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Journal of American Studies of Turkey
5 (1997) : 81-89.
Charles Olson’s Poetical Economy
Barýþ Gümüþbaþ
The phrase “poetical economy” in the title above intends to bring the
contexts of political economy and the process of poetic production together,
and this article aims at explicating the interaction between these two
fields in Charles Olson’s work, particularly in The Maximus Poems.
Within this framework, Olson’s work is not just a case in point which we
can replace with any other poet’s work; but for Olson, as I attempt to
show, principles that govern poetic activity and economic life are closely
interrelated.
Olson never wrote on economics in a fashion that directly falls within
the scope of the discipline proper. His writings are, however, immensely
involved in a project concerning the individual and the community; and
economics, in this context, is the subsistence activity of the organism,
or of the community. In this respect, Olson’s reading of economic activity
is “political,” not only because Olson holds a certain stance as to the
issues of production and distribution, but also because the authentic meaning
of “political” is hidden in polis (city, community) which is Olson’s main
point of reference especially in The Maximus Poems.
Olson deals with economics on two planes. On the first plane are his
opinions directly relating to the economic activity and reality of his
subject, that is, of Gloucester of The Maximus Poems. The second
level is, however, a little more complicated, and reference to economy
takes a metaphorical turn. This is the level where Olson’s principles or
ideals about the organization of material reality can be translated into
tenets underlying his poetics.
It is apt to begin with Olson’s notion of economy, which he clarifies
in “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn” as follows:
politics & economics (that is, agriculture, fisheries,
capital and labor) are like love (can only be individual experience) and
therefore, as they have been presented (again, like love) are not much
use ... (Additional Prose 3)
Olson regards economy as the function of a living organism; therefore,
whatever relates to that function necessarily involves the physical presence
of the organism. This physical presence is the presence of a form; that
is of the body. As love can emanate only from a particular body, self-subsistence
activity of the organism is meaningful only with an awareness of the body
which economic activity is, after all, meant to serve. Tying love, body,
and subsistence activity together, Olson’s is a highly eroticized understanding
of economy. In The Special View of History, he points to the relationship
between “Eros,” and “Economos,” which, along with “Ethos,” make up “the
inclusive factors in the single life” (55). Olson’s emphasis on the origin
of the word “economy” is meant to unfold the long-lost authentic meaning
of economic activity. As he states, “Economos” is the art of one’s controlling
and managing one’s “own house” (55). The primary question that should be
addressed, according to Olson, is “ekos: how is the ‘house’?” (Notes
for a University 65). In a pleasant but not surprising way, “ekos”
resonates in “ecology” which relates to the earth as the house on a larger
scale. Furthermore, “Ekos” is also man’s body, as he explains in “The Resistance”:
It is his body that is his answer, his body intact and
fought for, the absolute of his organism in its simplest terms, this structure
evolved by nature, repeated in each act of birth, the animal man; the house
he is, the house that moves, breathes, acts, this house where his life
is, where he dwells against the enemy, against the beast. (Selected
Writings 13)
In Olson’s project, economic activity revolves around three concerns. The
first one is the physical reality of the organism, the body of the human
subject and its “physiology,” and the resulting “SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE
ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES,” an awareness which he calls “proprioception”
(Additional Prose 17). This is the internal economy of the body.
Secondly, there is human activity to keep the house functioning. Such activity
involves using the body in interaction with nature and with other members
of the community. Thirdly, these two activities are possible only with
care about the well-being of our environment.
The Maximus Poems relate the destruction brought by a course
which has disturbed the coherence among these three components. To put
Olson’s project into context, I want to make use of an item coming from
the frozen food section of a supermarket: a pack of fish sticks processed
by Gorton’s, the largest fishing related industry in Gloucester. This plastic
bag with the product it contains represents everything that Olson stood
against. As a part of material reality, this product relates to Gloucester,
to fishing, and to economy, all of which Olson was concerned with, not
only as the source of his poetry, but also as the facts of his life. On
the other hand, the way Gorton’s language presents the product is an excellent
example of the mode of representation that Olson tried to abolish with
his poetic practice (see Figure 1). Interestingly,
the picture Gorton’s uses is a reproduction of the sculpture which Olson
writes about in “Maximus, to Gloucester, Sunday, July 19.” Olson was accurate
in his recognition of the underlying idea in the false representation of
the fisherman. The poem opens with the line “and they stopped before that
bad sculpture of a fisherman,” and the poet warns us against being deceived
by that false image:
Let them be told who stopped first
by a bronze idol
A fisherman is not a successful man
he is not a famous man he is not a man
of power, these are the damned by God.
