Hampson High Energy

In his recent book on Modernism, Tim Armstrong
observes that ‘Late nineteenth-century science
is dominated by one term: energy’.¹ He goes on:
‘electricity, magnetism and electromagnetic
waves are unified within a physics in which
energy and work are central’. He reminds us
that: ‘The 1890s, in particular, saw physics
enter a revolutionary phase, with the discovery
of radiation, X-rays, and the first real
understanding of atomic structure’ (116). We
might recall how Joseph Conrad met John
McIntyre, one of the first radiologists, on a
visit to Glasgow and famously responded to this
encounter with x-rays with a range of
speculations. He wrote excitedly to Edward
Garnett on 29 September 1898:

All day with the shipowners and in
the evening dinner, phonograph, X rays, talk
about the secret of the universe and
the non-existence of so-called matter. The
secret of the universe is in the existence of
horizontal waves whose varied vibrations are at
the bottom of all states of consciousness. If
the waves were vertical the universe would be
different. … But, don’t you see, there is
nothing in the world to prevent the simultaneous
existence of vertical waves, of waves at any
angles; … Therefore it follows that two
universes may exist in the same place and in the
same time – and not only two universes but an
infinity of universes …²

As Armstrong suggests, these new developments
in physics resulted in the ‘dissolving of
materiality into the categories of energy, field
and radiation’ (117). They also suggested the
possibility that Conrad picks up on of multiple
universes, a perception that perhaps lies behind
Conrad’s use of multiple perspectives in his
fictions, and that was certainly developed as a
conceit by Conrad and Ford in their
collaboration on a scientific romance, The
Inheritors, with its new breed of
humans from the Fourth Dimension.

Armstrong usefully shows how literature
responded to this new world-view in three ways:
by registering shock; by incorporating it into
its representation of the world and by deploying
science ‘at the level of poetics’ (117). In the
first part of the essay that follows, I want to
focus on the second and third of these
categories: literature that attempts to
incorporate the scientific world-view and the
deployment of science in poetics. I want to
begin with the deployment of science in poetics,
and I want to start with James Joyce and Ezra
Pound. Thus, for example, an important influence
on the development of James Joyce’s early
aesthetic theories was his reconsideration of
the neglected Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan.
We find Joyce beginning his 1907 lecture on
Mangan as follows:

There are certain poets who, in
addition to their virtue of revealing aspects of
the human consciousness to us that were unknown
until their age, also possess the more
questionable virtue of embodying in themselves
the thousand conflicting tendencies of their
age, of turning themselves into, so to speak,
storage batteries of a new energy.³

This provides the basis for part of Stephen
Dedalus’s aesthetic theories in Stephen
Hero, where it reappears as follows:

The poet is the intense centre of the
life of his age to which he stands in a relation
than which none can be more vital. He alone is
capable of absorbing in himself the life that
surrounds him.⁴

Ezra Pound takes a similar view of the central
role of the poet, and he too explores this
through ideas drawn from science. He focuses
particularly on energy and forms of energy.
Thus, in his 1913 essay, ‘The Serious Artist’,
he observes: ‘the thing that matters in art is a
sort of energy, something more or less like
electricity or radio-activity, a force
transfusing, welding and unifying’.⁵

During 1913 and 1914, Pound was working to go
beyond the Imagism that was a by-product of his
conversations with Ford Madox Ford. I have
discussed elsewhere how the programme for
imagism, articulated in ‘A Few Don’ts’  (Poetry,
I.6, March 1913), derived from Ford and the
‘prose tradition’ of Flaubert.⁶ In ‘The Serious
Artist’, he begins the dissociation of prose and
poetry by insisting on the role of emotion in
poetry, and asserting the idea of the
‘intellectual and emotional complex’ (LE51). He
insists on poetry as a hybrid form in which ‘the
thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty
must move and leap with the energising,
sentient, musical faculties’ (LE52). As the poet
develops, and his mind becomes ‘a constantly
more complicated structure’, ‘it requires a
constantly greater voltage of emotional energy
to set it in harmonious motion’ (LE52). In July
1914, he took the opportunity of his review of
Joyce’s Dubliners in The Egoist
to mark again the gap between himself and Ford,
between poetry and prose, by asserting intensity
against precision:

The followers of Flaubert deal in
exact presentation. They are often so intent on
exact presentation that they neglect intensity,
selection and concentration.⁷

By the time of ‘How to Read’, this had become a
definition of great literature as ‘language
charged with meaning to the utmost possible
degree’ (LE23). It is important not to miss the
scientific metaphor implicit in the word
‘charged’.

