Cole Swensen

For much of Olson’s career, his over-arching concern was what he perceived to be the bankruptcy of western civilization, a bankruptcy rooted in the Greco-Roman tradition of discourse, which he felt made language into a shield against actual experience. And experience, participation in the actual, was his goal. From there stemmed his emphasis on immanence, and from there, on breath, which anchored poetry’s effects in physiology. His famous essay “Projective Verse” clearly lays out the poem as a field of action, as an event in process, as opposed to the model epitomized by Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility.” It was, of course, the re of recollected that Olson opposed; poetry for him would always be presentational, not representational.

But though Olson did have a healthy disdain for western culture, it wasn’t categorical; he found aspects of it quite useful, even hopeful, particularly aspects of the sciences. To advances in late-19th century physics, for instance, Olson attributed the fact that man was “suddenly possessed or repossessed of a character of being, a thing among things, which I shall call his physicality”(1). And his concept of “field” is not based on the common noun, but on the Einsteinian understanding of the term as “the domain or environment in which the real or potential action of a force can be described mathematically at each point in space”(2). Another useful concept came to him from mathematics in the form of projective geometry, which he saw as the unifying element among a number of practices that marked the emergent art of the 1950s, such as action painting, and chance-based music. He stated that he took the title of his famous essay “Projective Verse” from the work of H.M.S. Coxeter on projective geometry, and Alfred North Whitehead, who was a major influence on The Maximus Poems, wrote a book titled The Axioms of Projective Geometry in 1906, though it seems that Olson didn’t encounter his work until much later. Regardless of where he found the idea, he used a fairly loose definition of it. In Muthologos, he defines it as “that movement of force as wave and particle and particles dissolving into vibration,” which has nothing to do with geometry at all. He’s using metaphors based vaguely on the physics of light, the “particles” of which certainly don’t dissolve—which he knew perfectly well.

Such “misuse” of scientific terminology has often been taken by scientists as an affront, but I’d like to suggest a different angle on it, one in which, in fact the poet reaches out to scientific language for its precision, and takes it from there as a raw material to be worked through metaphor, metonymy, and ambiguity until it expresses something that he can’t express otherwise. It wasn’t that Olson wanted to put poetry on a physical, and therefore, scientific footing; it was that he deeply believed that that was where it actually and inevitably was.

Olson became interested in post-Euclidean geometry in the mid-1940s, and was deeply intrigued by what he understood as a completely new and more accurate way of seeing the world, one in which space is not something independent of the objects within it but is actually determined by those objects. In addition to Coxeter’s work, he explored the 19th century advances made by Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann, which encouraged him to think in terms of extra-dimensional space and unbounded space. There’s a curious contradiction in such an intense interest in these highly abstract concepts on the part of someone as dedicated as Olson was to the immediate as revealed by the senses. I think what we see here is an instance of Olson’s recognizing a concept as a real thing in a real world, with real defined as that which has effect.

And while Olson’s work couldn’t take on the 4th dimension in concrete terms, it did extend in space in a new way. His most radical spatial innovations occurred in The Maximus Poems, in some essays from the 1960s, and in his curious hybrid genre of letter/bibliography/ commentary, in which we see the marks on the page straining to move beyond it by moving across it in unprecedented ways. The tension they display keeps us aware of the very real limits of our perceptions. And for one so dedicated to the actual, the increasing scientific proof of our inability to access it except through the mediation of mathematics and other conceptual apparatuses must have been extremely frustrating.

Olson applied his interest in and insight into post-Euclidean geometry in some of his critical work, such as in the essay “Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself,”in which, following Riemann’s categories, he draws parallels between, on the one hand, the Euclidian world view, characterized as “discrete,” “the old system [which] includes discourse, language as it has been since Socrates” and on the other, between a post-Euclidian world view and a new system that is “more true, the continuous.” In other words, post-Euclidean geometry reinforced exactly the distinctions and the conclusions he had developed through his more general consideration of the state of western culture.

And it is perhaps post-Euclidean geometry in its broadest application, that of mapping extra-dimensional spaces, rather than projective geometry per se, that Olson is tapping into in much of his work, yet there are elements of projective geometry as traditionally defined that seem closely related to his projects, even though he never explicitly drew the connections.

