Projective Verse Research Articles

Via literary mothers: Kathleen Fraser and the ‘permission-giving’ moment of ‘projective verse’

ABSTRACT Poet, editor, and critic Kathleen Fraser underscored the significance of Charles Olson’s seminal manifesto ‘Projective Verse’, emphasising the vital role the text played in expanding the methodological possibilities of Avant Garde writing by women in the 1970s to the present day. I ask why Fraser, who maintained great concern surrounding the neglect of the female writers who pioneered the modernist tradition, and editorially and pedagogically resisted the continued marginality of innovative women writers in her contemporary, might controversially position ‘Projective Verse’ as an ‘immense, permission giving’ moment. Gesturing toward the importance of Fraser’s HOW(ever) and How2 journals, I make a case for the continued significance of Olson’s projective poetics in relation to feminist poetic practice in North America and across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom.

Open Form in American Poetry: Essays by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

<i>Open Form in American Poetry: Essays</i> by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

올슨과 물리학 그리고 '객체주의'

Olson, Physics and 'objectism.' This paper examines how the American poet Charles Olson was influenced by the discoveries of modern physics in his poetry and prose. Einstein's physics demanded a change in our imaginative picture of the world and poets were attracted to such his concepts as the loss of absolute space and time. Olson's seminal essay “Projective Verse” advances methods of understanding poetry which draws from Einstein's special theory of relativity. In addition, this paper discusses the ways Olson drew from quantum mechanics in writing his poetic theories by focusing on “uncertainty principle.”&#x0D; In the early modernism represented by Eliot, the subject’s relation to objects is generally considered as one of recognition or domination and is characterized by discontinuity. Olson tries to break down the subject's epistemological tower by saying “a man is himself an object.” Olson’s definition of “a poem as object” shifts our attention from the subject’s power to dominate an object to “a series of objects in field” including the self and the poem, and leads a new way of American poetry beyond modernism.

The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry. By David-Antoine Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii+390.

<i>The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry</i>. By David-Antoine Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii+390.

‘Making New’ and ‘Attention’ in Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle’ and Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’

This article argues for a neural basis behind Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle’ and Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ to create a more robust cross-disciplinary aesthetic model. Brian Boyd and Ellen Dissanayake show that ‘attention’ and ‘making new’ in poetry is a stable but evolving technique. This shows up in constant variation in ‘classic’ and ‘modern’ poetry and it forms a pattern for interpretation. This article will look at Poe’s and Olson’s essays in relation to this technique, steering their conclusions toward a partially naturalized conception of poetics in conjunction with more standard literary models in order to broaden aesthetic understanding.

Coda: The Open

The notion of the open has a long history in poetry. This article also looks into its present and sketches its future, along a patient, open-ended recollection and reassembly of Robert Duncan and his poetic world. Exploring little known areas in American poetry, namely the 1973 anthology of Open Poetry put out by Ronald Gross and George Quasha, but also Charles Olson’s projective verse project, the full scope of Duncan’s Opening of the Field comes into view as an attempt at a new condition of poetry, as a kind of topological reality, where compositional decisions proceed seemingly from ad hoc pressures as if it too were a form of listening to the text. This journey through the poetic countercultures of the whole second half of the 20th century practices what it preaches. It stands, open, for the reader to range through.

Performance Typing

This essay reviews the publication of Larry Eigner’s selected poems and provides an introduction to Eigner (1927–96) and his place in US poetry. It gives an account of his life, describing his lifelong disability from cerebral palsy and the trajectory of his poetic career, which ended with over three thousand poems and great acclaim from US innovative poetic communities. It then relates Eigner to those communities, specifically Black Mountain in the 1950s and 1960s and the Language writers decades later. Eigner’s poetry is glancingly compared with that of Keats and of Dickinson, but the main juxtaposition is with Pound’s Pisan Cantos, where the rushed, typewritten quality of the lines is shown to have been foundational for Olson in his influential “Projective Verse.” Eigner’s work, while it shares characteristics, calls for different manners of reading. The latter part of the essay demonstrates this, by a close reading of a number of Eigner poems.

