Joshua Gardner
Between the Physical and the Cultural:
Basil King and Charles Olson’s “Herodotean Exploration.”
“I came with no ideas; Black Mountain did it all.”[1]
“The writing and the living are one!”[2]
“I think where I am not therefore I am where I do not think.”[3]
At sixteen Basil King, already a painter whose artistry was not being understood in his Detroit, Michigan high school, wrote to Charles Olson to ask to be admitted to Black Mountain College. At Olson’s invitation, King arrived in North Carolina to begin to study Olson’s unique curriculum and fall under the influence of his unique pedagogy. When Martin Duberman asked John Cage “which Black Mountain” he preferred, that of Josef Albers’ or Charles Olson’s, Cage (himself a postmodern pioneer) – somewhat unsurprisingly – preferred the “truly anarchical community” of the latter’s.[4] The American postmodern poet qua philosopher Charles Olson was first invited to Black Mountain College in 1948; by 1951 he had tenure and in 1953 he was installed as Rector. Characterized by the magnitude of his physical size (6 ft. 9 in.) and his intellectual bravura, Black Mountain immediately took to Olson and he to it.
The avant-gardiste Rector’s inherent incredulity toward the strictures of administration, “patternization” and “a priori judgment,” plunged the faculty-dependent community into anarchy and eventual collapse.[5] Coupled with a lack of subsidy for novel educational projects with the rise of McCarthyite America, the institution itself became physically disheveled and isolated. Yet this very anarchism became the driving force behind an unbridled artistic intensity. Therefore, “becoming a decidedly American, and decidedly radical environment.”[6] Olson himself called the College “Olson’s University,” indeed the poet’s premiership spearheaded a radical shift from the visual to the literary arts in Black Mountain’s final chapter.[7] The Black Mountain Poets would emerge from this culture. A readily transgressive group predominantly related by place, institution, and the on-site printing press producing the Black Mountain Review publication, this group featured teachers Robert Creeley, Dan Rice, Robert Duncan and students Joel Oppenheimer, Michael Rumaker, John Wieners, Ed Dorn, and Jonathan Williams amongst others.[8] King was affected as deeply by them as by the many great avant-garde visual artists among the faculty and students. Akin with their pluralist philosophies, The Black Mountain Poets, to whom I now add the contemporary poet and painter Basil King, are characterized by divergent styles and a heterogeneous body of work. They were, however, intellectually bound to Olson “as a locus;” using the radical “premise” set out in Projective Verse to “think of how a more active sense of poetry might be got,” to, in other words, post-modernize the medium.[9] Yet Olson held sway over everyone, not just the literati.
“Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar, and he must continuously seek to rediscover it.”[10] The telos of Charles Olson’s life can be understood as a continuous “exploration” of the disjunction between culture and nature. This exploration would ground the ethical basis of his politicization of poetics after an era in which the art form had become redundant in the autotelic autonomy of the ‘Metaphysical Modernist Tradition,’ typified by New Criticism.[11] The beginning of Charles Olson’s tenure was correspondent with the release of two works, the long-poem The Kingfishers (1949) and his poetic manifesto Projective Verse (1950). Both, established the poets place in the post-war poetic landscape, whilst forming the epistemological bases of Olson’s postmodern pedagogy consolidated at the College.[12] The foundations of which would culminate in his now published The Special View of History lecture series delivered in 1956. Through these texts, I shall attempt a convergence of his often disparate – yet in that disparity, rewarding – postmodern thought that culminated in this period.[13] Moreover, I shall argue that light on his thought can be shed through the lens of his student, Basil King, and vice versa.
The Kingfishers juxtaposes the various accessions, revolutions (e.g. the rise of Maoism), and extinctions of historical civilizations, before drawing parallels with the 20th century Occident.[14] Olson argues that contemporary cultural crises are due not to the floundering of religious teleology (Eliot), nor industrial capitalism (Pound), but rather as the consequence of two and a half millennia of “Modernity.”[15] Olson traces the modernist paradigm back to ancient Greece, circa 500 BCE. Characterized by logic and classificatory reason, the poet saw modernism as a “box” that placed strictures on “Western Man;” when a paradigm of Thought became absolute and conventionalized, it became modern.[16] The Kingfishers opens with the maxim: “what does not change / is the will to change,”[17] intended to underscore Olson’s argument that there should be constant cultural “revolution” to offset any “grand process” (or, “metanarrative”)[18] that could be used to “excuse history as a complex of abstract, impersonal forces.”[19] In his contention that “History is story,” Olson acknowledged that discursively contingent culture was largely narrative based and thus relative, thus inaugurating an epistemological “new localism” in which “fact” is not apodictic truth but “the place of the cluster of belief.”[20] Olson located his “post-Logical” lineage in the Greek mythologist qua historian Herodotus who “had retained the older definition” of truth as relative; Herodotus inversely set out to find not ‘truth’ but ‘evidence,’ therefore, Olson rather employed the verb ‘istorin, meaning “finding for oneself” to implore poets to become “Herodotean explorers of reality, creatively annihilating the Platonic distinction between muthos and logos (‘fictitious’ vs. ‘fact’) which had been so detrimental for so long.”[21] Thus re-instantiating the more etymologically Greek muthologos connected to the spoken word and story, thereby making history “ACTIVE” in one’s allegorical re-creating of it.[22] The mythologist explores culture, for a myth “is essentially popular i.e. collective, not the product an individual brain […] it blends, the historical and the natural;” in other words, the myth, a collation of tales, an “arrangement of incidents,” admits to its cultural contingency and disjunctive relation to the natural, yet does not flounder in spite of the absolute.[23] [24] In finding the evidence and becoming an archaeologist of the morning (as Olson styled his vocation), in order to become post-modern, one need first become pre-modern.
