-minded writer. They are bound by approaches to verse, literary institutions, and subject to the laws of nation states – the sort that give conditional permission for an American to visit Germany. Yet the poem bears no reference at all to nationhood or to citizenry. There is none of the filial relation or gendered proclamation of brotherhood found elsewhere in the collection – instead, only a bond between singularities, before those principal marks of the politicized other. When the speaker of Creeley’s poem insists that it is “impossible” to “define these / conditions of / friendship” (“For Rainer Gerhardt” 1–3), one possible meaning of this assertion is the impossibility to contain one’s friend within the conditioned parameters of identities or territories, and, therefore, to unbind one from these bonds, while simultaneity prescribing a radical equality for all.
The “wish to / be of use,” as Creeley puts it, disperses like a meme at mid-century. Olson’s exhortation in “Projective Verse,” “USE USE USE the process … its excuse, its usableness, in practice” (240–1), comes on the heels of his own appropriation of Creeley’s methods. As for the common field they were jointly building, Creeley would reflect in an interview on his relationship with Olson and his experiences at Black Mountain College during the mid-1950s: “I believe in handing everything over. If I find anything of use, I try to get it as quickly as possible to whomever I consider might use it” (Creeley, “Interview” by Ossman 7–8; my italics). Elsewhere, Creeley remarks similarly: “I am pleased by that poem which makes use of myself and my intelligence, as a partner to its declaration. It does not matter what I am told – it matters, very much, how I am there used” (“A Note” 33). This is a radical gesture imperfectly executed, since women were not included in the company of love more fully; we should look back on Black Mountain with a degree of disappointment for this reason, but we should also recognize the prescience of Creeley’s comments nonetheless. Let us call it open form’s gift economy, its “usableness” installed as the principal axiom of the post-war era’s first great poetic vision. Looking forward, members of the Toronto Research Group, Fluxus, and Language writing would likely herald this “We-full, not I-less” (McCaffery and Nichol’s term) model of writing, materializing as the “woven stuff” of many “heads and hands.” How open form gets used in the protest verse of the 1960s is the stuff of the next section.
In the preceding sections, I have argued that open form poetries were conceived in opposition to centralized political institutions in the United States at mid-century. If the concrete ramifications of Olson and Creeley’s work were not immediately clear, this is because Olson determined that political change would first require a fundamental transformation of one’s perception of reality and language. For Creeley, friendship was that type of communal relation that problematized the macro-categories shaping political discourse: religion, marriage, nationalism, etc. In the years after the formative work conducted at Black Mountain College, open form poetics would rhizomatically disperse, perhaps like no other poetic practice of the twentieth century, inspiring Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and members of the Beat group, Frank O’Hara and the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, TISH, Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts aesthetics, the feminist writing of Adrienne Rich, the eco-poetic tradition of Gary Snyder, and a diverse group of authors associated with the St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. Field composition spreads and adapts within the tumultuous social climate of the 1960s: protest of the Vietnam War and the countercultural movement give open form poetics a more explicitly political task. I have argued that projectivism is closely bound to several experiments in collaboration; developed in conjunction amid a network of physical encounters and correspondences, open form is linked to debates about community at Black Mountain, to interdisciplinarity, and to themes of polity and friendship. Duncan and Levertov will further expand this concept of field composition, exploring it through formal and theoretical investigations of activism and public space. In To Stay Alive (1971), Levertov conceives of the page as a site of multiple inscriptions, using strategies of appropriation and collage to write the anti-war protest into her text – in a sense, reimagining the projectivist field as a “public park.” Olson had speculated on the role of the projective in other artistic disciplines and Creeley pursued the possibilities of inter-artistic experimentation as an integral component of an open form practice, but it is Levertov who experiments more fully with the terrain of the page as a site of many converging voices. For Duncan’s part, he had famously called himself a “derivative” poet.54 In clear opposition to the proprietary basis upon which the “anxiety of influence” operates according to Harold Bloom, Duncan freely and openly appropriates techniques from many writers, including Gertrude Stein, Paul Verlaine, H.D., Walt Whitman, and Olson. As he would state years later: “[t]he goods of the intellect are communal” (“The HD Book” [1983] 63).55 To be “derivative” is to understand language as the material of a literary commons: “[t]here is no / good a man has in his own things except / it be in the community of every thing” (“Orders” [1968] 65–7). The Opening of the Field (1960) is often referred to as the beginning of Duncan’s “mature” verse, but it is also clearly an explicit reference to field composition, and thus signals both a dependence on a community of authors and open form’s possible expansion as a practice.