The actual definition of projective geometry is extremely broad and somewhat elastic. Tom Clark, in his biography, takes Olson to task for “his inability to grasp the technical fine points,” but that’s a state Olson shared with all but highly advanced mathematicians—the “fine points” are extremely fine, indeed. That said, there are some basic principles that could apply particularly to his notions of projective verse, albeit, taken metaphorically—and it seems to me that a lot rests on this distinction—i.e., can mathematical concepts be used metaphorically, or does that defeat their whole purpose? —but let’s put that aside for the moment to explore the possibilities.

In its broadest terms, projective geometry is the geometry of projected figures (defined in one place as the geometry of a figure and all its shadows), and deals with the distortions caused by projection as well as those elements that remain invariant (for instance, a line remains a line, even though its length (and even its relationship to other lines) may have changed). So it includes, but is not limited to, the geometry of perspective, from which we might be allowed to infer that it recognizes point of view as a determining factor of our world-view and recognizes that world-view as changeable and contingent.

Projective geometry is used in many common things; most map projections use a version of it that tries to meld the Riemannian geometry of the sphere with the demands of our two dimensional conceptual and literal representations, and all perspective drawings and works of art use its principles. These examples employ a more basic use of the concept than Olson did, and yet the notion of his field poetics creating a space in which the event that is the self-in-action-in-space could be projected makes a certain sense. The plane onto which the item is projected is obviously crucial to the resulting image, and poetry offers a conceptual plane flattened by convention until it’s almost visible as well as the literal, tangible space of the page. By refusing a priori forms and other conventions such as the justified left margin, Olson enabled the page to receive the projection of a nuanced time as the 4th dimension in addition to the well-accepted three. More than most, Olson’s poetry exists both as form in space—the page orchestrated in such a way that we see it in an instant—and also as form in time, as, like all language, it requires time to unfold, and he accentuated the dynamic between these two forms through his careful spacing, which the eye must leap across, making us aware of a kind of “white time” in which the four dimensions fuse.

A projection is always a distortion that grapples across dimension, that grapples to present more dimensions than its form allows. Olson saw what could be done by activating the field of the page, but in the long run it could offer no more than an intimation, and this accurate but elusive projection is the ineffable that haunts both his ideas and his poetry, this unshakeable recognition of space-time as a mundane fact and the concomitant inability to experience it as such.

To say that a field poetics allows a projection of the self or of the self’s experience onto the page is, of course, a metaphor. The word “self” is itself a metaphor for an untraceable confluence of impressions and impulses; there is no figure there to project, and the concrete mechanics of the process are completely lacking. And Olson wanted more than metaphor, which is, I think, why he evoked the principle but then immediately clouded it with other mathematical and physical principles that, though related and possibly relevant, cannot be used together in any normative fashion. The blend of these disparate terms creates an upheaval that Olson then tries to keep up in the air; he tries to keep the dust from settling because as long as it doesn’t, the collapse into metaphor can’t occur and intimations of an inexpressible actual may filter in through the gaps between.
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Olson may have been dedicated to the immanent, actual, material-world-as-action, but the one delivered to his senses wasn’t enough. He was after a physicality that was not beyond the available but that was more intense, not a metaphysicality but a hyper-physicality, and he looked to the language of the sciences, but even more so to that of mathematics, for a way to collapse the distance instigated by language. In a sense, he found the necessary tool in numbers. Partaking of an elaborate relational system similar to words and like words deriving their meaning entirely from that system, numbers nonetheless mean nothing but themselves, can mean nothing but themselves, and the geometrical figures they can construct can map the physical from the inside and emerge as the patterns of a life—not a representation of it, but the pattern itself, which can be projected, either directly or with the distortions we’ve come to call the aesthetic, onto surfaces as varied as page and planet and space.

NOTES:
1. Collected Prose, 121.
2. Shachar Bram, 20.

This essay was first presented at the Chax Press conference on Charles Olson in Tucson, Arizona, at The Poetry Center, October 11, 2008.

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