Poetics 2

"A tradition becomes inept when it blocks the nesessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have felt more."
Creeley means simply that if the tradition of poetry leaves the reader feeling nothing, it has missed its mark and purpose.
"A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act."
Here is the flaw of many readers. To think the poet is simply giving a picture in the mind and nothing more. Of course a poem will give the reader a picture in the mind, but that is not the point.
"The process of definition is the intent of the poem."
A poem must define itself and be the object of the readers reation. The reader and the poem are defined when the energy of a poem is communicated. And the poem must be treated as an object that has been defined in and of itself, not a concept existing outside the poem.

The Language

"Locate I"

Do it. Go on, locate I! The only location I can be is right here. The Self as a metaphysical entity cannot be located apart from the physical location of I. Creeley starts in right off the bat with a challenge. Objects may be located, the physical I may be located. The title, The Language, is straight to the point. Language is, just as the Self, unable to exist without the physical. He is not merely referring to a body to make an arbitrary symbol or sound, but also to objects which must exist in order for the mind to have something for which to make an arbitrary symbol.

"little. Words / say everything." Words, and by implication language, are the only reason we can have a cognitive idea to define objects. In other words, if we did not have language we would not be able to give objects any value in our mind. Cognition would be only instinct and no reason.

"I / love you / again, / then what" The "I" is separated from "love" because, since I is only capable of being located in the physical sense, it must be separated from love. Love cannot be located, is a concept, a metaphysical idea. Being so there is only one object to represent love, a little word. l-o-v-e So words are objects, are concrete, are full. Maybe that one little word is enough on which to locate the abstract idea of love.

Unfortunately, what words are full of is holes. The hole is known as the poverty of the input. One must have objects to label with words. But reciprocally objects must have words before the mind may define even to oneself any object. This is the inescapable power and inability of language.

Poetics 1

Olson's poetics convey a new order of importance to me. The syllable is key to the ear and therefore the mind. We hear in syllables. It is by syllables the mind will move. That movement of the mind must be constant in order to pass the energy of the poem to the reader.
The lines are breaths. Are not to be focused on, these are made as the poem is written. By paying attention to one's breath as he writes.
The field is the poem on paper. This represents the relationships between objects. But one must in composing leave each object, as represented in the whole of the joining of the syllable and line, solid and unchanged.
Though projective verse is "free form" poetry, it cannot be concieved as being formless. Rather, the form is natural, it is made of language, of words, of syllables, of sound. Language has form, it has instictive universal form.

IP=(spec)Xbar+YP*
Xbar=X+ZP*

"In Cold Hell in Thicket"

Olson begins the poem with a question about the (him) self. How can the self stay abstract, strong, strung, and cold, when confronted with this hell and thicket?First, one must ask what the self is confronted by in this hell.
Obviously the self has been knocked down in line twelve, and something has obstructed the self from where it must go. However, there is the possibility of escape. At the moment the self, the speaker deams, may be able to raise himself up out of this hell, this thicket. The problem is the self is "imageless" and "reluctant". He cannot escape or even transform the hell he is in if he does not know who he is. Which is the very question he will eventually ask. He becomes abstract to even himself. The self is its own thicket of questions, of fear at the inability to know itself. It grows as he grows, changes as he changes. The self is the prison and the prisoner, its own afflicter.
He has, "isolated, observed, picked over, measured, raised / as though a word, an acuracy were a pincer!" He knows the self more completely and acurately than ever. The thicket, the self, however, has grown now knows what he knows which only keeps him from raising out of the thicket.

II

The poem halts after the truth has been uttered. "But hell now / is not exterior, is not to be gotten out of, is the coat of your own self." He cannot move. The battlefield is in him. As each old self dies it changes into a new self, and a higher thicket. He is "shaped" and "carved" unable to know himself completely in order to be free of the self, because he is constantly changing. He is constantly, "moving off / into the soil, on his own bones." He must move "without wavering". This is demanded by nature of the self, to move, to change, to waver unwaveringly.

Olson begins with an ignorance is bliss tone of voice, yet follows himself into the realization of an inescapable hell. His awareness of the self has trapped him in indeterminancy. The poem reflects this indeterminancy because the poem is, "precise as hell is, precise / as any words."