(The Maximus 158/Max. I. 153)
Gorton’s logo produces an image which justifies the anxiety Olson expresses
here. As the eye moves between the words and the figure, the fisherman
at the wheel is visually subdued by the letters underneath, suggesting
a semiotic reconstruction of the material reality. The possessive case
“Gorton’s” almost unconsciously refers to the nature of the bond between
the company and the fisherman “since 1849.” From another perspective, we
can also say that with his clean-shaven face and in a rather formal looking
suit, the one steering is the chief executive, or, in Olson’s words, “a
successful man,” “a famous man,” “a man of power,” but not the fisherman
who is already outside of the picture. Under the logo is a summary of Gloucester’s
geographical features and of Gorton’s sense of duty. Pseudo-poetic language
solicits the consumer’s appreciation concerning not only the product but
also Gorton’s mission. After this appeal to the consumer’s intellectual
and aesthetic faculties, the second paragraph addresses the consumer’s
reason. Although the transition between the two paragraphs is rather abrupt,
the consumer of the frozen food has time for only this much of history
and poetry. Perfect taste comes through a perfect knowledge of the object
of taste, and Gorton’s, as the mediator between the experts of such knowledge
and the consumer, also grants us that knowledge at no extra cost. “Every
crunchy, golden bite,” is an absorption of that wisdom. Even the nature
of the activity of fishing, therefore of the product, is under control:
Gorton’s makes chance obsolete and assures that not one package among the
thousands can escape that touch of uniformity.
Starting from this reading of Gorton’s “text” and placing its inferences
next to those of Olson, we arrive at two opposing paradigms. On Olson’s
side there are fish, body/individual, danger, chance, and story, whereas
on Gorton’s side are fish stick, machinery/corporate, security, control,
and history in the fashion of fish stick advertisement. From this point
on, I would like to bring these terms first into a discussion of Olson’s
idea of economy then into his poetics.
The name Gorton’s, or, as it was formerly called, Gorton & Pew,
appears in The Maximus Poems several times. Olson himself worked
for the company when he was a young boy (Butterick 46). He attributes,
however, no particular significance to the agency of the company in Gloucester’s
story. A particular instance, where Gorton’s is mentioned, is relevant.
In “for Robt Duncan, who understands what’s going on-written because of
him,” Gorton’s is presented in its paradoxical role:
the decline of fishes, such a decline Bayliss, my son
calls her his first teacher, suggested to her husband Gorton’s have an
aquarium to show what fish look like - or it was already said it won’t
be long, with fish sticks, pictures will be necessary on the covers of
the TV dinners to let children know that mackerel is a different looking
thing than herrings. (The Maximus 208/Max. II. 38)
Gorton’s by itself is not the only responsible agency; it is part of an
economic system which is based upon the principle of a constant transformation
and processing of nature’s forms. The existence of the system, as well
as of Gorton’s, depends on the condition that as many fish as possible
should be transformed into fish sticks. This enormous task requires the
replacement of the body and individual labor by machinery. As more fish
take the form of fish sticks, the more fishermen or fishermen-to-be become
a part of that machinery, being “processed” into factory workers, as in
the case of the heroic fisherman Carl Olsen in “Letter 6” (The Maximus
30/Max. I. 27). Destruction of “ekos” is accompanied by the fisherman’s
becoming, as Olson would say, quoting Herodotus, “estranged from that with
which he is most familiar” (The Special View of History 25). Against
such transformation, Olson always emphasizes his interest in the natural
and undistorted forms as they exist in “ekos”:
I think stone, for example, and wood, and clay are more
interesting, again than brick, or steel, or glass, or iron, or copper,
or plastics—that these givens (rather than transformations of men) are
solid to habituate ourselves with more fruitful, in their issue,
than (as above, airplanes, any motors, than buildings, than mountains or
their urban equivalents like such building as Manhattan’s—than those hysterias:
elevators, say—than “china”—than the “fine” things. (“The Cave” 25-26)
The difference between the natural and refined forms Olson mentions is
the same as the difference between fish and fish stick. Each natural object
has its individuating particulars, whereas its processed forms become uniform,
as “mackerel” and “herring” do in the plastic bag.