The Age of Olson

The recovery of archival materials by and about Charles Olson for the University of New Mexico Press’s Recencies series sets the stage for a critical reassessment of this mid-century American poet. Recent titles include his correspondences with fellow American writer Robert Duncan and British poet J.H. Prynne, a collection of Duncan’s lectures on Olson, and ethnopoetic translator and writer Dennis Tedlock’s posthumously published study of Olson’s “Mayan Letters.” Together, these works implicitly argue for the centrality of Olson’s self-described projective verse poetics to Cold War poetry. They also compel a reimagining of what the term “projective verse” meant to both Olson and his compeers.

Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime by James Maynard

Reviewed by: Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime by James Maynard Joshua Hoeynck James Maynard, Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2018. 211 pp. Cloth, $65. Of the many exciting developments in post-1945 American poetry scholarship over the course of the last several years, the continual release of new publications from the University of New Mexico Press’s Recencies Series (edited by Matthew Hofer) has been one of the richest. With the publication of James Maynard’s Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime, the Recencies Series has filled a major gap in criticism on Robert Duncan and the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance. Maynard delineates three historical phases of Duncan’s career— characterized by surrealism, a poetics of organism, and a final French turn— while coordinating the ideas and [End Page 106] methods in Duncan’s writing with the pragmatist philosophies of John Dewey, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead. Duncan consistently read these philosophers throughout his life and used their cosmological worldviews to create “larger and increasingly complex structures in an attempt to make a poetics adequate to the excess of experience and the experience of excess,” as Maynard argues (33). Although Duncan made many explicit statements concerning his appreciative deployment of pragmatist ideas to conceive a relational and heterogenetic poetics that tries and fails to catch this excessive nature of the real, and although those statements clarify the central role American pragmatist philosophies played in Duncan’s imagination, many remain unpublished. That is to say that only James Maynard could have written this invaluable book. As Curator of the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo, Maynard has been and continues to be well positioned to articulate unique perspectives on Duncan’s writing, his influences, and his unpublished manuscripts. I first met James as a graduate student while researching Duncan’s correspondences, and like many other scholars who write about Duncan and the San Francisco Renaissance, I have benefited from his encyclopedic knowledge of Duncan’s sources over the years. That said, Maynard’s book does not merely coordinate concepts or philologically chart Duncan’s allusions to Whitehead, James, and Dewey. Engaging theory and poetry, Maynard’s first chapter develops the innovative concept of a “pragmatist sublime” through an extended intellectual history. In this account Whitehead’s process metaphysics and James’s pluralism contend with Kant’s and Lyotard’s negative sublime and subjectivism. Maynard thus diversifies the sublime, complicating its frozen image in the Kantian tradition “as an epistemological indeterminacy buttressing (or, in the case of certain postmodern versions, challenging) an autonomous subject” (14). In contrast to the subjective versions of the sublime, Maynard shows that Duncan adhered to and advanced the concept of the sublime “as a pluralistic, ontological, and relational phenomenon of experience” (14). This knowledgeable and well-drawn intervention makes this book not only useful for scholars of American poetry but also for students invested in theory, conflicting philosophical traditions, and influence studies. [End Page 107] The book’s following chapters apply the concept of the pragmatist sublime to three overlapping phases of Duncan’s career, investigating his early engagement with surrealism (about which almost no other scholarship exists), the development of his mature poetics of organism through his transformations of Whitehead and James, and finally the darker turn toward the French language and the void of Duncan’s last poems. The well-written analysis of these historical phases widens scholarly knowledge of Duncan’s poems while also unearthing the conceptual relationship between American philosophy and American poetry. Along the way readers well-versed in the influence that Whitehead wielded over projective poetry will find many intellectual matters with which to engage. Does the book too quickly dismiss Charles Olson’s first use of Whitehead and Olson’s subsequent influence on Duncan? Is Maynard’s attempt to coordinate continental philosophy with Duncan’s later poetics valid in light of the earlier pragmatist analysis? Although engaging critical questions like these will emerge for readers deeply invested in the finer points of projective verse and process philosophy, the book’s overall portrait of the intimate relationship between pragmatist strains of thought and Duncan’s avant-garde, projective practice is a...

Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ and the Inscription of the Breath

Charles Olson’s hugely influential essay-manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ is usually understood as proposing a close - and a necessary—link between poetry and body. Some account of Olson’s as a ‘poetics of embodiment’ or a ‘breath-poetics’ is almost ubiquitous in the extant criticism, yet what this might actually mean or imply for poetry and poetry-reading remains unclear. ‘Projective Verse’ is deeply ambivalent about print, seeing in it the ‘closed verse’ Olson looked to replace, while simultaneously idealising the typed-and-printed page as the only medium for the supposed immediacy of the poet’s breath. This essay contends that Olson’s lionisation of the typewriter is accompanied by a suppressed inscriptional register—a concern with carving and engraving—and asks what the substrate hosting this inscription might be. The aims of the piece are twofold: to demonstrate that ‘Projective Verse’ contains a logic of inscription which has gone severely underappreciated; and to argue that this logic runs up against the much better-documented logic of poetic embodiment via the breath in such a way as to deeply trouble criticism’s rather murky understanding of what that latter logic implies, both in Olson’s specific case and for poetry more generally.

Projective Verse: The Spiritual Legacy of the Beat Generation

Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, poetics or cultural activism; Jack Kerouac’s prose, poetry and his method of composition; Gary Snyder’s environmental and Buddhist consciousness and bioregional ethos, or the opening made by the Beats for Eastern spirituality in the west are of intrinsic value and will be for generations, this paper seeks to posit that it is Michael McClure’s use of Projective Verse, that future generations of writers and readers will come to appreciate as that movement’s spiritual legacy.

Quantum Field of Action : Robert Creeley and Projective Verse

Quantum Field of Action : Robert Creeley and Projective Verse

Semiotics and Poetry: Toward a Taxonomy of Page Space

Semiotics and Poetry:Toward a Taxonomy of Page Space Owen Bullock (bio) My research into semiotics and the relational axes—syntagmatic and paradigmatic—has led me to consider how the use of page space may be conceptualized, toward a discussion of the specific uses of this important tool. Briefly, the syntagm is a sequential lexical unit (Saussure 121–22), whereas the paradigmatic axis has to do with less logical choices a poet makes around relationships between words, which occur outside the immediate "neighborhood" of the text (Pettit 8). The use of space is most commonly understood as syntagmatic (Chandler 110), though I have challenged this assertion, since there are cases where the use of space breaks the sequentiality of the syntagm (Bullock). The use of space may be considered a natural counterpart to any discussion of the line. It is sometimes helpful to isolate these two elements and sometimes of benefit to bring them together. Overall, it seems as though the topic of space is somewhat neglected, perhaps the lesser force in the hierarchy of this particular binary. Eleanor Berry, a noted commentator on Charles Olson's poetics, collates and categorizes his experiments with page space ("Visual"; "Emergence"), but I have encountered no other attempt in the literary field to systematically articulate the variety of effects that space can yield, and this is work that I would like to extend here. The article attempts a provisional taxonomy of the use of space via analysis of work by three contemporary New Zealand poets—Alistair Paterson, Alan Loney, and Michele Leggott—and is contrasted with Berry's work. Though a discussion of the use of line and space in any number of contemporary poets from New Zealand and elsewhere—Robert Sullivan, Lisa Samuels, Jen Crawford, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and so on—might yield interesting results, the work of the three poets discussed is especially susceptible to semiotic analysis. It denotes a range of experiments with page space and its intersection with form over long practice and is closely connected with Olson's ideas. Loney and Paterson are both much influenced by Olson—Loney notes the impact of The Maximus Poems on his writing (Wood), and Paterson's poetics is informed by it. Leggott was influenced by Louis Zukofsky, another poet who made significant experiments with page space. The use of space to score music is an idea described by Olson in "Projective Verse" (339) and discussed in the New Zealand context by C. K. Stead (153), Paterson ("New" 30–31) and Loney ("Influence" 92–98). It has often been the justification [End Page 224] for experimental typography but is in some ways a curious proposition that needs more investigation; I argue that scoring music is just one possible function of many. The materiality of the page is also associated with the long poem (McHale, Obligation 260–61), in which method and process are often made explicit. Each work discussed here is a long poem of at least three pages; some are book length. Berry categorizes twelve functions of visual form in Olson's early poetry, in response to what she calls his "prosody of page space"; the first of these includes the familiar "scoring for performance" ("Visual" 107–8; "Emergence" 58–59). In a footnote to an essay on erasure, Brian McHale identifies several uses of space in recent American poetry, as a form of graphic design, or performance notes (like silence in music), as "semanticised figures," or as nonvisual referents, such as "the void" ("Poetry" 278). I have found numerous examples in the work of each of the poets studied of intriguing uses of space, but they do not always concern the idea of scoring music. It should be noted that the link or relationship between the visual and aural in a poem is uncertain. For example, when pondering Apollinaire's famous concrete poem "Il Pleut," Johanna Drucker writes about the difficulty of deciding at what point the visual produces an aural effect (106). In the simplest sense, space may be understood as absence. We interpret gaps in texts by considering how they might be filled, or by giving them meaning as spaces (Culler, Structuralist 171); in so doing, we give...

Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters

Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters Ian Davidson (bio) In her long poem, Revolutionary Letters (1968–2007), Diane di Prima is constructing a world at the same time as she is narrating its environmental and military destruction. As she says in #75: You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmologya cosmogonylaid out, before all eyes (103) Earlier in the poem she asserts the revolutionary “need to know laws of time & space / they never dream of ” (76) as alternative cosmologies that will “outflank” and “short circuit” repressive forces. Di Prima’s cosmology is constructed from the materiality of everyday life, including the temporary spaces of the body and the home; it is neither eternal nor outside the simultaneously entropic and fertile narratives of the material and natural world of living things and their spatial relationships. In di Prima’s world, the private locations, traditionally constructed as the preserve of the biological family, become increasingly public and reconstructed as “revolutionary spaces.” The poem’s ambitions are not, however, limited to the domestic. On a larger scale, Revolutionary Letters produces a sense of the American nation through the histories of land ownership and inhabitation. This narrative is further contextualized within a political world of revolution and activism, and the poem provides a counter history, as well as potential [End Page 314] alternative futures, through a roll call of forgotten or neglected figures, many of them engaged in armed and violent struggle. The poem’s politics, as its title suggests, are those of the militant counterculture, committed to revolutionary action. Revolutionary Letters not only incorporates public and private spheres, but blurs the distinctions between them, producing a world that deals with the histories of things that have happened and those fictional things that might have happened.1 The poem does this through the narrative of the life story of its speaking voice, that of di Prima as subject and author of the Revolutionary Letters. Rather than mimetically mirroring, doubling, or representing the experience of the speaking voice, the poem is integral to its production. In #75, speaking of the poetic work, the narrative voice says: “there is no part of yourself you can separate out” and “it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole / you do not ‘make it so’” (103). Through its self-conscious use of literary forms, the poem also works with and against the development of a single speaker. The poem uses the idea and the practice of multiplicity as a pedagogic practice. The potentially revolutionary audience is not taught things by an authoritative speaker, but learns by being part of the development of many voices. Rather than functioning as a form of individual consciousness-raising or heroic address, the poem combines and sustains critical and discursive conversations between forms of poetry, revolutionary politics, and aesthetico-political philosophies that inform the work.2 Revolutionary Letters and the American Long Poem Revolutionary Letters is, at least in part, informed by the predominantly masculine history of the American long poem. While there are earlier examples of long form experimentation by women, which could serve as models for some of di Prima’s strategies in Revolutionary Letters, many of these received little attention at the time of their writing. Mina Loy’s “Love Songs to Joannes” (1915–17) explores the nature of sexual relationships in a sequence that adopts typographical modernist tropes. Her use of gaps between words to indicate the rhythms of the poem was ahead of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” by some four decades. Loy’s use of asyntactic grammar and the free verse sequence anticipates the interests of later experimentalists in constructing works that articulate, simultaneously, diverse [End Page 315] perspectives on a single topic. Loy’s emphasis on the fluidity of the body and of sexuality outside of romantic love is feminist, and close in many ways to di Prima’s concerns in poems such as “The Practice of Magical Evocation” (Pieces of a Song 20). Muriel Rukeyser’s multi-voiced documentary epic, The Book of the Dead (1938), uses a range of material to document the Gauley Bridge construction project, which resulted in the...