It would be in Olson’s nominalist understanding of reality that he would foreground his artistic project to re-politicize poetics. Olson believed that that it fell to the artist – as a figure endowed with the power to re-present culture – to take a fundamentally political role in society: “If you don’t know, brother, that poetics is politics, poets are political leaders today.”[25] The poet thus proposed a modal “STANCE towards reality” to challenge any “know-it-all” philosophy through a return to poïesis.[26] Projective Verse established the pragmatics of how to facilitate a disruption of the Western tradition vis-à-vis a subversion of its presupposing delimitations on writing. Olson established “COMPOSITION BY FIELD,” premised upon two axioms: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” and “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIETLY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO ANOTHER PERCEPTION.”[27] Both principals are rooted in reducing the binary between knowledge and experience: the former to reconsider form as content itself (reducing the naturalism of “inherited line, stanza, over-all form”), and the latter by relocating episodic intellectual experience in embodied perception.[28] Projective verse is the somatic projection of the body and breath into the “ergon” (work) to interrupt the abstract delimitations imposed upon it by the Western “METAPHYSICAL tradition of history;” thus breaking its passive “descriptive and analytical” contingency on the “division of FORM and CONTENT” with the ACTIVE rhythm of the breath.[29]To “speak from these roots” is to register that “man is himself an object,” thereby deconstructing the humanist rationalism of that “peculiar assumption by which western man” has separated himself from the real world with “the ‘subject’ and his soul;” thus removing the arbitrary binary between the internal and external: “It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man.”[30]
With a penchant for “vernacular over grammar”[31]and topoi extolling on the “everyday,” supplemented with an infusion of high literature and interdisciplinary excursions on psychoanalysis and anthropology, Olson’s work constitutes a complexio oppositorium unlike any other.[32] Whilst characterized by the instigation of syntactical patterns without completion (e.g. opening parentheses without closure), projective verse features unremitting disjunctions between rhythms and observations that mitigate any sense of the conclusion, resolution, or definition often guaranteed by traditional syntax.[33] Employing a syntactically dissident and highly visual textual arrangement of form on the page, Olson deemed his linguistically deconstructive and somatically predicated poïesis “open field poetics;” whereby the emergent ‘OPEN form’ could rupture the poet’s rigid contingency on restricting modes of “syntax, logic and thematic progression,” engendering an amorphous “instant-by-instant engagement with reality,” by which any “absolute,” “if there is any… is never more than this one, you, this instant, in action.”[34]
Precociously presupposing Roland Barthes notion of the “death of the Author” and the “birth of the reader,”[35] Olson conceived of the resultant “high energy construct” as situated in a socio-political “force field” that exceeded any univocal authorial or teleological narratives imposed upon it.[36] In “composing by field,” one could argue that the projected Text, extant at the serial level of culture and predicated upon the polysemous epistemic foundation of the mythical, “challenges both the distinction between individual and environment and the belief in individual autonomy,”[37] whilst retaining a somatic origin precludes it from entering the itself absolute referential aberration of postmodern “cultural constructivism.”[38] It is this impulse of open field poetry – symbolized by a “newly mobilized, ‘deconstructed’ sense of self as defined by the coordinates of language, place, and history”[39] – that elucidates why Projective Verse “became a manifesto for so many Postmoderns.”[40] Indeed, Olson coined the term “post-Modern” for the first time in the history of aesthetics within a letter written to Robert Creeley in 1951.[41] Here, Olson would underscore the ability of ‘PROJECTIVE ART’ to engage a form of physical “KINESIS” by which the very “act, including the act of knowledge” itself could be rendered closer to an organic experience of “rhythm.”[42] Olson viewed this physical interpolation of culture as a means of ridding the various alienations inflicted upon humanity onset by modernism, yet often today ascribed to postmodernism.[43] Whereas the “modern” is alienated from the “universe,” “any POST-MODERN is born with the ancient confidence that, he does belong.”[44] Creeley would recall that “what was fascinating to Charles, [was] trying to break the habit of history as some discrete ordering apart from what energies or active forces were the case,” making his students literally take history and “pick it up,” facilitating their engagement to be “not only coincident with the fact, but they became active in the fact.”[45]
Olson most significantly develops the ontology of the subject in The Special View of History Black Mountain College lecture series, stating that “one can’t get out of the circle,” for the human is paradox, both “at once and differently, a natural man, a civilized creature – and this must be hardest to stomach – cultured.” However, one will always corporeally “know” real “familiar” experience despite his cultural predication, “for the simplest reason; that you do, by being alive;” yet due to what Olson coins the “majority” (culture), “Man is forever estranged to the degree that his stance towards reality disengages him from the familiar.”[46] In order to fully re-engage with – rather than duplicitously overcome – the paradox of life, Olson instigates the “imperative of the familiar,” by which one must adopt “What Keats proposes as Negative Capability, the readmission of the familiar.”[47] Olson deems the Negative Capability to be “crucial for post-Modern man,” for it will render him “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” ergo opening his Symbolic lens to the indeterminacy of existence, the historically contingent “or what we would call today relative” and thus to the “right now, as it is happening” – the embodied event itself.[48] Hence the somatic return to the Real in his work presupposes his adulation for the Romantic, for ‘he [Keats] unsat the unit “I,” he went so far [….] as to say that the Man of Negative Capability has – and quote – ‘not any individuality, any determined Character.’”[49] This radical imperative of the familiar employed by the Negative Capability demands that one “cannot abstract from it. One has to get it in its place of occurrences,” thus breaking history from its canonical bounds through its very juxtaposition with the Real; cultural reality becomes something that one “lives,” “an active” and indeterminate engagement: “The motive, then, of reality, is process not goal.”[50] Thus defying the “old static sense of the universe,” Olson makes the case for the “absolute which is included in the relative,” thus advocating a postmodern ontology of becoming, contra to being.[51] Olson routes the Promethean impulse of his mythic poetics here; for he acknowledges the constructivism of culture and the self’s contingency, yet in spite of that, he does not deny creation despite its illusionistic incipience but rather readily charges one with the tremendous task to “change the object itself,” not only its cultural perception but at a physical, ontic level and thus engender a “non-Euclidean penetration of reality.”[52]
Akin with Charles Olson’s critical postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard realized the political power of a critical postmodern avant-garde to destabilize the naturalized regulatory forms that substantiate a cultural reality; that it is in the denial of the “solace of good forms” – by considering form as content and then opening it – that the avant-gardiste negates the “representation” of the easily recognizable and thus opens a space for Symbolic (and possibly Real) change.[53] In denying the prescription of a “consoling” referent consubstantial with the dominant Weltanschauung, the artist denies the possibility of presenting any “essential” fact through culture.[54] It is in attesting to the embodied event, the sublime “happening,”[55] anterior to conception that an allusion to the “unpresentable” organic – and necessarily non-linguistically cognizable – Real is made.[56] This “shock of the new,” analogous with Olson’s projective employment of the Negative Capability, has the power to destabilize the axiomatic referents that anchor the contingent Symbolic Identities of the work’s audience; enveloping one in a realm of angst, heterogeneity and alterity, the postmodern work can attune the subject’s perception to their situation in a cultural reality that is always radically Other, ergo de-naturalizing its contingent forms and opening the possibility of a change in content; much as, one could argue, composition by field achieves.[57] In the ontological state of “Becoming” contra to “Being” put into action by the postmodern work’s negation of the tel quel (‘as is’), any transcendental meaning becomes historical; pluralized, the “realization of the fantasy to seize reality” is denied ergo enabling what Olson would deem: mythical exploration.[58] In the possibility of a public lack of response to the culturally divergent work proposed by the avant-gardiste, she therefore risks her “audience;” yet upon public identification with the work, the possibility of another relative reality is engendered. The artist can then precede the next reality when their normative dissensus is assimilated in collective consensus, thus constituting a deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) made modern through symbolization.[59] Necessarily anachronistic, a postmodernist “work of art can only become modern if it is first postmodern,” therefore, enforcing a temporal décalage that destabilizes linear temporality… the phenomenon, then, must be understood by the non-linear paradox as both future (post) anterior (modo).[60] Therefore, the post-modern qua pre-modern and the modern exist in a form of polylectical relation, feeding off of one another continuously in the form of cultural paradigms or modalities of being, rather than historical epochs.[61] Analogous with Olson’s notion that to become post-Modern, one must breach the modern through engaging a relation with the ‘familiar’ pre-modern, it becomes clear that his thought concerning a post-modernist artistic engagement – although espoused in a different lexicon – has been widely undervalued in the history of advanced postmodern scholarship. “A man’s life,” Olson summarized, “is an act of giving form to the condition or state of reality.”[62]
