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Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and Quantum Physics

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/camqtly/bfz028

1471-6836

Dominic Hand,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Charles Olson was one of the most significant poets of the post-war American period. He is best known for his epic work The Maximus Poems – an immense, quasi-autobiographical and cosmological poetic project, which ruminates on the power of place, space, and the shaping tides of American history – which Olson began in the mid-1940s but left unfinished at his death in 1970. His poetic corpus is one of the more complex of the period, and his later poetry made significant advances upon Ezra Pound’s pioneering use of counterpoint and parataxis within lyricism in the Cantos, similarly unfinished. In 1948, Olson was given a professorship at Black Mountain College, the influential experimental arts school in North Carolina. There, he joined a coterie of prominent avant-gardists such as John Cage, Cy Twombly, Buckminster Fuller, Josef and Anni Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allen Ginsberg. Olson brought with him revolutionary theories about language and poetic composition, which were circulated through the college’s literary cénacles, particularly among the poets Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan. These writers were later contextualised within Donald Allen’s era-defining anthology The New American Poetry, and are sometimes grouped as the ‘Projectivist poets’.1 ‘Projective Verse’, far and away Olson’s most influential essay, was published in 1950 and outlined his notions of poetry as an energetic and dynamic process.2 The essay was a powerful riposte to still dominant ideas of poetry as an art of closed form and technical artifice. Olson proposed that a poem be a ‘field’, within which perceptions circulate and co-produce each other. He argued that poetry should be guided by the physiological and musical rhythms of breath and its ‘projective’ qualities rather than by any metrical composition by numbers or the traditions of ‘inherited line, stanza, over-all form’.3 At the core of Olson’s theory of projective verse was energy, which he also referred to as ‘kinetics’. Projective poetry was a dynamic throwing-forth and a powerful outward push; an enactment of ‘energy transferred from where the poet got it … by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader’.4 Olson formulated the production of poetic energy as ‘composition by field’. In this respect, his theories also drew upon certain modernist methodologies, particularly Pound’s championing of the musical phrase over metronomic form, and William Carlos Williams’s theorisation of poetry as a ‘field of action’.5 For Olson, however, every poetic element (syllable, line, image, sound, and sense) participated in the co-production of the poem’s whole ‘kinetic’ field – its matrix of extensive movement and ongoing change.