The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Collected Prose by Charles Olson
Robert Buckeye

Charles Olson.Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Intro. Robert Creeley. Univ. of California Press, 1997. 472 pp. $50.00; paper $19.95.

Olson sought trace, prime. “I find it awkward to call myself a poet or a writer,” he notes. “If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what.” If his Collected Prose is a companion piece to his poetry, a work which constructs the armature around which the poetry turns, particularly in essays like “Projective Verse,” “Against Wisdom as Such,” and “A Foot Is to Kick With,” it is also, more crucially, an enterprise in its own right. The thing is to be of use, Olson emphasized over and over, in whatever context. Increasingly for Olson, literature becomes écriture, and his project is a reading of entrails, a sifting of signs, a dive down, in or out. He studied himself to understand that outside himself. He read far and wide to read himself. We were part of the universe, and the universe was part of us, and we had to measure the plumb lines. The dictionary, encyclopedia, and card catalog, Ralph Maud comments, were for Olson stories. The gyre turned in ever-widening circles only to circle back upon itself. For Olson, finally, history was histology, poetry, breath, psychology, archaeology. The gesture was the man (the detail contained everything). It was body knowledge Olson was about, interiors (“you better figure on man’s interiors,” he says). His philosophy, his aesthetics, call it what you will, was a kinetics. One had to know oneself before one could apply oneself, be of use. Each of us, he reminded us over and over, had to find his own train and track. Much of this material is out of print or difficult to obtain, and we are all in debt to the University of California for bringing it together in one volume. It lies on the stage of poetry today, as the six-foot-seven, 270 pound Olson once did in a dance performance at Wesleyan as an undergraduate, impossible to go around without bumping against. [Robert Buckeye]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Collected Prose by Charles Olson Robert Buckeye Charles Olson.Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Intro. Robert Creeley. Univ. of California Press, 1997. 472 pp. $50.00; paper $19.95. Olson sought trace, prime. “I find it awkward to call myself a poet or a writer,” he notes. “If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what.” If his Collected Prose is a companion piece to his poetry, a work which constructs the armature around which the poetry turns, particularly in essays like “Projective Verse,” “Against Wisdom as Such,” and “A Foot Is to Kick With,” it is also, more crucially, an enterprise in its own right. The thing is to be of use, Olson emphasized over and over, in whatever context. Increasingly for Olson, literature becomes écriture, and his project is a reading of entrails, a sifting of signs, a dive down, in or out. He studied himself to understand that outside himself. He read far and wide to read himself. We were part of the universe, and the universe was part of us, and we had to measure the plumb lines. The dictionary, encyclopedia, and card catalog, Ralph Maud comments, were for Olson stories. The gyre turned in ever-widening circles only to circle back upon itself. For Olson, finally, history was histology, poetry, breath, psychology, archaeology. The gesture was the man (the detail contained everything). It was body knowledge Olson was about, interiors (“you better figure on man’s interiors,” he says). His philosophy, his aesthetics, call it what you will, was a kinetics. One had to know oneself before one could apply oneself, be of use. Each of us, he reminded us over and over, had to find his own train and track. Much of this material is out of print or difficult to obtain, and we are all in debt to the University of California for bringing it together in one volume. It lies on the stage of poetry today, as the six-foot-seven, 270 pound Olson once did in a dance performance at Wesleyan as an undergraduate, impossible to go around without bumping against. [Robert Buckeye]

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