Poetry News

Max Lesser Explores Charles Olson's Legacy at LARB

Originally Published: August 28, 2018
Image of the poet Charles Olson.
Photo by © Allen Ginsberg/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

What is the legacy of projective verse, as theorized in Charles Olson's 1950 essay of that title? At Los Angeles Review of Books, Max Lesser discusses the revolutionary idea's connections with poets and writers in the 20th-century. "Do you care about 20th-century American poetry? If so, you may be embarrassed to admit it," Lesser begins. From there:

In our culture, too many regard poetry, and especially the poetry of the last century, as having all the real-world utility of underwater basket-weaving.

That reputation, though unfortunate, may be well deserved. A quick glance at Ezra Pound’s sprawling, self-indulgent, showily allusive Cantos will reinforce this impression. Another glance at his political screeds may solidify it. Pound isn’t all of it, of course — and that raises another issue. What does one mean by 20th-century American poetry? Where does one start? Robert Frost’s rugged philosophizing or Wallace Stevens’s imaginative dreamscapes? And what binds Claude McKay’s socialist realist sonnets to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets’ scientistic abstractions? Can we really expect to sort through so many different voices from so many different backgrounds?

In fact, there are many points of entry. And one of the most promising takes us back to an unlikely place and time: North Carolina, in the depths of the Great Depression, where a number of faculty members recently dismissed from Rollins College for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge founded the legendary Black Mountain College. Here, the ideas and inventions of American icons such as John Dewey and Buckminster Fuller would merge with the teachings of exiled European intellectuals and artists, including Albert Einstein, Walter Gropius, and Josef Albers. A partial list of Black Mountain teachers and students will suffice to indicate its central role in 20th-century American culture: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov.

Learn more at Los Angeles Review of Books.