Charles Olson’s Selected Writing (New Directions): In all seriousness, why don’t more publishers go for simple covers like this one? Love it.
A scribbling:
Also, had to pick up something by Conrad Aiken after reading about his influence on Malcolm Lowry:
Charles Olson’s interview with The Paris Review is one of the best things I’ve read in ages. Here’s a nice big chunk from the beginning:
CHARLES OLSON
Get a free chair and sit down. Don’t worry about anything. Especially this. We’re living beings and forming a society; we’re creating a total, social future. Don’t worry about it. The kitchen’s reasonably orderly. I crawled out of bed as sick as I was and threw a rug out the window.
INTERVIEWER
Now the first question I wanted to ask you. What fills your day?
OLSON
Nothing. But nothing, literally, except my friends.
INTERVIEWER
These are very straight questions.
OLSON
Ah, that’s what interviews are made of.
INTERVIEWER
Why have you chosen poetry as a medium of artistic creation?
OLSON
I think I made a hell of a mistake. That’s the first confidence I have. The other is that—I didn’t really have anything else to do. I mean I didn’t even have enough imagination to think of something else. I was supposed to go to Holy Cross because I wanted to play baseball. I did, too. That’s the only reason I wanted to go to Holy Cross. It had nothing to do with being a priest.
INTERVIEWER
Are you able to write poetry while remaining in the usual conditions of life—without renouncing or giving up anything?
OLSON
That’s the trouble. That’s what I’ve done. What I’ve caused and lost. That describes it perfectly. I’ve absolutely.
INTERVIEWER
Are the conditions of life at the beginning of a work . . .
OLSON
I’m afraid as well at the end. It’s like being sunk in a cockpit. I read the most beautiful story about how Will Rogers and Wiley Post were lost; they stomped onto a lake about ten miles from Anchorage, Alaska, to ask an Indian if Anchorage was in that direction and when they took off, they plunged back into the lake. The poor boy was not near enough to rescue them, so he ran ten miles to Anchorage to get the people to come out. He said one of the men had a sort of a cloth on his eye and the guy then knew Post and Rogers were lost. Wiley Post put down on pontoons; so he must have come up off this freshwater lake and went poomp. Isn’t that one of those great national treasures. I’ll deal you cards, man. I’ll make you a tarot.
INTERVIEWER
Does poetry constitute the aim of your existence?
OLSON
Of course I don’t live for poetry; I live far more than anybody else does. And forever and why not. Because it is the only thing. But what do you do meanwhile? So what do you do with the rest of the time? That’s all. I said I promised to witness. But I mean I can’t always.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say that the more you understand what you are doing in your writing, the greater the results?
OLSON
Well, it’s just one of those things that you’re absolutely so bitterly uninterested in that you can’t even live. Somehow it is so interesting that you can’t imagine. It is nothing, but it breaks your heart. That’s all. It doesn’t mean a thing. Do you remember the eagle? Farmer Jones gets higher and higher and he is held in one of the eagle’s claws and he says you wouldn’t shit me would you? That’s one of the greatest moments in American poetry. In fact, it is the great moment in American poetry. What a blessing we got.
INTERVIEWER
Does Ezra Pound’s teaching bear any relevance to how your poems are formed on the page?
OLSON
My masters are pretty pertinent. Don’t cheat your own balloon. I mean—literally—like a trip around the moon—the Jules Verne—I read that trip . . . it is so completely applicable today. They don’t have any improvements yet.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write by hand or directly on the typewriter? Does either method indicate a specific way in which the poem falls on the page?
OLSON
Yeah. Robert Duncan is the first man to ask me the query. He discovered when he first came to see me that I wrote on the machine and never bothered to correct. There’s the stuff. Give me half a bottle. Justice reigns.
Blind, loving, wrestling touch! sheath’d, hooded, sharp-tooth’d touch!
Did it make you ache so, leaving me?Parting, track’d by arriving—perpetual payment of perpetual loan;
Rich, showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.Sprouts take and accumulate—stand by the curb prolific and vital:
Landscapes, projected, masculine, full-sized and golden
Section 29 of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.
A poem by Lucille Clifton—
cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty
or what i am capable of.when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their countryand smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.i didn’t ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.
