Since 2013, the University of New Mexico Press’s Recencies Series has made available several key texts related to Black Mountain-era poetry and poetics, most notably Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn’s Collected Letters (2013), Edward Dorn’s The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin Plateau (2013), Dennis Tedlock’s The Olson Codex (2017), and James Maynard’s Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime (2018). My own 2017 contributions to the series, along with Robert Bertholf, include Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson and An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. The recent addition to the series of The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne (UNM, 2017), edited with a substantial introduction by Ryan Dobran, brings into public circulation a strikingly rich expansion of Olson’s intellectual interests and shares insight to Prynne’s encounters with American poetry. Through these encounters, Prynne began to forcefully distinguish his writing from British contemporary poets like Donald Davie and Charles Tomlinson, directing his attention to the interiority of poetic composition where style, statement, and self converge. The constellations of inquiry and in-group performance in the letters between Olson and Prynne, Olson and Duncan, and Baraka and Dorn, make publicly available for the first time a record of correspondence between writers who often asserted their views at the extreme of literary margins in the 1950s and 60s. Many of the letters have been available to scholars working with library holdings, most notably the Charles Olson Research Collection at the University of Connecticut. But the public dissemination of the correspondences will extend the historical context of those poets who attempted new forms of open-verse poetry motivated by many non-literary areas of interest, such as geography, cultural history, and anthropology. The publications of Olson’s letters to Duncan and Prynne join those already available in Olson’s Selected Letters (2000) and in published correspondences with Cid Corman, Frances Boldereff, and, most notably, Robert Creeley, forming an invaluable record of poetic friendship, literary ambition, and formal innovation.
The new epistolary collections reveal aspects of Charles Olson, both the man and the poet, across various lines of communication, and it is this, in part, I would like to foreground: the force and contradiction of Olson’s thought is revealed by circumstances and relationships, each drawing on the diverse energies of his larger poetic enterprise, most notably his epic of Gloucester, MA, The Maximus Poems (1983). While a comparative look at the range of his letters with multiple correspondents certainly yields many unique insights into the man and his project, I want to draw attention here to the rhetorical and grammatical aspects of Black Mountain poetics as they appear in the letters he shares with Duncan and Prynne. Grammar is particularly evident among the concerns of the Olson and Prynne correspondence; the grammars of attention to diverse texts and phenomena reveal both poets’ commitments to the terms and conditions of their independent and shared studies. Summarizing a vast body of research in the fields of rhetoric and grammar risks certain generalizations, but the distinctions help make sense of Olson’s capacities as a poet and as a figure active in poetic communities at mid-century. Modern scholarship emphasizes rhetoric as the study and teaching of persuasion, a heightening of awareness toward the ways communication is fostered by modes of reasoning and feeling through a range of media, including literature. But rhetoric is more than manipulative or instrumental uses of language. Discussions between Duncan and Olson often center on the attitudinal relationship of writers to their audience. See, for example, the letters in An Open Map leading up to Olson’s controversial essay “Against Wisdom as Such” (1954), wherein he takes Duncan to task for asserting the possibility of a wizened outlook prefiguring the written utterance. Duncan and Olson also challenge one another in terms of expanding their capacities for formal innovation in poetry, increasing their confidence and capabilities as writers while attempting to work in a modernist context that expanded the Pound-Williams tradition to acknowledge the location of the author in the written work. The physicality of attention and the performance of self at the limits of what one knows at a given moment of composition inherently located the author bodily in the temporal and spatial moment of poetic making. The rhetorical commitment stresses the persuasive possibilities connected to poetic form, and it places the writer’s responsibility solidly in the process of composition.
Grammar, on the other hand, may be thought of as close heuristic analysis not only of texts, but of material information. The persuasive force of directed speech is less important to the grammatical outlook than to detecting relationships of syntax, cultural histories, material objects and the records of their uses. The grammarian searches etymologies and archives to acquire the fundamental information on the basis of which persuasive positions are exchanged. In the ancient tradition, grammar combined the study of something like anthropology, cultural history, and linguistics/ philology. Through hermeneutic practices, the uses and meanings of words and acts were analyzed, deciphered for greater understanding. The ancient Grammatike, as Jeffrey Walker explains it in The Genuine Teachers of this Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity (2011), is in a sense the foundation of a larger paideia, and also represents processes of specialization, from linguistics to forms of literary exegesis. Certainly, The Maximus Poems as well as much of Prynne’s work are built on this kind of attention to information, and the poet’s attitude toward language and cultural material is what I would like to call here a grammatical outlook, if not an outright grammar of attention. Most of what follows, then, will take on this grammatical grounding of thought as shown in Olson’s letters to the younger British author. Additionally, I want to stress how his correspondence with Prynne differs notably from his letters to Duncan, because to do so reveals intersecting concepts of language and its uses for larger poetic enterprises based in a variety of social and literary contexts.