By Spring 1914, when Pound gave the lecture at
the Rebel Art Centre which became his essay
‘Vorticism’ (Fortnightly Review,
September 1914), Pound was defining imagism as a
‘critical’ movement rather than a creative
movement. It had performed a necessary
‘critical’ operation on its predecessors, but
did not in itself provide a way forward. Pound
argues that it had borrowed ‘from the
impressionist method of presentation’ (GB85),
but, whereas impressionism was ‘surface art’,
imagism was intensive (GB92). He elaborated on
this distinction later in a letter to Ford:
explaining that he had sought to take Ford’s
‘cloud’ of impressions and ‘put a vortex or
concentration point inside each bunch of
impressions and thereby give it a sort of
intensity’ (P/F43). Pound’s redefinition of the
image as ‘a radiant node or cluster … a VORTEX
from which, and through which, and into which,
ideas are constantly rushing’ (GB92) is an
attempt to get beyond what he felt to be the
stasis of the image.

In his essay ‘Cavalcanti’, which Pound wrote
over the period 1910-1931, we can observe again
this struggle to define his own poetics in
contradistinction to Ford’s impressionism. He
begins with the assertion that ‘the Tuscan …
declines to limit his aesthetic to the impact of
light on the eye’ (LE 151). Instead, he
foregrounds the role of the perceiver and ‘an
interactive force: the virtu, in
short’ (LE 152). This is comparable to the
distinction he makes in his book on
Gaudier-Brzeska between two opposed ways of
thinking of mankind: as ‘the plastic substance
receiving impressions’ or as ‘conceiving instead
of merely reflecting and observing’ (GB 89).
Tuscany, for Pound, means ‘the conception of
love, passion, emotion as intellectual
investigation’ (LE343), just as Gaudier-Brzeska
means intense feeling and his art-work ‘the
abstraction of this intense feeling’ (GB 37). In
the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay, this in turn brings in
the body and what Olsen would term
proprioception: ‘The senses at first seem to
project for a few yards beyond the body. Effect
of a decent climate where a man leaves his
nerve-set open … ’ (LE152). Pound rejects
‘monastic thought’ and asserts the importance of
‘the body as perfect instrument of the
increasing intelligence’ (LE152). He then
attempts to clarify what he realises is no more
than mens sana in corpore sano through
translation into self-consciously modernised
terminology as ‘the aesthetic or interactive
vasomotor magnetism in relation to the
consciousness’ (LE152). From Cavalcanti, above
all, Pound recovers the apprehension of ‘the
radiant world where one thought cuts through
another with clean edge, a world of moving
energies … magnetisms that take form’ (LE152).
From this medieval world of ‘moving energies’,
it is a short step to the ‘modern scientist’ and
‘the rose that his magnet makes in the iron
filings’ (LE152) or ‘the current hidden in air
or in wire’ (LE153)

Peter Nichols has noted how Pound’s early
speculations about ‘energy’ conflated scientific
vocabulary with theosophical language and ideas.
⁸ This lies
behind his ‘attention to momentary disclosures
of “force” and “energy”’ (8) and his emphasis on
‘the instantaneous nature of “vision”’ (9).
Modern science is yoked together with a
visionary Neo-Platonism. In the essays I have
just been discussing, Pound moves between the
medieval and the self-consciously modern, the
literary and the scientific in his attempt to
articulate an aesthetics in terms of intensity
and energy. I want to bring in two other writers
before moving on to three poets working in this
tradition.

First I want to mention the scholar Ernest
Fenellosa. Late in 1913, Pound acquired
Fenellosa’s notebooks, which contained (among
other things) what became the essay on the
Chinese written character. As K. K. Ruthven
notes:

Before grappling with Fenellosa,
Pound talked of the image as if it were a static
phenomenon … afterwards, it was the dynamic
element that counted.⁹

As Ian Bell notes, the field theories of
Faraday and Clark Maxwell revisioned matter as
lines of force, and Pound’s scientific reading
prepared him for Fenellosa’s vitalist universe.¹⁰
 Fenellosa’s essay involved focussing not
on things but on the relations between things
or, more precisely, on ‘the relational nature of
phenomena’ (Bell, 102). For Fenellosa: ‘Valid
scientific thought consists in following as
closely as may be the actual and entangled lines
of force as they pulse through things’ (CWC,
12). Above all, Fenellosa’s work encouraged
Pound to consider the operations of language in
terms of the notions of electromagnetic force
that he was familiar with from field theory. The
ideogram was a ‘composite picture of
things  … simply placed in conjunction’,
which carried with it ‘the verbal idea of
action’.  As a result, Pound saw the
possibilities of the ideogram as ‘an implement
for acquisition and transmission of knowledge’
(LE 61) and reconceived the sentence as a matter
of energy transfer. This was to lead to the
ideogrammic method of the Cantos.

