#projective verse

[foreign-lawns]

Broadside poem by Charles Olson, published by The Institute of Further Studies

[echobf]

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.

– Robert Duncan, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" The Opening of the Field

[poetcooper11]

O Rotting Sun Episode 10 Thrust

NSFW! O Rotting Sun Chapter 2 Thrust

[poetcooper11]

O Rotting Sun Episode 2 Las Vegas sWill

[astranemus]

It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he will find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to a dimension larger than the man.

Charles Olsen, Projective Verse

[johananderslif]

It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.

Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” (1950)

[thewriterscaravan]

Olson thus rejected "academic" verse, with its closed forms and alleged artifice. The Times Literary Supplement notes that "culture, civilization, history (except history as personal exploration as in Herodotus) and, above all, sociology, are dirty words for him." Olson said: "It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature. . . . If he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. . . . This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destructions (species go down with a crash). But breath is man's special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. . . . I keep thinking, it comes to this: culture displacing the state." M. L. Rosenthal comments: "The problem is to get back to sources of meaning anterior to those of our own state-ridden civilization and so to recover the sense of personality and of place that has been all but throttled."

Charles Olson & Projective Verse