Olson and Duncan approached each other as peers. Ezra Pound introduced them in 1947, and Olson visited Duncan in Berkeley that year when he traveled west to study documents related to the tragic Donner Party passage to California. Much of their correspondence focuses on details of publication, travel, and advocacy of Black Mountain poetics, as well as reinforcing their mutual respect and devotion to one another as friends and literary peers. They approach form as a rhetorical project too, one devised from the energy and dynamic processes of planned design in specific contexts (see for instance their discussion while Duncan traveled in Spain in 1955–56 regarding dynamic cultural instantiations of form in individual artists). Rhetoric, if we think of it not as an application of figures and tropes in some stylistic process, but as a range of discursive features in ever-shifting poetic and institutional contexts, helps us see how Duncan and Olson interacted to achieve goals in their writing and in the larger communities of poets and publishers they inhabited. Their correspondence is concerned with the persuasive terms of coterie dynamics; the advocacy of literary projects; an expansion of the scales of publishing, from little presses to larger sites of cultural production at Grove and New Directions; and valuable disagreements and displays of mutual affection in efforts to articulate the meaning of “fuerza,” the energy of new form that Duncan and Olson persuasively realized in the 1950s.
By contrast, Olson’s exchanges with Prynne are less companionable, if more rigorous in terms of specific investigations. It is important here to note, for instance, that throughout much of the correspondence Prynne acts in many ways as Olson’s amanuensis, tracking down and locating shipping records, mailing books to Olson, xeroxing articles, and even typing a transcript of Maximus for publication. The Weymouth Port books are records Prynne shares with Olson in a letter dated May 2, 1963, which provide details for some of the English merchant vessels involved in the colonization of Cape Ann, Olson’s main precinct of study. These men are not peers, then, separated by age, geographic location, poetic methodologies, and social position. Olson had entered the final decade of his life when the correspondence commenced in 1961. His reputation already had been established in part through the publications of Call Me Ishmael (1947), “Projective Verse” (1950), Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960), The Distances (1960), and publications of The Maximus Poems in several volumes (1953, 1956, and 1968). Much of his research and thinking about the American West, poetic form, and literary challenges to the literature and poetics associated with New Criticism had been worked out decades prior.
Prynne was a young Cambridge fellow and librarian, precocious, intellectually rigorous, and committed to literary history. When he met Olson he was about to publish his first book of poems, a publication he later disavowed (Prynne’s books published during the period of his correspondence with Olson, notably Force of Circumference and other Poems [1962], Kitchen Poems [1968], and The White Stones [1969], reflect his encounter with the New American Poetry). Their reputations are incongruent insofar as Olson is older, more widely known, and more in command of the relationship in terms of his intellectual requirements; he is a figure of admiration for Prynne when he initiates the correspondence in November 1961, writing to ask Olson for poems he might publish in the Cambridge literary magazine Prospect. Olson quickly becomes interested in the British poet’s exhaustive attention to primary material, effortlessly (at least as it appears in the letters) tracking down shipping records and other sources for his and Olson’s research. Prynne’s letters are tightly focused, his deliberate and explanatory prose is informed by a different epistolary tradition than what we see often in Olson’s performative shorthand. They explore some of the crucial primary sources of Maximus and help us understand the young scholar-poet’s role as Olson’s intellectual confidant early in their correspondence.
If the Duncan and Olson letters can be characterized as a complex social and, by extension, rhetorico-cultural project, then we have in the letters to Prynne a contrasting focus on the integrative material of poetry, its language and sources. This side of Olson is committed to the terms of his grammar. And the grammatical orientation found in the correspondence led them to observe the basic role of words, their histories and functions, and what Prynne refers to as “tones of being,” explaining in a letter dated March 18, 1966:
The language with which we specify the tones of being will affix only to processive nouns, as in “with pleasure,” “for pleasure.” Otherwise we can only relate the matter elsewhere: “I did it for good reason, in spite of objection, out of very personal motives.” What we should know is that “doing for its own sake” is specifically a form of being, and not part of the fiscal linkage of transfer. To do it “for love” or “for pleasure” is the partial & localized recognition of real continuance, the ground of feeling…. And if the tones ever could diversify and blend into a complete arc, the reason-and-motive dialect(ic) would simply melt into the ground.
