The Charles Olson Reader

Ian Brinton, PN Review, issue 167, January - February 2006
Black Mountain in England
Ralph Maud's A Charles Olson Reader, recently published by Carcanet, will probably stand for some years to come as the most intelligent and informative introduction to the American poet's life and work that is available. In his introduction Maud refers to Charles Tomlinson's special issue of Ian Hamilton's magazine of poetry and criticism, The Review. As the guest editor, in January 1964, Tomlinson produced an anthology of work related to the Black Mountain poets including poems by Olson, Zukofsky, Dorn and Levertov, Robert Duncan's essay 'Notes on Poetics' and an interview between the editor and Robert Creeley. It was particularly appropriate that this introduction to American poetry should have been taken on by Charles Tomlinson since the work of the British poet had been more readily recognised in the States than in his own country. Tomlinson's volume, The Necklace, had been published in 1955 by the Fantasy Press and in his absorbing autobiographical sketches, 'Some Americans: A Personal Record' (published in the volume American Essays: Making It New, Carcanet 2001), he suggests that it 'would not have appeared then, had Donald Davie not contributed an introduction.' Hugh Kenner reviewed the volume in the summer 1956 issue of Poetry and, as Tomlinson points out, by the date of the review 'I had virtually completed a full-scale collection, Seeing is Believing, adding a few more poems to the manuscript in the following year. This book found no English publisher--I tried most of them--until 1960.' With Kenner's assistance the manuscript went off to a new publishing house in New York, McDowell Obolensky, and in the winter of 1957 they accepted it for publication.
In Tomlinson's interview with Creeley some discussion takes place concerning the nature of reading with Tomlinson recalling that Creeley's own poem 'I Know a Man' had been referred to in the Times Literary Supplement. Tomlinson remembers that 'where the name John occurs and someone says "for Christ's sake", in the TLS account, both John and Christ had to be gone into on a very symbolic level. I think this is the kind of thing the English tend to do when they read Williams, when they read Pound, when they read you: they can't take what you're presenting--they must somehow try to dig down for something which they think ought to be there and they get frustrated when they find it isn't.' Creeley's response to this posits the view that 'that's partly due to the fact that the two cultures are separated really by the terms of a whole spiritual environment. I mean, when one lives in the States, even so recently as, say, my own childhood, the terms of that environment are most usually ones that demand an immediate recognition of facts and substantial data in that environment. Now this is what Williams meant, I think, when he said, "No ideas but in things". It's the old characteristic that has become so associated with American pragmatism.' Inevitably this recognition of facts leads to discussion of localism and Tomlinson registers the difficulty some English readers have with Williams's interpretation of environment as placed in New Jersey. Creeley's reply is central:
Well, I know, for example, of your own interest in Machado, and I certainly think of Chaucer and a number of other major figures of all nationalities who depended on, let's say, a very particular, close local reference for the substance of their detail. This has been remarked over and over and I don't think Williams' emphasis upon a body of local detail has limited him any more than it has Chaucer or Machado...I'm sentimental enough to believe that one proceeds from the immediate and particular--this is where the universal is to be embodied, if anywhere.
In February 1957 Tomlinson had incorporated this idea into his own 'Sea Poem' which he sent to Williams, prompting the reply:
'Sea Poem' is a fine piece that impresses me both for its scholarly composition in the English sense of the term and for its generosity toward the American idiom and all it implies for me...
The poem was the first of Tomlinson's experiments with the Williams three-ply line:
A whiter bone:
the sea-voice
in a multiple monody
crowding towards that end.
It is as if
the transparencies of sound
composing such whiteness
disposed many layers
with a sole movement
of the various surface,
the depths, bottle-glass green
the bed, swaying
like a fault in the atmosphere, each
shift
with its separate whisper, each whisper
a breath of that singleness
that 'moves together
if it moves at all',
and its movement is ceaseless,
and to one end--
the grinding
a whiter bone.
Tomlinson was not simply imitating Williams and as he puts it in Some Americans, 'it was the three-ply poems that appealed to me most, perhaps because they afforded the possibility of a more meditative movement.' 'Sea Poem' has an English echo contained in its awareness of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 in the sound and wording of 'crowding towards that end' and the reference to Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence' in the moving together 'if it move at all'. Richard Swigg points out in Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition (Associated University Presses,1994).
Where the whole is seen via the part and the part reverberates within the whole, the Wordsworthian quotation gains further resonance inside Tomlinson's new verse-tune. It speaks of the tremulous balance between self and the world, local and universal, besides offering resistance to mere flux and fatalism--as Wordsworth sees in the consoling strength of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor.
Some three months after the publication of the Black Mountain Poets issue of The Review Tomlinson published 'One World' in the second number of The Resuscitator where he appeared alongside Olson, Corman and Zukofsky:
One world you say
eyeing the way the air
inherits it. The year
is dying and the grass
dead that the sunlight burnishes
and breeds distinctions in. Against
its withered grain the shadow
pits and threads it, and your one
lies tracked and tussocked, disparate,
abiding in, yet not obedient
to your whim. Your quiet ministers
to windless air, but the ear
pricks at an under-stir
as the leaves clench tighter
in their shrivellings. The breath of circumstance
is warm, a greeting in their going
and under each death, a birth.
Whilst there is a clear memory here of Williams's poem from the 1923 volume, Spring And All, 'By the road to the contagious hospital' there is also that particular English echo of Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight' which 'performs its secret ministry,/Unhelped by any wind'.