I want to juxtapose Fenellosa to Sergei
Eisenstein and the idea of montage. This is an
idea derived not from science but from an
engagement with the materiality of film, but it
echoes in various ways what I have been saying
about Pound. In his essay, ‘Bela Forgets the
Scissors’ (1926), Eisenstein asserted that ‘the
essence of cinema does not lie in the images,
but in the relation between the images’. ¹¹ For Eisenstein,
montage was ‘fundamental to cinema’.¹² Montage is the
dynamic principle of the medium, operating at
the micro-level of 24 frames per second, which
produces the illusion of movement, through the
editing of shots to the macro-level of
intellectual montage. In his Notebooks from
1919, he described montage as ‘the
process of constructing with prepared
fragments’.¹³Montage
relies on ‘consecutive, separate presentation’
(41), but it also has the potential to liberate
film ‘from the plot-based script and for the
first-time takes account of film material, both
thematically and formally, in the construction’
(40). Montage is recognisably an ideogrammic
method: ‘What the shots reproduce is no longer
an image of reality, but something that is
already conceptual’. ¹⁴
The anti-naturalistic device of intellectual
montage was also a device for condensing
‘different meanings into a single element of
representation’ (Aumont, 167). All of this has
implications that I will pick up later. I want
to consider now the first of the three poets on
whom this essay focusses.

via Rob Mclennan: Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Ruth Witt-Diament, 1958 San Francisco State University	via Poetry Foundation: Semicircle, l. to r.: Bill Berkson, John Ashbery, John Wieners, unknown woman, Desmond O’Grady, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Olga Rudge (?), 3 others unknown. Settimana di Poesia, Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Italy, June 1965.

CHARLES OLSON

In his 1950 essay,
‘Projective Verse’, Charles Olson presents a manifesto
for what is called ‘projective verse’ or ‘open
field’ poetry. He begins by contrasting ‘“closed”
verse, that verse which print bred’, with new
possibilities for verse developed by Pound and
William Carlos Williams.  Closed verse is a
matter of ‘inherited line, stanza, over-all form’.
By contrast, open field poetry derives from a
different concept of poetry, a concept which (as
the word ‘field’ suggests) picks up on Pound’s
emphasis on energy. Thus Olson begins with
kinetics: ‘A poem is energy transferred from where
the poet got it …by way of the poem itself to, all
the way over to, the reader.’ From this it follows
that: ‘the poem itself must, at all points, be a
high energy-construct and, at all points, an
energy-discharge’. There are obvious continuities
here with Fenellosa. Olson even cites Fenellosa’s
view of the sentence as a ‘passage of force from
subject to object … the VERB, between two nouns’.

Olson also tries to explain how the poet achieves
this ‘high energy-construct’. First, it involves a
different ‘stance toward reality’. Venturing into
field composition means that the poet ‘has to
behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some
several forces just now beginning to be examined’.
Behind this vague statement lies the scientific
idea of field theory, setting the subject in a
field of forces (rather than granting them
perspectival dominance) as well as Carl Sauer’s
idea of areal studies, trying to take into account
all the factors and forces in play that produce a
cultural landscape. Secondly, it involves an
awareness of the page as page-space and then using
the page-space to map and manage relations between
lexical elements. Thirdly, there is the
compositional principle that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE
THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’. Where Pound had, in
his early work, been concerned to explore existing
forms such as the sestina and the canzone, Olson
sweeps all this away. Instead, he offers a process
by which, as he puts it, this principle ‘can be
made so to shape the energies that the form is
accomplished’, and that process he reduces again
to a single statement: ONE PERCEPTION MUST
IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER
PERCEPTION’. This provides a rule both for
composition and for ‘our management of daily
reality’: ‘keep in, speed, the nerves, their
speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the
split second acts, the whole business’. It also
brings us back to the body and, more specifically,
the ‘possibilities of the breath’. For
compositional purposes, the line comes ‘from the
breath, from the breathing of the man who writes,
at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is
here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for
only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every
moment, the line its metric and its ending’. Here
Olson picks up on the way cummings, Pound and
Williams have each used the space of the page, and
the disposition of words, lines and half-lines in
that space, ‘as a scoring to his composing, as a
script to its vocalisation’. They provide a set of
conventions for using the space of the page to
register the breath of the poet. As a result, the
layout of the poem on the page is both a graphing
of the breath of the poet and, effectively, a
score for performance.