This close attention to the relationship of words and their tonal patterns compels the interests of both men, though Olson directs the conversation toward the material grammar of written records. Writing on April 24, 1966, more than a month later, he asks: “any way there…to check vessels built before 1630: in particular the Royal Merchant, 600 tons by William Stevens (Stephens—+ I’m pretty sure for Stepney? date of building—? + if discernable any info on shipyard capable of such bldg?” In one sense, Olson shifts the conversation to his interests, leaning on the young scholar to locate information related to the project of Maximus. Here I’m trying to identify impulses toward a careful discovery on the parts of Olson and Prynne in their correspondence by suggesting that grammar, an area of study with overlaps into linguistics, material histories, anthropology, and geography established meaning for them as poets and as committed coworkers in fields that are not typically connected to poetry. For instance, Olson and Prynne connect lexicography to everyday things, and so the back-and-forth of their correspondence remains focused on this line of understanding: shared cultural resources, both of language and the material culture through which it moves and leaves traces in documents and habits of usage, are seen as the main objective of the letters. Even when there are incongruent exchanges between them (Prynne is the more active correspondent), they are frequently united by joint concerns over the interpretations of records and texts, sharing in the transmission of information and a growing body of knowledge derived from the complex intersection of disciplines once understood as grammar.
Certainly, however, the younger Prynne provided much of the labor of friendship through gifts, documents, typescripts, and contributions from his own scholarly and poetic training. Such kindness was not always reciprocated. There are often long gaps on Olson’s side of the correspondence, and in 1966–67, while visiting the UK, he does not even go to Cambridge to see Prynne, though they do meet briefly elsewhere. Dobran relates in his introduction that the two poets did not really get along in person, which is perhaps one reason why the correspondence drifts off after Olson’s visit. Things thereafter cool down between them, Olson’s final letter posted in 1968, and in less than two years Olson would die. Prynne nonetheless made efforts to maintain close contact with the older poet until his death in January 1970, though they were not always reciprocated. A gift to Olson, Ernest de Selincourt’s edition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, drew vehement rebuke. Writing to Prynne on January 18, 1967, he says:
Dear Jeremy: I abhor…of course (+ all the sticky feeling of + bet. DW [Dorothy Wordsworth] (shit) etc + STC [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] (germ)
Olson’s dismissal of British Romanticism wasn’t a surprise to those who knew him, and many understood his rejection of the expressivity and subjectivity associated with Wordsworth especially, a poet who was, nonetheless, close to Prynne’s thinking. The notational shorthand of Olson’s rejection is in keeping with much of his side of the correspondence, where short bursts of passion function as affective signposts for the receiver. Still, there is evidence of great affection on both sides of the correspondence, and Prynne’s patience and generosity are apparent. This collection of letters reveals a view of both men as complex in feeling and temperament, both giving to each other what was possible within the limitations of their particular domains of study and creative practice. Prynne’s energy and determination of scholarly research helped give the correspondence rigorous definition, bringing to life a new grammar of mid-century poetics that remains instructive for anyone committed to the ways intricate forms of information can enhance poetic practice now.
This book is distinguished from the other published Olson correspondences by focusing less on poetic communities—he and Prynne are too separated geographically for that—but on an array of topics like the crucial questions of shipping across the Atlantic, new developments in linguistics, then-current scholarship in ancient European myth and society, and newly encountered research among geologists of the period. Prynne rejected a postwar tradition that had formed in the UK through the efforts of W. H. Auden, with poets like Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes turning to a formal poetic structure through which they pronounced strong attitudes toward modern society. The young Cambridge poet was much more embedded in the transmission of language, how its formal usages revealed unexamined attitudes or cultural positions. He looked through shared cultural usages of language to achieve a poetic stance from within the poem, rather than attempting, like many of his better-known contemporaries, to impose social positions on the poems themselves. This could be seen as yet another distinction between rhetoric and grammar, where the former is understood as a conscious approach to the shaping of language for advantageous purposes while the latter investigates the ways attitudinal relationships are socially embedded in the terms of language and its history of shared usages.
Dobran announces in the introduction that obscure terms and figures are easily available through internet searches, but this is easier said than done, and brief editorial notes would enhance and ease the reading experience. This collection is really prepared for those readers and scholars familiar with Olson and Prynne, though I hold out hope for the possibility of new readers who might find much to value in the terms and innovations of Black Mountain poetics. As a record in its own right, Dobran has made an admirable contribution to helping us see the relationship not only of Olson and Prynne, but of the larger connections between US and UK poets in the 1960s, where Black Mountain authors Edward Dorn and Robert Creeley, Paris Review poetry editor Tom Clark, and the British/ Canadian scholar Ralph Maud all sojourned at various times, meeting Prynne and others in the UK literary scenes. But these figures are mostly sidenotes to a more substantial discussion held over nearly a decade regarding poetry’s ability to express cultural patterns and linguistic modes of relationality rather than insisting on the formal play of the art as it is shaped into a literary object. As in other Black Mountain correspondences, conversation is informed by much more than literary traditions. The editorial commitment to excavating a grammatical enthusiasm shared by Olson and Prynne provides great insight to mid-century writing, showing how Olson and Prynne’s grammar prepares new possibilities for us now.