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Turning Process into Poetry:
Notes on Charles Olson and Whitehead
The purpose of this page is to introduce people interested in process philosophy and theology to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson, encouraging further study. The page emerges in two contexts One is that of a forthcoming conference (October, 2021) on Process Poetry in mainland China, at which I will be sharing my own thoughts on what the phrase "process poetry" can mean. I know that I have much to learn from Olson and others such as Robert Duncan. The other is a feeling that, if process philosophy has any kind of future at all, it needs poetry.
Don't know Olson? Here's how the Poetry Foundation describes him:
Don't know Olson? Here's how the Poetry Foundation describes him:
Charles Olson was an innovative poet and essayist whose work influenced numerous other writers during the 1950s and 1960s. In his influential essay on projective (or open) verse, Olson asserts that "a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge." (The Poetry Foundation)
As this assertion suggests, Olson imagines a poem in terms of what Whitehead calls a "vector" transfer of energy and feeling. It moves from poet to reader. And he imagines the process of creating a poem in a similar way. It begins with an act of receiving the past actual world through feelings or prehensions, appropriating that world in a private subjective act, and then dissolving or splaying back into the world in what Whitehead calls a "superjective" way.
What does such projective poetry look like? The Poetry Foundation offers an excellent sample of his poems in print form. Click here. I must admit at the outset that I have a very hard time reading Olson's poems, but a much easier and often quite enjoyable time, listening to him read his poems. You can do the same below. And if you want to hear him read many more poems, go to this page on PennSound. It is treasure trove of Olson recordings.
- Jay McDaniel, Sept. 10, 2021
Excerpts from Robin Blaser's essay on Whitehead and Olson
In a lecture at Black Mountain College, dated 1956, Olson describes and dates his take on Whitehead:
I am the more persuaded of the importance and use of Whitehead’s thought that I did not know his work -- except in snatches and by rumor, including the disappointment of a dinner and evening with him when I was 25 and he was what, 75!-- until last year. So it comes out like those violets of Bolyai Senior on all sides when men are needed, that we possess a body of thinking of the order of Whitehead’s to catch us up where we wouldn’t poke our hearts in and to intensify our own thought just where it does poke. He is a sort of an Aquinas, the man. He did make a Summa of three centuries, and cast his system as a net of Speculative Philosophy so that it goes at least as far as Plato. And his advantage over either Plato or Aquinas is the advantage we share: that the error of matter was removed in exactly these last three centuries. I quote Whitehead:
“The dominance of the scalar physical quantity, inertia, in the Newtonian physics obscured the recognition of the truth that all fundamental quantities are vector and not scalar.” (Scalar, you will recall, is an undirected quantity, while vector is a directed magnitude as of a force or a velocity.)
So one gets the restoration of Heraclitus’ flux translated as, All things are vectors. Or put it, All that matters moves! And one is out into a space of facts and forms as fresh as our own sense of our own existence.
I am the more persuaded of the importance and use of Whitehead’s thought that I did not know his work -- except in snatches and by rumor, including the disappointment of a dinner and evening with him when I was 25 and he was what, 75!-- until last year. So it comes out like those violets of Bolyai Senior on all sides when men are needed, that we possess a body of thinking of the order of Whitehead’s to catch us up where we wouldn’t poke our hearts in and to intensify our own thought just where it does poke. He is a sort of an Aquinas, the man. He did make a Summa of three centuries, and cast his system as a net of Speculative Philosophy so that it goes at least as far as Plato. And his advantage over either Plato or Aquinas is the advantage we share: that the error of matter was removed in exactly these last three centuries. I quote Whitehead:
“The dominance of the scalar physical quantity, inertia, in the Newtonian physics obscured the recognition of the truth that all fundamental quantities are vector and not scalar.” (Scalar, you will recall, is an undirected quantity, while vector is a directed magnitude as of a force or a velocity.)
So one gets the restoration of Heraclitus’ flux translated as, All things are vectors. Or put it, All that matters moves! And one is out into a space of facts and forms as fresh as our own sense of our own existence.
[Olson gives us] a fresh world-view, then, indebted to science by way of Einstein and Whitehead, neither otherworldly nor transcendent to life, is what is at stake. And further, the imaginary, the thought given by way of image is not denigrated but made dynamic in the perceptual field. That field is large, relational, in the sense of operative, and alive. This aspect of the translation of science into poetry leads to an enormous change in the formal mode of a poem.
I want to draw attention to the passages from Whitehead, which Olson introduces here. They are from the chapter on “Process” (PR II.X.III), better than halfway through the argument of Process and Reality. Olson’s purpose, then, appears to be to move directly to the “process of feeling” and to emphasize it. It is striking that, knowledgeable in mathematics himself, he continues to maintain Whitehead’s mathematical vocabulary. Olson is here approaching the problem of a language that will hold on to reality as process.
As it turns out, the solution will be found, not simply in the words, but in the form as well. Where one may have missed the point of Olson’s earlier definitions of scalar and vector, which were strictly dictionary definitions, it may be useful, with Whitehead’s sense of “the foundation of the scalar superstructure” in mind, to emphasize that the scalar is “a quantity fully described by a number” and a vector is “a complex entity representative of a directed magnitude, as of a force or a velocity.”