The question of how a protest poetry should be written would come to dominate a considerable aspect of Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan’s correspondence.56 Duncan was drafted for service in the Second World War in 1940 but was later discharged; Levertov worked as a civilian nurse in London from 1943 to 1944. They lived through the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. Not until the onset of Vietnam, however, did a more explicit politics emerge in the verse of both poets, after a decade in which both had focused primarily on personal themes. Yet Vietnam would also generate divergent routes towards a poetics of protest. During the 1960s, Levertov became increasingly involved in the peace movement, helping to promote RESIST, a group which supported draft dodgers during the war; as the decade progressed, she frequently read at political rallies, integrating her activism and her poetry.57 Duncan, on the other hand, refused to participate in organized political resistance. His commentary on an interview Levertov gives to the Public Broadcast Lab58 at the Rankin Brigade Washington protest helps to clarify his objection:
The person that the demos, the citoyen-mass of an aroused party, awakes is so different from the individual person … [A]s always in the demotic urgency, [one observes] the arousal of the group against an enemy – here the enemy clearly being the whole state structure against our humanity … In the PBL view of you, Denny, you are splendid but it is a force that, coming on strong, sweeps away all the vital weaknesses of the living identity; the soul is sacrificed to the demotic personal that fires itself from spirit. (Berholf and Gelpi, The Letters 607)
Duncan’s accusation is clear: Levertov had allegedly succumbed to the glorification of the individual “personality,” the one claiming to speak for the many. But more importantly, she had, in poems like “Staying Alive,” subordinated poetry to propaganda. Just as the body of the speaking subject fuses leviathan-like in and as the body politic, the poem becomes undifferentiated from the political dogma of a given group. Duncan claims to reject the “us/them” dichotomy that political factionizing engenders. By “tak[ing] up arms against the war,” revolution perpetuates the logic of violent opposition. Instead, Duncan advocates what might be called a politics of non-cooperation with agencies of power and domination. In the same letter to Levertov, he encourages war refusers to “go underground, evade or escape the conscription. As in South Vietnam, it is not the Liberationists that I identify with but the people of the land who are not fighting to seize political power but are fighting to remain in their daily human lives” (Bertholf and Gelpi, The Letters 608). The role of poetry, then, is not active participation in the construction of a “new politics,” but rather its purpose is to expose the discursive apparatus of power, and to determine how the individual may withdraw from it.
It is significant, however, that Duncan’s commentary focuses on Levertov’s appearance rather than her message. Partly this is his point: that the visual spectacle of the rally overpowers the political message; yet, nonetheless, Levertov’s speech problematizes Duncan’s objection: “Mothers, don’t let your sons learn to kill and be killed. Teachers, don’t let your students learn to kill and be killed. Wives and sweethearts, don’t let your lovers learn to kill and be killed. Aid, abet, and counsel young men to resist the draft!” (Bertholf and Gelpi, The Letters 677). Levertov’s “war against the state” constitutes a non-violent form of opposition, if not an alternative form of citizenry – a position not altogether different from Duncan’s. She contends, however, that it is precisely those institutions within the state – the family, the school – that have the capacity to participate in the protest rather than collude with government ideology. Levertov insists that collective agency can take place within these official mechanisms of power.
The debate between Levertov and Duncan has led some critics to draw a connection between the former’s political pragmatism and a lyric poetry of witness. Robin Riley Fast insists that Levertov foregrounds a “recognition of the political nature of individual experience” (“She Is The One” 107); Anne Dewey observes that she “subordinates poetic plot to history in her diary/documentary ‘Staying Alive,’” portraying the “individual as increasingly overwhelmed by history’s turbulent floodwaters” (“Poetic Authority” 118). It is precisely this fusion of poetic lyricism and political declaration that Duncan criticizes as the permission to propagandize under the protection of poetic licence. Yet this emphasis on the anecdotal lyric-cum-political documentary obfuscates the most interesting formal experiments of her protest verse.