The world of Basil King is a world in which one painting, one poem, one idea, is always interrelated with others—no matter how seemingly disparate those relations may appear. Throughout King’s career, the interconnections have posed a difficulty in comprehension not only for the critics, the markets, and his fellow poets and painters, but also for the artist himself. I have interviewed King extensively in an attempt to “connect the dots.”[63] The first thing I realized was that to understand the work, and moreover the postmodern praxis that governed it, one would have to understand his intellectual relationship with Charles Olson. First enrolling at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1951, King attended periodically over the institution’s last anarchical years.[64] When asked about his writing classes with Olson and others, Basil responded, “Heck, you could have had classes with Picasso, and that’s not going to make you a painter. What made me a writer was internalizing what those men had taught me, and that didn’t come until later, but it did.”[65] King stressed the importance of understanding that this internalizing process “which can take years” is integral to apprehending one of the key facets that constitutes his work: namely, that it “isn’t planned out,” the work itself is not linear, because he himself is not: “I just think differently, I’m not a linear man.”[66]
When I asked whether there was an “essential Basil King,” what I received back was a chuckling New York “No,” relayed as if thought over for years and laughed away in seconds. Basil recalled a time gone by when he saw a psychiatrist. He hoped to get to the root of why he was not being taken on by the commercial galleries; the psychiatrist asked Basil how many people constituted himself, and he replied with hesitation: “Three.” She replied, “No, you’re seven—and perhaps even more—and you’re going to have to work with each one of them every day to get to where you’re going.” “No,” Basil replied, “there is no essential Basil King, there never has been, and I doubt there ever will be—or even can be.”[74]
“I am one of seven […]
every one of us asks
Which one is going to do the division […]
‘It has taken us
A lifetime
To take a fork in the road
And find a table
Wide enough to accommodate
8, 9 and 10
Muscles and Triangles
The physical and the abstract.”[75]
“Autobiography has more than one ambiguity:” like the artist situated between ‘the physical and the abstract,’ whom unseats the unit ‘I,’ one cannot diacritically explain his work that so illustratively exemplifies Olson’s ontological plea for an indeterminate Negative Capability. Indeed, to do so is to miss that very binding relation which is key to understanding – though paradoxically – what that unifying force in his oeuvre is that elides the “essence” of unification. King’s work, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, “quotes without quotation marks;” it transfigures the historical field; his poetry, prose and painting coalesce with the political, and – non-internal – they intermingle freely with that which is external to them: they are inter-Textual.[76] “Shift gears, arm yourself. The dark and the unforgiving can be corrected by the text; history and poetry, politics; language is everything.”[77] The multiplicity of signification becomes undeniably apparent – one cannot escape history in these allegories, one cannot escape its presence, culture becomes immediate, the signs: immanent. “In politics as it is in art it is necessary to bring disparate things together. Language has the capacity to have more than one voice, more than one line, no border needs a wall,” King, like Olson before him, illustrates our situation without prescribing it; his ACTIVE artistry is polyvocal and thus his works are desirable in so far as they disperse our minds instead of concentrating them; his oeuvre explores a reality in flux and somehow makes profound the uneasy disparity of subjective experience.[78] A postmodern in continual process, King, like his predecessor, attests to an ontology of Becoming, one that suspends the duplicitous presentation of reality and conversely explores its disparate plurality.[79]To quote from an earlier volume in his epic Learning to Draw / A History saga:
“Reality/Fantasy
What comes first
fantasy or reality
measure the distance the need
to draw and paint
the need to recognize something
that is not you
I paint and I draw and I
follow in the footsteps of all the painters
that came before me
fantasy/reality
the imagination and the abstract rock”[80]
History is of the morning. And it is in the vein of Herodotus, of poïesis, that King joins Olson as an “archaeologist of the morning,” one whom not only records but also actively makes history in his explorations of it.[81] A living extension of the Black Mountain legacy, King, that always shifting identity flicks between people and mediums in moments, and poets, painters, historians—let alone the several Basil Kings—come knocking. From one moment to the next, “he” struggles keeping them out; from what was a disparity, what is left is a profusion: a mythology. History, now.
[1] Charles Olson, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), 2.
[2] Olson quoted in Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972), 384.
[3] Jacque Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme (unpublished, 1966-1967).
[4] Martin Duberman, and John Cage, Phone Interview with John Cage, April 26, 1969 (North Carolina: Western Regional Archives), 23.
[5] Black Mountain College Faculty Minutes, November 21st, 1951. For more on Olson’s educational philosophy, see transcripts: November 2nd, 28th, 30th, October 25th, 1951: Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.
[6] Martin Duberman, Black Mountain, 339.
[7] Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Massachusetts: The MIT Press ,1987), 168.
[8] Duberman, Black Mountain, 388-406. Indeed, such diacritical compartmentalizations are impossible to attribute in this period. Students became teachers, and vice versa, Martin Duberman would state: “During its last two years, in fact, Black Mountain may well have been more an informal learning environment than a formal community. Indeed, the lack of formal organization was probably one of the aids to learning. Neither institutional structures, nor barriers of age and ‘position’ stood in the way of continuous dialogue.” “Any place you went, day or night,” as one resident put it, “There were always people arguing and talking…. All kinds of people with different, associated interests and fields…”
The Black Mountain Review provided a rare outlet to publish non-conventional poetics to a national and even international audience. Producing not only poetry but stories, essays and picture reproductions, the Review expanded beyond Black Mountain alone and featured early works by the Beat Generation including Allen Gingberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac.
[9] Robert Creeley, “The Black Mountain School of Poets,” The Serif, Kent State University Library Quarterly, vol. 2 no. 2, June, 1965,
22-28.
[10] Olson, The Special View, 14 (my emphases).
[11] Peter Brooker, Modernism/Postmodernism (New York: Longman Publishing, 1992), 7/18.
[12] Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 16.
[13] In an attempt to rectify past scholarship on Olson’s postmodernism (or, rather open another avenue for future scholarship), I have avoided referencing extant literature on Olson’s postmodernism by George F. Butterick and Ralph Maud. Predominantly due to their misconceptions of “postmodernism” itself, as will become clear, I place Olson within a “critical postmodernist” canon that defies the negation of the physical and absolute referential aberration too often attributed to all postmodernist discourse.
[14] Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, eds. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 3.
[15] Alex David, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 189/190.
[16] Charles Olson, “October 3rd, 1951,” Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence Volume 7, eds. George F. Butterick (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 234.
[17] Olson, “The Kingfishers,” 2.
[18] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 8. “Simplifying to the extreme,” Lyotard summarized, “I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives.” A metanarrative (or, as he also employs: ‘grand narrative’) is a presupposing narrative or teleology to which all others within a culture are homogenized and legitimated in reference to; thus substantiating a world view, the often naturalized metanarrative (e.g. the emancipatory rationalism of the Enlightenment, or the Cartesian “cogito” explains real events within its own self-referential logic. An incredulous postmodernism de-naturalises the implicit metaphysics of a metanarrative’s predicates; it in this vein, then, that Olson is in accord with most overarching conceptions of the “postmodern.”
[19] Edward Foster, Understanding the Black Mountain Poets (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 56.
[20] Charles Olson, The Special View, 25.
[21] Tom Clark, and Robert Creeley, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2000), 200/221.
[22] Ibidem., 222. Therefore, one could “render obsolete the one-dimensional linear-discursive tracing of past events as practiced in classic Theudysian analytic history.”
[23] Olson, The Special View, 23.
[24] Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998), 107. Olson therefore constructs a relative form of “performative epistemology,” characterized by knowing as making, doing or acting, analogous to Wittgenstein’s relation of knowledge to the “mastery of technique,” or, one could equally state poïesis.
[25] Foster, Black Mountain Poets, 71/72.
[26] Ibidem., 62. Olson traced the etymology of ‘poetry’ back to the Greek “poïesis” to underscore the active dimension of the word.
[27] Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” The New American Poetry, 387/389 (capitalization in original text).
[28] Ibidem. See also: Jeffrey Gardiner, Olson as Pedagogue: The Black Mountain Years (Delaware: Vernon Press – expected 2018), 3-5. Although Olson never cited Josef Albers directly, the painter’s pedagogical influence on the College may have been one of the principal causes for Olson’s return to the material origins of his writing in this period.
Perhaps Albers’ influence supplemented Olson’s deconstruction of the binary between form and content, recall Albers statement: “every perceivable thing has a form… and every form has a meaning” (Eva Díaz, The Experimenters Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 26.).
[29] Charles Olson, “October 3rd, 1951,” Complete Correspondence Volume 7, 238/240
[30] Olson, Projective Verse, 395-397. It is in the embodied registering of the Real vis-à-vis the somatic that removes Olson from the New Criticism of the “non-projective” Eliot, whose “root is the mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that.”