Translated, as Olson appears to do, the one is complete form, say, the subjective poet of the old humanism, the other is coming into form by attention. The emphasis is upon prehensive activity. By maintaining Whitehead’s vocabulary of the physical sciences, Olson accomplishes two things: he places human nature in the physical, like Whitehead’s actual occasions or actual entity--in this instance Whitehead is discussing both--and he shifts the attention to the vector, “the original vector forms,” “the origins” ( ). This is important to Olson because origin, beginning, and renewal are finally the true subjects of his poems, and such regard transforms the finitude of modern humanism with its despair and terrorisms. He was to search for active form, rather than the referential kind which he reads as entrapment in present cultural conditions. A dead duck, if I may so express myself.
It fascinates me that when I turn to science, I find the physicist David Bohm in his cosmology undertaking the same search:
The subject-verb-object structure of language, along with its world view, tends to impose itself very strongly in our speech, even in those cases in which some attention would reveal its evident inappropriateness. [. . .]
Is it not possible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than the noun? (29)
This involves, I think, a renewed sense of literature, particularly poetry, in which the work of an active, undistanced language goes on, a parataxis.
I note Whitehead’s currency in these contemporary cosmological concerns, in Bohm, in Ruth Nanda Anshen’s beautiful essay “Convergence,” and in Bernard Lovell’s Emerging Cosmology. Lovell closes his book with this quotation from Whitehead:
There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievements: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues. (Lovell,197)
This wonderful voice, guiding science and, as we shall see, entering into poetry, draws attention to what is most to be attended to in art--if I may cadge some phrases from a scholar of Melville, Olson’s first master-- “the mode of [the] engagement with life, the capacity to the deep-diving literary imagination to plunge to the bottom of human experience and to find there what is funded as ontological possiblity” (Sherrill 238). Funded by Olson and Whitehead on this occasion.
But it is Kenner’s point that reality as process was prepared for in Emerson’s “organicism” to bring us by affinity to “Whitehead, and Darwin and Frazer, and Gestaltists and field physicists, and the synergism of Buckminster Fuller,” to “organisms not systems,” to “process and change and resemblance and continuity.”
And behind that effort. Behind it, preparing for it, a chain of philosophers, a chain which “leads back through Hegel, Lotse, Schelling and Herder to Leibnitz (as Whitehead constantly recognized), and then it seems to disappear”: seems to disappear because we are looking for European predecessors, and Leibnitz was indebted to China. So runs Joseph Needham’s remarkable hypothesis, which attributes European organicism, via Leibnitz’ Jesuit friends of the China Mission, to neo-Confucian Li and the school of Chu Hsi. . . . (Kenner 231)
Kenner is surely right to point to the history of this receptivity, however much modern relativity theory, interpreted by Whitehead, placed a premium on process. Olson, modern as he is, is also New England. He had that ground. In an old fashioned American education, Emerson was simply among the books on the family shelves. In terms of poetry and process, Olson’s first debts are to Pound’s Fenollosa and Confucianism and, then, to William Carlos Williams’ early interst in science, reflected in his poetry, as a means to gain objectivity and emotional accuracy.
Mike Weaver has finely drawn these concerns together in his discussion of science and poetry in Williams’ early work. There, we find out that Williams requested a copy of C.P. Steinmetz’ book on relativity in 1926 and that he was given a copy of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World in December, 1926. Williams wrote in that copy: “Finished reading it at sea, Sept. 26, 1927--A milestone surely in my career, should I have the force and imagination to go on with my work” (Weaver 47, 48 n.2).<7> Because Whitehead’s science of reality influences stance and, thereby, form in so powerful a poet as Williams, it is fair to say that the currency of Whitehead in poetry has something like a date just there.
The subject-verb-object structure of language, along with its world view, tends to impose itself very strongly in our speech, even in those cases in which some attention would reveal its evident inappropriateness. [. . .]
Is it not possible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than the noun? (29)
This involves, I think, a renewed sense of literature, particularly poetry, in which the work of an active, undistanced language goes on, a parataxis.
I note Whitehead’s currency in these contemporary cosmological concerns, in Bohm, in Ruth Nanda Anshen’s beautiful essay “Convergence,” and in Bernard Lovell’s Emerging Cosmology. Lovell closes his book with this quotation from Whitehead:
There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievements: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues. (Lovell,197)
This wonderful voice, guiding science and, as we shall see, entering into poetry, draws attention to what is most to be attended to in art--if I may cadge some phrases from a scholar of Melville, Olson’s first master-- “the mode of [the] engagement with life, the capacity to the deep-diving literary imagination to plunge to the bottom of human experience and to find there what is funded as ontological possiblity” (Sherrill 238). Funded by Olson and Whitehead on this occasion.
But it is Kenner’s point that reality as process was prepared for in Emerson’s “organicism” to bring us by affinity to “Whitehead, and Darwin and Frazer, and Gestaltists and field physicists, and the synergism of Buckminster Fuller,” to “organisms not systems,” to “process and change and resemblance and continuity.”