Olson concludes by outlining what he calls
‘objectism’. By this he means two things. First,
‘Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical
interference of the individual as ego, of the
“subject” and his soul’. Instead of the
presumption of placing himself above the ‘other
creations of nature’, Olson insists on a different
relation to nature: as an object ‘in the larger
field of objects’. Secondly, in the process of
writing, every element of the poem ‘must be
handled as a series of objects in field in such a
way that a series of tensions … are made to hold,
and to hold exactly inside the content and the
context of the poem’.

Olson’s essay was very influential, and we find
contemporary poets as diverse as Robert Duncan,
Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders
responding to it. In Olson’s own practice, it
takes two forms. In early poems like ‘The K’, ‘La
Preface’, and ‘The Kingfishers’, it produces not
the stream of consciousness that we might expect
but rather constructivism. The principle of
collage or montage can be seen most clearly in the
1949 poem ‘The Kingfishers’, which interweaves
material from Plutarch’s ‘The E at Delphi’,
Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico,
Pound’s ‘Pisan Cantos’ and ‘Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley’, Eliot’s Four Quartets and
the entry on Kingfishers in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. The poem is an extended
meditation that kicks off from Heraclitus: ‘What
does not change/is the will to change’. Mao is the
chief embodiment of the ‘will to change’ in the
poem, and the Chinese Revolution is presented as a
manifestation of this recurrent transformative
energy ¹⁵. The
second section begins:

  I  thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said
  la  lumiere
          but  the kingfisher
  de l’aurore
          but the kingfisher flew west
  est devant nous!
          he got the color of his breast
          From the heat of the setting sun!
  

  And ends:
       Mao concluded: 
                        nous  devons
                                      nous  lever
                                                   et  agir!

The opening demonstrates very clearly the
principle of montage according to which the poem
is constructed. As well as Mao’s recent victories,
the poem also takes in the ruins of Angkor Wat and
Mayan  rituals. It is part of Olson’s
archaeological effort to recover lost energies
both within the individual and within the society.
It is also, as Merrill noted, part of Olson’s
‘anthropological commitment to the recovery of a
pre-Greek orientation’, to get outside of the
Western box.¹⁶

Olson’s major work, however, is the multivolume Maximus
Poems, a life-work like Pound’s Cantos,
and, like the Cantos, it is the long
poem as research project. The central figure,
Maximus, is a version of Olson himself, blown up
to epic and mythic proportions. The poem explores
the history of Gloucester, Massachussetts, in an
attempt to engage with modern man’s estrangement
from ‘that with which he is most familiar’. It is
the quest for the recovery of lost energies
carried out through research into local
particulars, which are presented on the page as
arrays of information through the ‘grandly
oracular’ persona of Maximus (Merrill, 166)..

 

Allen Fisher

With Allen Fisher, we have an English poet whose
early work very clearly responded to Olson and to
the notion of open-field composition, but we also
have a poet who goes beyond the use of science as
poetics to the incorporation of a scientific
world-view – or, rather, various scientific
world-views, in his work. Fisher is particularly
interested in scientific ideas that challenge or
undermine what might seem common sense ideas about
reality: he is interested in the conceptual as a
challenge to the perceptual.

The work by Fisher which most clearly responds to
Olson is his early ten-year project, Place,
which was begun in 1971 and, according to plan,
abandoned rather than finished ten years later. It
is, in a sense, a durational piece; the ten years
allotted to the work provide the major constraint.
Like Maximus, it is what Eric Mottram
termed a locationary action – an exploration of a
particular place: the South London that Fisher
grew up in and lived in.

The early part of the poem involves a series of
negotiations with Olson. In an early section,
written in 1971, for example, he writes:

        I, not Maximus, but a citizen of Lambeth
                                  cyclic on linear planes
	the construction of parallels along a water line
        where the intersections are our mistakes
return we will not	we have come
                                                      all this way

As Clive Bush observes, Fisher here both
acknowledges his debt to Olson and ‘rejects the
epic hero of Olson’s Maximus poems as a
trans-cultural and trans-historical figure’;
instead, his hero is ‘a citizen of Lambeth’.¹⁷ Similarly, the
language of geometry is brought in as a language
of analysis and explanation (‘cyclic on linear
planes’), but, at the same time the adequacy of
this abstract language is also constantly
challenged. The suggestion of cycles of history,
an entrapment that the last line refuses, is also
more subtly undermined by the more prosaic
suggestion of a Lambeth citizen on his bicycle.
This is typical of Fisher’s handling of his very
varied sources: different discourses are brought
into dialogue and are simultaneously challenged
through their juxtaposition.