[31] Charles Olson, “Letter to Elaine Feinstein, May, 1959,” in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, eds. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 397. Olson hereby traces this influence to Dante, whom also realized the value of reducing systemic abstraction in prose vis-à-vis reference to “speech.”
[32] Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 11. See fig.3.1 full-page reproduced for its visual order, note also reference to the I Ching, perhaps a connexion to the indeterminate program of John Cage (BMC 1948-1953).
[33] Foster, Black Mountain Poets, 74. Olson “could be as aphoristic as Emerson or Nietzsche but then undercut the sense of closure and definition that aphorisms impart, by simply omitting a period.”
Donald Allen, and George F. Butterick. The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1982), 12.
See also: George F. Butterick, Editing The Maximus Poems: Supplementary Notes (Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1983), v-x. Olson’s – ineluctably, art historically significant – formal employment of the written word is strongest in a hand-written format. Although publishers were able to render the formal elasticity and immediacy of the effect to an extent, the inflexibility of typescript – and the need for syntactical certainty – imposes numerous limitations on the reproduction of projective verse.
[35] Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 148.
[36] Anne Dewey, Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10/213.
[37] Ibidem., 17.
[38] Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 11-20.
[39] Brooker, Modernism/Postmodernism, 18/19.
[40] Dewey, Beyond Maximus, 19/209. Dewey traces the nascent postmodern understanding of the force field by the Black Mountain Poets through its later influence upon the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, whom would “refract Projective Verse through a poststructuralist understanding of language as a self-contained system.”
[41] Charles Olson, “August 9th,, 1951,” Complete Correspondence,77. Indeed, one could argue that the written correspondence between the two poets in this period serves as a structural juncture between Projective Verse and The Special View of History.
Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 12-16. Although the term “postmodern,” or indeed as Olson would state “post-West” or “post-historical,” had been employed sparingly before (Toynbee), Charles Olson was the first to employ it in a manner resembling its post-war - current sense.
[42] Olson, “October 3rd, 1951,” Complete Correspondence, 240/242.
[43] Belsey, Culture and the Real, 60/61.
[44] Olson, “August 20th, 1951,” Complete Correspondence, 115. Then Erudite: Historically significant due to the early date of Olson’s theorizing, thus presupposing the critics, etc.
See also: Charles Olson, “The Art of Writing in the Context of Post-Modern Man,” in Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, number 2, 28. In the course description of his class entitled The Act of Writing in the Context of Post-Modern Man, Olson wrote: “The proposition is the simplest: to release the person’s energy word-wise, and thus begin the hammering of form out of content.... each class... is to search for a methodology by which each person in the class, by acts of writing... may more and more find the kinetics of experience disclosed—the kinetics of themselves as persons as well as of the stuff they have to work on, and by.”
[45] Creeley quoted in Olson, The Special View, 6/7. See also: John Wieners quoted in Mary Emma Harris Interview with John Wieners, 2: Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. “So much of the verses that are written in the Twentieth Century were so conventional that Charles was… it was imperative for him to break the bonds of great composi… of great verse. And… uh. He stressed that upon that where one was most familiar he would therefore find his most honest origins.”
[46] Ibidem., 29.
[47] Ibidem., 32.
[48] Ibidem., 43 (my emphases).
See also: Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Connecticut: MIT, 1999). Foster traces a contemporary postmodernist tendency that has “returned to the real” physicality of the world, thus setting postmodernism in dialectical relation with earlier modernisms. However, I contend that this postmodernist awareness of the culturally inaccessible Real was apparent in earlier postmodernist work such as that produced by Black Mountaineers anterior to its negation by the 1980’s.
[49] Ibidem., 32/37. Indeed, Olson would subsequently remark: It is in lieu of the imaginary illusion created by one’s situation as half cultural, half natural, that “he has the illusion. He creates by the illusion. He fails in the illusion,” indeed, “He is, as she is, the illusion.” Thus the very “I,” Olson theorizes, is illusionistic, “history is not nature” it is “precisely cut to the term man.” A Lacanian revelation indeed.
[50] Ibidem., 38/43. “Radical” as etymologically derived meaning: “to the root.”
[51] Ibidem., 53.
[52] Clark, Allegory, 222. Comparable in the affective engagement of the real to Theatre Piece No.1.
Jeffrey Gardiner, Olson as Pedagogue, 8/9. Erwin Straus (BMC 35-48) was a phenomenologist against the Cartesian splitting of eye and mind, Straus’ legacy at the College perhaps influenced the primacy Olson accorded to embodied experience and perception: “The space in which we live is as different from the schema of empty Euclidean space as the familiar world of colors differs from the concepts of physical optics.... As immediately experienced, space is always a filled and articulated space.”
[53] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.
[54] Thomas Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 16-17.
[55] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Don Barry and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 97.
[56] Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rotenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 55-56. “In this regard the sublime feeling is only the irruption in and of thought of this deaf desire for limitlessness. Thinking takes ‘action,’ it ‘acts’ the impossible, it subjectively ‘realizes’ its omnipotence. It experiences pleasure in the real.” (Lyotard proceeds to acknowledge his employment of Lacan’s conception of the “Real”).
[57] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 80-81. One could equally contend that is partly in thanks to Olson’s projective verse that Lyotard could state the following thirty years hence: “The grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no longer accepted as given; rather, they appear as academic forms, as rituals originating in piety (as Nietzsche said) which prevent the unpresentable from being put forward.”
[58] Ibidem.
[59] Lyotard, Postmodern Explained, 13/14. Unlike postmodern art, however, Lyotard argues that the modernists had – although leaving mimesis and turning to abstraction – only decided to (more) abstractly signify the Real referent, thus quasi-presenting it in pseudo-transcendent forms of cultural absolutes.
See also: Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 240. Building upon Freud and Lacan, Foster argues that the significance of a (postmodern) avant-garde event can only be “register through another that recodes it,” when, in other words, the Real impact – originally eliding signification – is signified and enters the Symbolic Order. It is in this manner that a neo-avant-garde is “no less ‘neo’ than nachträglich.”
[60] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.In departing from the consoling forms of a prior aesthetic reality, postmodern avant-gardists “are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done,” it is in this manner that the postmodern “work and text have the characters of an event.”
[61] Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 88-92.
[62] Olson, The Special View, 11.
[63] Joshua A. Gardner, Basil King Interviews: Joshua A. Gardner Black Mountain College Research Collection, Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. The approximately twelve conducted hours of taped phone interviews are currently in the process of transcription at the Western Regional Archives; hence I shall cite the respective tape numbers (t. x.) accordingly.
[64] Gardner, Basil King Interviews, t.1. Basil recalled the physical poverty of the College often, whilst reinforcing the “intensity” of its communal vigor. With the closure of the dining hall in 1952, Basil remembered learning how to cook so he could use this skill as a trade for the food he prepared for others.
[65] Ibidem., t. 2.
[66] Ibidem.
[67] Ibidem., t.9.
[68] Ibidem., t.6.
[69] Ibidem., t.4.
[70] Ibidem., t.6.
[71] Ibidem., t.9.
[72] Basil King, History Now (New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2017), x. Indeed, the back cover of this book illustrates the word “STORY” derived from “HISTORY NOW” on the front cover (my emphases).
[73] Charles Olson, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), 2.
[74] Gardner, Basil King Interviews, t.5.
[75] King, History Now, 136-137.
[76] Barthes, Image Music Text, 160.
[77] King, History Now, 92.
[78] Ibidem., 124.
[79] Gardner, Basil King Interviews, t.12.
[80] Basil King, The Spoken Word / the Painted Hand (New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2014), 97.
[81] Charles Olson, Archaeologist of the Morning (London: Cape Golliard Grossman Press, 1970).