And behind that effort. Behind it, preparing for it, a chain of philosophers, a chain which “leads back through Hegel, Lotse, Schelling and Herder to Leibnitz (as Whitehead constantly recognized), and then it seems to disappear”: seems to disappear because we are looking for European predecessors, and Leibnitz was indebted to China. So runs Joseph Needham’s remarkable hypothesis, which attributes European organicism, via Leibnitz’ Jesuit friends of the China Mission, to neo-Confucian Li and the school of Chu Hsi. . . . (Kenner 231)
Kenner is surely right to point to the history of this receptivity, however much modern relativity theory, interpreted by Whitehead, placed a premium on process. Olson, modern as he is, is also New England. He had that ground. In an old fashioned American education, Emerson was simply among the books on the family shelves. In terms of poetry and process, Olson’s first debts are to Pound’s Fenollosa and Confucianism and, then, to William Carlos Williams’ early interst in science, reflected in his poetry, as a means to gain objectivity and emotional accuracy.
Mike Weaver has finely drawn these concerns together in his discussion of science and poetry in Williams’ early work. There, we find out that Williams requested a copy of C.P. Steinmetz’ book on relativity in 1926 and that he was given a copy of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World in December, 1926. Williams wrote in that copy: “Finished reading it at sea, Sept. 26, 1927--A milestone surely in my career, should I have the force and imagination to go on with my work” (Weaver 47, 48 n.2).<7> Because Whitehead’s science of reality influences stance and, thereby, form in so powerful a poet as Williams, it is fair to say that the currency of Whitehead in poetry has something like a date just there.
Shahar Bran: Charles Olson and Whitehead
"Through a detailed and thoughtful study of the impact of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy on Olson’s aesthetic theory, this book points out the conceptual unity underlying what seems to be a sprawl of fragments in Olson’s major work, The Maximus Poems.
The poetics that Olson develops expressed a total weltanschauung, which was influenced by two major sources. Others have called attention to Olson’s use of Whitehead, but no critic has systematically analyzed the specific ways in which Whitehead’s thought, mainly as presented in Process and Reality (1929), served as a structural model for Olson’s poetry. Whitehead’s philosophy functions as a net through which not only modern science enters the work of Olson, but also the mythopoeia of an ancient, “primitive” world, the second source influencing Olson, as is manifested in various texts from different cultures, times, and places. Thus Whitehead offered Olson a way to combine a scientific and mythopoeic view of time and space. From this Olson constructed a poetics that could renew human contact with the external world and rid poetry of, in Olson’s words, “the individual ego, the subject and his soul, that peculiar presumption which western man has interposed between what he is as a creature…and those other creations of nature, which we may…call objects.”
Explicating this philosophical fundament of Olson’s poetry, the discussion turns out to be an extensive analysis of the generic question of The Long Poem. The Long Poem as a process, as the act of the organism and as an organism per se, as a real event in the world, as a ritual and story, as multiplicity within unity - all these terms rely on foundations anchored in Whitehead’s philosophy and in mythopoeic patterns of thinking. The author uses Olson’s philosophical investment in Whitehead in order to explain not only the content of Olson’s verse, but its formal, structural elements. Olson’s poetics of the Long Poem is based on openness at the micro level, while suspending the narrative and unified perspective of the poem at the macro level. The transition between micro and macro allows the integration of openness and determinism, suspension and fluency, spatial and temporal patterns of thinking, multiplicity in unity.
On the one hand, concrete poetic units of the Maximus Poems serve as a starting point for clarifying how different elements are joined together in one unity. On the other hand, the book traces the blending of the whole poem at the macro level, following its course through a temporal progress in which the poem moves from one poetic unit to the next; that is, from a unity (of multiplicity) to a new unity (in which the previous unity is already part of the multiplicity building the new one). Thus the book illuminates Olson’s theory of the Long Poem as an “all-containing” corpus, governed by metaphysical principles, equal to life itself, enacted in the process of working on The Maximus Poems."
The poetics that Olson develops expressed a total weltanschauung, which was influenced by two major sources. Others have called attention to Olson’s use of Whitehead, but no critic has systematically analyzed the specific ways in which Whitehead’s thought, mainly as presented in Process and Reality (1929), served as a structural model for Olson’s poetry. Whitehead’s philosophy functions as a net through which not only modern science enters the work of Olson, but also the mythopoeia of an ancient, “primitive” world, the second source influencing Olson, as is manifested in various texts from different cultures, times, and places. Thus Whitehead offered Olson a way to combine a scientific and mythopoeic view of time and space. From this Olson constructed a poetics that could renew human contact with the external world and rid poetry of, in Olson’s words, “the individual ego, the subject and his soul, that peculiar presumption which western man has interposed between what he is as a creature…and those other creations of nature, which we may…call objects.”
Explicating this philosophical fundament of Olson’s poetry, the discussion turns out to be an extensive analysis of the generic question of The Long Poem. The Long Poem as a process, as the act of the organism and as an organism per se, as a real event in the world, as a ritual and story, as multiplicity within unity - all these terms rely on foundations anchored in Whitehead’s philosophy and in mythopoeic patterns of thinking. The author uses Olson’s philosophical investment in Whitehead in order to explain not only the content of Olson’s verse, but its formal, structural elements. Olson’s poetics of the Long Poem is based on openness at the micro level, while suspending the narrative and unified perspective of the poem at the macro level. The transition between micro and macro allows the integration of openness and determinism, suspension and fluency, spatial and temporal patterns of thinking, multiplicity in unity.
