Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside

by Miriam Nichols

A study of six poets central to the New American poetry—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Susan Howe—with an eye both toward challenging the theoretical lenses through which they have been viewed and to opening up this counter tradition to contemporary practice
 
In 1950 the poet Charles Olson published his influential essay “Projective Verse” in which he proposed a poetry of “open field” composition—to replace traditional closed poetic forms with improvised forms that would reflect exactly the content of the poem. <!--? prefix = o ns = "" /--> The poets and poetry that have followed in the wake of the “projectivist” movement—the Black Mountain group, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Language poets—have since been studied at length. But more often than not they have been studied through the lens of continental theory with the effect that these highly propositional, pragmatic, and adaptable forms of verse were interpreted in very cramped, polemical ways. Miriam Nichols highlights many of the impulses original to the thinking and methods of each appeals to perceptual experience, spontaneity, renewed relationships with nature, engaging the felt world—what Nichols terms a “poetics of outside”—focusing squarely on experiences beyond the self-regarding self. As Nichols states, these poets may well “represent the last moment in recent cultural history when a serious poet could write from perception or pursue a visionary poetics without irony or quotation marks and expect serious intellectual attention.”

368 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2010

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This prescient, at times brilliant study never jells stylistically until the last eight pages, when Nichols, a British Columbia scholar and the executor of Robin Blaser's estate, puts down her notes and seems almost extemporaneously to speak her conclusions to six chapters, on the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance -- Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Robert Duncan -- as well as on the poets, Charles Olson, who, first appearing in Berkeley in 1949, met Duncan, and Robert Creeley, adding, to grow on, one of Olson's most important legatees, from the subsequent generation, Susan Howe.

What holds this group together? Nichols' subtitle, Essays on the Practice of Outside, is an evaluative claim in the guise of a descriptive one: Among the so-called "New American" generations who would claim to be engaged in a counter-poetics, six poets emerge in what might then be described as "a practice." The role of social coterie in Nichols' treatment is ill-defined -- Howe aside, the five poets under study were friends; while it's unclear to me how well Creeley knew Spicer, it can be said, from Duncan's perspective, that his Berkeley Renaissance-era intimacy with Blaser and Spicer strained under the widening social circle Duncan pursued after coming into contact with Olson and Creeley, at Black Mountain in 1956, and, even more importantly for RD, Denise Levertov. Duncan didn't "throw over" Spicer/Blaser as he did, say, his poet-friend James Broughton; however, Duncan's emergence into Levertov's social circle was attended by reviews of friends, like Broughton (in Poetry), that in some sense could be said to have ditched them, and he did it to Blaser, too, by calling out in publication of a special issue of Audit/Poetry, in 1967, Blaser's translation of Nerval's Chimeras, of which fact Blaser's executor is not unaware. From a social point of view, perhaps the group didn't hold together; "the practice" is pretty dodgy, too. The cost of Nichols' evasion of social coterie is most evident in her work on Duncan, but's it's evident, too, in the manner of Nichols' own academic theoretical discourse as this has to "go up" a level toward jargon in order to stitch the six together in an argument about "the practice of outside." In brief, one can imagine a study of these six that was less formal and just as coherent.

So much are we surprised and pleased to have the six treated together, in whatever manner, we're primed for Nichols' argument for why it might be so. "The practice of outside," as a practice, takes its cues from Spicer, more specifically (Spicer's own executor) Blaser's 1975 essay on Spicer, an afterword to The Collected Books, which cites a long passage from a 1965 Spicer lecture on "the outside," or "medium," by which figure Spicer tropes in comparing Cocteau's Orphee, Orpheus getting the poems off the car radio, to Spicer's own "dictate," or outside -- "the [poem's] composing factor," in Blaser's gloss. The machine trope ("radio") is key; as Nichols emphasizes: "I read Spicer's apparent rejection of the human universe for coterie as a serious qualification of the Olson-Duncan project of a public poetry." And drawing her own thematic threads together, Nichols continues:

Cosmicity, from Spicer's perspective, is a raw deal. In this Spicer sets himself in symmetrical opposition to the whole Emersonian line of American poetry, including its postwar manifestations. I have stressed that composition by field and the process poetics it initiated allows the "I" projective size insofar as its acts make visible the larger ground of its being; the figure-on-the-ground is a consistent trope in the work of Olson and Creeley, and Duncan, too, when the latter is not too deeply inside an impersonation. Spicer takes up the obvious omission -- the blind spot -- in this poetics. Certainly he separates figure and ground, radically so; the whole point of performing the duel is to dramatize the difference. . . 'We are all alone,' Spicer says, 'and we do not need poetry to tell us how alone we are.' (CB 181) At the cosmic level, these affective elements of personhood simply disappear into the general becoming of the plenetary Whole. [Bold face mine](Nichols 173)

In a reading (brilliant) like this, we note Nichols minding her subject. We sense how poems -- here, Spicer's The Heads of Towns -- figure for her. The phrase, "the whole Emersonian line" seems commonplace enough, but "line" has a peculiar meaning for Nichols' man, Robin Blaser, whose Spicer essay seems to have confirmed for him his later interest in Gilles Deleuze, the French Heideggerian aestheticist of "the fold" ("A painting always has a model on its outside; it is always a window." [The Fold 27]). For Blaser, then, Deleuze is both pupil and teacher. In short, Nichols' way of reading poems is indebted both to Blaser as well as Jack Spicer, who Blaser follows in "the practice of an outside" -- outside Deleuze's window. And in the cases of both Spicer and Blaser, this "practice" sets itself up in response to Duncan, who had his own interest in a more linguistically-based hermeneutics.

Nichols' remark, vide, about the "Emersonian line" is indeed hard to comprehend; similarly, "allowing the 'I' projective size," and "making visible a larger ground of being," point to a philosophical tradition Duncan reads much differently than do Olson or Blaser, the subjects of Nichols' most penetrating chapters. The "cosmicity" she claims plays Spicer false is in fact the Deleuzean "chaosmos" and so even such a remark as that has to be read against Nichols' tendency to read the poems "up" a level of abstraction, so that within the Deleuzean description they can be said to look out upon . . . an ecology of theory. Meanwhile, the Deleuzean literary style (the nirvana of job talks across North America) with its interpolative code-switching between (in The Fold) Leibniz, late Heidegger and Deleuze's own fantastic grasp of the history of science, which Nichols is not quite telling us she would herself enact, gets ventured in the last eight pages of this book -- to, again, remarkable if surprisingly Nicholsian effect.