Basil King and Charles Olson’s “Herodotean Exploration.”
“I came with no ideas; Black Mountain did it all.”[1]
“The writing and the living are one!”[2]
“I think where I am not therefore I am where I do not think.”[3]
At sixteen Basil King, already a painter whose artistry was not being understood in his Detroit, Michigan high school, wrote to Charles Olson to ask to be admitted to Black Mountain College. At Olson’s invitation, King arrived in North Carolina to begin to study Olson’s unique curriculum and fall under the influence of his unique pedagogy. When Martin Duberman asked John Cage “which Black Mountain” he preferred, that of Josef Albers’ or Charles Olson’s, Cage (himself a postmodern pioneer) – somewhat unsurprisingly – preferred the “truly anarchical community” of the latter’s.[4] The American postmodern poet qua philosopher Charles Olson was first invited to Black Mountain College in 1948; by 1951 he had tenure and in 1953 he was installed as Rector. Characterized by the magnitude of his physical size (6 ft. 9 in.) and his intellectual bravura, Black Mountain immediately took to Olson and he to it.
The avant-gardiste Rector’s inherent incredulity toward the strictures of administration, “patternization” and “a priori judgment,” plunged the faculty-dependent community into anarchy and eventual collapse.[5] Coupled with a lack of subsidy for novel educational projects with the rise of McCarthyite America, the institution itself became physically disheveled and isolated. Yet this very anarchism became the driving force behind an unbridled artistic intensity. Therefore, “becoming a decidedly American, and decidedly radical environment.”[6] Olson himself called the College “Olson’s University,” indeed the poet’s premiership spearheaded a radical shift from the visual to the literary arts in Black Mountain’s final chapter.[7] The Black Mountain Poets would emerge from this culture. A readily transgressive group predominantly related by place, institution, and the on-site printing press producing the Black Mountain Review publication, this group featured teachers Robert Creeley, Dan Rice, Robert Duncan and students Joel Oppenheimer, Michael Rumaker, John Wieners, Ed Dorn, and Jonathan Williams amongst others.[8] King was affected as deeply by them as by the many great avant-garde visual artists among the faculty and students. Akin with their pluralist philosophies, The Black Mountain Poets, to whom I now add the contemporary poet and painter Basil King, are characterized by divergent styles and a heterogeneous body of work. They were, however, intellectually bound to Olson “as a locus;” using the radical “premise” set out in Projective Verse to “think of how a more active sense of poetry might be got,” to, in other words, post-modernize the medium.[9] Yet Olson held sway over everyone, not just the literati.
“Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar, and he must continuously seek to rediscover it.”[10] The telos of Charles Olson’s life can be understood as a continuous “exploration” of the disjunction between culture and nature. This exploration would ground the ethical basis of his politicization of poetics after an era in which the art form had become redundant in the autotelic autonomy of the ‘Metaphysical Modernist Tradition,’ typified by New Criticism.[11] The beginning of Charles Olson’s tenure was correspondent with the release of two works, the long-poem The Kingfishers (1949) and his poetic manifesto Projective Verse (1950). Both, established the poets place in the post-war poetic landscape, whilst forming the epistemological bases of Olson’s postmodern pedagogy consolidated at the College.[12] The foundations of which would culminate in his now published The Special View of History lecture series delivered in 1956. Through these texts, I shall attempt a convergence of his often disparate – yet in that disparity, rewarding – postmodern thought that culminated in this period.[13] Moreover, I shall argue that light on his thought can be shed through the lens of his student, Basil King, and vice versa.
The Kingfishers juxtaposes the various accessions, revolutions (e.g. the rise of Maoism), and extinctions of historical civilizations, before drawing parallels with the 20th century Occident.[14] Olson argues that contemporary cultural crises are due not to the floundering of religious teleology (Eliot), nor industrial capitalism (Pound), but rather as the consequence of two and a half millennia of “Modernity.”[15] Olson traces the modernist paradigm back to ancient Greece, circa 500 BCE. Characterized by logic and classificatory reason, the poet saw modernism as a “box” that placed strictures on “Western Man;” when a paradigm of Thought became absolute and conventionalized, it became modern.[16] The Kingfishers opens with the maxim: “what does not change / is the will to change,”[17] intended to underscore Olson’s argument that there should be constant cultural “revolution” to offset any “grand process” (or, “metanarrative”)[18] that could be used to “excuse history as a complex of abstract, impersonal forces.”[19] In his contention that “History is story,” Olson acknowledged that discursively contingent culture was largely narrative based and thus relative, thus inaugurating an epistemological “new localism” in which “fact” is not apodictic truth but “the place of the cluster of belief.”[20] Olson located his “post-Logical” lineage in the Greek mythologist qua historian Herodotus who “had retained the older definition” of truth as relative; Herodotus inversely set out to find not ‘truth’ but ‘evidence,’ therefore, Olson rather employed the verb ‘istorin, meaning “finding for oneself” to implore poets to become “Herodotean explorers of reality, creatively annihilating the Platonic distinction between muthos and logos (‘fictitious’ vs. ‘fact’) which had been so detrimental for so long.”[21] Thus re-instantiating the more etymologically Greek muthologos connected to the spoken word and story, thereby making history “ACTIVE” in one’s allegorical re-creating of it.[22] The mythologist explores culture, for a myth “is essentially popular i.e. collective, not the product an individual brain […] it blends, the historical and the natural;” in other words, the myth, a collation of tales, an “arrangement of incidents,” admits to its cultural contingency and disjunctive relation to the natural, yet does not flounder in spite of the absolute.[23] [24] In finding the evidence and becoming an archaeologist of the morning (as Olson styled his vocation), in order to become post-modern, one need first become pre-modern.