On the one hand, concrete poetic units of the Maximus Poems serve as a starting point for clarifying how different elements are joined together in one unity. On the other hand, the book traces the blending of the whole poem at the macro level, following its course through a temporal progress in which the poem moves from one poetic unit to the next; that is, from a unity (of multiplicity) to a new unity (in which the previous unity is already part of the multiplicity building the new one). Thus the book illuminates Olson’s theory of the Long Poem as an “all-containing” corpus, governed by metaphysical principles, equal to life itself, enacted in the process of working on The Maximus Poems."
Jonathan Heaney
A Post on Olson's Poetics
"A very quick post, following some prodding from Mark Murphy of the ever-excellent Social Theory Applied blog, but one with an oblique relationship with social theory as such. The New England poet Charles Olson, a key member of the Black Mountain School of American Poetry, was also one of the most philosophical poets of his generation. In particular, Olson’s poetry is heavily influenced by the process metaphysics of A.N.Whitehead. Olson made his debt to Whitehead explicit, referring to him often as ‘my cosmologist’ and his poetry can be read as a dialogue with, and cannot be properly understood without reference to, Whitehead.
Olson, as you can hear the clip above where he recites ‘Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]’, developed a distinctive style of poetry influenced by this ontology, which he called ‘open’ or ‘projective verse’. In an essay in which he outlines this innovative approach to poetry called Projective Verse (pdf) he writes that:
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?"
The answer is breath. Or at least, ear and breath in dynamic relationship. Form for Olson is ‘never more than an extension of content’ and the process is:
how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement…ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER.
Ear and breath, the acquisitions of the former and the pressure of the latter:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
Thus, the poem is ‘organic’, it grows, from the inside out. It is, fundamentally, like nature, processual.
In the clip below, where Olson discusses this way or method, he invokes his ‘great master, and the companion of my poems, Mr. Whitehead, who called his cosmology the philosophy of organism’. The overlap with and influence of Whitehead is clear. These are reinforced when he turns to ‘objectism’, a position opposed to both objectivism and subjectivism:
What seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is “objectism,” a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, 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.
This is an Object Oriented Ontological Poetry in all but name (on which, see Morton (2012)pdf), as well as a process poetry.
The clip, and the one after it, are of a short documentary featuring Olson from 1966. In the first one, he reads ‘Maximus to Gloucester’ again. In the second he reads The Librarian.
There is lots more to be said – the connections between the poet and the philosopher have been subject to a number of analyses, such as Blaser (1986), and more recently Bram (2004) – and I haven’t even mentioned Olson’s Maximus Poems, but for now, I leave Olson speak for himself. Another interesting ‘poet of process’ is A.R.Amons, but I may return to him at another time.
What the post is intended to provoke is an exploration of the link between philosophy and art, between poetry and theory. What Olson does is theory as poetry, which is, to me, an interesting approach.
- Jonathan G. Heaney, July 5, 2013, Theory Types: A Blog for Theory Types
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The Kingfishers
BY CHARLES OLSON
1
What does not change / is the will to change
He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He
remembered only one thing, the birds, how
when he came in, he had gone around the rooms
and got them back in their cage, the green one first,
she with the bad leg, and then the blue,
the one they had hoped was a male
Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat.
He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat,
I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter,
he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself
in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers!
who cares
for their feathers
now?”
His last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone,
ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched
they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they
wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened,
he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought
“The pool the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth why
did the export stop?”
It was then he left
2
I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said
la lumiere”
but the kingfisher
de l’aurore”
but the kingfisher flew west
est devant nous!
he got the color of his breast
from the heat of the setting sun!
The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit)
the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings
where the color is, short and round, the tail
inconspicuous.
But not these things were the factors. Not the birds.
The legends are
legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher
will not indicate a favoring wind,
or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting,
still the waters, with the new year, for seven days.
It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters.
It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There,
six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones
not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds.
On these rejectamenta
(as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born.
And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes
a dripping, fetid mass
Mao concluded:
nous devons
nous lever
et agir!
3
When the attentions change / the jungle
leaps in
even the stones are split
they rive
Or,
enter
that other conqueror we more naturally recognize
he so resembles ourselves
But the E
cut so rudely on that oldest stone
sounded otherwise,
was differently heard
as, in another time, were treasures used:
(and, later, much later, a fine ear thought
a scarlet coat)
“of green feathers feet, beaks and eyes
of gold
“animals likewise,
resembling snails
“a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots,
and worked with tufts of leaves, weight
3800 ounces
“last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills
gold, the feet
gold, the two birds perched on two reeds
gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds,
one yellow, the other
white.
“And from each reed hung
seven feathered tassels.
In this instance, the priests
(in dark cotton robes, and dirty,
their disheveled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly
over their shoulders)
rush in among the people, calling on them
to protect their gods
And all now is war
where so lately there was peace,
and the sweet brotherhood, the use
of tilled fields.
4
Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is
the law
Into the same river no man steps twice
When fire dies air dies
No one remains, nor is, one
Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up
many. Else how is it,
if we remain the same,
we take pleasure now
in what we did not take pleasure before? love
contrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use
other words, feel other passions, have
nor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue
the same?
