Well, coincindent or not, they just had a doco on Merce Cunningham on the tele which
ties in nicely with projective verse. Cunningham with dance, Cage with music and to
a lesser degree Pollack with paiting, alongside Olson, provided a much needed
obstacle to the predictable progress of contemporary arts from banality to
sentimentality - the P. K. Page poem is a vivid example of what the majority of
today's poetry would be like without people like Olson. Anyway, Cunningham - who was
brought to the Black Mountain College with Olson's help (I think) - says something
to the effect of: "I don't want the dancers doing a dance, I want them to become the
dance". To him, I think, the first physical step on the stage is an equivilant of
Olson's first line on the page - an outward movement, like starting an engine. Where
the Beats got stuck was after starting the engine they had no idea how to change the
damn gears from PARK to DRIVE. 'Howl' is like a hot engine with a lot of smoke and
noise withoiut wheels. I heard someone read out Corso's 'Marriage' at the pub
yesterday, and despite a very articulate reading and the occaision of the whole
thing (ten minutes later someone read out, you guessed it,'Howl') no one including
the reader himself could deny that Corso's poem was very dated and, well, plain
boring. Something about Olson's 'Distances', or Cunningham's choreography, just
doesn't age.
Ali Alizadeh
---- Original Message ----
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?neville=20attkins?=
Date: Thu 2/1/01 7:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: breath & ear - line &syllable
I've not had the pleasure of Olson's manifesto, but I
am sure that someone will say that it is limiting and
that this is a problem, they always do, imagining
presumably that there is someway of writing verse that
isn't limited, it is words not pure thoughts but it is
this very limit that is expressive. How meaningless to
complain for example a way of doing art is limited:
oil paintings are flat: good,, if they weren't no one
would have had to invent perspective... and how much
fun was had making them describe the third and fourth
dimensions. I like very much the propsition that
poetry is only syllabuls how marvelously playful to
have to worry about those left out little sylabuls,
personally the letter is the thing, take care of them
and and the rest takes care of itself.
more power to your larynx Ali
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