Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ and the Inscription of the Breath

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20248171
AutoresBrendan C Gillott (University of Cambridge, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen7
Número4
Páginas108
Fecha de publicación2018-11-01
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHumanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h7040108
OpenAlexW2898747995
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas11

Charles Olson’s hugely influential essay-manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ is usually understood as proposing a close - and a necessary—link between poetry and body. Some account of Olson’s as a ‘poetics of embodiment’ or a ‘breath-poetics’ is almost ubiquitous in the extant criticism, yet what this might actually mean or imply for poetry and poetry-reading remains unclear. ‘Projective Verse’ is deeply ambivalent about print, seeing in it the ‘closed verse’ Olson looked to replace, while simultaneously idealising the typed-and-printed page as the only medium for the supposed immediacy of the poet’s breath. This essay contends that Olson’s lionisation of the typewriter is accompanied by a suppressed inscriptional register—a concern with carving and engraving—and asks what the substrate hosting this inscription might be. The aims of the piece are twofold: to demonstrate that ‘Projective Verse’ contains a logic of inscription which has gone severely underappreciated; and to argue that this logic runs up against the much better-documented logic of poetic embodiment via the breath in such a way as to deeply trouble criticism’s rather murky understanding of what that latter logic implies, both in Olson’s specific case and for poetry more generally

Art · Criticism · Linguistics · Literature · Manifesto · Poetics · Poetry · Diverse Musicological Studies · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Translation Studies and Practices

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