The Poet as Archaeologist

The poet as archaeologist: arche, beginnings. One recalls that Husserl, when he discovered phenomenology, and was looking for a name for his method (which moved back through the experience of phenomena to basic, infra-psychological structures of perception and jLidgment), wanted to call it an archaeology.The name, however, was pre-empted by the narrowing science of that name. Olson, as Maximus, as original maker, seeks another archaeology: origins of life and language, a concise paratactic sense of event before Logos got hold of the mind and twisted it out of the context of body (and its run on existence); a state where language and event are coincident (at least energetically so); where speech (syntax) names things, gives way to the actual knots and hesitancies of experience, rather than losing itself in its own welter of delight and effect (Weltanschauung). Olson is certainly the most unique voice in contemporary American poetry. No other poet requires such an effort equivalent to learning a new language, or rather adjusting the sense we have of the old one, so that we hear the precision of his, and experience a world through it. There are Olson poems I doubt anyone will ever understand, except in their general aspect. Others are line and sunlight clear. The best of them

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