600 The American Century: Literature since 1945particle” in this form, or rather field, would be the syllable, “the king and pin of
versification:” the poet should always pay attention to the sound of the syllables as
they unrolled from the mind and appealed to the ear. “It is by their syllables that
words juxtapose in beauty,” Olson said; and these syllables, energetically constructed,
should in turn rule and hold together the lines, which constituted “the larger forms”
of the poem. “The line comes ... from the breath, from the breathing of the man who
writes,” Olson argued, “at the moment he writes”; it was therefore unique to the poet
and the occasion. Breath reified experience by creating an awareness of bodily “depth
sensibility:” the poet responded to the flow and pressure of things, he registered this
in his diaphragm, and he then compelled his readers, by sharing his breathing
rhythms, to feel the same pressures and participate in the flow of the moment.
“I have had to learn the simplest things / last,” Olson wrote in one of his poems,
“Maximus, to himself ” (1953), “Which made for difficulties.” The problem, as he
saw it, was not that truth was intrinsically difficult: on the contrary, earlier
civilizations like the Mayan had acted upon it with instinctive ease. It was that habits
of mind and language that had been entrenched for centuries had to be unlearned:
man had become “estranged / from that which was most familiar,” and he had to
turn his consciousness against itself in order to cure the estrangement. The process
of unlearning, and then making a new start, began with books like Call Me Ishmael
(1947), his extraordinary critical work on Melville which opens with the ringing
assertion, “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America ... I spell it
large because it comes large here:” a belief that was to be developed in his
preoccupation with spatial, rather than linear, forms as well in his later, direct
explorations of “American space” (where there is “nothing but what is” Olson
claimed, “no end and no beginning”). It was also initiated in some of the earlier
poems published in the 1940s, which celebrate the movement of nature in “Full circle”
and attack the tendency to perceive life and literature in closed terms (“The closed
parenthesis reads: the dead bury the dead, / and it is not very interesting”). However,
it was in the work published after this, through the 1950s and beyond, that his sense
of poems as performative moral acts was fully exercised: in shorter pieces like
“The Kingfishers” (1949), “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” (1950), “The Lordly and Isolate
Satyrs” (1956), “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” (1956), and “Variations Done for Gerald
Van de Wiele” (1956), as well as in The Maximus Poems (1960–1983), written over
several decades, which represent Olson’s own version of the American epic. A poem
such as “The Kingfishers” powerfully expresses Olson’s belief in serial, open forms.
“Not one death but many, / ” it begins, “not accumulation but change, the feed-back
proves, the feed-back is the law / Into the same river no man steps twice.” But it not
only expresses it in the literal sense, it enacts it: working on the assumption that
nothing can be said exactly and finally, Olson uses repetition, parenthesis, and
apposition. “To be in different states without a change,” the poet suggests, “ / is not a
possibility”; and so recurring figures metamorphose according to the altered
conditions in which they are placed. As they change, the line changes too, in lively
responsiveness: rapid, energetic, constantly varying in pace, it denies any attempt to
receive the discourse and experience of the poem as anything other than a continuousGGray_c05.indd 600ray_c 05 .indd 600 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM