“All our literatures are leavings,” writes Gary Snyder (Practice of the Wild, 112), recycling Thoreau’s remark “Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils,” which he wrote in his journal after observing that “while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature’s primitive wildernesses” (16 March 1852). While Thoreau’s reading in the classics marked him as a Harvard man for his contemporaries, his instincts were not scholastic, but ecological. Walden, that prospectus of wild moods, is a compost of rhetorical jubilation...

The barren sand opened up to British archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard in 1845, as he tapped into two millennia of unguessed literacy:

… papyrus

jungle sandhill splayed-wedge wader damsel

crane …

The papyrus had long since decayed (taking with it perhaps the major literature of the time, since the most esteemed Mesopotamian texts were inscribed on elegant parchment rather than on the crude though durable clay tablets); but some twenty-thousand tablets of “splayed-wedge” script went to the British Museum, where the work of deciphering and translating eventually captured public interest in pages of the Daily Telegraph in 1886. Over...

The Romantic phase of English poetry is separated from that later branch we know as American by nothing less than the recovery of half the total span of the Western literary record. Champollion’s decipherment of the Rosetta stone in the 1820s, and the subsequent popularization of prebiblical civilizations, created the unique conditions in which a distinctively American literature arose. Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman can be read as inaugurating an imaginal bibliographic recovery of the oldest written records (see Irwin).* It’s interesting to imagine that the now clear distinction between English and American writing may have been blurred...

In a few months of North Carolina spring in 1953 Charles Olson came to articulate fully the shift from the productive to the generative.

The generative is, in fact, the weather of existence, of all of it, of every act, as well as those biological dominant acts which engage us all.

Generation can be seen literally to be the climate of our being as decisively as the place of it is that internal environment we call our selves, the individual (“Chiasma,” 36).

To his poet’s sense, one word discloses three: actions are generative, as weather is (he values the Cro-Magnon...

For many generations “America” was sheer verbal invention: a provocation of the advertising circular and the conceptual challenge of a newly discovered realm. But “ ‘Discovery’ was a double concept, since it referred both to the act of finding and to the later act of revealing what had been found” (Franklin, 182). In calling many of his Maximus poems “letters,” Olson wedges himself into that exploratory stance in which each notation redefines the utility of perception. “[O]ne real center in American experience has been the isolated self”—recalling Olson’s “Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I, Maximus, address you”—“which is...

Gradual adjustment to the rugged sylvan dimension of a New World enabled settlers to rejoice in the “bee-loud glade”; but for the natives, the sound of the bees had a more ominous connotation.

… the movement of men was to the west,

as the slow advance

of bees

through the woods

meant to the Indians

in a year, an axe would be heard.

Each coffin hollowed out

as a canoe. Each set backwards on a river,

underground.

It has not much been told from the perspective of those who suffered first epidemic and then actual invasion—the microbial assault that...

“We will produce no sane man again.” “Can this saying and this being unsaid be assembled, can they be at the same time?”—this is Emmanuel Levinas’s question—“whether one can at the same time know and free the known of the marks which thematization leaves on it by subordinating it to ontology. Everything shows itself at the price of this betrayal, even the unsayable” (Otherwise Than Being, 7). “This kind of speaking / doubles the unspeakable.” This ontological subordination is rendered explicitly historical by liberation theologist Enrique Dussel. “Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro,” he says,...

The final measure of the “Chiasma” lectures for the New Sciences of Man is the outcome of Olson’s concern with materialized humanity, something like tin or coal to be tuned or used up or burned off. Rexroth saw this as “the pure form / Of the cutting edge of power— / Man reduced to an entelechy.” For Olson, “man himself is the universe the materials and motions of which call for primary investigation, that he is the unknown—and no longer allowably unknown” (“Chiasma,” 68). At midpoint of the century, which in 1953 Olson clearly felt astride, the dead heaped...