The good people at Contra Mundum Press are putting out the first English language translation of Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca’s Self-Shadowing Prey. Mary Ann Caws translates. Here’s the first poem in the book:
at the edge of a forest
whose trees are slender ideas
and each leaf a thought at bay
the vegetal reveals to us
the damned depths of an animal sect
or more precisely
an old insect anguish
waking up as man
the only way
the only basic weapon
to animate a mental state
that I hurry to write mantil
like a mantis
if only to mark
with a dry warning laugh
the devouring word
Entity and antithesis of the bush
a sort of wild and organic brush
grows in the head of that man
ravaged
by the heresy of parks and greenhouses
like the orgasm of a key
a lovely door
So the legendary passivity
the famous and ample passivity of plants
changes here to idle hate
to mad rage
to sex brawl and dare
luring by sap blood lava . . .
as rapid as the passage of woman
to beast
she empties us of a foul ancestral
wound
which in a spurt relieves us
of these fixed plaints
and these false death rattles plumbing us
our calm gestures of the interred
Now only terror
is still able to insert
in the tropism of body and of guilty
spirit
this prism as doubled echo
where brains and senses capture
the violent innocence
of a flora and a fauna
whose marriage is a long seizure
and a rape as slow as gold
in the implacable lead
And it’s around the mental equator
in the space delimited by the tropics
of a head
at the angle of the eye and what surrounds it
that the myth of a kind of utopian
jungle surges into the world
As virgin as the unknowable
or the other “face” of the moon
and never in the reach of a gun
or an axe
its prey is the snow
sand ball hip if not the trap
that the diffuse breath of a dream
lights up
For tangled
soldered to massive corkscrew keys
the vines
the branches stoves and rituals
fuse
around the forms placed
as if by miracle
at the crossroads of dryads
of druids and of man
So many points to aim at
all these yes and nos that
outside outside of time
of space and weight
select a sort of coupled oasis
and hamlet
to descend in these gods
from before the ages
the gods-place-beast-island-ash-fire
come forth as from the coupling of bird
and branch
and those exiled from the center
and from the shade of a golden foliage
will adore one day
between the walls of their somber cities
(From A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson; illustrated by Charles Robinson, 1895. Via the LOC’s rare books collection.)
Ezra Pound’s poetry tips; from The Paris Review interview:
INTERVIEWER
You once wrote that you had four useful hints from living literary predecessors, who were Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, and Robert Bridges. What were these hints?
POUND
Bridges’s was the simplest. Bridges’s was a warning against homophones. Hardy’s was the degree to which he would concentrate on the subject matter, not on the manner. Ford’s in general was the freshness of language. And Yeats you say was the fourth? Well, Yeats by 1908 had written simple lyrics in which there were no departures from the natural order of words.
(Via the Library of Congress).
A poem by Emily Dickinson:
A Wounded Deer—leaps highest—
I’ve heard the Hunter tell—
‘Tis but the Ecstasy of death—
And then the Brake is still!The Smitten Rock that gushes!
The trampled Steel that springs!
A Cheek is always redder
Just where the Hectic stings!Mirth is the Mail of Anguish
In which it Cautious Arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “you’re hurt” exclaim!
From Number 5, Vol. 7 of Fuck You, (1964) a mimeograph magazine from editor Ed Sanders. The magazine featured Allen Ginsberg, Tuli Kupferberg, Frank O’Hara and more. There’s a fantastic visual archive of Fuck You at Reality Studio, which is where I got this Burroughs layout.
From Lawrence’s chapter on Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (more):
POST-MORTEM effects?
But what of Walt Whitman?
The ‘good grey poet’.
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet.
Post-mortem effects. Ghosts.
A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes.
DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!
ONE IDENTITY!
ONE IDENTITY!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Do you believe me, when I say post-mortem effects ?
When the Pequod went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat still fussing in the seas. The Pequod sinks with all her souls, but their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and ocean-crossing liners. Corpses.
What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.
So that you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalization. First uncomfortable universalization. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh, God! Better a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ACHE OF AMOROUS LOVE!
Think of having that under your skin. All that!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there’s so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!
CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!
Reminds one of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They’re the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them. Forty million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE. Steam-pressure. CHUFF!
An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the fashion.
It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE. All of it.
Walt was really too superhuman. The danger of the superman is that he is mechanical.
I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,
the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking,
they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets
hanging from their shoulders,
On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant
beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,
She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks
descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, section 10.
(From Stuart Kendall’s Gilgamesh)
RIP Adrienne Rich. “For the Dead”:
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answerThe waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourselfI have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stoppedor the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
From Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “The Books Which Have Influenced Me”:
I come next to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank–I believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gun-powder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.
Biblioklept