Levertov is suspicious of the confessional mode. In an interview with Michael Andre, she observes that it often “exploit[s] the private life”: “I think the first poem in which I was largely autobiographical was in a group called ‘The Olga Poems’ about my sister and that will be reprinted in my new book. It seems to be a prelude to some of the later stuff and I want to get it all into one book” (“Denise Levertov: An Interview” 65). The volume she is referring to is To Stay Alive; in an introductory note to this work, Levertov expresses her decision to reposition “The Olga Poems” in this collection: “it assembles separated parts of a whole. And I am given courage to do so by the hope that the whole will be seen as having some value not as mere confessional autobiography but as a document of some historical value” (To Stay Alive ix). Levertov’s concern with poetic sequence resonates with an aesthetic shift in her writing towards techniques of appropriation and verbal collage. If “The Olga Poems” are indeed a “prelude” to something, it is the lyric “I” exposed to a multiplicity of poetic and non-poetic forms. In To Stay Alive, the author “assembles” autobiographical lyric with narrative modes, visual signs, and an intertextual network of quotations from friends, poets, and members of revolutionary collectives. Her long poem in the collection, “Staying Alive,” interweaves personal anecdote with excerpted manifestos, prose passages, and war reportage. The text features mimeographs, transistor radios, cassette recordings, and PA systems belting out a multiplicity of voices (SA 42, 47, 78).
At the centre of “Staying Alive” is a description of the “People’s Park,” a reference to the activist communities at Berkeley during the late 1960s. Yet the park also provides Levertov with an organizing metaphor for the text under construction. In a sense, the “field” of projective writing undergoes a subtle but important terminological adaptation. What is the difference between a field and a park? Both are suggestive of social interaction and play, but the park tends to emphasize festivity, and hence is the preferred site of picnics, festivals, rallies, carnivals, and protests. It is, indeed, more likely to evoke a public space of celebration. The etymological evolution of the word is instructive: initially referring to lands held by royal grant, the word in modern usage came to denote a site of “public recreation” (OED). One might understand Levertov’s adaptation of field composition and its operative social metaphor as an intensification of its capacity to accommodate a multiplicity of forms and expressions. Levertov describes the park:
May 14th, 1969 – Berkeley
Went with some of my students to work in the People’s Park. There seemed to be plenty of digging and gardening help so we decided, as Jeff had his truck available, to shovel up the garbage that had been thrown into the west part of the lot and take it out to the city dump.
…
– scooping up garbage together
poets and dreamers studying
joy together, clearing
refuse off the neglected, newly recognized,
humbly waiting ground, place, locus, of what could be our New World even now, our revolution, one and one and one and one together[.]
(SA 43–4)
There is no question that Levertov’s description romanticizes the social network at the park, but arguably the reference to the work undertaken to rebuild the site also unworks this mythologization by emphasizing a mixture of communal labour and celebration. In May of 1969 students and community activists at Berkeley expropriated unused university parklands for the creation of a space for demonstrations and communal gatherings. School administrators were largely tolerant of the actions taken by the students, which earned Berkeley the reputation of being “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants”59 – at least, this was the belief of the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Believing the appropriation of the park to be an illegal seizure of university property, and without the university chancellor’s consultation, on 15 May 1969 Reagan ordered 250 Berkeley police and California Highway Patrol officers into the People’s Park, erecting a fence around its perimeter. By noon some three thousand protesters had arrived at nearby Sproul Plaza for a rally and subsequent march towards the park. Levertov records the following conflict between students and police:
Thursday, May 15th
At 6 a.m. the ominous zooming, war-sound, of helicopters breaks into our
sleep.
To the Park:
ringed with police.
Bulldozers have moved in.
…
The fence goes up, twice a man’s height.
Everyone knows (yet no one yet
believes it) what all shall know
this day, and the days that follow:
now, the clubs, the gas,
bayonets, bullets. The War
comes home to us[.]
(SA 44–5)
By the end of the conflict, police had killed one person, while another was blinded and several were injured. The incident at the People’s Park instigated similar confrontations between Leftist organizations and government officials over control of public land and freedom of assembly rights.