In Gnomonology—a primer of poetics and practical wisdom—Howard McCord speaks of the need “to SHAPE expression beyond the bleating self.” “You would know the whole?” he asks, and amidst his bibliocentric cartography urges a path “Through the force of love, by the heart’s blind eye, in the swiftness of glimpsed forms, in lightness, in balance.” McCord’s references range widely, including works like Ron Linton’s Terracide, the plant lore of Oakes Ames and Edgar Anderson, Yi-Fu Tuan’s The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God, Adolf Portmann’s Animal Forms and Patterns, and a richly synthesized compilation of similar resources....

“The past is not a husk”: it persists not only in our stories, but in and as us. We are the genetic monstrance of deep time, living demonstrations of what the past forged. “The human mind is the result of a long series of interactions with other animals,” writes ethologist Paul Shepard (The Others, 15), foremost of which, in terms of biomorphic resonance, was the hunt. In the provocatively archaic prospect of The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Shepard speculates that the lapse of hunting (or “cynegetic”) culture was a catastrophe from which our species may not recover:

The...

Culture is said to live, while its makers die. The unsettling terms of this respiratory system have a long history, in which themes of truth and beauty (all you know and all you need to know, the Grecian urn tells humbled John Keats) emerge as consolations in the face of unyielding laws of organic life. In the Western world this has fostered a psychological legacy of perennial inadequacy: surrounded on all sides by “classics,” we’re overburdened not only with the malady of belatedness, but with the constant beguilements of consumerism. The apparatus of cultural life increasingly stands between the organism...

In its first fire Whitman’s verse was magnificently tropic, a crisp, biodegradable composition of the States (not yet “United” but cosmically chaotic) into a demonized poetic topos; a body of work that might have as its most fitting epigraph not the overconfident “Song of the Open Road” singled out by D. H. Lawrence, but “This Compost.” Of the major poems, only “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Song of Myself,” and “The Sleepers” precede it. The grand collection of shorter gems and “sparkles from the wheel” in the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass are beach stones that roar and scrape...

The seashore is a summons:

These things I would record:

the drift of sand

at the edge of the sea’s eternal roar

where my dry hands impetuous for sound

unlock from keys

inventions from inventions of the world’s music

The face of the shore is under ceaseless erasure by overinscription, awash with spirit traffic in sublunary plenitude, composing in tidal rhythms “runes upon the sand / from sea-spume.” These traces are nudges and winks from the dead. “They are dead. That is they do not answer. What is this busyness of theirs they do not answer to our calls?” They...

Here (hear) is a concord of inaugurations:

And then went down to the ship,

∼

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

∼

A

round of fiddles playing Bach

These are the beginnings of poems that mark the boundaries of their authors’ lives. (The Cantos and The Maximus Poems were never definitively completed, while Zukofsky died a few years after finishing “A.”) Inspiration verges on expiration. This is precisely the nature of the duplicity of the Muses, whose gifts of song or honeyed words are always initiatory detours, beginnings, and “a beginning shows us how much language, with its perpetual...

To be inspired is to be inducted into danger, so the poet wonders:

How can I leave you be in me—

myths to leap inside of—

psyche’s appetite, soul’s mouth

bound to rock

with monster

“I attempt the discontinuities of poetry,” writes Duncan. “To interrupt all sure course of my inspiration.” Is inspiration to be understood as a kind of predation? This might illuminate the furor ignited by The Waste Land in 1922. It was hardly as genteel an affair as it now sounds; a “living literature” of classic titles was being cannibalized for its nutrients, skull soup, and much...

In scenes of inspiration, as in cases of shamanistic transport, language descends from a higher power to brutalize the human vessel who suffers it knowingly, gnawingly. To assent to this condition is to follow Robert Kelly in believing that “Language is the only genetics,” or to follow Robert Duncan’s faith in the somatic pantheon of biochemistry guiding the composition of the poem; or, with Jack Spicer, call it dictation from the Martians. Taken together, these and other testimonies insist on the capacity of the language in its most subconscious particularity as nourishing and enabling, while conceding that unilateral “meaning” may...