Documentaries: Poems by Walter Hildebrandt

Reviewed by: Documentaries: Poems by Walter Hildebrandt Dale Lakevold Walter Hildebrandt, Documentaries: Poems (Edmonton: NeWest Press 2016) Walter Hildebrandt's latest and eighth collection of poetry, Documentaries, focuses on an investigation of history, whether recent or more distant history, by exposing its fault lines, more specifically those moments when oppression is met with resistance and something new is created. It is there in "dissensus" and "disjunction," we learn in the collection's first poem, "Illegal Combinations: Glasgow 1787," that the poet finds the presence of "another history." (13) The disruption of the ordered past thus enables new alignments in that history to be perceived, and new ways of thinking and acting to be engaged by this knowledge. (13) This process of recording these other histories, such as that of the Glasgow of 1787 or the Winnipeg of 1919, and of understanding our present moment in those contexts becomes the subject of Hildebrandt's book. There are seven poems in Documentaries, five of the long form variety and two shorter ones. It would be possible to call the entire work a long poem, considering the documentary approach common to each individual piece and a narrating voice that remains consistent throughout the collection as it shifts between present and past. The form of the writing, as well, with the short, broken line of projective verse connects each poem with the next, not that such formal coherence is necessary. The author could, if he were so inclined, continue to add to this collection in much the same way that Robert Kroestch did when he turned his long poem project Field Notes into a life work that spanned decades. Hildebrandt is following Kroestch in this respect by showing that the work of reading the past with an eye on the present is never complete. There are many perspectives and many obstacles to be found in this undertaking. In the collection's second poem, "Let Them Eat Grass / The Dakota Wars 1862," for example, we hear the speaker struggling to come to terms with the extent of the American betrayal of the Dakota. "Treaties / had been / the hope for both," he says, until "the ground moved / the rules changed," and coexistence on the land is transformed into violence and genocide. There are "so many windows / onto these events … hard to see it all at once." (26) The poet relies on documenting this history as a response to the amnesia that often keeps the past safely hidden and forgotten: "removals / legislated violence / humiliations / marginalization / loss of homelands / windows / onto this complex / history / documentaries." (34) The works within Documentaries lie very much within the tradition of the Canadian long poem of the past century or more, a poetry that has characteristically made history its subject. Examples of such work might include Dorothy Livesay's Call My People Home (1950), a treatment of the Japanese-Canadian internment; Armand Garnet Ruffo's Grey Owl (1996), a deconstruction of the life of Archie Belaney, an Englishman who posed famously as an Ojibwa; or Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems (1976), an examination of Southwest Saskatchewan history that gives voice to Indigenous and settler experience. Hildebrandt's poetry turns decidedly toward the political, which places his work in good company with the work of poets such as Livesay. In fact, Hildebrandt may have been recalling Livesay's The [End Page 271] Documentaries (1968), her collection of six long poems, all addressing political subjects, when he conceived of his own Documentaries. The book opens with a poem set in present-day Glasgow where we are taken directly to the site of Glasgow Green, the "people's park," a "place of mass protests / public demonstrations." (9) Here in this city and in this park a "radical reform movement" would find a home in the aftermath of the weavers' strike of 1787: "on September 3, seven thousand gather at the Green / strike / demand a just solution / companies lock them out / call in police and military / desperate times / unarmed protesters / asking to talk / answered by force." (19) That day three would be shot dead and three would die later, says the speaker, and a union movement would be born. (20) In recording this...

Objects across the Pacific: Poetic Interruptions of Global Sovereignty in Charles Olson and Kiyota Masanobu