There are other ways of making use of nature. Here I want to digress
briefly by quoting Ivan Illich who, in his Shadow Work, compares
a “subsistence-oriented way of life” with a primarily exchange- and consumption-oriented
economy. Illich presents the characteristics of the former as follows:
There, the guitar is valued over the record, the library
over the schoolroom, the backyard garden over the supermarket selection.
There, the personal control of each worker over his means of production
determines the small horizon of each enterprise, a horizon which is a necessary
condition for special production and the unfolding of each worker’s individuality
... This mode of production can be maintained only within the limits that
nature dictates to both production and society. (14-15)
Olson’s preference for the natural over the manufactured forms come out
of his desire for a social and economic order as described above. The ideal
economy Olson has in mind is strictly “subsistence-oriented.” The activity
of fishing perfectly fits in the context of an economy as such, because
fishing, by its nature, is not a mode of production but of harvesting what
“ekos” yields. In an interview with Herbert Kenny, Olson rejects the notion
that fishing is a form of business and warns against the deceptive form
it has taken (“I know Men for Whom Everything Matters” 24-25). With the
transformation that it goes through, fishing loses its characteristics
which define and distinguish the activity from others. Among these characteristics,
danger and chance factors are the most definitive ones, become almost extinct
with machinery taking over the human factor. In the same interview with
Kenny, Olson defines the loss as follows:
Well, one big thing, Herb-sure, which has gone out of
human life-which is nature, right? I mean, it’s like as though you no longer
had to hunt for your food. I mean, they were still fishermen as hunters
of food because of the condition of the vessel. It was like--jeez,
it was like Indians and White men as hunters, right? And when suddenly
that thing got protected, then, in a sense, in a funny way—and in fact
it’s now developing, as you know-in fact today’s great mother ships, the
Mayakovsky class Soviet draggers and all that stuff, are factories, they
are called factory ships. Essentially, there isn’t any danger in fishing
any more. (29)
The element of danger is a primary principle of life. Every moment of man’s
life is a struggle against an unpredictable death. This incertitude stimulates
the organism and keeps it alive. If danger is eliminated by the agency
of an alien factor and not by the organism’s own devices, then the organism
atrophies and gradually loses its powers. When Kenny asks Olson if “we
need that element of danger for our best character,” Olson’s reply is:
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s the nature of danger but it
is the nature of perception, of attention, yes. Which is a spiritual condition.
You could put it, intensity. I mean, the amount of slackness today, the
laziness, the slackness, the limpness, is all in the fact that you don’t
need attention any more, you don’t need your perceptions any more. It’s
all taken care of for you by the environment of your automobile, your house,
of the economy, of the money system. In fact there isn’t any money, there
is credit. In fact, it’s worse. I mean this is a crazy sort of a post-nature,
post-natural thing that the species has gotten into. (30-31)
The situation Olson describes is the draining of human proprioceptive power
by a non-organic and alien (and alienating) mechanism which AP-propriates
what originally belongs to human beings who thus bleed to death. Olson’s
fascination with the Mayan culture and the Mayan people is due to their
mode of relating to “ekos,” which reflects in the frame of the Mayan descendants,
as Olson reveals in “Human Universe”:
they still carry their bodies with some of the savor
and the flavor that the bodies of the Americans are as missing in as in
their irrigated lettuce and their green-picked refrigerator-ripened fruit.
For the truth is, that the management of external nature so that none of
its virtue is lost, in vegetables or in art, is as much a delicate juggling
of her content as is the same juggling by any of us of our own. And when
men are not such jugglers, are not able to manage a means of expression
the equal of their own or nature’s intricacy, the flesh does choke.
