Picking up the injuns: poetics as transformation

I have been thinking about poetics lately. Mostly this thinking was provoked by the work that Victor Coleman and I did editing Robert Duncans The H.D. Book. It has been proposed by some that The HD Book was Duncans attempt at literary theory and by others at literary history. In the course of editing the book it became abundantly clear that although Duncans work participates in both--certainly the history more so than the theory--it is primarily concerned neither with history nor theory. It is in fact a quest for a poetics. This, in any case, is what Duncan calls it. Quest, from the same Latin root as question and query, is a search. Of course the history of the word turns it for Duncan into a kind of romance, a romance he enacts in the 700+ pages of the book with fidelity and imagination. This idea of a quest has something to do with the imagination of the ground of poetry. The idea of a quest for a poetics suggests that achieving such a thing is the outcome not so much of thinking or rethinking as of being. For Duncan, this orientation (in Henry Corbins sense of turning towards an inner rising sun, an inner Orient) took him through a particular literary history (the history of the forgetting of women at the inception of what we still call, I think, high modernism as it continues to feed our own writing.) It took him through reclamations of other hidden histories and hidden minds. That was the first stage of his quest. The second, which occupies Book 2 of The HD Book, involved following that into an event, committing himself to the transformations that arose out the passage through that occulted material. The third stage was Roots and Branches and Bending the Bow, and the work that followed. I wanted to lead this through Duncan into some thoughts about Olsons sense of a poetics because I think that there is a similar commitment to an actual transformationthe kind of transformation that took place in the Alchemists cruciblethat is crucial to both mens work. There are obvious and important differences between the two poets, one of them having to do with the significance of body to Olsons work and Romance to Duncans, the other having to do with the way Olson orients himself in relation to the thinking of before, whereas Duncan is focused on the thinking of

within. That may finally be a bogus distinction, but just let it stand for the moment as a way of noting a difference and well see what happens with it. In a piece I presented to the Vancouver Olson conference earlier in the summer, I read Olsons little book, Proprioception, as an attempt to defend and develop what he calls an American secularization that loses nothing of the divine. His joining of two words that we would normally assume to be mutually exclusive is telling. We tend to operate in a frame of mind where secularization and divine cannot coexist in the same space. In fact, the growth of secularization in the West is measured precisely in terms of the recession of the divine, whats been called the disenchantment of the world. But here is Olson, linking them and doing so in relation to his thinking about what we call the body. Secular and divine in this sense are what William Blake called opposites as they operate in the imagination of modernity. For Blake it was more complex, part of an understanding of the visionary states we move through. What we think of as the secular Blake identified with Ulro or two-fold vision. It is the imagination of a barren world, a world stripped of depth and left to the meager measurements of Newtons calipers. Blake sometimes pictured Ulro as a man and woman tied together back to back. To bring them into another relation where they yield to, say, an embrace, is to open the imagination to another dimension, the threefold. For Blake, it was Beulah, an erotically charged vision of a complex living world. Olson imagined it in Proprioception as a new body, which is to say a new being in the world that could lead into a furtherness, say, the four fold. Al Glover suggested to me that the different modes of the four fold as they appear in the work of Olson, Blake, Medieval theories of exegesis, and Jack Clarke are perhaps fundamentally incommensurable with each other. But for Jack Clarke, I think, at least my sense of Jack, the isomorphism of Blakes four fold vision and the traditional Medieval four level exegesis, for example, (or the Buddhist Kayassometimes three, sometimes four) testify to a deep common rhythm where the four fold and the anagogical resonate with a similar experience. Whitmans wave, maybe. In any case, each of these modes of thinking about perception and knowledge are similarly grounded on the understanding of a movement