Objects across the Pacific:Poetic Interruptions of Global Sovereignty in Charles Olson and Kiyota Masanobu Mayumo Inoue (bio) For a man is himself an object . . . the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. —Charles Olson, "Projective Verse" Instead of fearing objectification, it is more productive to willingly become an object first and then to explore what necessarily exceeds such objectification in the space where the notion of human subject is already bankrupt as a condition of human existence. —Kiyota Masanobu, "Metamorphosis into Objet" [End Page 297] Poetic of Objects in the Age of "Global State" What critical sense do poetry and its mediation of the world bring us today? If "sense," as Jean-Luc Nancy argues, indexes a birth of sensuous sense whose surprising newness at once revises or fractures the grid of cognitive sense, poetic sense emerges as a world within and perhaps in excess of the normative world construed as a picture to be mapped (Martin Heidegger) or a target to be bombed (Rey Chow) or compartmentalized as nationalized or racialized "societies" to be defended (Michel Foucault).1 If, as Nancy further adds, "matter is always singular or singularized," its singularity as a signatory uniqueness requires not its signification "but sense as singular coming." The thing exists as "[t]he outline of this signature," the signature's necessary exposition to other things, or, in short, its own "excription."2 Poetry's inscription of the thing's singular exposition thus serves as a further "excription," a form that is exposed to other singular things and is also an origin of the ideality of sense. Poetic sense, then, "comes before all significations, prevents and over-takes them, even as it makes them possible, forming the opening of the general signifyingness."3 Somewhat differently put, poetic sense that manifests the essential materiality of ideality constitutes an attempt in human language to speak of and for the thing's (and therefore the body's) singularity, its unique signature, and its signatory exposition to other singular beings. At the same time, the global permeation of "sovereignty as an expansive power in networks" has increasingly nominated nation-states as its capillary agents that regulate and discipline their national subjects and noncitizens and ultimately resort to sovereign violence, which today serves more as a supplemental branch of these biopolitical powers.4 As Sandro Mezzadra notes, this sovereignty operates through a "mixed constitution" of global law that addresses the needs of specialized sectors and of national sovereignty inserted into that global field of partial laws.5 In a similar context, Judith Butler argues that such a "global state" is always necessarily refracted by its lived, affective state wherein a certain "state of mind"—as when one finds oneself "being upset, out of sorts"—potentially energizes its aesthetic and activist contestations.6 "[I]t makes sense to see that at the core of this 'state' . . . is a certain tension produced between modes of being or mental states, temporary or provisional constellations of mind of one kind or another, and juridical and military complexes that govern how and where we may move, associate, and speak."7 This essay attempts to see Butler's "constellations of mind" through the aesthetic analytic of poetic sense, placed within and potentially against the [End Page 298] juridico-military "complexes" that govern our discourse and movement in the world today. Especially in the transpacific context of the United States and East Asia after the end of World War II, I would like to foreground the curious coemergence of two object-based poetics during the 1950s and 1960s, proposed respectively by the poets Charles Olson (1910–70) in the United States and Kiyota Masanobu8 (1938–) in U.S.-occupied Okinawa. As Naoki Sakai and Hyun-Joo Yoo explain within the twentieth-century context of the United States and East Asia, the transnational form of sovereignty in network—or what they call the "global sovereign state"—is "irreducible to any single state of old imperialism" and unfolds as a "systematicity of international relationships in which national states are sustained in complicity."9 Exemplified by a...

CounterTexting One Another: Conceptual Poetics, Flarf, and Derridean Countersignature

Using the precedent of Charles Bernstein's spoof on Charles Olson's ‘Projective Verse’ poetics manifesto as part of a long contextual introduction on issues of literary filiation, influence, and intertextuality, this essay analyses the recent exchanges between conceptualist poetry (Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith's ‘uncreative writing’) and ‘flarf’ (Drew Gardner) in the light of Derrida's twin notions of signature and countersignature. In the process it ties together reading and writing(-as-rereading) in response and co-responsibility in order to theorise the critical notion of ‘countertextuality’ as a more contemporary inflection of the mechanics of literary interaction known as intertextuality, better suited to characterise the textual interaction between current poetic movements. The critical apparatus and developments in the footnotes are also conceived as a creative enactment of the countertext, whose final instance (the epilogue, or ‘Necrologue’) is a parodic rewriting performatively exposing the creative impasse and derivativeness of several recent textual productions mimicking Sol LeWitt's ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’. As it moves towards its final critical part, the essay also puts forward, while enacting them, more general views about the relative sterility of some aspects of contemporary poetic debates while gesturing for a possible way out, via Felix Bernstein's ‘Notes on Post-conceptual Poetry’, in order to reclaim ‘the genuinely imaginary-affective-intellectual fabric and texture of the poetical’.