In Tomlinson's introduction to the Black Mountain anthology he refers to The Black Mountain Review, published 1954-57 and edited by Creeley:
It transmitted what was viable in the post-Williams, post-Pound era; its poetry deepened, among other things, our sense of what Olson called the projective, our sense of the syllable and of the breath.
Tomlinson was introduced to Olson's 'Projective Verse' in 1960 when he was sent a copy by his friend Fred Siegal and in a review of books about Olson for the TLS on 14/12/79 he comments:
'Projective Verse' still seems to me, for all its unevenness, a genuine attempt to measure where things stood with verse in the late 1940s. it is certainly a work of discipleship and one can track many of its formulations to Pound's 'Treatise on Metre' and to Williams's manifesto statements. But Olson knew this: his intention in 'Projective Verse' was not originality, but the extending of a tradition forward from the two masters he acknowledged and quoted as openly in his work as Pope did Dryden and Milton.
His recognition of the importance of Olson's work is also registered by his inclusion of Robert Duncan's 'Notes on Poetics: Regarding Olson's "Maximus"' in the Black Mountain anthology. He calls it 'one of the most trenchant works of aesthetic theory from the Black Mountain ambience...It brings together brilliantly strands from both Olson and Zukofsky and will, one trusts, send the reader back to their prose.' Duncan suggests that 'conception cannot be abstracted from doing; beauty is related to the beauty of an archer hitting the mark':
Referred to its source in the act, the intellect actually manifest as energy, as presence in doing, is the measure of our artt (as vision, claritas, light, illumination, was the measure of Medieval artt)).
Duncan goes on to quote from 'Letter 7' of The Maximus Poems, written in April 1953 at Black Mountain, where Olson refers to the American painter Marsden Hartley:
In 'Maximus', Olson points to Marsden Hartley: 'to get that rock in paint'--a getting, a taking grasp, a hand that is the eye. 'But what he did with that bald jaw of stone'. 'Did with', not 'saw in'. And here Olson comes to the hand--Hartley's hand. Jake's hand: 'a man's hands,/as his eyes'.
This energy of grasp is reflected in Tomlinson's own poem, 'Swimming Chenango Lake', written in September 1967 and published in The Way of a World, Oxford 1969:
But he has looked long enough, and now
Body must recall the eye to its dependence
As he scissors the waterscape apart
And sways it to tatters. Its coldness
Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp,
For to swim is also to take hold
On water's meaning, to move in its embrace
And to be, between grasp and grasping, free.
He reaches in-and-through to that space
The body is heir to, making a where
In water, a possession to be relinquished
Willingly at each stroke.
As Richard Swigg makes clear:
The observer visually, like the swimmer physically, enters that changeful flux, but still retains an unsubmerged awareness...The self is not anarchically doing what it likes and has kinship with Lawrence's idea of freedom in the American Studies, when one is bound by place and obedient to the 'IT', the 'deepest self'.
In The Poem as Initiation: An Address delivered at Phi Beta Kappa Convocation, Colgate University, 30 October 1967, Tomlinson speaks about 'Swimming Chenango Lake' linking it to a Hopi initiation ceremony where a child's coming of age is ritually celebrated by clansmen wearing masks. The Hopi elders remove their masks at the end of the ceremony to reveal to the child the sense of new-born kinship and Tomlinson says 'the naked reality, the spreading, pulsating water takes over from the swimmer, the mask of the poem (so to speak) is being put by, and the elusive reality of the lake, or of life, is admitted back into its own.'
Towards the end of the conversation between Tomlinson and Creeley, the American poet, referring to Olson's distinction in 'Projective Verse' between the 'head' and the 'heart', suggests that 'the head, the intelligence by way of the ear to the syllable--which he [Olson] calls also 'the king and pin'--is the unit upon which all builds.' By contrast, the heart stands 'as the primary feeling term' whilst the head 'is discriminating':
It is discriminating by way of what it hears. People talk about what they see in a poem--that's fine--I understand that. A lot of poetry in our particular period has been written as a visual occasion, but the finer occasion seems to be one in which one is hearing a poem.
Richard Swigg's second major study of Tomlinson's work, Look with the Ears (Peter Lang 2002) was subtitled 'Charles Tomlinson's Poetry of Sound'. Referring to the lines from 'Swimming Chenango Lake' quoted above, he recognises that the swimmer 'cuts through the element with a force that unegotistically yields and actively shapes:
Subject to water's 'coldness / Holding' (with an aspirate clutch that tightens : 'Holding him to itself') the swimmer nevertheless 'grants the grasp'--closely accorded in the sound-match, but with room for volition's awareness. There is more room still when the sentence balances out the infinitives in enactment of reason's physicality. 'For to swim' is 'to take hold', thence 'to move' in the 'embrace' of 'water's meaning', with the verse-line stretched now over a space of discrimination:
And to be--between grasp and grasping--free.
The last question that Tomlinson put to Robert Creeley in that published 'Conversation' concerned T.S. Eliot and whether he was still available to the American poet as a useful influence. Creeley's response was a clear 'No'. Instead, he mentions 'the figure the New Critics and the universities to this day have conspired to ignore: that is Walt Whitman.' In Some Americans, Tomlinson mentions his own 'growing dissatisfaction with Whitman' and quotes D.H. Lawrence's diagnosis of the American poet as 'always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other.' Perhaps this distrust informs the Olson review, 'From Amateur to Impresario' which is reprinted in American Essays:
Olson wrote 'Projective Verse' when he was unknown. The earlier Maximus Poems, printed in Stuttgart (1953-6), found fit but limited audience. Later Olson passed from the elite public grouped round the Black Mountain experiment to the over-exposure of a fame that seems to have followed the publication of The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen, in 1960. In...