To every ascension there is a corresponding descent, involving passage over a threshold or through a gate.

All things move toward

the light

except those

that freely work down

to oceans’ black depths

In us an impulse tests

the unknown

∼

I passed through the lens of darkness

as through a furrow, and the dead

gathered to meet me.

A herm is a pile of commemorative stones left for Hermes, the Bringer, guide of soul from world to world (soul as message, Hermes the messenger), from vessel to vessel, moment to moment to endowment. Under Hermes’s sponsorship, dice, bones, sticks,...

From emptiness or blank, a scene arises; there is always a scene, a presentiment of knowing, the viewer’s gnosis in the prehensile grasp of the elements. But prior to the scene there is a mood, a predisposition, whether expectation or aversion. The mood is black bile; whatever its temperamental coloring, it does dark work, work in the dark. The black bile “obliges thought to penetrate and explore the center of its objects, because the black bile is itself akin to the center of the earth” (Ficino, in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, 259). Each object is fruit, a fleshy covering over...

The stars point to an articulate order surpassing language, evolving a realm in which

art is not construction, artifice, meticulous

relationship to a space and a world existing

outside it is truly the ‘inarticulate cry’

as Hermes Trismegistus said, ‘which seemed

to be the sound of the light’

∼

These stars

are fragrant and I follow their scent.

I am their hunting hound,

predator of the marvelous.

In the region of the inarticulate cry, where all sensations reduce to blank dazzle, “Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide,” Emerson writes (“Illusions”).* “Thus events grow on the same...

Predation has its solar remainder:

Only the sun

in the morning

covered him

with flies

Then only

after the grubs

had done him

did the earth

let her robe

uncover and her part

take him in

Robinson Jeffers documents a late encounter, “Vulture,” in which the bird of prey sizes up the aged poet and savors him for another time. “I tell you solemnly / That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—/ What a sublime end of one’s body, what...

Every planet conforms to a celestial orbit in which the cosmic order repositions itself, one by one: a planet is a hunter of times.

This language is a horizon

terraced into a ladder that spins

into a blade of light, and drugs the darkness with its brilliant stem.

Desire smiles in all directions at once.

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram recounts a memorable experience. Stepping out of a hut in Bali built on stilts above rice paddies, he finds himself acutely disoriented, with “no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of star-studded space falling...

The mytho-astronomy of Hamlet’s Mill advances the challenging concept of the sky as another kind of compost; “the sky was an exacting teacher and the order of the stars an ancient gnosis” (McCord, Gnomonology). In Kenneth Irby’s view, “man matured as a creature of ice.” We see at the end of his poem “Delius” a new crisis, need of a new vocabulary (to absorb the deglaciation? agricultural urbanization? pastoral nomadism? the passing of Virgo in 10,080 B.C. or Taurus in 1800 B.C.?) The sights are set not on the mound underfoot, but on that starry horizon the alchemist beholds in...

Any litany attests to marvels:

they look up at the sky they see

again the pink cloud move across the yellow cloud

again a pine cone bounce against the sun

again a diamond antler crack like sugar

again a new-born frog rise from the savage onions

again a flute melt to announce the light

again a blue eye peer from a headstone

again a dead bell speak without a tongue

again the animals shed their skins beside the furnace

“Take constant notice of the clarity of things,” Empedocles advises (Parmenides and Empedocles, 32). Every act divides and multiplies. Heraclitus’s proposal...

Order is relative.

‘An apparent confusion if lived with long enough

may become orderly’. Charles Ives

… accumulating,

a humus! (The upper strata—dry, newly-

fallen leaves, twigs, lichen.

Seeds from the size of the whispered dandelion, to

acorns

big as thumbs.

This passage (from Ronald Johnson’s “The Different Musics”) continues in a scrupulous documentation of layers of disintegration, to “the under-ooze & loose loam of slug & worm.”

… to find, out of the design,

words may be pulled up

like onions, a humus still

clinging to them, sweet to the taste—

nutty & fragrant.