To be in different states without a change
is not a possibility
We can be precise. The factors are
in the animal and / or the machine the factors are
communication and / or control, both involve
the message. And what is the message? The message is
a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time
is the birth of the air, is
the birth of water, is
a state between
the origin and
the end, between
birth and the beginning of
another fetid nest
is change, presents
no more than itself
And the too strong grasping of it,
when it is pressed together and condensed,
loses it
This very thing you are
II
They buried their dead in a sitting posture
serpent cane razor ray of the sun
And she sprinkled water on the head of my child, crying
“Cioa-coatl! Cioa-coatl!”
with her face to the west
Where the bones are found, in each personal heap
with what each enjoyed, there is always
the Mongolian louse
The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet
in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness
which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough
as long as it was necessary for him, my guide
to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose
so you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look
and, considering the dryness of the place
the long absence of an adequate race
(of the two who first came, each a conquistador, one healed, the other
tore the eastern idols down, toppled
the temple walls, which, says the excuser
were black from human gore)
hear
hear, where the dry blood talks
where the old appetite walks
la piu saporita et migliore
che si possa truovar al mondo
where it hides, look
in the eye how it runs
in the flesh / chalk
but under these petals
in the emptiness
regard the light, contemplate
the flower
whence it arose
with what violence benevolence is bought
what cost in gesture justice brings
what wrongs domestic rights involve
what stalks
this silence
what pudor pejorocracy affronts
how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
what breeds where dirtiness is law
what crawls
below
III
I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage.
And of course, no Roman:
he can take no risk that matters,
the risk of beauty least of all.
But I have my kin, if for no other reason than
(as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and,
given my freedom, I’d be a cad
if I didn’t. Which is most true.
It works out this way, despite the disadvantage.
I offer, in explanation, a quote:
si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guères
que pour la terre et les pierres.
Despite the discrepancy (an ocean courage age)
this is also true: if I have any taste
it is only because I have interested myself
in what was slain in the sun
I pose you your question:
shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?
I hunt among stones
Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers” from The Collected Poems of Charles Olson. Copyright © 1987 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of University of California Press.
Source: The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (University of California Press, 1987)
from Poets.Org on Olson and the Maximus Poems
Educated at Wesleyan and Harvard Universities and the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, Charles Olson had a distinguished career in academia and politics before becoming a serious poet. He began work on his opus, The Maximus Poems, in the mid-1940s, and continued to expand and revise them until his death in 1970. Formally similar to Ezra Pound's Cantos, the Maximus poems are, in Olson's words, "about a person and a place."
The person, Maximus, represents Olson's alter ego, and is named after the second-century Maximus of Tyre, as well as a fourth-century Phoenician mystic, and may also refer to Olson's impressive stature (he was six feet seven inches tall). The place is Gloucester, Massachusetts, or more accurately, the small town communal American life that Olson struggled to preserve. Taking up local issues such as preserving the wetlands and documenting the history of fishermen in the Northeast, Olson's poems are widely read as political, but like the Cantos, they also contain deeply lyrical and personal passages as well.
The Maximus Poems are divided into three volumes, meant to be read as a long, single poem--Olson refers to it as such. The collection includes "Maximus to Himself" and "Maximus to Gloucester," a series of poems to the town that were printed in the local newspaper. The most frequently anthologized pieces are the opening pages, a selection of the letters to Gloucester, and "Cole's Island," a poem from the last volume that describes his encounter with death.
As a teacher at the Black Mountain College, Olson was one of the three most influential members of the Black Mountain movement, alongside to Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Creeley has joked that Olson was referred to as "Maximus" and he was called "Minimus," in reference to their teacher-apprentice relationship, a close friendship documented in their long, published correspondence.
The person, Maximus, represents Olson's alter ego, and is named after the second-century Maximus of Tyre, as well as a fourth-century Phoenician mystic, and may also refer to Olson's impressive stature (he was six feet seven inches tall). The place is Gloucester, Massachusetts, or more accurately, the small town communal American life that Olson struggled to preserve. Taking up local issues such as preserving the wetlands and documenting the history of fishermen in the Northeast, Olson's poems are widely read as political, but like the Cantos, they also contain deeply lyrical and personal passages as well.
The Maximus Poems are divided into three volumes, meant to be read as a long, single poem--Olson refers to it as such. The collection includes "Maximus to Himself" and "Maximus to Gloucester," a series of poems to the town that were printed in the local newspaper. The most frequently anthologized pieces are the opening pages, a selection of the letters to Gloucester, and "Cole's Island," a poem from the last volume that describes his encounter with death.
As a teacher at the Black Mountain College, Olson was one of the three most influential members of the Black Mountain movement, alongside to Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Creeley has joked that Olson was referred to as "Maximus" and he was called "Minimus," in reference to their teacher-apprentice relationship, a close friendship documented in their long, published correspondence.
Robin Blaser
on Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead
click on button to read essay
"Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Canada in 1966, joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University; after taking early retirement in the 1980s, he held the position of Professor Emeritus. He lived in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia.
In June 1995, for Blaser's 70th birthday, a conference was held in Vancouver to pay tribute to his contribution to Canadian poetry. The conference, known as the "Recovery of the Public World" (a phrase borrowed from Hannah Arendt), was attended by poets from around the world, including Canadian poets Michael Ondaatje, Steve McCaffery, Phyllis Webb, George Bowering, Fred Wah, Stan Persky and Daphne Marlatt; and poets who reside in the United States, including Michael Palmer and Norma Cole (who was born in Canada, subsequently migrating to San Francisco).
