incarnation is

incarnation is

     place  &  name

 landscape  &  inscape

habitation of orb & urb

as clue to the whole of creation

. . . 

Pangaea Gondwanaland Ouroboros

(circa 300 million years ago)

her head and nose

the coastline and the cape

her eyes in the south, her nose thrust

eastward toward the ear of

him whose head and hands are

grossly distended peninsulas

her tongue whispers westward,

his ear inclined north

their world of

gigantic geographical copulation,

their coitus of two united

world hemispheres

closed in a circle each occupies

round the world

from the end of the world

in the west to the end

of the world in the east

[. . . ]

The Beginning (and How to Get There) ['Gnostalgia' 1]

          _1_

The path to the center is arduous.

Into the backward

inward circling

of the past

          he found himself
transported back to
the beginning of time,

projected out of
the profane world

returning to

remember his origin

or remember himself consciously

recalling his total existence

          in a rite of passage
he went back to
the origin of the world

and witnessd the original
cosmogony

by descending along the ladder of memories

down

to the bare earth

of his being.

          _2_

Entering consciously into death

in a fit of passion

he enterd

the depth

the source

the origin

nameless

in and out of

the breath.

The union was the union with

the full Self

the one true complete original

Self of which

our little lives are

such finite fractal fragments.

          _3_

All was vertigo.

Through endlessly cascading corridors of metacosmic memory

he fell, never quite touching bottom.

He shut his eyes for a moment,

thinking

      All the dualities and opposites
      all my sins and virtues
      all this dazzling chaos was

      the tensors
      bending me
      to the breaking point.

Then he opend his eyes.

That's when he saw the Aleph.

[to be continued ...] 

George Quasha on encountering Charles Olson

George Quasha on encountering Charles Olson:

You’re going to be disappointed. My meeting with Olson wasn’t in Gloucester. I went to Gloucester and tried to meet him. He was in one of his dark periods. He was there, and I knocked on the door and called him on the phone many times. He’d unplugged his phone. He wouldn’t answer his door or any of those things. 

It was subsequent to that I met him in London for the first time. There was a big poetry conference in London, in the Albert Hall. Everybody was there, Neruda was there, I mean, poets from all over the world. It was incredible, a young poet’s dream to be able to go there and hear all there people in the course of a few days. ...

So we got to talk for about an hour or so. It was at that point I could ask him for manuscripts for Stony Brook magazine. I had in mind the idea that I was going to edit something. ... He responded to being in the magazine and submitted a poem. 

And actually the most valuable thing I can say to you about Olson is the relationship I had with him about that poem that’s published in Stony Brook. He submitted it, and then he called me up and said, “What happened to my manuscript?” And I said, “Oh, did you want this back?” 

It came to me on pieces of paper pasted together that was like that cheap carbon that you put in as your second sheet so you don’t dent the wheel. So it’s not real paper, really the stuff is meant to disappear in fifteen minutes. I was, like, holding it so that it wouldn’t come apart. If it came apart you might never quite get it together again. And you could see how he composed. Antin’s claim that it was collage had a kind of authenticity in the actual method Olson used in sticking these pieces of paper together. 

I said, “Well, I didn’t know you wanted it back so soon.” He says, “Yeah, I’ve got to have it back. Also, I’m not sure it’s right.” I said, “Well, you don’t have a copy at all?” He said, “No, I don’t have a copy. . . Read it to me.” I said, “Well, we’re going to press. We’re typesetting it right now. There wouldn’t be time for it to go back to you to make changes.” “Well, read it to me.” 

So I was reading his poem to him all on the telephone. He said, “Wait a minute. What did you just say? What was that? What was that? Read that again.” And I’d read the line again. “I didn’t say that, did I?” [Laughter] So we’d go a little further down, and he says, “Nah, you can’t say that. Go back and read that first paragraph up the top, up the top. You can’t say that up there if you’re saying this down here. . . Change that word. I’m going to change the one up there.” 

He went on like that, and so — actually I was scared stiff. Here’s this guy revising his poem in my head: the theater of Olson’s possibility. 

...

But let me say what it meant to me, because it actually changed my life, that experience. You never get to experience what goes on inside another poet’s process, and most of the time you don’t really need to know that. It’s not important. But Olson was important to me, and so to be able to hear that as something happening right there inside your time, the poem’s time becomes your time, and it’s his time, and he can’t have that time unless you read to him, so you’re involved, and you feel oddly responsible for something if you — you had no power, you’re just responsible. 

So it was very very anxious, but at the same time I got to hear how he thought. I actually felt I touched the way that he wrote poems, and what was interesting to him, how his ear would pick up at the bottom of the page what had resonance for something that had happened at the beginning of the poem — if this was here, you couldn’t do that there. 

So I actually got to hear by field. I got to hear what a field meant. It was a total auditorially accessible living reality that he was inside of, inside the poem, and was listening for. And because he had to externalize it to hear his poem back through my mouth, something that never gets externalized was momentarily out there, happening; and I got to be there to have it happening inside me, and it just changed something inside me. I heard poems totally differently as a result of that.  

...

It was spontaneous, but was rising to the occasion. The point was that there was a sense of responsibility that Olson had to something I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t hear it — I could hear it because he said so. Being responsible to the total field, it was as though Olson had made a mistake because he hadn’t listened well enough to the total field when he stuck these things together — because that’s a visual method: this has got to go there, this has got to go here — and so, unless you read it over and over to yourself or hear the whole thing, you might miss something. 

So another thing is the rigor of the method. It’s very hard to establish that. If you are writing about an Olson poem, you might be tempted to use language and methods of analysis that apply to poems in general to explain what’s happening, and it was quite clear to me that that was completely wrong, that he was listening to something that had a different reality altogether from how poems usually went together. It’s not that it didn’t have many of the elements; it’s what held them together was different, that that was the magic substance that you couldn’t put your finger on, and it was all in how you heard that total field.  

...

It was extremely objective. That’s the other thing about it. It was like there was an object there in the sense that you could point to it and you could be responsible to it.