It would be in Olson’s nominalist understanding of reality that he would foreground his artistic project to re-politicize poetics. Olson believed that that it fell to the artist – as a figure endowed with the power to re-present culture – to take a fundamentally political role in society: “If you don’t know, brother, that poetics is politics, poets are political leaders today.”[25] The poet thus proposed a modal “STANCE towards reality” to challenge any “know-it-all” philosophy through a return to poïesis.[26] Projective Verse established the pragmatics of how to facilitate a disruption of the Western tradition vis-à-vis a subversion of its presupposing delimitations on writing. Olson established “COMPOSITION BY FIELD,” premised upon two axioms: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” and “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIETLY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO ANOTHER PERCEPTION.”[27] Both principals are rooted in reducing the binary between knowledge and experience: the former to reconsider form as content itself (reducing the naturalism of “inherited line, stanza, over-all form”), and the latter by relocating episodic intellectual experience in embodied perception.[28] Projective verse is the somatic projection of the body and breath into the “ergon” (work) to interrupt the abstract delimitations imposed upon it by the Western “METAPHYSICAL tradition of history;” thus breaking its passive “descriptive and analytical” contingency on the “division of FORM and CONTENT” with the ACTIVE rhythm of the breath.[29]To “speak from these roots” is to register that “man is himself an object,” thereby deconstructing the humanist rationalism of that “peculiar assumption by which western man” has separated himself from the real world with “the ‘subject’ and his soul;” thus removing the arbitrary binary between the internal and external: “It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man.”[30]
With a penchant for “vernacular over grammar”[31]and topoi extolling on the “everyday,” supplemented with an infusion of high literature and interdisciplinary excursions on psychoanalysis and anthropology, Olson’s work constitutes a complexio oppositorium unlike any other.[32] Whilst characterized by the instigation of syntactical patterns without completion (e.g. opening parentheses without closure), projective verse features unremitting disjunctions between rhythms and observations that mitigate any sense of the conclusion, resolution, or definition often guaranteed by traditional syntax.[33] Employing a syntactically dissident and highly visual textual arrangement of form on the page, Olson deemed his linguistically deconstructive and somatically predicated poïesis “open field poetics;” whereby the emergent ‘OPEN form’ could rupture the poet’s rigid contingency on restricting modes of “syntax, logic and thematic progression,” engendering an amorphous “instant-by-instant engagement with reality,” by which any “absolute,” “if there is any… is never more than this one, you, this instant, in action.”[34]
Precociously presupposing Roland Barthes notion of the “death of the Author” and the “birth of the reader,”[35] Olson conceived of the resultant “high energy construct” as situated in a socio-political “force field” that exceeded any univocal authorial or teleological narratives imposed upon it.[36] In “composing by field,” one could argue that the projected Text, extant at the serial level of culture and predicated upon the polysemous epistemic foundation of the mythical, “challenges both the distinction between individual and environment and the belief in individual autonomy,”[37] whilst retaining a somatic origin precludes it from entering the itself absolute referential aberration of postmodern “cultural constructivism.”[38] It is this impulse of open field poetry – symbolized by a “newly mobilized, ‘deconstructed’ sense of self as defined by the coordinates of language, place, and history”[39] – that elucidates why Projective Verse “became a manifesto for so many Postmoderns.”[40] Indeed, Olson coined the term “post-Modern” for the first time in the history of aesthetics within a letter written to Robert Creeley in 1951.[41] Here, Olson would underscore the ability of ‘PROJECTIVE ART’ to engage a form of physical “KINESIS” by which the very “act, including the act of knowledge” itself could be rendered closer to an organic experience of “rhythm.”[42] Olson viewed this physical interpolation of culture as a means of ridding the various alienations inflicted upon humanity onset by modernism, yet often today ascribed to postmodernism.[43] Whereas the “modern” is alienated from the “universe,” “any POST-MODERN is born with the ancient confidence that, he does belong.”[44] Creeley would recall that “what was fascinating to Charles, [was] trying to break the habit of history as some discrete ordering apart from what energies or active forces were the case,” making his students literally take history and “pick it up,” facilitating their engagement to be “not only coincident with the fact, but they became active in the fact.”[45]
Olson most significantly develops the ontology of the subject in The Special View of History Black Mountain College lecture series, stating that “one can’t get out of the circle,” for the human is paradox, both “at once and differently, a natural man, a civilized creature – and this must be hardest to stomach – cultured.” However, one will always corporeally “know” real “familiar” experience despite his cultural predication, “for the simplest reason; that you do, by being alive;” yet due to what Olson coins the “majority” (culture), “Man is forever estranged to the degree that his stance towards reality disengages him from the familiar.”[46] In order to fully re-engage with – rather than duplicitously overcome – the paradox of life, Olson instigates the “imperative of the familiar,” by which one must adopt “What Keats proposes as Negative Capability, the readmission of the familiar.”[47] Olson deems the Negative Capability to be “crucial for post-Modern man,” for it will render him “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” ergo opening his Symbolic lens to the indeterminacy of existence, the historically contingent “or what we would call today relative” and thus to the “right now, as it is happening” – the embodied event itself.[48] Hence the somatic return to the Real in his work presupposes his adulation for the Romantic, for ‘he [Keats] unsat the unit “I,” he went so far [….] as to say that the Man of Negative Capability has – and quote – ‘not any individuality, any determined Character.’”[49] This radical imperative of the familiar employed by the Negative Capability demands that one “cannot abstract from it. One has to get it in its place of occurrences,” thus breaking history from its canonical bounds through its very juxtaposition with the Real; cultural reality becomes something that one “lives,” “an active” and indeterminate engagement: “The motive, then, of reality, is process not goal.”[50] Thus defying the “old static sense of the universe,” Olson makes the case for the “absolute which is included in the relative,” thus advocating a postmodern ontology of becoming, contra to being.[51] Olson routes the Promethean impulse of his mythic poetics here; for he acknowledges the constructivism of culture and the self’s contingency, yet in spite of that, he does not deny creation despite its illusionistic incipience but rather readily charges one with the tremendous task to “change the object itself,” not only its cultural perception but at a physical, ontic level and thus engender a “non-Euclidean penetration of reality.”[52]
Akin with Charles Olson’s critical postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard realized the political power of a critical postmodern avant-garde to destabilize the naturalized regulatory forms that substantiate a cultural reality; that it is in the denial of the “solace of good forms” – by considering form as content and then opening it – that the avant-gardiste negates the “representation” of the easily recognizable and thus opens a space for Symbolic (and possibly Real) change.[53] In denying the prescription of a “consoling” referent consubstantial with the dominant Weltanschauung, the artist denies the possibility of presenting any “essential” fact through culture.[54] It is in attesting to the embodied event, the sublime “happening,”[55] anterior to conception that an allusion to the “unpresentable” organic – and necessarily non-linguistically cognizable – Real is made.[56] This “shock of the new,” analogous with Olson’s projective employment of the Negative Capability, has the power to destabilize the axiomatic referents that anchor the contingent Symbolic Identities of the work’s audience; enveloping one in a realm of angst, heterogeneity and alterity, the postmodern work can attune the subject’s perception to their situation in a cultural reality that is always radically Other, ergo de-naturalizing its contingent forms and opening the possibility of a change in content; much as, one could argue, composition by field achieves.[57] In the ontological state of “Becoming” contra to “Being” put into action by the postmodern work’s negation of the tel quel (‘as is’), any transcendental meaning becomes historical; pluralized, the “realization of the fantasy to seize reality” is denied ergo enabling what Olson would deem: mythical exploration.[58] In the possibility of a public lack of response to the culturally divergent work proposed by the avant-gardiste, she therefore risks her “audience;” yet upon public identification with the work, the possibility of another relative reality is engendered. The artist can then precede the next reality when their normative dissensus is assimilated in collective consensus, thus constituting a deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) made modern through symbolization.[59] Necessarily anachronistic, a postmodernist “work of art can only become modern if it is first postmodern,” therefore, enforcing a temporal décalage that destabilizes linear temporality… the phenomenon, then, must be understood by the non-linear paradox as both future (post) anterior (modo).[60] Therefore, the post-modern qua pre-modern and the modern exist in a form of polylectical relation, feeding off of one another continuously in the form of cultural paradigms or modalities of being, rather than historical epochs.[61] Analogous with Olson’s notion that to become post-Modern, one must breach the modern through engaging a relation with the ‘familiar’ pre-modern, it becomes clear that his thought concerning a post-modernist artistic engagement – although espoused in a different lexicon – has been widely undervalued in the history of advanced postmodern scholarship. “A man’s life,” Olson summarized, “is an act of giving form to the condition or state of reality.”[62]