toward a deeper and richer experience of the world, one that is lost to us in the various materialisms and positivisms of modernity. Olsons imagination of body, which he puts in quotes to distinguish it from our usual sense of body, is a surface, a single surface, which, through invagination and evagination, folding and unfolding creates out of itself a complexity of organs and cavities. What we think of, and have thought of, as the contents of a vessel--consciousness, the unconscious, self, soul, mind--arise in Olsons sense of body out of the movement and frictions of this complex surface--absolutely integral to it. It is a bodymind, in the same way the world is seculardivine. This is a crucial move for Olson who was in quest of a poetics that escaped the trap of traditional notions of form and content (and their opposites), what Whitehead called the bifurcation of nature into mind and matter. Form and content, in that context, become part of a cosmology that is based on a world of mutually exclusive opposites, a Cartesian cage. It was suggested in Vancouver that my presentation of Olsons sense of body was a mystification of something called a natural body and was ignorant of contemporary theories of the socially constructed body and of the self as so-called subject positions erected by something called society in those construction projects. Michel Foucault was one of the early sources for this thinking of discursive bodies. What he left us was a brilliant critique of modernity and the Cartesian subject. As a critique, though, it is in relation to that order, a site of demolition as its been called, not beyond it. Even the structure of the argument which sets up something called essentialism as the mutually exclusive opposite of something called constructivism locates it as part of an anti-Cartesian structure. The notion of the self as a subject position, moreover, socially imposed on a body still locates them in a dualistic discourse that is anchored firmly in relation to that old humanism that begins with the distinction between self and society. Olson does give us a critique--in Mayan Letters he calls it Original stupidity, in contrast to something called Original sin. But the thrust of his thinking is toward a way out of that treacherous mental trap toward something further. It is a poets thinking, a poets technique--a quest for a poetics. In Proprioception Olson also addressed something he calls society, going so far as to give us a theory of society, though it is hardly recognizable as anything sociological. His push here, as always in

his quest for a poetics, was toward specificity and away from generalizations. As he wrote to Robert Creeley, what they were pissing at in their intense correspondence, was how to make the object yield dimension. This was where he located the possibility of a seculardivine. Anything that robbed the object of its specificity was the enemy of that process. And, crucially, the self was no more than any other object--merely another singular, irreducible force in a field of forces. This was an attempt at a postCartesian move toward the possibility of a bodymindself beyond the limits of modernitys disciplines and resistances. For Olson, that meant going back in order to figure out how to go further. Or this, in any case, is how he put it in the letters to Creeley that were published as the Mayan Letters. I have heard the Mayan Letters described as ethnology and cited as evidence of Olson as ethnologist. I would respectfully suggest thats bunkum. Charles Olson was never anything other than a poet. Ethnology, as one of those Enlightenment inventions like sociology (which Olson identified in his Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn as a lot of shit), is deeply rooted in modernitys addiction to binaries (its foundational gesture being the creation of an Other suitable for study), and to some lingering notion of objectivity (and, of course, subjectivity) that are crucial to its sense of itself as a science, albeit a social science as they call them. Olson never had any interest in those terms or the disciplines that authorize them, especially the idea of science as a rigorous method of investigating an objective world (although he was sympathetic to a Whiteheadian visionary science). How can I pick up these injuns, he asks Creeley, most unscientifically, and then later, by way of further explanation, for their nouns, undone, are my nouns. In other words, his complex interest in the Mayans began not with a sense of objective distance or study but with a sense of identification and the desire for transformation. The Mayans were not other to him; they were a mysterious possibility of his self, a further unfolding. This identification was a sign of his quest for a poetics that would reorient his self, reconstitute it. As is well known, Olson always thought of our condition as the outer limit of a box that got put together sometime around 1200 BCE. To imagine the postmodern (as he famously put it), Olson turned to the archaic, both modes of being outside the box. If Sumer was the high water mark of human civilization and

