Through an 'Open Field'

...Reviewed by donald sutherland Author, "Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work" It has been too easy, if one does not follow the movements of modern poetry closely, to miss the crucial importance of Charles Olson...

...2S0 Park Ave...

...Nov in Paperback S1.9S...

...And the variability is the greater the less public the conditions that go to create the energy of the content...

...Pound and Williams kept their distances????marked off by world history or private practice in New Jersey?which now seem, compared to Olson and his followers, insulated and dead spaces...

...More has been done by Olson's followers and other poets one can reasonably associate with the movement-Robert Duncan, James Broughton, Helen Adam, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dick Higgins????but I think they all stay within the art of the single voice, no matter how many choruses and characters get into the act, and the plays, no matter how eventfully staged, do not go beyond the lyric...

...One has, practically, to make up one's mind about that...

...Cloth SS.7S BIOGRAPHY OF THE SODS by A. Eustace Haydon, former Head of Religion Department, University of Chicago, Leader Emeritus, Ethical Culture Society FREDERICK UNGAR PUBLISHING CO...

...Olson's theory of projective or activist verse coincides with the practice and program of action painting and those of aleatory music...

...I still cannot get past these prejudices into his poetry, and am reduced to distant admiration of occasional passages and phrases, but like anyone else I am surrounded by his theory and his peculiar force and manner of thinking...

...I had thought, hastily, that he was one more New England writer with a saline glitter of mind backed by the certainties of Harvard and obsessed both with local detail and, for balance, with the Tropics, in his case Gloucester and the Maya Indians...

...Even the severe schematics of so terminally pedantic a "neatnik" as Josef Albers retain a vibration of color and a poise of proportion as their major interest...

...In 1957, I studied up on what seemed to be going on in modern poetry and came out with a perspicacious enough analysis of the attitudes and techniques of the avant-garde, only to find a few years later that my best notions had already been formulated, with more acuity, in a manifesto by Charles Olson on "projective" verse and the "open field" published in 1950...

...Olson is beautifully clear about all this...

...But for poetry, the problem of keeping the particles of energy at their true degrees and interrelated by some sort of continuity or pervasiveness over the whole field is only partly solved by the most consequential corollary of his theory, the notion of "breath...

...Perhaps the most impressive thing about him, along with his extraordinary immediacy of mind, is his being unreservedly inside present situations, in touch and at the scene, personally and with all his faculties...

...Nevertheless, Albee is trying to get action incorporated into his lyrical tirades, and we may be repeating the course of Greek drama, from the lyrical dithyramb to full tragedy...

...Olson's little dance with words is, I think, perfectly impossible theater, hung up on the ritual and symbolical stuff of Yeats for one thing, but it is an excellent study of certain lyrical possibilities within a theatrical convention, assimilating narrative and discourse, even scholarship in the manner of Pound...

...They are a triumph of the single voice, and in America appealing^ old-fashioned, like revivalists or silver-tongued orators or a vaudeville turn...

...He, Pollock and Kline, and John Cage, were all variously associated with the Black Mountain College venture, a very seductive fact for the historian of cultural movements, but also a sign that what we are dealing with now is a quite general theory, which has its correspondences to life at large, not an isolated technical squabble among the bards...

...The "happening" is a direct derivative, and the pop arts hardly do more than organize the field by magnetic or explosive figures, with the maximum "projection" toward the audience...

...Each turn of syntax is a very lively event, surprising and exciting and telling, as it does not follow the logical progress with any docility, is everlastingly on the shy, as it were, but does not wander off and get lost????as perhaps it should, in theory and in the interests of discovery...

...he treated his staggering address at Berkeley as a political convention or a performance comparable to one by Sammy Davis...

...It does have a kind of intensity by isolation and disconnection or small associations within a phrase, but its interrelations or crossreferences over the whole magnetic field depend too much on specific, largely private emotion about the content, of each particle...

...The theory proposes that the work consist of its irreducible physical materials-syllable, touch of pigment, a sound—understood as energies eventuating and interacting in a relatively "open field" with little predetermination by a formal scheme if not altogether at random...

...It certainly did, so that a whole varied modern movement wore and still wears the quite legible signs of that first powerful formulation...

...So far, I believe, it remains an art of the single voice, as of the ode or incantation or public address, and we have a sort of lyric rather than dramatic theater...

...In any case, so much of his work I eat up with a spoon...

...The manifesto was "merely to get things started...

...Op, too, depends entirely on the visual event...

...These Selected Writings also contain an adroit sampling of his poetry, some very lively and penetrating letters on the archaeology of Yucatan, a play or dance with words on Appollonius of Tyana, and essays on the Human Universe, Melville, the late verification of Shakespeare, etc...

...Not only has his publication been scattered, but when you do come across his work it can seem to disappear under that of his predecessors like Pound and W. C. Williams, or behind that of his more lurid followers like Allen Ginsberg, or more purely lyric like Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan...

...In Olson's prose, where there is after all a general drift or drive of discourse, the independent energy of each word is more appreciable...

...On the jacket of this book it is called "epoch-making" ????with no exaggeration...

...Breath is taken for an inward rhythm of energy regulating the voice of the poet under its most varied expression?a more vital equivalent of an external metric or the conventions of phrase, sentence, paragraph...

...And after 17 years it is still a hot issue, not just a monument to be tended by graduate students in American Lit...

...The poem, commited to print, is incomplete, not only because it becomes a sort of vocal score awaiting performance but because, from the page, one can rarely tell whether the poet has emphysema or the indefatigable wind of Allen Ginsberg...

...He was, at that rate, beyond my interest, and as a follower with a few reservations of Ezra Pound, well beyond my sympathies...

...The word as a particle of energy is not readily appreciable if it does not occur within or in some relation to a larger scheme of metric or discourse...

...I was going to object to the thin sensuality in his poetry, a very strange phenomenon considering his insistence on particulars of experience, and his devotion to Melville and D. H. Lawrence, not to mention the Maya Indians...

...If so, Charles Olson will have had a great deal to do with it...

...But a more sensuous poetry might have less energy, and certainly in a dramatic poetry to come the mobility of the words, if Olson remains a precedent, will be the higher and less encumbered...

...The natural and traditional place for the poetry of the living voice is not so much the revivalist's tent, the convention hall, or the Chautauqua Circuit, as the theater, and of course this kind of poetry is taking the theater on...

...All this gives, at last, a clear idea of Olson's wide range of mind, and also his consistency of temper throughout, his note...

...At least for the time being...

...S, New York 10003 "A fascinating study . . ." New York Times...

...It helped none that he is of Swedish descent and I of Norwegian...

...The poem has to fulfill itself in recitation, where the living voices of the poet or of a congenial interpreter can get all these energies and their modulations finally straight and clear...

...And why should they...

...For poetry the theory has been enormously productive, and a source of difficulties...

...The word "codfish" does not have the degree of porten-tousness and romance in Omaha, Nebraska, that it has in Gloucester, Massachusetts...

...A quickie and at once over...

...There is not much in later movements to date that does not derive from this basic apprehension or reckon with it directly...

...I happen to detest poetry recitations, but their tradition goes back to Homer and they are currently a great success both in theory and in practice...