Contemporary Poetry

performance and the poem 99

OPEN FIELD POETICS AND PROJECTIVE VERSE:
ADAPTATIONS

Published in 1950 , Charles Olson’s groundbreaking manifesto
essay ‘Projective Verse’ presents an important envisioning of the
relationship between poetry and performance.^1 Olson describes
projective verse as a form of open poetry. The essay centres
around the energy, or what he calls the ‘kinetics’, of writing, and
also importantly links the relationship between writing and the
body with its sustained reference to an ideation of breath. Central
to Olson’s essay is the proposition of an open or projective verse
as ‘COMPOSITION BY FIELD’, which creates a space for the
poem ‘opposed to inherited line, stanza, overall form’ (p. 148 ).
The motivation for such writing is described aphoristically by the
poet, as ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION
OF CONTENT’ (p. 148 ). Olson’s emphasis upon the act of per-
ceiving – ‘ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND
DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION’ (p. 149 )

• suggests a degree of immediacy to the writing and the creation
  of an open form that resists preconceived structures. Key to our
  understanding of performance is Olson’s emphasis on the relation-
  ship between the poem and musicality, the poem in effect as a score
  for the human voice. Discussing the importance of the typewriter
  in the process of composition Olson states:

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 fi rst time the poet has the stave and the bar, a musician has

had. For the fi rst 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. (p. 154 )

Olson’s acknowledgement of the intimate relationship between
page, breath, voice and body animates an appreciation of both
poetry as spoken word performance and the textual performance on