The world of Basil King is a world in which one painting, one poem, one idea, is always interrelated with others—no matter how seemingly disparate those relations may appear. Throughout King’s career, the interconnections have posed a difficulty in comprehension not only for the critics, the markets, and his fellow poets and painters, but also for the artist himself. I have interviewed King extensively in an attempt to “connect the dots.”[63] The first thing I realized was that to understand the work, and moreover the postmodern praxis that governed it, one would have to understand his intellectual relationship with Charles Olson. First enrolling at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1951, King attended periodically over the institution’s last anarchical years.[64] When asked about his writing classes with Olson and others, Basil responded, “Heck, you could have had classes with Picasso, and that’s not going to make you a painter. What made me a writer was internalizing what those men had taught me, and that didn’t come until later, but it did.”[65] King stressed the importance of understanding that this internalizing process “which can take years” is integral to apprehending one of the key facets that constitutes his work: namely, that it “isn’t planned out,” the work itself is not linear, because he himself is not: “I just think differently, I’m not a linear man.”[66]
When I asked whether there was an “essential Basil King,” what I received back was a chuckling New York “No,” relayed as if thought over for years and laughed away in seconds. Basil recalled a time gone by when he saw a psychiatrist. He hoped to get to the root of why he was not being taken on by the commercial galleries; the psychiatrist asked Basil how many people constituted himself, and he replied with hesitation: “Three.” She replied, “No, you’re seven—and perhaps even more—and you’re going to have to work with each one of them every day to get to where you’re going.” “No,” Basil replied, “there is no essential Basil King, there never has been, and I doubt there ever will be—or even can be.”[74]
“I am one of seven […]
every one of us asks
Which one is going to do the division […]
‘It has taken us
A lifetime
To take a fork in the road
And find a table
Wide enough to accommodate
8, 9 and 10
Muscles and Triangles
The physical and the abstract.”[75]
“Autobiography has more than one ambiguity:” like the artist situated between ‘the physical and the abstract,’ whom unseats the unit ‘I,’ one cannot diacritically explain his work that so illustratively exemplifies Olson’s ontological plea for an indeterminate Negative Capability. Indeed, to do so is to miss that very binding relation which is key to understanding – though paradoxically – what that unifying force in his oeuvre is that elides the “essence” of unification. King’s work, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, “quotes without quotation marks;” it transfigures the historical field; his poetry, prose and painting coalesce with the political, and – non-internal – they intermingle freely with that which is external to them: they are inter-Textual.[76] “Shift gears, arm yourself. The dark and the unforgiving can be corrected by the text; history and poetry, politics; language is everything.”[77] The multiplicity of signification becomes undeniably apparent – one cannot escape history in these allegories, one cannot escape its presence, culture becomes immediate, the signs: immanent. “In politics as it is in art it is necessary to bring disparate things together. Language has the capacity to have more than one voice, more than one line, no border needs a wall,” King, like Olson before him, illustrates our situation without prescribing it; his ACTIVE artistry is polyvocal and thus his works are desirable in so far as they disperse our minds instead of concentrating them; his oeuvre explores a reality in flux and somehow makes profound the uneasy disparity of subjective experience.[78] A postmodern in continual process, King, like his predecessor, attests to an ontology of Becoming, one that suspends the duplicitous presentation of reality and conversely explores its disparate plurality.[79]To quote from an earlier volume in his epic Learning to Draw / A History saga:
“Reality/Fantasy
What comes first
fantasy or reality
measure the distance the need
to draw and paint
the need to recognize something
that is not you
I paint and I draw and I
follow in the footsteps of all the painters
that came before me
fantasy/reality
the imagination and the abstract rock”[80]
History is of the morning. And it is in the vein of Herodotus, of poïesis, that King joins Olson as an “archaeologist of the morning,” one whom not only records but also actively makes history in his explorations of it.[81] A living extension of the Black Mountain legacy, King, that always shifting identity flicks between people and mediums in moments, and poets, painters, historians—let alone the several Basil Kings—come knocking. From one moment to the next, “he” struggles keeping them out; from what was a disparity, what is left is a profusion: a mythology. History, now.
[1] Charles Olson, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), 2.
[2] Olson quoted in Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972), 384.
[3] Jacque Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme (unpublished, 1966-1967).
[4] Martin Duberman, and John Cage, Phone Interview with John Cage, April 26, 1969 (North Carolina: Western Regional Archives), 23.
[5] Black Mountain College Faculty Minutes, November 21st, 1951. For more on Olson’s educational philosophy, see transcripts: November 2nd, 28th, 30th, October 25th, 1951: Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.
[6] Martin Duberman, Black Mountain, 339.
[7] Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Massachusetts: The MIT Press ,1987), 168.
[8] Duberman, Black Mountain, 388-406. Indeed, such diacritical compartmentalizations are impossible to attribute in this period. Students became teachers, and vice versa, Martin Duberman would state: “During its last two years, in fact, Black Mountain may well have been more an informal learning environment than a formal community. Indeed, the lack of formal organization was probably one of the aids to learning. Neither institutional structures, nor barriers of age and ‘position’ stood in the way of continuous dialogue.” “Any place you went, day or night,” as one resident put it, “There were always people arguing and talking…. All kinds of people with different, associated interests and fields…”
The Black Mountain Review provided a rare outlet to publish non-conventional poetics to a national and even international audience. Producing not only poetry but stories, essays and picture reproductions, the Review expanded beyond Black Mountain alone and featured early works by the Beat Generation including Allen Gingberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac.
[9] Robert Creeley, “The Black Mountain School of Poets,” The Serif, Kent State University Library Quarterly, vol. 2 no. 2, June, 1965,
22-28.
[10] Olson, The Special View, 14 (my emphases).
[11] Peter Brooker, Modernism/Postmodernism (New York: Longman Publishing, 1992), 7/18.
[12] Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 16.
[13] In an attempt to rectify past scholarship on Olson’s postmodernism (or, rather open another avenue for future scholarship), I have avoided referencing extant literature on Olson’s postmodernism by George F. Butterick and Ralph Maud. Predominantly due to their misconceptions of “postmodernism” itself, as will become clear, I place Olson within a “critical postmodernist” canon that defies the negation of the physical and absolute referential aberration too often attributed to all postmodernist discourse.
[14] Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, eds. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 3.
[15] Alex David, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 189/190.
[16] Charles Olson, “October 3rd, 1951,” Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence Volume 7, eds. George F. Butterick (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 234.
[17] Olson, “The Kingfishers,” 2.
[18] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 8. “Simplifying to the extreme,” Lyotard summarized, “I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives.” A metanarrative (or, as he also employs: ‘grand narrative’) is a presupposing narrative or teleology to which all others within a culture are homogenized and legitimated in reference to; thus substantiating a world view, the often naturalized metanarrative (e.g. the emancipatory rationalism of the Enlightenment, or the Cartesian “cogito” explains real events within its own self-referential logic. An incredulous postmodernism de-naturalises the implicit metaphysics of a metanarrative’s predicates; it in this vein, then, that Olson is in accord with most overarching conceptions of the “postmodern.”
[19] Edward Foster, Understanding the Black Mountain Poets (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 56.
[20] Charles Olson, The Special View, 25.
[21] Tom Clark, and Robert Creeley, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2000), 200/221.
[22] Ibidem., 222. Therefore, one could “render obsolete the one-dimensional linear-discursive tracing of past events as practiced in classic Theudysian analytic history.”
[23] Olson, The Special View, 23.
[24] Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998), 107. Olson therefore constructs a relative form of “performative epistemology,” characterized by knowing as making, doing or acting, analogous to Wittgenstein’s relation of knowledge to the “mastery of technique,” or, one could equally state poïesis.
[25] Foster, Black Mountain Poets, 71/72.
[26] Ibidem., 62. Olson traced the etymology of ‘poetry’ back to the Greek “poïesis” to underscore the active dimension of the word.
[27] Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” The New American Poetry, 387/389 (capitalization in original text).
[28] Ibidem. See also: Jeffrey Gardiner, Olson as Pedagogue: The Black Mountain Years (Delaware: Vernon Press – expected 2018), 3-5. Although Olson never cited Josef Albers directly, the painter’s pedagogical influence on the College may have been one of the principal causes for Olson’s return to the material origins of his writing in this period.
Perhaps Albers’ influence supplemented Olson’s deconstruction of the binary between form and content, recall Albers statement: “every perceivable thing has a form… and every form has a meaning” (Eva Díaz, The Experimenters Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 26.).
[29] Charles Olson, “October 3rd, 1951,” Complete Correspondence Volume 7, 238/240
[30] Olson, Projective Verse, 395-397. It is in the embodied registering of the Real vis-à-vis the somatic that removes Olson from the New Criticism of the “non-projective” Eliot, whose “root is the mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that.”