A later section, with the dedication ‘to Pierre,
dec. 72’, is written in response to Pound’s death
and locates Fisher and Pierre Joris in a line of
descent from Pound and Olson. At the same time, it
consistently problematises ideas of line, descent
and origin:

                  
now it’s Pound dead

                                                     
after Olson & before him

                  
before us

                                
in front of us

                  
a flow of field spiralling out

 The temporal complication is an easily
resolvable riddle: Olson died in 1970, Pound in
1972, but Pound was born in 1885, whereas Olson
was born in 1910. However, the riddle has the
effect of destabilising the idea of linear
chronology that both descent and origin require. A
later line has a similar effect: ‘a mythology new
to our children & forefathers’. This second
riddle, I suspect, has its origin in Pound’s
assertion of the contemporaneity of all ages at
the start of The Spirit of Romance:

The future stirs already in the minds
of the few. This is especially true of literature,
where the real time is independent of the
apparent, and where many dead men are our
grandchildren’s contemporaries, while many of our
contemporaries have been already  gathered
into Abraham’s bosom …’ (SR, 6)

In the passage I just quoted, the repetition of
the word ‘before’ masks a movement from time to
space: time becomes space, and the line of descent
is exploded into a field and then twisted into a
spiralling of energy outwards.

Energy, in various forms, is one of the key
concerns of Place. One of the early
sources was Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight
Road (1925), which was rediscovered in the
1960s. Its concern with pre-historic pathways and
what it called Ley lines, lines of energy, are
very much of their time. These energy lines chime
with Feng Shui, which Fisher also explored, and
have been taken up again by the psychogeographers.
They appear in the poem as a model for hidden
energies, energies whose direction, redirection or
blockage might have implications for the health of
the inhabitants. They are echoed by Fisher’s
interest in the lost rivers of London: rivers like
the Fleet and the Efra which continue to flow
beneath the city streets, and whose flow impacts
on the energies of place. One example of the
impact of the lost rivers is provided by Fisher’s
source, Nicholas Barton’s The Lost Rivers of
London (1962). Barton shows how the maps of
the lost rivers correspond to maps for
nineteenth-century cholera epidemics. Fisher’s
extensive scientific knowledge takes this beyond
what might seem New Age fad or antiquarianism into
what he calls pertinent information. He draws on a
wide range of informations to re-think space and
to think outside of human experiential
limitations:

we are part of an interaction

ununified

electromagnetic and gravitational

fields contradict

birds sensitive

to axis not polarity

fish

thru sea water see

through a moving conductor

flowing

past the lines of force

thru the magnetics

setting up perpendicular current

a direction

of flow and field

contradicting reason

Fisher was also interested in Wilhelm Reich and
his ideas about sexual energy, the ‘orgone energy’
of orgasm, and the link between cancer and sexual
repression. An on-going concern in Fisher’s work
is with health, disease and cure. Here he teases
out and develops the ecological implications of
Olson’s stance in relation to reality.  

As Bush observes, Place is rooted in
‘the local, the particular, the specifically-lived
historical condition’ (110). It traces movements
through particular streets; it explores the
historical archives; it engages with buildings and
the urban infrastructure. It manufactures
convergences between different discourses and
knowledges: astronomy, biology, optics,
mathematics, thermodynamics, ecology All the time,
it works to construct what Bush calls ‘an
interactive world of complex structures’ (143) and
to convey Fisher’s sense of complex
‘interconnectedness’ (145).  Fisher draws
readily on a range of scientific discourses, but
he also consistently questions their claims to
authority.

 

REDELL OLSEN

The work of the third poet I want to discuss,
Redell Olsen, can be situated within the
tradition, but  the focus is not so much
scientific discourses as the issue of gender and
sexuality. The tradition I have been sketching can
be seen to be not only male but also (with the
exception of Fisher) distinctly masculinist. In Pavannes
& Divagations (1921), for
example, Pound wrote:

The brain itself is, in origin and
development, only a sort of great clot of genital
fluid held in suspense or reserve .

