“To open your ears”

Abstract

The open form poetics of the New American Poetry rejected traditional poetic and social forms in favor of spontaneity and improvisation. Through their use of the typewriter, Beat and Black Mountain writers practice an embodied poetics that recovers the experience of space-time from the time crisis of modernity, one example of the social conformity rejected by the avant garde. In Olson’s theory of Projective Verse, the typewriter produces a visual form on the page that is intended to be heard. This chapter argues that Beat-Black Mountain writers such as Jack Kerouac and Larry Eigner use the typewriter, in Olson’s “projective” or “percussive” sense, to produce irreducibly graphic texts that refuse the binary distinctions between writing and speaking, seeing and hearing, space and time.