The concept of the “Park” comes to constitute a set of formal practices in the text. Part 2 of the poem features a mimeographed leaflet of A.J. Muste’s message of peace, followed promptly by the appropriated speech of a young protester, Chuck Matthei, who declares that “[n]o one man can bring about a social change” (SA 42). Levertov applies a comparable logic to the poem itself, interweaving the text of a manifesto published in The Instant News, a publication affiliated with the Berkeley student protests, and the reproduced message from a Black Panther support button.60 The first provision of the Berkeley manifesto – “[b]e in the streets – they’re ours!” – aptly describes the public space of language she creates in the poem. The poet carefully assembles discourses of the war-resister movement, the Berkeley student movement, and the Black Panther Party. Levertov’s poetry of reportage chronicles these events, but just as important, the formal politics of her poem operates by converting the page into a site of public assembly, converting the poetic field into a park, and thus opposing the property relations that restrict the function of a university campus or a written text. Rather than conflate all of these communities into a singular identity expressed through a lone lyric voice, she employs collage in order to preserve their heterogeneity, generating a “chain of equivalence” (Mouffe and Laclau’s term) between collective entities in opposition to the Vietnam War and the U.S. government’s suppression of civil rights.
With her strategies of appropriation and collage in mind, it is instructive to recall that which Levertov emphasizes about projectivism: “writing is not a matter of one element supervising the others” but a mapping of the “interaction between the elements involved” (“Some Notes on Organic Form” 628). Collage functions by intersecting, overlapping, and juxtaposing formal elements, none of which receives primacy, nor does the amalgam created produce a homogeneous or autonomous entity. Levertov equates this practice with a model of social action, one that neither privileges the community by subordinating the individual to the state, nor a model that understands society as the aggregate of discreet selves. Collage assembles elements so that each is recognizable but only meaningful in relation to the assemblage within which it participates. Levertov asks of us to conceive of subjectivity in commensurate terms.
Despite Duncan’s suspicion of the war resistance, he was not opposed either to literary or political group action. He was a central figure in the Black Mountain and San Francisco scenes during the 1950s and 60s, and a vocal opponent of war. Moreover, anarchist theories of community had shaped the poet’s political orientation from the 1940s onward.61 Duncan’s refutation of the anti-war movement had to do with the form of rebellion it took, believing that such movements often end up mirroring the systems of power they seek to overthrow.
Duncan claims that poetry must refuse didacticism, if it is not merely to recapitulate party propaganda. The poem cannot instruct the reader to act; simply, it should expose and make evident the systems of coercion that organize and oppress communities. The system of power under scrutiny in Duncan’s 1960s verse is the “military-industrial complex” of which Eisenhower warns in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. In Bending the Bow (1968), Duncan identifies
not men but heads of the hydra
his false faces in which
authority lies
hired minds of private interests[.]
(“The Multiversity” BB 1–4)
These “faces,” the reader learns, are the “heads of the Bank of America,” “heads of usury,” “heads of war” (6, 8). President Johnson, too, is only a figurehead, joining the “great simulacra of men, / Hitler and Stalin” (“Up Rising” BB 1–2). Like the image of the hydra, the “simulacra of men” suggests that the appearance of plurality masks a singular source of power. For Duncan, this power is not any individual but instead the “business of war,” a system to which the heads of state (government), the heads of war (military), and the heads of usury (industry) ultimately submit.
Duncan’s blending of the mythological and the topical constitutes an attempt to abstract this system of power relationships from the lived experience of events:
The monstrous factories thrive upon the markets of the war,
and, as never before, the workers in armaments, poisond
gasses and engines of destruction, ride
high on the wave of wages and benefits. Over all,
the monopolists of labor and the masters of the swollen
ladders of interest and profit survive.
The first Evil is that which has power over you.
Coercion, that is Ahriman.
In the endless Dark the T. V. screen,
the lying speech and pictures selling its time and produce,
corpses of its victims burnd black by napalm
– Ahriman, the inner need for the salesman’s pitch – [.]