Blaser was also well known as the editor of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which includes Blaser's essay, The Practice of Outside. The 1993 publication The Holy Forest represents his collected poems to that date.
In 2006, Blaser received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Blaser won the Prize itself in 2008."
- Wikipedia
In June 1995, for Blaser's 70th birthday, a conference was held in Vancouver to pay tribute to his contribution to Canadian poetry. The conference, known as the "Recovery of the Public World" (a phrase borrowed from Hannah Arendt), was attended by poets from around the world, including Canadian poets Michael Ondaatje, Steve McCaffery, Phyllis Webb, George Bowering, Fred Wah, Stan Persky and Daphne Marlatt; and poets who reside in the United States, including Michael Palmer and Norma Cole (who was born in Canada, subsequently migrating to San Francisco).
Blaser was also well known as the editor of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which includes Blaser's essay, The Practice of Outside. The 1993 publication The Holy Forest represents his collected poems to that date.
In 2006, Blaser received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Blaser won the Prize itself in 2008."
- Wikipedia
Olson as a Process Poet
Jay McDaniel
How a Poem is Breathed into Life
How does a poem get breathed into existence?
Imagine that a poet undertakes a three fold process. He or she (1) begins with a moment of breathing in which she opens herself to influences from the past actual world, both personal and social and environmental, that are given to her from the depths of life. She then (2) appropriates those influences in the privacy of her own experience, making meaning of them as best she can,creating a holistic gestalt out of the disparate infuence that are given to her. And then she (3) sends the result into the world in the poem itself, which is charged with feeling and energy in its own right.
Imagine that she does this moment by moment, with each breath, and that the units of the poem (phrases, words, use white space, gaps, word order, texture) come forth from the moment itself. If these units are combined into a single poem, then in a sense a poem emerges from her skin, from her breathing, as combined with her imagination and feeling. Her writing process is guided, not by traditional rules of grammar and meter and rhyme, but by her breathing as it participates in the primal heartbeat of the universe.
The Poem Breathes, Too
Thus there's more to this breathing than her breathing. There is the breathing of the universe, for example, and there is the breathing of the poem as an outcome of her breathing. As with her own breathing, the poem or its units have life and energy. They are, to use Whitehead's word, vectors, reaching forth from where they come into the reader or listener's mind, heart, and imagination. Or, to use Whitehead's words for explaining a proposition, they are "lures for feeling." In short, the poem breathes or energizes its reader, as best it can. given the circumstances of their lives.
Of course the readers and listeners play a role in this. The readers, too, are in-breathing or inhaling influences from their worlds, and the poem or unit of poetry, is one of those influences. As they read or hear the poem, they can breathe with the poem but also add their own breathing in ways the poet may never have imagined. In their very reception of the poem, to quote Whitehead, "the many become one and are increased by one."
Alfred North Whitehead
Note, then, that the poet's activity as described above resembles and embodies the three dimensions of what Whitehead calls "an actual occasion of experience' - (1) experience in the mode of causal efficacy by which the past actual world is received in the moment at hand, (2) the privacy of a subjective experience of concrescence with its gathering together of many influences from the past, and (3) the dissolution of the immediacy of experience in what Whitehead calls the "superjective" side of experience, through which aspects of the moment (feelings, ideas, images, etc.) becomes an object for prehensions (feeling) in successive moments. As the poet Christina Hutchins puts it, they splay forth into a multitude of receptive acts, and this splayins is their (in Whitehead's phrase) their objective immortality. The wiriting process resembles what happens in a single moment in Whitehead's philosophy, and in what comes after that moment: the splaying out into the world.
The Poet is a Verb not a Noun
And who is the poet herself? She is not only the subject in the moment of experience but also the splaying. And she is herself different at every moment. She is not a self-contained ego cut off from the world by her skin. Rather she is a breathing, feeling self-in-the-moment, or, perhaps better, a series of such moments. The poet who creates the poem is not the same poet who reads her poem later although she may see something of her past in the poem she reads. As she sends the poem into the future, she also sends herself, thus becoming an object for the world, that is, an influence in the world, amid the sending. She herself exerts causal efficacy, or agency, in the world. Of course it is not only poets who do this. Plumbers and librarians, children and parents, animals and plants, and, yes, mountains and riverse are all doing this kind of thing all the time: receiving influences and the responding through their own agency, making the world slightly new in their response.
Poetry as Cosmology
Thus the threefold process embodies or instantiates a creativity that is anywhere and everywhere throughout the universe, which means that a poet's act of creating a poem, and thus herself in the moment at hand, is an expression of, not an exception to, what is happening everywhere. Her activity is cosmological as well as poetic. Or, to put it another way, the act of creating a poem or a poetic unit is a cosmological act. Poetry is cosmology in creative, linguistic form. And so is plumbing and parenting.
Charles Olson as a Process Poet
This, I believe, is the way that the late Charles Olson understood a poem or, better, a poetic unit. He was an innovative poet and essayist whose work influenced numerous other writers during the 1950s and 1960s, and he was deeply influenced by Alfred North Whitehead and his book Process and Reality. He was, in this sense, a process poet.