As John Tytell noted, this idea derives from
Pound’s reading of Remy de Gourmont’s Physique
de l’amour: essai sur l’instinct sexuel
(published in English as The Natural History
of Love).¹⁸
De Gourmont suggested a correlation between a
‘complete and profound intercourse and cerebral
development’ and accordingly advocated a
liberation of sexual energies. In a review of a
book on glandular systems, Pound tried to develop
his theory further, arguing that ‘the two sides of
the brain mutually magnetised themselves into
“great seas of fecundative matter”’. In Pound’s
theorizing of sex, man was the inventor, because
his brain was bathed in residual sperm, which
caused ‘the original thought, as distinct from the
imitative thought’. The place of women in this can
be gauged from Pound’s account of his earlier role
as the introduction of new ideas into the ‘great
passive vulva of London’. For his part, Charles
Olson, in his poem ‘The K’, describes the process
of confronting setbacks and the subsequent
self-emergence as follows:

Take, then, my answer:

there is a tide in a man

moves him to his moon and,

though it drop him back

he works through ebb to mount

the run again and swell

to be tumescent I

One of the interesting developments in recent
years has been to see how, since the 1960s and
1970s, this tradition, and Charles Olson in
particular, has been detourned by feminist women
writers. The American poet, Kathleen Fraser, in
her 1996  essay, ‘Translating the
unspeakable’, traces the  enactment of ‘field
poetics’ and the development of a visual poetics
derived from Olson’s poetry in  ‘current
female writing practice’ as exemplified by the
work of Susan Howe, Susan Gevirtz, Myung Mi Kim
and others. Fraser notes how Olson’s proposal,
‘the getting rid of the lyrical interference of
the individual as ego’, provided an ‘alternative
ethic of writing for women poets’ (TU, 176) to the
dominant mode of ‘I-centred poems’ and their
problematic notions of identity. Furthermore, she
argues, the ‘excitement and insistence of Olson’s
spatial, historical and ethical margins’ even
while ‘clearly speaking from male imperatives’
(TU, 177) helped women poets to stake out an area
of practice. Fraser, however, pays particular
attention to the visual aspects of Olson’s
handling of the page-space and to the word-grid
introduced by Robert Duncan, derived from Pound
and Fenellosa’s work on the Chinese written
character. As Fraser notes, both Olson and Duncan
treat the page as ‘a graphically energetic site in
which to manifest one’s physical
alignment with the arrival of language in the
mind’ (TU, 186). In both cases, the poetic
practice, in which the page becomes a graphically
energetic site, chimed with contemporary work by
women visual artists associated with the New York
abstract and expressionist movements. Fraser cites
Helen Frankenthaler, Nell Blaine, Elaine
DeKooning, Grace Hartigan , Jane Freilicher, Joan
Mitchell, and Agnes Martin. There are, for
example, obvious similarities between Agnes
Martin’s graphed canvasses and Duncan’s
ideogrammic grid poem. Fraser concludes with a
range of work by women poets who have picked up on
and developed Olson’s ‘pictographic use of type’
(TU, 198), exploiting the ‘fluid surface of
juxtapositions and collisions’; the possibility of
registering gaps, silences, and indecisions; and
the excitement of ‘energy flung across synapses’.
¹⁹

Redell Olsen comes out of the same concern with
finding ‘an ‘ethic of writing for women poets’.
This relates to both a writing practice and the
professional situating of that practice in public
spaces, and it is figured in her work as a
recurrent concern with the ‘in-between’. Ann
Rosalind Jones’s essay, ‘Writing the Body’, is
useful here. ²⁰
Jones challenges the idea of l’ecriture
feminine by affirming the permeation of
language by phallocentrism and insisting on the
importance of the context in which women’s
discourses are produced. She asserts the need to
examine words, syntax, genres, but also the need
to engage with questions of authority, audience,
modes of publication and distribution – and Olsen
would add sites of performance. Olsen also comes
out of that convergence of painterly and poetic
practices that Fraser maps out in her essay.
Olsen’s PhD, for example, was on the
scripto-visual element in recent verbal and visual
art, and her own practice is on the borders of
poetry and visual art. For Olsen, the page is
always a visual space, a graphically energetic
site, but she also moves her work off the page
both through new technologies of writing and
through site-specific and site-responsive
projects.