(“The Soldiers” BB 82–93)
“Ahriman,” a concept borrowed from Zoroastrian theology, signifies “destructive spirit.” For Duncan, Ahriman is not a personification but a force embodying subjects and systems in the greater processes of history. In a contemporary American context, the forces of coercion emerge and re-emerge in the “speech[es] and pictures” of political pundits and the “salesman’s pitch” of war profiteers. President Johnson’s advocacy for war is a pre-packaged formula: “Johnson now, no inspired poet but making it badly, / amassing his own history in murder and sacrifice / without talent / … the bloody verse America writes over Asia” (“The Soldiers” BB 32–4, 37). Duncan’s tactic is akin to Olson’s critique of “Mu-sick” – the role of the political poet is to expose those “who use words cheap” (“Letter 3” MP 1:9). To follow the lines of power, one must pursue not only the war of flesh, but also the war of industry, information, technology, the war of markets. Topical writing alone is myopic, according to Duncan. If war is the ultimate instrument of a given system to discipline and dominate populations, then a poetry of witness is misguided, since what needs to be witnessed is precisely the modes of power that underscore acts of oppression.
According to Duncan’s letters to Levertov, he would have his readers believe that the descriptive exposition of power’s techniques is the arena of the poet, and not the prescriptive formula of an organized rebellion against it. Yet the reader of texts like Bending the Bow cannot help but notice the frequency with which Duncan evokes the “hidden community” and the “commune of Poetry,” beset on all sides by capitalism’s “terror and hatred of all communal things, of communion, of communism” (“Up Rising” 32–3; “Preface” vi; “Multiversity” 62). Duncan’s letters indicate his familiarity with the work of anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin and, especially, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, whose concept of the “volitional politic” he cites frequently (The Letters 542, 568, 629ff). In Vanzetti’s letters, the anarchist thinker emphasizes the necessity of human agency, “but I wholly share of your confidence in co-operatives, and, what is more, in real co-operatives, free initiative, both individual and collective. Mutual aid and co-operation … shall be the very base of a completely new social system, or else, nothing is accomplished” (Frankfurter, Denman, and Jackson, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti 143). Duncan repeats a version of this pronouncement in Bending the Bow:
Where there is no commune,
the individual volition has no ground.
Where there is no individual freedom, the commune
is falsified.
(“The Multiversity” BB 32–5)
Vanzetti’s letters suggest a practice of community that synthesizes individualism with social anarchistic principles of “mutual aid” and “cooperation.” For Duncan, community and individualism are not antithetical but codependent; his “longing” for a community that “moves beyond governments to a co-operation” must be founded on the “free association of living things” (“Ideas” 90). Poetic propaganda establishes a false community because it robs the individual of the volition to formulate her own position, and thus the voluntary commitment to a communal ideal.62
Recalling Olson’s premise that a poetics must express a “stance toward reality,” Duncan remarks similarly in “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” that freedom – the “free association of living things” – “may have seeds of being in free verse” (90). The possibility of “variable forms[,] … when they are most meaningful,” possess “the same volition of reality that Vanzetti means in his voluntarism” (The Letters 568). For Duncan, the commune not only represented a way of life, it served as the foundation of his practice of writing: projectivist writing, he insists, has the capacity to manifest anarchist notions of communal life at the level of poetic form.
Towards the end of the 1960s and with the publication of Bending the Bow, Duncan’s approach to serial composition had also undergone radical changes. Like Levertov, Duncan experimented with serial arrangements, often repositioning texts in subsequent volumes. The sequence of poems he calls “Passages” weave through Bending the Bow, Tribunals, and Ground Work: Before the War, while certain sequences, such as the “War” passages, were additionally published as separate volumes. Duncan subverts the linear arrangement of his collections in order to generate a “new process of response”: each text is “conceived as a member of every other part, having, as in a mobile, an interchange of roles” (“Preface” BB ix). The principal images in Bending the Bow – fields, mobiles, communes, and constellations – echo this design. Again, not unlike Levertov’s use of verbal collage, Duncan stresses systems and social configurations of interdependence: each text is partially autonomous and partially connected, conveying Duncan’s assertion that community requires both individual volition and mutual aid.
I mention earlier that Duncan, like Levertov, Olson, and Creeley, understood poetic convention to be akin to a “government” imposing order on a community of words: “some set of rules and standards that will bring the troubling plenitude of experience ‘within our power’” (“Ideas” 103). Duncan sought a poetry capable of representing a more flexible arrangement of poetic elements. Indeed, if the poem is a “free association,” then its design must imitate open collectivities:
The design of a poem
constantly
under reconstruction,
changing, pusht forward;
alternations of sound, sensations;
the mind dance
wherein thot shows its pattern:
a proposition
in movement.
