I'm suggesting, for me, certainly, as I don't write narrative poetry, that
one approaches the darkest places, the traumas beyond words (which is how I
experience genocide) either very matter-of-factly, or as a painter suggests
physical darkness, by painting the light around the edge.

Olson is the inevitable source I would guess for most of what you find
interesting in American poetry since the 50s.

Olson set out in Maximus to describe the sensory, emotional, mental and
physical field by projecting outwards, from a finite point, into its
history as well as its various presents. As the book proceeds he wanders
further from the present moment, occasionally reeling the line back in to
the deeply personal. There's an intense need to get it right, so that poems
go beyond the description at times to be shaped on the page like maps made
of lines.

I'm at a loss to describe further, and only very lengthy quotation would
show anything of the method. The whole of Maximus, in fact, works as a
unit, an enormous collage, or better, a palimpsest. In the edition I have
it's 635 pages. In some ways it's a mess, but a better ruin to walk around
in than all but a very few poets' builded places. We can dive in together
(I guess it just became a submarine ruin) when you're here, if you like.

Paul Metcalf met Olson when he was 14. Olson was working on his Melville
book, Call Me Ishmael. Olson had called unannounced on Paul's mother, the
only surviving grandchild of Herman Melville, who saw her grandfather's
Billy Budd into print. Paul developed a kind of documentary prose and
poetry mixed collage technique. American Indian data occurs throughout his
work. His first very conventional, but quite wonderful, novel, Will West,
has for protagonist a Cherokee Indian who relives his people's history in
an outburst of irrational violence. Of his collage works I think Apalache
would be the best plkace to look specifically for how he found to deal with
it.

Susan Howe acknowledges Olson as a spiritual father. She knew Paul and his
work, tho I don't think she says much about it.

At 01:12 AM 10/14/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Mark:
>>I think that the best one can do is to remember in one's work as in one's
>>life that we stand, all of us, on bloody ground to which we have no
>>inherent rights. And to take responsibility, as beneficiaries of the
>>slaughter, but also as members of the species. It's far too easy to dismiss
>>the unthinkable as the acts of monsters. I'm with Hannah Arendt on this one.
>
>Certainly, from my own position, financial, social, cultural, I can
>have no claim to be beyond implication. I'm very aware to how great
>extent Ireland, one of the earliest modern colonies, benefits now
>from that colonisation; how much Irish soldiery (my ancestors
>included) participated in the suppression of other peoples on behalf
>of Empire; to how great an extent this continues. (I'm reading,
>interlineated with other things, Ward Churchill's 'A Little Matter of
>Genocide', about the ongoing destruction of native Americans. Africa
>is hard to avert from.)
>
>But my question isn't a moral, human one; I take that for granted as
>an indispensible prior in approaching the whole field, though it's
>necessary to keep on overcoming my deep ignorance by reading and
>talking. What I'm asking is: what tools have been worked through to
>deal with such matters 'poetically'.
>
>>Behind Howe, of course, is Olson, who didn't treaqt the subject much but
>>established a methadology, followed, among others, by Paul Metcalf.
>
>I've only read superficially in Olson, I'm afraid. Could you gesture
>at that methodology, in however summary a form? Or just point me at
>specific texts or passages? And who's Paul Metcalf? More ignorance
>for me to get through, it seems . . .
>
>Best,
>
>Trevor