the remnants / unresolved : bigness, littleness, ego, anonymity, gender

Feminist Poet = one who talks a lot about gender and sexuality in her / his work. No, wait—that would be lots of poets—Olson, Williams. So try—a poet who marks the constructedness of gender and sexuality in his/her work, takes gender as an ideology about maleness and femaleness and wants to investigate, to critique, not simply to benefit.

– Rachel Blau Duplessis, Blue Studios, “Blue Studio: Gender Arcades”

Robert O’Brien Hokanson’s “ ‘Projecting’ Like a Man: Charles Olson and the Poetics of a Gender,” published in Sagetrieb in 1990, explores the role of gender in Olson’s poetics and poetry—a facet Hokanson claims was largely unexplored (previous to the 1990 essay, of course).

Yes, I’m talking about gender again. Yes, I found more essays on gender and Olson. What is my need to pursue this still? Why does the investigation continue? What urgency?

Throughout the course of reading Olson, we’ve shuddered/been appalled/confused/and enraged by Olson’s treatment of women/the feminine—as subject/object matters in his own poetry, as real people, as markers and symbols in the cosmology of Maximus. For me, discovering and then reading Rachel Blau Duplessis alongside Olson has been a necessary pharmacology, a poultice, if not an antidote. But I find the need to lay out some tinctures—here is a small, found apothecary:

If “form is never more than an extension of content,” then the appearance of the form of women in Olson poetry and poetics (in goddess, in pronoun, in mythology) needs to be viewed not as tangential to Olson’s work, some unfortunate personal flaw resulting from Olson’s historical place in time (you are allowed to briefly look, then look away, see the centercraft) but as a constituting factor of his poetry, poetics, his thinking, and what his poetry has to offer. Ultimately finding value in Olson’s work—which, I think, we have each individually established in this course that we do—does not dismiss the need for a close reading of gender within his work. I am making no diagnosis; just pointing:

literary lineage:

Essential to Hokanson’s argument is Charles Bernstein’s claim that modernism presented two distinct lineages for poets to claim: the Pound-Williams lineage, or that of Eliot. According to Charles Bernstein, poets in the Pound-Williams tradition are “ambivalent about maintaining the negative capability necessary to their poetics of discover because of the socially reinforced ‘discomfort with vulnerability and mutability’” (qtd. in Hokanson 171), whereas Eliot “came to be identified with domesticity and, by traditional extension, femininity for some poets” (171).

“Throughout the 1950s, it is apparent that in establishing himself in relation to Pound and Williams and as head of a movement against ‘domesticated’ Modernism by trying to out-innovate, out-primitivize, and out-rebel his literary predecessors” (172).

projective verse:

From “Projective Verse”: “Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial things, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand at the moment” (20). Olson’s projective verse, Hokenson notes, is “against a slack and feminized diminution.” And, it’s worth noting, against Eliot who “presents a danger” even:

he has stayed there where the ear and the mind are, has only gone from his fine ear outward rather than, as I say a projective poet will, down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has to come from, where, the coincidence is, all act springs. (26)

Hokenson again: “The origin of ‘Projective Verse’ thus seems to run deeper than the diaphragm’s exhalation of breath, down perhaps to the (male) groin” (174).

elsewhere:

• Olson reinscribes the masculine and feminine mystiques of the 1950s in “Human Universe” (176).

• Hokanson also recognizes gender identity and gender roles in Olson’s poetry as linked to aesthetic prescriptions for each gender, specifically looking at “In Cold Thicket” (180).
• As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim in their book No Man’s Land, experimental form is no guarantee of progressivism (172). (This may go against some of my previous thinking earlier in semester, specifically my thinking about French Feminism in relation to “Projective Verse.”)
• “If Olson is to be of lasting significance in the literature of the United States, poets and critics [. . .] need to more fully understand the tensions as well as triumphs in his work” (182).

alternatives?

to bigness . . . smallness . . . to ego . . . anonymity:

• Rachel Blau Duplessis’s essay “Lorine Niedecker, The Anonymous: Gender, Class, Genre, and Resistances” from her book Blue Studios seems like a good starting point.
• tiny poems and folk form made her even more “culturally coded as minor” than being a female writer did
• In her close reading of Niedecker’s poem that begins “Remember my little granite pail?” Duplessis states that “movement between little or miniaturized subjectivity and far stickier, complex thought produces an interplay between surface and depth with special meaning for a female poet” (139). Niedecker’s work was small, egoless, her correspondence and anonymity are evidence of the humilitas that Olson aspires to in “Projective Verse.”
• Her form is small, often working with haiku, “she plays renga—linked haiku—with herself, imaginatively creating a community” (Duplessis 152). Noteworthy is the fact that Niedecker claimed Basho and not Pound and Williams or H.D. Duplessis explains that “To choose a foreign marker for this contained, oblique mode [Niedecker’s form] . . . is in part to deny one’s own belatedness . . . (152).

Fragmentary thoughts:

This different in literary lineage seems important. That a marginalized writer would choose an international poet (not of the American literary tradition) and produce a different form. Niedecker never seeks to transcend her experienced material life in a heroic or Romantic tradition; she did, however, create poems of resistance in issues of class, gender, politics through her quiet, unassuming form, through her attention to the world around her.

Some poems . . .

—-

In the great snowfall before the bomb
colored yule tree lights
windows, the only glow for contemplation
along this road

I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else.

I was Blondie
I carried my bundles of hog feeder price lists
down by Larry the Lug,
I’d never get anywhere
because I’d never had suction,
pull, you know, favor, drag,
well-oiled protection.

—–

What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
Time is white
mosquitoes bite
I’ve spent my life on nothing.

The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing,
sitting around with Something’s wife.
Buzz and burn
is all I learn
I’ve spent my life on nothing.

I’ve pillowed and padded, pale and puffing
lifting household stuffing—
carpets, dishes
benches, fishes
I’ve spent my life in nothing.

—-

Poet’s work

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery

—-

This is such a scant sampling. For more, look at the online facsimile of Paean to Place.