Olson

On "Projective Verse":

The musical phrase (breath). Syntax of thought (I think I intuited this).

Musical syllable (Keats); beautiful sound in the non-metrical sense. It makes sense to hit the syllable first, it’s smaller, and then shape it into lines. Then the field, which at first I got confused and was all thinking about only field (big sheets of paper with words and phrases scattered willy-nilly) and not line/breath, but then I remembered and must remember that it’s the next step beyond line, after the syllable and line, the next thing to work on.

“O Western Wynd” is one of my favorite lyrics ever even though something bothers me about the last two lines, I think the rhythm of “Christ”.

What does he mean by OBJECTS? Words? Nouns? Relationships? The elements (syllable line image sound sense)? I think the latter combined with the “objects of reality.” He says they must be treated without “ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem;” I wonder if he’d allow the sorts of loose associations and connotations that words have for individual readers to be treated.

Man, it’s hard to read Olson and not start to write like him. His voice gets stuck in my head.

What the heck is he saying about tenses? Is he arguing against the use of past and future? “Do not tenses.” Mmmmmmkaywhat?

Back to the syntax of thought: it’s odd how each of Olson’s sentences makes sense, and is (mostly) grammatical, and yet sometimes I have a really hard time following his thought-jumps between them. I almost feel like I’m reading an article summary with all the arguments cut out and only the conclusions. But Shelley was like that too.

On the uses of typesetting: Olson’s discussion of the powers of evenly spaced letters, the “stave and the bar a musician” has, reminds me of some of Jackson Mac Low’s “Twenties” poems, which were supposed to have pauses precisely measured by typewriter spaces: three spaces indicated a pause for the length of an unaccented syllable, four spaces was accented, etc., or something like that. It was totally impossible to figure out how many spaces there were between phrases / words. It’s a nice idea, but really it doesn’t work that well. It DOES work, just not in the precise way he’s suggesting. And I really agree with the spaces equaling thought-pauses. Same with indentations and stuff. The form affects the way the reader perceives it.