The design
not in the sense of a treachery or
deception
but of a conception betrayd,
without a plan,
…
reveald in its pulse and
durations[.]
(“An Essay at War” [1951] 1–14, 18–19)
With Duncan’s understanding of the politics of form in mind, the “design of the poem” expresses the principles of the “commune”: community’s open definition, a “proposition” continuously changing, “without” a predetermined “plan.” The most often quoted principle of projective writing, that a content should determine its form, articulates a practice of living.
In describing the projects of these writers, it is enticing to sentimentalize about a poetry of protest in opposition to state and corporate power. It is clear from both writers that community is something continuously fought for and under threat. Levertov speaks of a “momentary community” (SA 77); she finds it emerging among a group of young war resisters (21–8), again among Sudanese activists in Rijeka (68, 77), and once more in the clandestine conversations of protestors at the Juche Revolutionary Bookstore (77). Like Creeley’s “conditions” of ethical obligation to the friend, there is the “inexhaustible wish” for an infinite openness to the other that violently collides with the restrictions that delimit such a desire. These pronouncements retain a degree of preciousness if they are not tested within concrete circumstances – a town such as Gloucester, the formation of friendships amid the ravages of war, or a protest besieged by the state.
What, then, shall we say is the meaning of Black Mountain? A reductive question to be sure, but we should hazard an answer. Its import, I believe, can be found in open form writing as a cultural poetics fusing localism and freedom. For Olson, Creeley, Levertov, and Duncan any element that enters the field of the poem must count equally. Every element is afforded an unqualified equality among all others. This is taken up as a poetic practice and a political project, insofar as poetic discourse is meant to reconfigure the space of social experience. If these poets explore the idea of a mobile, permeable community, it is unqualified equality that allows such a political configuration to come into being. To this end, the Black Mountain poets give the mobile community another meaning. To say that community is “provisional” is to acknowledge that it is often makeshift, limited to a finite set of resources, under pressure, and often only partially successful. The title of Levertov’s collection, To Stay Alive, speaks at once to a community both as ideal and as pragmatic solution. It is within these terms that critics should understand the politics of projective verse. Open form does not imply a poetry without rules, or that the poet works with unlimited freedoms; rather, field composition responds to the demands of a concrete historical moment. To “work in OPEN” means to forge a poetic writing within an immediate context, using whatever resources are locally available, using whatever ideas, images, technologies, and collaborators present themselves within a field of action for use. A great body of criticism has been written dealing with Black Mountain’s influence on a truly daunting array of poets and literary scenes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Poets affiliated with the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, Black Arts, and the poets of Women’s Liberation all cite its important contributions. And although the mechanics of open form is said to link these practices, more specifically it is the fusion of field composition with an explicitly socio-political objective that connects these poets: Baraka’s Black militancy; O’Hara’s cosmopolitan camp; the anti-war writings of Ginsberg; and the feminist poetics of Rich, Grahn, Morgan, and others, who, in bidding farewell to the New Left, take open form writing with them.
We will return to this crucial act of appropriation in chapter 4, but first let us address the Cold War’s consequences for communities beyond the borders of the United States. Turning now to the Caribbean Artists Movement, the reader will find no conscious influence or explicit intertextual link between the poets discussed in the chapter just completed and the one now to commence (Brathwaite wrote with no knowledge of Black Mountain). In a sense, the book begins again from a different geographic and social location. From the local environs of a small college in North Carolina we move to the cosmopolitan milieu of London, England; from a group composed largely of white American writers negotiating Cold War containment within the world’s most powerful empire to a group of mainly Black Caribbean poets displaced (some voluntarily, some involuntarily) to the United Kingdom. One should remember that Cold War ideology – like the Bush doctrine in the wake of the September 11th attacks – influenced the immigration policy of innumerable countries, patterns of migration, and global policies defining the status of the refugee. If the Cold War’s reach is global, then we will need to move from Creeley’s surrounding “darkness” to the walls erected to keep Brathwaite’s “arrivants” out.