(The stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to a new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.)įirst, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective. I want to do two things: first, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective, it is accomplished and II, suggest a few ideas about what stance toward reality brings such verse into being, what the stance does, both to the poet and to his reader. (The revolution of the ear, 1910, the trochee’s heave, asks it of the younger poets.) Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. It led Keats, already a hundred years ago, to see it (Wordsworth’s, Milton’s) in the light of “the Egotistical Sublime” and it persists, at this latter day, as what you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall) (or what a French critic calls “closed” verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams: ![]() In conclusion, Olson suggests a movement he calls “objectism,” which he defines as “the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul For man is himself an object.” At the close of the essay Olson expresses the hope that projective verse has the increased capacity needed to carry epic works, and indeed Olson began work on his epic project, The Maximus Poems, that year. Olson argues against a lazy reliance on simile and description, which can drain a poem of energy, and proposes that syntax be shaped by sound rather than sense, with nuances of breath and motion to be conveyed to the reader through typographical means. The HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE” “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless-and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath: Harnessing poet Robert Creeley’s assertion that “form is never more than an extension of content” and Edward Dahlberg’s belief that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. Olson sees the challenge of the transference of poetic energy from source to poem to reader, and the way in which that energy shifts at each juncture, as particularly of concern to poets who engage in composition by field, because the poet is no longer relying on a received structure as a propulsive force. ![]() ![]() The essay introduces his ideas of “composition by field” through projective or open verse, which is a continuation of the ideas of poets Ezra Pound, who asked poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,” and William Carlos Williams, who proposed in 1948 that a poem be approached as a “field of action.” Olson’s projective verse focuses on “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.”Ĭomposition by field opposes the traditional method of poetic composition based on received form and measure. Charles Olson’s influential manifesto, “Projective Verse,” was first published as a pamphlet, and then was quoted extensively in William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography (1951).
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