(Selected Writings 58)
What Olson points out here is the interdependence between two senses of
“ekos”: environment and man’s physical frame. As products of an undue and
corrupting interference in the natural course, “irrigated lettuce” and
“green-picked ... fruit” harm both sides of the scale.
These issues and connections are brought into the same context by Olson
within a single poem, entitled “Maximus, to Gloucester, from Dogtown, after
the flood” which was written during Maximus Poems IV, V, VI
but was not included in that volume by the poet. The poem opens with Maximus
addressing mankind in a prophetic manner, almost like Noah, as “the flood”
implies a punishment for humankind. Yet, due to human destruction of “ekos,”
even the flood is devoid of its constitutive element, that is, of water,
and can only be a “reverse deluge” and a “flood of dryness” (9). Man’s
and woman’s reproductive powers, as well as their faculties of reason and
emotion, have their share in this dryness (9). All three senses of “ekos”—environment,
human physical form and power, and humanity’s ability to manage its own
house—decline in an interrelated manner. Maximus’s first aim is to revive
the productive powers of mother nature. Then comes an awareness of
“polis,” which would enable human beings to regard themselves as part of
a larger organic structure. Once humanity starts paying attention to the
particulars of its own environment, or “ekos,” life itself becomes “the
business” that should be taken care of. Maximus wants people to make their
“houses” an extension of the “polis,” and build them in a fashion as nature
dictates them, “as though it were planting” (8). In order to achieve this,
people should first unplug themselves from that system, “a government or
a banker’s loan,” which works against the well-being of “ekos,” drives
“Sicilianos” and “Portuguese” out, and replaces fish with “slabs of frozen
fish” only to process them into fish sticks.
Once Olson’s notion of ideal economy is located in the context of his
project concerning Gloucester, some aspects of his ideal can be traced
into his poetics, not as the subject matter of his poetry but as a sensibility
defining the way in which the poet relates to his material.
Fishing as an activity does not only comply with the principles of an
“ekos”-oriented economic activity but also serves as an apt metaphor for
Olson’s understanding of poetry, particularly as presented in “Projective
Verse.” As Olson suggests, the idea of “projective” has ramifications reaching
far beyond poetry; it involves a new “stance towards reality” (15). Being
in the Open is equal to being in touch with “ekos.” The human being/poet
has to face and cope with the unpredictable nature of the Open and depend
exclusively upon proprioceptive powers in this constant challenge. As in
the words of a fisherman of Gloucester, who has “been out in a dory a lot
alone,” once you are in the Open “you gotta watch it yourself. That’s survival
for yourself” (When Gloucester Was Gloucester 32). The Open
is the fishing grounds for the poet who can reap only what nature yields
to him. In this nature-based economy, the poet does not try to impose patterns
or manipulate the activity. As Olson states in “Projective Verse,” “from
the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—put himself in the open—he
can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for
itself” (16). Yet, nature does not yield itself without resistance, or,
in other words, without co-operation on humanity’s part. In this respect,
the fisherman and the poet share the same responsibilities towards their
activities. Sherman Paul aptly illustrates this fact in the context of
“Letter 6”:
Both fishermen and poet are active men of skill (“hands”),
of attention and care (“eyes”), and Maximus assimilates them to each other
throughout the poems, explicitly in “Letter 6.” Their stance is exemplary:
they have the readiness, the responsiveness to the field, the quick attentiveness
to change, to the moment, the possibility that summons one and defines
“that which you can do!” (122)
The eye, which is the primary tool in the fisherman’s activity, is replaced
with the ear in the poet’s case. This physical quality pertaining to writing
in the Open has another dimension. Components of a poem, or elements in
the Field, have their physical quality and autonomy. And Olson, who is
interested in the undistorted states of nature’s forms, is determined to
protect the “ekos” of the poem, when he says, “the objects which occur
at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are,
can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any
ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem ...” (Selected Writings
20). Olson wants to prevent fish from becoming fish sticks.