[31] Charles Olson, “Letter to Elaine Feinstein, May, 1959,” in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, eds. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 397. Olson hereby traces this influence to Dante, whom also realized the value of reducing systemic abstraction in prose vis-à-vis reference to “speech.”
[32] Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 11. See fig.3.1 full-page reproduced for its visual order, note also reference to the I Ching, perhaps a connexion to the indeterminate program of John Cage (BMC 1948-1953).
[33] Foster, Black Mountain Poets, 74. Olson “could be as aphoristic as Emerson or Nietzsche but then undercut the sense of closure and definition that aphorisms impart, by simply omitting a period.”
Donald Allen, and George F. Butterick. The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1982), 12.
See also: George F. Butterick, Editing The Maximus Poems: Supplementary Notes (Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1983), v-x. Olson’s – ineluctably, art historically significant – formal employment of the written word is strongest in a hand-written format. Although publishers were able to render the formal elasticity and immediacy of the effect to an extent, the inflexibility of typescript – and the need for syntactical certainty – imposes numerous limitations on the reproduction of projective verse.
[35] Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 148.
[36] Anne Dewey, Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10/213.
[37] Ibidem., 17.
[38] Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 11-20.
[39] Brooker, Modernism/Postmodernism, 18/19.
[40] Dewey, Beyond Maximus, 19/209. Dewey traces the nascent postmodern understanding of the force field by the Black Mountain Poets through its later influence upon the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, whom would “refract Projective Verse through a poststructuralist understanding of language as a self-contained system.”
[41] Charles Olson, “August 9th,, 1951,” Complete Correspondence,77. Indeed, one could argue that the written correspondence between the two poets in this period serves as a structural juncture between Projective Verse and The Special View of History.
Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 12-16. Although the term “postmodern,” or indeed as Olson would state “post-West” or “post-historical,” had been employed sparingly before (Toynbee), Charles Olson was the first to employ it in a manner resembling its post-war - current sense.
[42] Olson, “October 3rd, 1951,” Complete Correspondence, 240/242.
[43] Belsey, Culture and the Real, 60/61.
[44] Olson, “August 20th, 1951,” Complete Correspondence, 115. Then Erudite: Historically significant due to the early date of Olson’s theorizing, thus presupposing the critics, etc.
See also: Charles Olson, “The Art of Writing in the Context of Post-Modern Man,” in Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, number 2, 28. In the course description of his class entitled The Act of Writing in the Context of Post-Modern Man, Olson wrote: “The proposition is the simplest: to release the person’s energy word-wise, and thus begin the hammering of form out of content.... each class... is to search for a methodology by which each person in the class, by acts of writing... may more and more find the kinetics of experience disclosed—the kinetics of themselves as persons as well as of the stuff they have to work on, and by.”
[45] Creeley quoted in Olson, The Special View, 6/7. See also: John Wieners quoted in Mary Emma Harris Interview with John Wieners, 2: Black Mountain College Collection, Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. “So much of the verses that are written in the Twentieth Century were so conventional that Charles was… it was imperative for him to break the bonds of great composi… of great verse. And… uh. He stressed that upon that where one was most familiar he would therefore find his most honest origins.”
[46] Ibidem., 29.
[47] Ibidem., 32.
[48] Ibidem., 43 (my emphases).
See also: Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Connecticut: MIT, 1999). Foster traces a contemporary postmodernist tendency that has “returned to the real” physicality of the world, thus setting postmodernism in dialectical relation with earlier modernisms. However, I contend that this postmodernist awareness of the culturally inaccessible Real was apparent in earlier postmodernist work such as that produced by Black Mountaineers anterior to its negation by the 1980’s.
[49] Ibidem., 32/37. Indeed, Olson would subsequently remark: It is in lieu of the imaginary illusion created by one’s situation as half cultural, half natural, that “he has the illusion. He creates by the illusion. He fails in the illusion,” indeed, “He is, as she is, the illusion.” Thus the very “I,” Olson theorizes, is illusionistic, “history is not nature” it is “precisely cut to the term man.” A Lacanian revelation indeed.
[50] Ibidem., 38/43. “Radical” as etymologically derived meaning: “to the root.”
[51] Ibidem., 53.
[52] Clark, Allegory, 222. Comparable in the affective engagement of the real to Theatre Piece No.1.
Jeffrey Gardiner, Olson as Pedagogue, 8/9. Erwin Straus (BMC 35-48) was a phenomenologist against the Cartesian splitting of eye and mind, Straus’ legacy at the College perhaps influenced the primacy Olson accorded to embodied experience and perception: “The space in which we live is as different from the schema of empty Euclidean space as the familiar world of colors differs from the concepts of physical optics.... As immediately experienced, space is always a filled and articulated space.”
[53] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.
[54] Thomas Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 16-17.
[55] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Don Barry and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 97.
[56] Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rotenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 55-56. “In this regard the sublime feeling is only the irruption in and of thought of this deaf desire for limitlessness. Thinking takes ‘action,’ it ‘acts’ the impossible, it subjectively ‘realizes’ its omnipotence. It experiences pleasure in the real.” (Lyotard proceeds to acknowledge his employment of Lacan’s conception of the “Real”).
[57] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 80-81. One could equally contend that is partly in thanks to Olson’s projective verse that Lyotard could state the following thirty years hence: “The grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no longer accepted as given; rather, they appear as academic forms, as rituals originating in piety (as Nietzsche said) which prevent the unpresentable from being put forward.”
[58] Ibidem.
[59] Lyotard, Postmodern Explained, 13/14. Unlike postmodern art, however, Lyotard argues that the modernists had – although leaving mimesis and turning to abstraction – only decided to (more) abstractly signify the Real referent, thus quasi-presenting it in pseudo-transcendent forms of cultural absolutes.
See also: Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 240. Building upon Freud and Lacan, Foster argues that the significance of a (postmodern) avant-garde event can only be “register through another that recodes it,” when, in other words, the Real impact – originally eliding signification – is signified and enters the Symbolic Order. It is in this manner that a neo-avant-garde is “no less ‘neo’ than nachträglich.”
[60] Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.In departing from the consoling forms of a prior aesthetic reality, postmodern avant-gardists “are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done,” it is in this manner that the postmodern “work and text have the characters of an event.”
[61] Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 88-92.
[62] Olson, The Special View, 11.
[63] Joshua A. Gardner, Basil King Interviews: Joshua A. Gardner Black Mountain College Research Collection, Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina. The approximately twelve conducted hours of taped phone interviews are currently in the process of transcription at the Western Regional Archives; hence I shall cite the respective tape numbers (t. x.) accordingly.
[64] Gardner, Basil King Interviews, t.1. Basil recalled the physical poverty of the College often, whilst reinforcing the “intensity” of its communal vigor. With the closure of the dining hall in 1952, Basil remembered learning how to cook so he could use this skill as a trade for the food he prepared for others.
[65] Ibidem., t. 2.
[66] Ibidem.
[67] Ibidem., t.9.
[68] Ibidem., t.6.
[69] Ibidem., t.4.
[70] Ibidem., t.6.
[71] Ibidem., t.9.
[72] Basil King, History Now (New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2017), x. Indeed, the back cover of this book illustrates the word “STORY” derived from “HISTORY NOW” on the front cover (my emphases).
[73] Charles Olson, The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), 2.
[74] Gardner, Basil King Interviews, t.5.
[75] King, History Now, 136-137.
[76] Barthes, Image Music Text, 160.
[77] King, History Now, 92.
[78] Ibidem., 124.
[79] Gardner, Basil King Interviews, t.12.
[80] Basil King, The Spoken Word / the Painted Hand (New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2014), 97.
[81] Charles Olson, Archaeologist of the Morning (London: Cape Golliard Grossman Press, 1970).