Olsen’s early work,

Book of the Fur (2000),
makes very clear this use of the page as a visual
space. It takes as its source books on fur
trapping and fur processing.²¹
This source material is then subjected to a
process of ‘flaying’, cutting and recombining –
and represented in a variety of forms.  To
begin with, each page has a square block of text
at its centre, the block of text made up of a
montage of phrases, with the sense running on from
one block to the next – the final cut in each case
made by the predetermined shape of the text.
Subsequent sections use other forms: a four-line
stanza form briefly emerges; then a section where
(as in Joan Rettallack’s afterrimages)
each poem appears in two forms, one a deteriorated
or damaged version of the other; then a section of
poems with three-line stanzas, the lines stretched
and fractured across the page, prompting spatial
rather than linear readings; then a section using
the full space of the page for visual array; and,
finally, a long alphabetical list of trade names
for different kinds of fur – and their animal
source (usually rabbit). Into this sequence, Olsen
splices in visual images relating to the fur trade
and narrative interventions derived from an
account of Meret Oppenheim’s making of her
fur-covered teacup. This is a text which examines
words and syntax and reflects on its own writing.
At the same time, through the fur trade, it
engages with gender and sexuality, identity and
commodification. In an interview with Lucy
Sheerman, Olsen observed:

… there is a right and a wrong side for
writing on parchment. The wrong side is hairy. I
was wondering if women writers might be on the
hairy/furry side of writing and what it might be
like to try and write a text that acknowledged
this furriness.²²

In her second book, secure portable space
(2004), Redell Olsen continues these explorations
in a number of distinctly different ways. The
first sequence, ‘corrupted by showgirls’, explores
gender by reference to cinema, cinematic
techniques and film-script terminology. As Scott
Thurston has noted, the opening section directly
announces its concerns through the figure of the
female star and her disempowerment within the
industry. ²³ The
opening line outlines the problem of how to assert
identity within language: ‘Sum: a realisation that
she is signing her name with letters that are not
her own’. The final line of the first section
presents a comic and complex reflection on the
performance of gender: ‘At other times, in order
to put myself across the footlights I have to
imagine that I am a man who sews.’ The final
section, describing Marlene Dietrich in Dishonoured,
reads in full:

A spy clad in feathers, she goes to her
death before a firing squad, after stopping to
reapply her make-up in the reflection of the sword
of one of her gaolers.

What might be read as a courageous gesture, a
defiant assertion of identity, turns into a
performance that merely confirms imprisonment
within a reified role.

A later section of the book, ‘Era of Heroes’,
raises the issue of performance in a different
way. This text exists in a variety of forms. It
exists, for example, as a perspex and neon sign,
in which the phrases ‘era of heroes’ and ‘heroes
of error’ alternate. This part of the work, on the
borders of light sculpture and concrete poetry,
was exhibited for a short time in the window of
the bookarts bookshop in London. The text included
in secure portable space, which consists
of an alphabetical listing of the names of heroes
and superheroes, presents the reader with a
challenge, since Olsen makes clear that apart from
the concept and the searching for the names, there
is minimal personal input and investment in the
fifteen-page list. ‘Era of Heroes’, however, was
also performed by Olsen on the streets around Old
Street, with the reading of the text transmitted
to an audience in the bookarts bookshop. As with
the location of the text as sign in the bookshop
window, this reading of the longer text in the
street takes the work into public space. At the
same time, the transmission of the text into the
bookshop problematises the location of the work:
it exists in a heterotopic space – both public and
private, both art space and civic space. There is
a further twist. The reading of the text while
walking through the streets in Mickey Mouse ears
is recorded on video as documentation, and stills
from the video are provided as documentation in
the book.

This idea of the individual work being replaced
by a work-in-process developed through a variety
of forms was explored further in a collaborative
project set up with the book-artist, Susan
Johanknecht. In the first phase, ‘writing
instructions/reading walls’, invitations were sent
out to nine writers/artists to take part in an
installation at the Poetry Café, London. Each was
invited to send instructions to Olsen and
Johanknecht for a work that would be installed on
the walls of the café for part of a five-month
installation. The instructions were followed by
Olsen and Johanknecht and the work was installed
for an agreed period. The process of installation
and the installation itself were videoed. Olsen
and Johanknecht then responded to each
installation with a new set of instructions for
each participant. The work produced in response to
the second set of instructions was included in a
bookart work here are my instructions
along with versions of material produced in
documenting the event. The text of here are
my instructions was subsequently performed
at the Small Press Book Fair against a video based
on the filming of the installation process. The
video of this reading was then shown at a later
event. Not only has the text moved off the page,
but the transfer of energy from writer to reader
becomes this generative and transformational
process between writers and across media.