One way that nuttiness and fragrance is...

The living word masks the crossroads where a mystery prevails, blending corporeal substance with inscrutable breath, apparent premonition of a spirit world corresponding, at the somatic level, with the equally inscrutable depths of the body.

How can a body be made from the word?—language, a shivaree

of transparence—jigsaw—glass immensity

Proprioception has to do with the cavity of the body, the body’s cave, ward of dark matter, where there are not only functional organs but a phylogenetic inscriptive insistence: “the ‘body’ itself as, by movement of its own tissues, giving the data of, depth” (Olson, Additional Prose, 18)....

Epic and lyric are the extravagant symptoms of an adventure.

… Dante in my dream

went into Occitan

in search of a sentence that would flow both ways

∼

There is a mill which grinds by itself, swings of itself, and scatters the dust a hundred versts away. And there is a golden pole on top of which is also the Nail of the North. And there is a very wise tomcat which climbs up and down this pole. When he climbs down, he sings songs; and when he climbs up, he tells tales. (Santillana and von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill,...

The word “person” means mask, from Latin persona.

The problem of personality

Is the problem of the value

Of the world as a totality

The precarious balance between the personal and the public is amplified in a torrid zone. Crossing the desert in a stagecoach with a corpse called “I,” a character named Everything in Edward Dorn’s Slinger makes the pertinent observation

it’s gonna be hot soon.

I only mean I never met I

but if he turns out to be put together

like most people I’s gonna

come apart in the heat.

You see what I mean?

The boy...

Rachel Blau DuPlessis remarks, “Like translations, poems / say the unsayable twice, once to another language.” Where types propose a reification of sense (author into authority, logos into lexis), tropes propound an anarchy of sense and sensation, abridgment of book into conjugal detours, hot fertilities;

the work of Art to set words

jiving breaking into crises

—where, in Robert Duncan’s practice, “the line / [is] a trial” and “each element a crisis of attention.”* The tropes of a text tell tales of how things are turned into words, events into beliefs, and how all are blackened, sealed in the furnace...

Language is inconceivable without a granary of words, a “mill of particulars” in Robert Kelly’s parable. But particularity can run amok without an informing pattern, a disposing matrix. The pestilential vision of parts overrunning the whole takes the form of bacterial invasion in Kenneth Rexroth’s vision of the onset of World War II,

Spreading over the world, lapping at the last

Inviolate heights; mud streaked yellow

With gas, slimy and blotched with crimson,

Filled with broken bits of steel and flesh,

Moving slowly with the blind motion

Of lice, spreading inexorably

As bacteria spread in tissues,

Swirling with the precise...

As Europe succumbs to conflagration in 1940, Kenneth Rexroth, on the California coast, finds himself writing

… this poem

Of the phoenix and the tortoise—

Of what survives and what perishes,

And how, of the fall of history

And waste of fact—on the crumbling

Edge of a ruined polity

That washes away in an ocean

Whose shores are all washing into death.

Even as the sea subsides “To a massive, uneasy torpor,” the “Fragments of its inexhaustible / Life litter the shingle, sea hares, / Broken starfish.” Rexroth imagines the corpse of a Japanese sailor “bumping / In a...

Imagination is the organ of inner ecology. In the nineteenth-century volkisch view, the imagination transcended individuality, giving rise to the notion that great artists “belonged” to a nation, that intensity in an individual brightened the race. This short-circuited into a racial stinginess, a prophylactic urge to preserve the purity of imaginative expression, with nationalism as self-appointed custodian of purportedly “universal” values. The stage was set for the absorption of all cultural activity into a bureaucratic network of filtered “exposure” to “culturally enriching” events. Every citizen is delegated a personal sensibility to cultivate like a suburban backyard garden plot, a compound...

Cid Gorman’s magazine Origin helped launch the career of Charles Olson. But what is origin? Isn’t origin unthinkable, like the moment of one’s birth? Whatever we mean by origin, it always comes back to the earth.

