The primary act of nature is the transfer of energy. One thing passes its energy on to other things. This is how life survives. Each thing is receiving energy from other things and transferring its own energy to still other things. Nature is like an unending transitive sentence. If nature is transitive then poetry also must be transitive. For the poet receives energy from certain objects and transfers that energy via the poem over to the reader. The poet must be a conductor of the energy. He must be like a nerve connecting the object to the reader, making sure that all the impulses he receives from the object will be picked up and transmitted to the reader. He wants to give the reader excitement equal to the excitement the object stimulated in him. He does not want to lose any of the original power and spirit of the object in transferring it to the reader. To keep the object alive the poet must enact the object. He must allow the object to transfer its energy, its identity, over to the reader. The poet helps this process by trying to coincide with the object and experience the object from the inside-out. He tries to apprehend the very growth-urge and motivating principle of the object, what causes it to act the way it does. He intuits the shape of the object, what it looks like. He even tries to grasp the object's "intentions" (its tendencies) and desires. Once he has identified with the object then his imagination goes to work. He lets the object act out its desires. He lets it fantasize. He enters a dream with the object where the object is allowed to become whatever it "wants" to become. It grows out of itself. It transforms into various images that seem to be the direct descendants of itself. The imagination allows the object to continually dissolve and re-create itself and thus play out its inherent fate. Through imagination the object performs itself and acts itself out for the reader. And the poet must write at the speed of imagination if he is to conduct all the split-second images that issue from the object. To identify with the object the poet must first get into tension with the object. Every object, whether it be concrete or emotional, has tension. The tension of an object is its force of form. The way its parts are pulled into one another and cohere. Tension, in other words, is tropism. It is the way the object behaves and grows. The poet must identify with the object's tension. He must find the same tension in himself. He must feel the pull and strain of the object in himself. His whole body must be tense with the object. His heart must imitate the rhythm of the object and his throat imitate the squeeze of the object in order to squeeze it into words. If the poet writes a poem about a tree, he does not contemplate what words go with "treeness"; rather he begins imitating the tension of the tree. And imitating the tension of the tree creates a vortex into which the words are naturally pulled. The words that erupt will send forth not especially the look of the tree but the emotional pull of the tree, its tension. The words will be tense with the nerve of the tree itself. This is the act of metaphor, the words leaping immediately from the object to the reader. The poet, then, does not try to embalm the object, but to "enact" it. He does not try to paralyze the object, to photograph it (as a still picture) but to let the object evolve as if it were a movie picture. He wants to dramatize the object, to make it act out its fate. The poet does not want to analyze the object into its separate parts, but feel the cohesion of those parts, their tropism, and follow the tendencies of that tropism into speech and imagery. The poet does not seek to abstract any transcendental "essences" from the object, but rather release the object itself into action, thus liberating any "essences" it may partake. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

The American Projectivist verse of Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan contains within its poetics many epistemological assumptions shared by quantum physics. These assumptions exist in three broad categories: perception, process, and wholeness. In physics, the epistemology of perception has been profoundly altered by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation, which creates a symbiotic relationship between the observer and the observed. At least one photon of light is necessary to observe an electron; one photon is sufficient to alter the electron's momentum or position; therefore, a physicist affects an electron's "fate" in the act of observing it. Similarly, in Projectivist poetics, the perceptions of the reader are often enlisted to help "compose" the poem which is offered to him in "pieces," or, as in Robert Duncan's poetry especially, in self-reflexive segments. By "self-reflexive," we further mean that the Projectivist poem often "mirrors itself" as an electron "mirrors itself" as wave or as particle, while it is paradoxically both. A Projectivist poem may pause halfway through and "unravel" itself, i.e., study its own etymology. The reader thus must participate in "putting the poem back together," as the physicist participates in the phenomena he observes. The second epistemological model in physics and poetry stresses becoming, rather than being. Matter at the subatomic level has been defined as energy-in-flux. Similarly, the Projectivist poems of Charles Olson especially often exist as "fields" with no syntactical beginnings or endings. Moreover, the "I" of the Maximus Poems is often seen in a perpetual process of becoming the world of spacetime in the poems, creating a system similar to the being-and-becoming model of particle-and-field in quantum mechanics. Third, wholeness is a premise governing poetry and physics separately and together. Jack Spicer's thematics blend matter and consciousness, as "love and death matter/Matter as wave and particle." Similarly, Robert Duncan's poetics describes a "dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity." In physics, wholeness is seen primarily in an "implicate order" which attempts to overturn the old paradigms of fragmentation and connect matter and consciousness, including language, as interrelated systems of information.

No description available.

This dissertation considers the relation between literary documents and public identities, and how U. S. culture is reflected and transfigured by poetry in the United States after 1960. Concerned with epideictic communication in public contexts, this study looks at how private interventions in public spaces can shape attitudes toward cultural phenomena. A secondary concern elucidates the ways literary texts are valued in English departments, bearing critical reflection on rhetorical, literary, and creative pedagogy. Insofar as the epideictic mode prepares individuals for a decision-making process in current democratic situations, this dissertation considers recent examples of strategic public engagements, and provides rhetorical readings of key situations in American social and cultural life since 1960 to illustrate how such methods can bring rhetoric and literature together in contemporary public contexts. The first of these studies inspects the correspondence and poetry of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov during the Vietnam War over the uses of poetry as a public document. Public identity and U. S. social practices are explored in the following chapter with the 1970s and ’80s poetry of Lorenzo Thomas and Edward Dorn, whose poems participate in the articulation of tensions between private and public life. Chapter 4 argues that Charles Olson’s poems and letters appearing in the editorial pages of The Gloucester-Daily Times in the 1960s effectively helped bring civic attention to the transformation of public space in Gloucester, Mass. While he interpreted the changes he perceived in Gloucester through literary and historical theories, he framed them within rhetorically motivated communication strategies to deliver new perceptions of what constituted civic value. Chapter 5 concludes by examining more recent attempts by poets to influence public reflection on crucial events that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through digital media, public performance, and civic encounters mediated by fugitive texts. The opening and final chapters introduce my methodology and present the problem of poetry in public contexts, and advocates for reflection within English departments on the rhetorical value of literary texts. / text

This oral interpretation thesis analyzes the impact that three poets from Black Mountain College had on contemporary American poetry. The study concentrates on the lives, works, poetic theories of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan and culminates in a lecture recital compiled from historical data relating to Black Mountain College and to the three prominent poets.