I wanted to end with a Redell Olsen’s engagement
with being ‘Olsen with an e’, not ‘6 foot
whatever’, and ‘from the wrong Gloucester’. ²⁴  In Letter 4
of ‘The Minimaus Poems’, she writes:

what is aware is

that anything is I, more than that

is called for. Limits

suggest confines for

revolt from within.²⁵

Olsen’s engagement with Olson obviously
foregrounds issues of gender. We can read ‘The
Minimaus Poems’ as another feminist detournement
of Olsen, as another version of placing a woman’s
voice in civic and public space, but the poem’s
engagement with politics is from a position which
is precisely situated in terms of class as well as
gender. In this particular passage, she explicitly
rejects Olson’s egotism and acceptance of limits
(‘Limits/ are what any of us/ are inside of’). The
registering of boundaries leads directly to the
desire to break them. What is more easy to miss,
however, is that Olsen challenges Olson’s attitude
towards the citizens of Gloucester. Thus, The
Maximus Poems begins with the direct
address of ‘I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You’.
Section 3 includes the following:

By ear, he sd.

But that which matters, that which insists, that
which will last,

that! o my people, where shall you find it, how,
where, where shall you listen

when all is become billboards, when, all, even
silence, is spray-gunned?²⁶

Redell Olsen’s take on these lines in ‘The
Minimaus Poems’ reads:

By ear, he sd.

matters did not last, gunned insistence, ‘War Is
So Last Century’ sprayed

O under the Kingsland viaduct! What people are
yours? You listen

I’ll be the billboard, when, all, even silence,
is neoned-in ²⁷

Olsen questions the abrogation of the right to
speak for others, the construction of a collective
through the suppression of intersubjectivity. ²⁸  Where Olson
presents his ‘people’ in terms of their passive
listening, she challenges him to listen. She also
challenges his picture of the passivity imposed on
‘the people’ by the commodified world of
advertising by foregrounding secondary production
and the creative, expressive and political
possibilities of detournement through graffiti and
through art practices (such as Jenny Holzer’s)
which re-appropriate the public spaces of the
commodity. Olsen’s citation of the graffito under
the Kingsland viaduct very precisely places the
feminine voice of the fashionista against an Olson
whose brief history of Greek theatre, in response
to Carolee Schneemann’s account of her work, was
‘when the cunt began to speak, it was the
beginning of the end of Greek theatre’ (referring
to the introduction of women performers). ²⁹ That question
‘What people are yours?’ Not only raises the issue
of gender, but also, in the setting of the
Kingsland Road, draws attention to the
multicultural communities of Gloucester (with its
Portuguese sailors, whom Olson calls ‘my
Portuguese’) and London. Olsen foregrounds
difference, but also the possibilities of
subversion, resistance, both citing and enacting
counter-practices, harnessing creative energies in
a varied and multiform writing back to power.

 

CONCLUSION

Olson’s manifesto for the poem as high-energy
construct was specifically for the poem typed on
the page.  Drawing on his engagement with
Pound, he foregrounded the kinetics of the text,
which he grounded in the breath of the poet, and
developed an ideogrammic practice of montage.
Open-field poetics had a particular impact on the
handling of the page-space, breaking away from the
anchorage of the left-hand margin to produce an
array of information. At the same time, the
two-dimensional page-space becomes potentially the
three– or four-dimensional space of performance.
Fisher picks up on Olson’s use of the page-space
for the array of informations. In his case, the
kinetics of the text are the medium for a
deeply-informed and very sophisticated engagement
with various forms of energy. I mentioned how place
uses time, the allotted ten-year writing span, as
a regime. What I didn’t have space to mention is
the poem’s complex structural plan, which set up
relations between the four books of the poem and
relations between individual poems that break down
the linearity of the book and generate rhizomatic
connections across the poem. Fisher’s later work
has developed both the procedural and rhizomatic
aspects of place. Brixton Fractals
(1985), for example, includes poems where the
second stanza is generated through transformations
of lines from the first, the third from the second
and so on. Fisher’s transformational poetics
produces a boundlessly signifying text. Olsen’s
work, while deriving its energy (like Olson’s and
Fisher’s) from montage – from the hard-edged
cutting of different language fragments and
discourses – also shares their interest in process
and in moving poetry off the page into
performance. Like Fisher, she is interested in
procedures and the work that generates further
work.

 

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from: facultimedia.com a short video talk on the genesis of this essay: ‘High Energy Construct’ : Olson, Fisher, Olsen. Professor Robert Hampson Professor of Modern Literature Royal Holloway, University of London

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