Whispers and Roars

Whispers and Roars Patrick James Dunagan (bio) Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems. Michael McClure; Leslie Scalapino, ed. University of California Press. http://www.ucpress.edu. 344 pages; cloth, $55.00, paper, $24.95, eBook, $24.95. A friend of mine recently awoke from a nap while aboard a cross-country flight to the quite surreal shock of seeing poet Michael McClure up on the in-flight film screen. McClure's visage was soon exchanged for a clip of Jim Morrison crooning out a rock ballad, the film being a recent documentary of the late 1960s psychedelic band The Doors. A habitué of the Haight-Ashbury scene, McClure was familiar with many rock 'n roll stars of the era, even assisting Janis Joplin with writing the lyrics for her hit "Mercedes Benz." In recent years, he has been collaborating with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, releasing albums together and frequently playing tour dates in major cities. Short to say, McClure gets around. He's nothing less than a living icon. Throughout his life, McClure has remained a dedicatee of the arts, friend to artists such as Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Stan Brakhage, Jess, Wallace Berman, George Herms, and many others, all the while dedicating himself to his work as a poet. As McClure says in his brief preface, he wishes his poems "be soft and vigorous as the breath of a sparrow on the redwood deck rail and as tumultuous as a lion purring in the rain by the roadside in Kenya." He's not kidding, either. McClure is bombastically driven to using rather hyperbolic images, yet his work also exhibits a lucid, Zen-inspired embrace of beauty and calm. In contrast to the at times overbearing enthusiasm with which he hurls images onto the page, McClure also offers up subtle rhythmic play of alliteration and rhyme as he delights in all forms of life. Whether it is as a young father watching his daughter in "Two Weeks Baby Sunbathing": This old brown velvet by daylight is not eternal velvetbut the baby on it, bright in the morning sun, is more beautiful than human. Her glory fills the room. Her back and buttocks are mounds of color. Her toes and fingers are fat stars. Or celebrating what he assumes to be the playfulness of wild creatures, as below in "Gray Fox at Solstice." The fox coughs, "Hahh!" Kicks his feet— stretches. Beautiful claw toesin purple brodiaea lilies. He dance-runs through the Indian paintbrush. Galaxies in spirals. Galaxies in balls. Whether just imagined or eye witnessed, McClure's vivid imagery engages the imagination as strongly as any documentary. McClure's conception of his own poetics follows the lead set by Charles Olson's essay "Projective Verse" (1950), which bases the measure of the free verse line on the breath of the poet writing, yet for McClure, this focus yields a cosmic, ecological sense of identification within a greater whole from out of which he derives both purpose and value centered in the self as physical body. Our breath IS TO SERVE THE ULTIMATE beautyof ourselves. Possessed with a near manic desire to share a Message with his art, he verges on, and for many readers no doubt crosses over, a too-thin display of an easily come by sense of there being a higher meaning to the order of things. In this regard, he's prone to a quasi-New Age Spiritualism that encourages an erstwhile yearning in his work to give space to representing the perspective and assumed interests of the non-human. In "Hummingbird Ode," McClure addresses a dying hummingbird "smashed on the plate / glass window." He pushes himself to ask: "WHAT'S / ON YOUR SIDE OF THE VEIL? / DO YOU DIP YOUR BEAK / in the vast black lily / of space? Does the sweetness / of the pain go on forever?" He can't help but continue: "WHERE ARE THE LOVES THAT MAKE THE BLOSSOM / of your body? Do they still spin / in the air? Your wives / and loves? Are you now / more than this meat? Finally / A STAR??" Meanwhile in "The Air," McClure goes so far as to adopt the mask of a lion...

A critical poetics of allure: 10 antiphons for the bringing-to-appearance of the place of allure as a complicity of human and non-human matter in writing, or, the Physis of the Whale in Anglo-Saxon England

This essay attempts to write variety with a variety of whales. It is an experiment in attempting to think and write with Anglo-Saxon poesy concerning whales in Anglo-Saxon England in interface with recent archaeological studies and the remains of actual whales from Anglo-Saxon England. Two notions from Charles Olson's recently edited notes on ‘Projective Verse II’ are particularly guiding: (1) that ‘The poem's job is to be able to attend, and to get attention to, the variety of order in creation’; and (2) that ‘A poem is a “line” between any two points in creation (a poem's beginning and its end). In its passage it includes – in the meaning here it passes through – the material of itself. Such a material is the “field” ’ (Olson, 2010, 15, 16).

Projective/Spontaneous: 4 Pomes from the EZ-Chair

Written under Buddhic trance on derelict typewriter, these pomes offer fruit. Origin process includes: Olson's theories of projective verse, Kerouac's "first thought best thought," Ginsberg's mad poetry, other ghosts' murmurs. Scribed in mode of joyousness. The Beats were not vegetables. Enjoy with wine.