Not our good luck nor the instant peak and fulfillment of time gives us to see

The beauty of things, nothing can bridle it.

God who walks lightning-naked on the Pacific has never been hidden from any

Puddle or hillock of the earth behind us.

The origin is a daily event, daily evident, each day’s evidence all that’s needed to “make it new.” Not...

“Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind” (Emerson, “Illusions”—reiterated in Aldo Leopold’s famous exhortation to think like a mountain). This migration mimics the interplay of real and ideal in the “loom of time”: “Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness—these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life” (“Experience”). The loom is a figure attracting not only Emerson but Melville in “The Mat-Maker” (Moby-Dick, chap. 47). In a dreamy stillness aboard the Pequod, Ishmael says, “it seemed as if this were the...

Fear and trembling, awe and dread reverberate the archaic animal body in cultural personae. Gorgon and Medusa are such figures, the Muse is another, bringing on shudders, rapture, palsied compliance;* allowing no deviations, her strictness is meter, pulse, rhythmos. She is part of a tide of intercultural drift, a detritus like glacial boulders. But in cultural morphology—what Guy Davenport calls the geography of the imagination—there are forces of distribution and distillation that have little to do with human boundaries, historical or social. He describes the geography as a map:

Such a map would presumably display such phenomena as...

If the logos—locked in dogma by authority of a book—is an image of centrality, mythos might be seen not as peripheral (i.e., subordinate or secondary to the center) but as centrifugal. Myth is the centrifugal suction pulling centers apart into other circles, new centers, rings, circles within circles expanding and contracting in a “steady bargain with the way things are.” What Derrida calls “arche-writing” is, ostensibly, composting poetry: nonlinear, denoting the transcendental signified of the Book, deferring all questions of origin and originality, yet referring them to writing as the disseminating medium that at once constitutes the book...

Myth arises, reputedly, as participatory response: the interjected mu of onlookers in a circle around a performance or recitation. The mu of myth is the oracle of circularity: myth is psyche affirming a circulation and is as innate to the individual as the distinctive whorl of fingerprint by which we are identified: an implicating fold, a personal labyrinth, a diagram of detritus pathways. The very notions of psyche and myth are unambiguously concentric in their bias. Jacques Derrida’s critique of logocentrism couples the image of centrality with the logos, that traditional antithesis of myth. In Of Grammatology Derrida covertly addresses...

Jorie Graham poses a question in the form of a delicately hanging mobile:

Is the house empty?

Is the emptiness housed?

Paleolithic cave art represents approximately twenty thousand years of applied human perception. Hunting-gathering cultures made this graffiti panorama in the form of outlines, stains, dots, and meanders, in abstract and cryptic as well as recognizably mimetic figures. This was all produced well after hominid evolution had resulted in people like us, but with slightly larger cranial capacity. A relatively undocumented period followed, probably linked to deglaciation. This time—between the Gravettian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian cultures of the late Paleolithic,...

Facing American derelictions of surplus meaning becoming global fate, Olson laments:

The individual

has become divided

from the Absolute, it is the times promised

by the poets.

I’ve seen it all go in other directions

and heard a man say why not

stop ocean’s tides

and not even more than the slow

loss of a small piece of time, not any more vibration

than the normal wobble of the earth on its present axis

......................................

… He is only valuable

to himself—ugh, a species

acquiring

distaste

for itself.

… One even, at this date begins to look on man...

The old question recurs: in this trope of universe, what is our place?

Ficino had the idea

life circulates from the earth

to the stars

“in order to constitute the uninterrupted tissue of the whole of nature.”

But what if we are the interruption, the clog; we are the discord, festering the scales of the serpentine ouroboros?

There is no life that does not rise

melodic from the scales of the marvelous.

To which our grief refers.

If Ficino’s vision of an “uninterrupted tissue of the whole of nature” marks the Renaissance (in its unique preservation of mediaeval cosmology filtering...