the back wall of the box, it rested on the foundation of Pleistocene man (our evolutionary sweet spot, as I heard it put on the CBC this summer) as Olson drove further back seeking an imagination of being in the world that could give rise to a new poetic energy. The Maya were another instance of that, one that offered him a literal entrance through a handson encounter with the actual material remains of their culture, an American culture at that, which, following his work with Melville, who constituted the front wall of that same box, became an important condition (Olsons sense of America always included the whole enchilada, pole to pole). The Mayan Letters are remarkable not for some ethnographic description of a cultural other, but for their record of a poets struggle to pick up the injuns: I have been in the field, away from people, working around stones in the sun, putting my hands into the dust and fragments and pieces of those Maya who used to live here down and along this road. . . . The big thing . . . is the solidity of the sense of their lives one can get right here in the fields and on the hill which rises quite steeply from the shore. Tellingly, from having his hands deep in the Yucatan earth digging up pieces of the Maya, Olson then dives into a critique of Pound and Williams, the Scylla and Charybdis of his imagination of the condition of poetry he inherited. He finds the failures of Pound and Williams in their inability to grasp the substantive change in history and their failure to realign their methods in relation to the new materials. Pounds ego, while turning time into space, lost all emotional diversity. Williams, while opening his poem to emotion, gave up space to the singularity of Patterson. Olson ties both problems to what he calls the question of nomination and then turns to his reading of Mayan glyphs as an alternative because they were hot for the world they lived in & hot to get it down by way of a language which is loaded to the gills of the FIRST GLYPH with that kind of imagination which the kerekters have a way of calling creative. . . . What continues to hold me, is, the tremendous levy on all objects as they present themselves to human sense, in this glyph-world. And the proportion, the distribution of weight given same parts of all, seem, exceptionally, distributed & accurate . . . And the weights of same, each to the other, is, immaculate (as well as, full)

Olson moves here toward an experience of language beyond the representational (and nonrepresentational, its opposite). Each word cum glyph, each nomination as he encounters it in the glyph-world embodies the fullness of the experience of, the disposition of, the world in language. It is an experience of specificity, of language not as limit or restriction, but as the stuff of creation. It is a move, I would argue, toward what he calls in Proprioception, the secular that loses nothing of the divine, a language that incarnates the ineffable in the specific materials of the world. Not surprisingly, at least from my standpoint, what I am calling the bodymindself entered Olsons thinking here at a crucial juncture. I ought to get off to you about the flesh here, he wrote to Creeley in the midst of a rant about North Americas obsession with improvement. BUT the way the bulk of them (the unimproved) wear their flesh. . . . the flesh is worn as a daily thing, like the sun, is--& only in this sense--a common, carried as the other things are, for use. He went on, The result . . . is, that the individual peering out from that flesh is precisely himself, is a curious wandering animal. If Olsons language here still struggled against the tendency to describe the experience in terms of an inner and outer, the thrust of his thinking was clearly toward an experience of the whole fleshy self as he encountered it and absorbed it among the descendants of the Maya: jeesus, when you are rocked, by the roads, against any of them - kids, women, men - its so very gentle, so granted, the feel, of touch - none of that pull, away, which, in the States caused me, for so many years, the deepest sort of questions about my own structure, the complex of my own organism, I felt so very much this admission these people now give me. This admission, as he called it, is, I am suggesting, a kind a transubstantiation, an alchemical transformation of the whole self into a new being, one that is like the Mayan as he was able to recover that--and through that recovery discover the ground of his poetics, freed from the failures of Pound and Williams, especially in relation to history: The capacity for (1) the observation & (2) the invention has no more to do with brick or no wheels or metal or stone than you or i are different from, sd peoples: we are like. Therefore, there is no history.

I am back to where I started, then, with the proposition that poetics is not a theory, its not thought or rethought--it is a condition of being that the poet wins through struggle. Duncan`s quest for that new condition led him into what was hidden all around us, what he called the occult--hidden histories, hidden mind, hidden processes--as a way to open the hidden dimensions of the world into his careful music. Olson`s quest led him back as a way further out into possibilities--necessities, really--of the world to come. There is no better place to end this then than deep in Maximus

No Greek will be able to discriminate my body.

An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.

I have this sense, that I am one with my skin

Plus thisplus this: that forever the geography which leans in on me I compell backwards I compell Gloucester to yield, to change

Polis is this Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]