from PROJECTIVE VERSE
First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN
or what can also be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD,
as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the "old"
base of the non-projective.
(1) the kinetics of the thing.
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some
several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to,
the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct
and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish
same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at
all points energy at least the equivalent energy which propelled him in
the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which
will be, obviously, different from the energy which the reader, because
he is a third term, will take away?
This is the problem which any poet
who departs from closed form is specially confronted by. And it involves
a whole series of but new recognitions. From the moment he ventures into
FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open—he can
go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself.
Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several
forces just now beginning to be examined. (It is much more, for example,
this push, than simply such a one as Pound put, so wisely, to get us started:
"the musical phrase," go by it, boys rather than by, the metronome.)
(2) is the principal, the
law which presides conspicuously over such composition, and, when obeyed,
is the reason why a projective poem can come into being.
It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got
phrased by one, R. Creeley, and it makes absolute sense to me, with this
possible corollary, that right form, in any given poem, is the only and
exclusively possible extension of content under hand.) There it is,
brothers, sitting there, for USE.
Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle
can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I
think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by
Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER
PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I
should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it,
keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the
acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can,
citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points,
in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!
[Charles Olson. "Projective Verse." In Human Universe, Grove Press, 1951, 1959, 1965, 1967.]