Robert Duncan
Not the process poet however. There were in his time several poets who were directly influenced by Whitehead, and among them was the poet Robert Duncan who brings out sides of Whitehead not found in Olson's work. I quote from an essay by Michael Niemann called "Playing in the Planetary Field: Vulnerability and Syncretic Myth-Making in Robert Duncan's Ecopoetics."
Like Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets, Duncan was taken with systems thinking and process philosophy, but he added an essential focus on psychology, asking how an individual can participate in complex systems. If we are to participate in such systems without trying to control them, he realized, we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable...Duncan’s ecopoetics decouples nature from convention, wedding it instead to extravagant emergent forms, and invites us not to seek technoscientific mastery of Earth and cosmos but to participate in them playfully by cultivating vulnerability and a “vital weakness.” At a time when pervasive apocalyptic thinking pushes us toward unwise technofxes to global environmental problems, Duncan’s work ofers contemporary ecopoetics an alternative way of imagining and practicing hope.
For my part, I find Duncan's work as described here more congenial to the social concerns and sense of receptive vulnerability that are true to process philosophy today. I hope to develop another page in Open Horizons that is on Duncan. But here the emphasis is on Olson as illustrative of what might be called process poetry.
Process Poetry: Two Meanings
Process poetry can mean two things. On the one hand it can mean poetry that illuminates themes important to process thinkers: the balue of the natural world, the role of feeling and relationships in human life, the dynamics of beauty (including tragic beauty), hopes for compassionate communities and ecological civilizations (both realized and frustrated), the role of creativity and novelty in life, the reality of a loving God, the uniqueness of each particular event, and the idea of process itself.
In this sense there is much process poetry that carries no reference to process philosophy, much less Whitehead, but that is nevertheless process in its form, content, and textures - including its sounds, rhythms, and, if written, the way it appears on a page. The poem at issue can be epic poetry, lyrical poetry, traditional poetry, postmodern poetry, world poetry, folk poetry, spoken word poetry, religious poetry; it can be a ballad, a dirge, a haiku, an elegy, a lament - what makes it process is that, directly or indirectly, it communicates ideas and feelings that are important to process thinkers.
The point is not that the poem simply illustrates the ideas and feelings to that they can be entertained conceptually; it is that they themselves - the ideas and feelings - are evoked by the poem and understood through the poem. The poem may well communicate the ideas and feelings much better than abstract philosophy. Whereas some might think philosophical and theological texts in prose are "the real thing" and poems merely afterthoughts; it is arguable that in many cases poems are "the real thing" and philosophical and theologican texts are mere prompts. This is why, in introducing process philosophy to people, process poems may well be primary.
On the other hand, process poetry can refer to poetry that is explicitly Whiteheadian in one way or another. The poetry of the late Charles Olson does the latter. He is, among 20th century poets, one of the most Whiteheadian of poets, in the sense that he develops poems and a poetics (theory of poetry and its significance for the world) that is quite explicitly influenced by Whitehead. "The American poet who has made the most profound use of Whitehead’s thought is Charles Olson," writes Robin Blaser in The Violets: Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead. And rightly so. Charles Olson is a process poet in both senses of the phrase. You can read about Olson here. The rest of this page is meant to introduce you to more of Olson's work through his own voice and the work of scholars.
- Jay McDaniel. Sept. 8, 2021
How does a poem get breathed into existence?
Imagine that a poet undertakes a three fold process. He or she (1) begins with a moment of breathing in which she opens herself to influences from the past actual world, both personal and social and environmental, that are given to her from the depths of life. She then (2) appropriates those influences in the privacy of her own experience, making meaning of them as best she can,creating a holistic gestalt out of the disparate infuence that are given to her. And then she (3) sends the result into the world in the poem itself, which is charged with feeling and energy in its own right.
Imagine that she does this moment by moment, with each breath, and that the units of the poem (phrases, words, use white space, gaps, word order, texture) come forth from the moment itself. If these units are combined into a single poem, then in a sense a poem emerges from her skin, from her breathing, as combined with her imagination and feeling. Her writing process is guided, not by traditional rules of grammar and meter and rhyme, but by her breathing as it participates in the primal heartbeat of the universe.
The Poem Breathes, Too
Thus there's more to this breathing than her breathing. There is the breathing of the universe, for example, and there is the breathing of the poem as an outcome of her breathing. As with her own breathing, the poem or its units have life and energy. They are, to use Whitehead's word, vectors, reaching forth from where they come into the reader or listener's mind, heart, and imagination. Or, to use Whitehead's words for explaining a proposition, they are "lures for feeling." In short, the poem breathes or energizes its reader, as best it can. given the circumstances of their lives.
Of course the readers and listeners play a role in this. The readers, too, are in-breathing or inhaling influences from their worlds, and the poem or unit of poetry, is one of those influences. As they read or hear the poem, they can breathe with the poem but also add their own breathing in ways the poet may never have imagined. In their very reception of the poem, to quote Whitehead, "the many become one and are increased by one."