Another important aspect in Olson’s poetical economy is the nature of
the relationship between the Open, language, and the poet. Olson places
the poet’s relation to his language in the same context as one’s managing
one’s own house. In her journal kept during the Summer of ‘63 conference,
Daphne Marlatt jots down Olson’s remarks as follows:
economicos——use of words: “testing any word you use”
Olson: each word must be taken/claimed as
The language of a poem written in the Open comes into being in the immediate
context of the poet’s existence in “ekos.” Language belongs to the poet’s
“house,” house being the natural and social environment. This is the origin
of language, as in Illich’s description of the relationship between language
and society in “subsistence-oriented” traditional cultures:
These cultures that lived mostly on the sun subsisted
basically on vernacular values. In such societies, tools were essentially
the prolongation of arms, fingers, and legs. There was no need for the
production of power in centralized plants and its distant distribution
to clients. Equally, in these essentially sun-powered cultures, there was
no need for language production. Language was drawn by each one from the
cultural environment, learned from the encounter with people whom the learner
could smell and touch, love or hate. (66)
Olson is aware of this connection between material life and language. In
his “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” and along the same line as Illich, he
insists upon the power of language as it is closer to its source.
What sounds like a deficiency of non-standard language to the “refined
ear” is actually what makes it stronger:
The only advantage of speech rhythms (to take your 2nd
question 1st) is illiteracy: the non-literary, exactly in Dante’s sense
of the value of the vernacular over grammar-that speech as a communicator
is prior to the individual and is picked up as soon as and with ma’s milk.
(Selected Writings 27)
As language moves away from its roots and is processed by forces which
do not belong in the same field of existence, it becomes a deception. Language
should be “proprius,” that is, “one’s own.” As in the case of Gorton’s
language, however, it is AP-propriated. It is the language of the corporate
body and machinery, instead of that of the individual or organic activity;
yet it pretends to be speaking the same language as that of fish and fishermen.
The purpose of Gorton’s language is not to communicate but to render communication
a formality of successful marketing techniques. If we reverse Illich’s
words in Gorton’s case, Gorton’s language neither touches, nor loves or
hates. It does not discriminate; it says the same things to thousands.
Language becomes the primary obstacle to its own purpose; it speaks but
does not communicate. The poet, whose relation to language is a matter
of love, is furious about the corruption and pollution which turn to language
after having finished their job on “ekos.” Olson’s anger in the following
lines is directed at Gorton’s kind of language which pervades “all over,”
leaving no breathing space for man:
And words, words, words
all over everything
No eyes or ears left
to do their own doings (all
invaded, appropriated, outraged all
senses. (The Maximus 17/Max. I. 13)
We should remember that “eyes” and “ears” are what make fishermen and poets.
Destruction of “ekos” brings about the decay of “eros,” “economos,” and
“ethos” as well as the withering of our senses. To withstand destruction
and keep the fisherman and the poet in each of us alive, we should hear
Olson’s grievance.
Works Cited
Anastas, Peter and P. Parsons. When Gloucester Was Gloucester.
Gloucester: 350th Anniversary Celebration, Inc., 1973.
Butterick, George F. A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Illich, Ivan. Shadow Work. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981.
Marlatt, Daphne. “Excerpts from a Journal.” Olson: The Journal of
the Charles Olson Archives 4 (1975): 76-85.
Olson, Charles. Selected Writings of Charles Olson. Ed. with
an Introduction. by Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966.
-----. The Special View Of History. Ed. with an Introduction.
by Ann Charters. Berkeley: Oyez, 1970.
-----. Additional Prose. Ed. by George F. Butterick. Bolinas:
Four Seasons Foundation, 1974.
-----. “Notes for a University at Venice, California.” Olson: The
Journal 2 (1974): 65-68.
-----. “I Know Men for Whom Everything Matters.” Interview by Herbert
A. Kenny. Olson: The Journal 1 (1974): 7-44.
-----. “The Cave.” Olson: The Journal 10 (1978): 23-27.
-----. “Maximus, to Gloucester, from Dogtown, After the Flood.” Olson:
The Journal 9 (1978): 8-9.
-----. The Maximus Poems. Ed. by George F. Butterick. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983.
Paul, Sherman. Olson’s Push. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University,
1978.
Figure 1
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