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.  

The S T A R

Th e   S  T  A   R

blossomd with crowded
orbits of these shining jewels,
the whole sky

became visibly
a l i v e
with myriads of worlds .


Each peopled with unique
intelligences
united in community,

each system
was itself
a communal being.


And the whole string
strung from end to end
in a single telepathic

mesh network was
an intelligent
and loving being,

common spirit of
countless
diverse individuals .

. . .

"It may be relevant that
Charles Fort (Persinger and Lafreniere, 1977)
frequently noted the "coincidence"
of mass human events and environmental oddities
at the time that "new" stars were first observed ..."

. . .

Valorize all / forms of life

Valorize all
forms of life
that
preserve

culture
holding open
human
possibilities

Holy Fire

1

The early seer sages perceived
these Powers, contemplated
the mysteries of creation
(the successive aspects assumed
by earlier solar systems)

The magi of Chaldea
the priests of Egypt
to them the stars were alive,
in the stars they saw
the gods

So the planets became
the gods of mythology


2

The central doctrine of occult science
is the F I R E Principle

substance of the universe,
instrument of the gods



AGNI
who was Fire hidden in all things
who was universal agent and substance

the Aryans revered the FIRE of Agni
for they saw in it the substance
and vestment of the gods



FIRE is an elemental first form of matter
the garment and the body of the gods,

the medium thro which
the gods acted upon the world



This doctrine of HOLY FIRE is an ancient doctrine
illuminated in the poetry of the Vedas,

formulated scientifically by Heraclitus
"FIRE is genesis
from whose transformations
all things are born"



FIRE is not only a vivifying principle
FIRE is also a destroying principle

planets, moons, created in fire
will be destroyed by fire


3

The gods are dead

There is only this
unending torrent of phenomena
following one another flowing
like w a v e s around
the circle of the sun

All things united
by sympathy or antipathy,
the whole of creation
held and linked together
is living and animated


[...]

1. circa 806 to 670 BC
2. circa 806 to 670 BC
3. post 670 BC

Gathering . . .

George Quasha on the late Jackson MacLow:

"We get different results when we listen or read for something—something we think we want and already know how to hear (poetry!)—than when we allow language to freely talk to us, perhaps through us, or indeed to guide our thinking according to an unknown axis. . . .

"Jackson went on beyond procedure, as mentioned, to a new order of spontaneous composition, which also performatively changed the physical dimension of poetics. (I for one have never recovered from hearing them: the responsive alteration of ear-mind is unidirectional.) This is hard to explain; one has to listen “deeply” (to use Pauline Oliveros’s term for transformative listening) to the performance voices of both Cage and Mac Low to register the magnitude of the event inside the voice. It can alter our whole sense of the poetic vehicle and what it tells us about language. . . . 

"There’s a reciprocity between language and mind that we can feel but hardly understand. It seems to give, for one thing, direct access to the state of mind that is the release and receptivity of the poetic act .  . . . "

Quasha: MacLow and Root Poetics

More on MacLow's practice of "gathering," a core principle of projective verse (cf. Charles Olson):

". . . he composed from the field of language wherever he was (at home, out in the city, traveling abroad), drawing words, phrases, even whole sentences from language he read, saw, heard, or thought in the moment of writing. He called it “gathering,” not “chance” . . ."

MacLow's "Gathering"

3100 BC

After some confusion of mind

we realized we were looking at the solar system
in an earlier stage of its life
in fact

a time before it was really
much of a regular and ordered system
at all


It was clear that we had traveled back thro time


to the west
tangled tresses of star-streams spread
abroad on the darkness


to the north
two long whirling tassels
like spinning tops swayed


their currents sometimes
interpenetrated

neonhot filaments of noonlight
interweaving

streams crossing one another's paths
pulled one another

moving in great sweeping curves
as they pass from one to the other

each from each
swung round away

or more rarely
came together

and together
united

. . .


"Merkelbach began from such passages
to form his theory that all ancient novels
were intended by their authors as coded ritual
texts for use in Mystery Religions"

. . .

Beginnings . . .

Where
the story starts is

where
one is looking

. . .

There's a hidden access

What's true of the smallest handful of dirt
is necessarily true
of the whole
earth .

There's a hidden axis

a precarious balance between
the interdependence
of single lives
and clustering forces flowing

forward and backward interweaving
possible motives and meanings

not apparent at first glance .

Z-Pinch Interference Pattern

Electricity      compressed
& expressed
     by magnetism

     Where the circuit completes
two Birkeland Currents meet
and briefly become one
          self-manifest
     discharge

     - Implosive
     explosion -

     Where stars are born
& new earths are birthed
spherical and whole
     small and large

     . . .