Alfred North Whitehead
Note, then, that the poet's activity as described above resembles and embodies the three dimensions of what Whitehead calls "an actual occasion of experience' - (1) experience in the mode of causal efficacy by which the past actual world is received in the moment at hand, (2) the privacy of a subjective experience of concrescence with its gathering together of many influences from the past, and (3) the dissolution of the immediacy of experience in what Whitehead calls the "superjective" side of experience, through which aspects of the moment (feelings, ideas, images, etc.) becomes an object for prehensions (feeling) in successive moments. As the poet Christina Hutchins puts it, they splay forth into a multitude of receptive acts, and this splayins is their (in Whitehead's phrase) their objective immortality. The wiriting process resembles what happens in a single moment in Whitehead's philosophy, and in what comes after that moment: the splaying out into the world.
The Poet is a Verb not a Noun
And who is the poet herself? She is not only the subject in the moment of experience but also the splaying. And she is herself different at every moment. She is not a self-contained ego cut off from the world by her skin. Rather she is a breathing, feeling self-in-the-moment, or, perhaps better, a series of such moments. The poet who creates the poem is not the same poet who reads her poem later although she may see something of her past in the poem she reads. As she sends the poem into the future, she also sends herself, thus becoming an object for the world, that is, an influence in the world, amid the sending. She herself exerts causal efficacy, or agency, in the world. Of course it is not only poets who do this. Plumbers and librarians, children and parents, animals and plants, and, yes, mountains and riverse are all doing this kind of thing all the time: receiving influences and the responding through their own agency, making the world slightly new in their response.
Poetry as Cosmology
Thus the threefold process embodies or instantiates a creativity that is anywhere and everywhere throughout the universe, which means that a poet's act of creating a poem, and thus herself in the moment at hand, is an expression of, not an exception to, what is happening everywhere. Her activity is cosmological as well as poetic. Or, to put it another way, the act of creating a poem or a poetic unit is a cosmological act. Poetry is cosmology in creative, linguistic form. And so is plumbing and parenting.
Charles Olson as a Process Poet
This, I believe, is the way that the late Charles Olson understood a poem or, better, a poetic unit. He was an innovative poet and essayist whose work influenced numerous other writers during the 1950s and 1960s, and he was deeply influenced by Alfred North Whitehead and his book Process and Reality. He was, in this sense, a process poet.
Robert Duncan
Not the process poet however. There were in his time several poets who were directly influenced by Whitehead, and among them was the poet Robert Duncan who brings out sides of Whitehead not found in Olson's work. I quote from an essay by Michael Niemann called "Playing in the Planetary Field: Vulnerability and Syncretic Myth-Making in Robert Duncan's Ecopoetics."
Like Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets, Duncan was taken with systems thinking and process philosophy, but he added an essential focus on psychology, asking how an individual can participate in complex systems. If we are to participate in such systems without trying to control them, he realized, we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable...Duncan’s ecopoetics decouples nature from convention, wedding it instead to extravagant emergent forms, and invites us not to seek technoscientific mastery of Earth and cosmos but to participate in them playfully by cultivating vulnerability and a “vital weakness.” At a time when pervasive apocalyptic thinking pushes us toward unwise technofxes to global environmental problems, Duncan’s work ofers contemporary ecopoetics an alternative way of imagining and practicing hope.
For my part, I find Duncan's work as described here more congenial to the social concerns and sense of receptive vulnerability that are true to process philosophy today. I hope to develop another page in Open Horizons that is on Duncan. But here the emphasis is on Olson as illustrative of what might be called process poetry.
Process Poetry: Two Meanings
Process poetry can mean two things. On the one hand it can mean poetry that illuminates themes important to process thinkers: the balue of the natural world, the role of feeling and relationships in human life, the dynamics of beauty (including tragic beauty), hopes for compassionate communities and ecological civilizations (both realized and frustrated), the role of creativity and novelty in life, the reality of a loving God, the uniqueness of each particular event, and the idea of process itself.
In this sense there is much process poetry that carries no reference to process philosophy, much less Whitehead, but that is nevertheless process in its form, content, and textures - including its sounds, rhythms, and, if written, the way it appears on a page. The poem at issue can be epic poetry, lyrical poetry, traditional poetry, postmodern poetry, world poetry, folk poetry, spoken word poetry, religious poetry; it can be a ballad, a dirge, a haiku, an elegy, a lament - what makes it process is that, directly or indirectly, it communicates ideas and feelings that are important to process thinkers.
The point is not that the poem simply illustrates the ideas and feelings to that they can be entertained conceptually; it is that they themselves - the ideas and feelings - are evoked by the poem and understood through the poem. The poem may well communicate the ideas and feelings much better than abstract philosophy. Whereas some might think philosophical and theological texts in prose are "the real thing" and poems merely afterthoughts; it is arguable that in many cases poems are "the real thing" and philosophical and theologican texts are mere prompts. This is why, in introducing process philosophy to people, process poems may well be primary.
On the other hand, process poetry can refer to poetry that is explicitly Whiteheadian in one way or another. The poetry of the late Charles Olson does the latter. He is, among 20th century poets, one of the most Whiteheadian of poets, in the sense that he develops poems and a poetics (theory of poetry and its significance for the world) that is quite explicitly influenced by Whitehead. "The American poet who has made the most profound use of Whitehead’s thought is Charles Olson," writes Robin Blaser in The Violets: Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead. And rightly so. Charles Olson is a process poet in both senses of the phrase. You can read about Olson here. The rest of this page is meant to introduce you to more of Olson's work through his own voice and the work of scholars.
- Jay McDaniel. Sept. 8, 2021