It was the 1950s in America and the world had gone nuclear. It was no wonder. The greatest scientists of all time had finally gotten insight into the foundational bits that make up all there is. The atom!—where the concrete existence of mass and the slippery power of energy intersect. Atomic energy infected the zeitgeist. Everything from our wars to our families became “nuclear.” Charles Olson brought this nuclear power into poetry in his manifesto, “Projective Verse.”
In “Projective Verse,” Olson pushes poets to move into a new age of composition that will give the communication of creative energies precedence over form and structure. He declares that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (sect. 1, par. 4). But this basic “principal,” as Olson calls it, is in service of a greater change in creative focus that he describes early in the essay: “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it … by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader … the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” (sect. 1, par. 2). The interplay and interchange of energy and object: this is pure physics.
Olson goes on to encourage writers to attend to syllables, “particles of sound,” “the elements and minims of language,” in order “to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical” (sect. 1, par. 10). In these lines, we see him embrace atomic science as a way of addressing all facets of poetry. The words that Olson has selected are charged with scientific meaning. Here, “particles” are not mere specks of dust; they are wondrous packages of mass/energy which must be precise because they construct the larger world, and yet which lack logic in their behaviors under observation. This level of Projective Verse, as Olson describes it, recalls the activity of subatomic particles, particularly electrons. Electrons exist in a cloud that determines the volume and chemical behavior of the atom (“Electron”). They can be located based on their relationship to their nucleus, each other, and the magnetic forces around them, but individually they are hard to pin down.
Electrons are also particularly susceptible to the observer effect; that is, by looking at the place or motion of an electron, the observer cannot help but change its place or motion. Likewise, the reader influences the effect of the energy stored on a page of the poem. In both cases, electron and poem, the observer can only come up with general descriptions, probabilities, and instant drawings of data, all of which are imperfect. Yet, on a larger scale, the observer receives an experience that is somehow complete.
When particles combine and interact, new compounds form, bonds are made or broken, and energy is released and absorbed. Our minds may witness such phenomena through heat, color, light, taste, scent, substance, and myriad other sensations. We call this chemistry. Similarly, Projective Verse poetry, according to Olson, is
a matter, finally of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside
a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be
used … that every element in an open poem (the syllable, the
line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up
as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are
accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that
these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem
just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the
world. (sect. 1, par. 23)
An analysis of Olson’s manifesto could go on in greater depth, paragraph after paragraph. Such an analysis is certainly worthy, but would take far more time, space, and energy than I can commit here. (For those interested in further exploring how this context influenced Olson’s thinking, I suggest The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, an excellent book on the scientific revolution in the first half of the twentieth century.) Let’s turn, instead, to some of the ways in which Projective Verse appears in his own poetry.
Olson treats images and thoughts as if they were beyond the scope of Newtonian physics and in the foggy realm of subatomic physics, where units are only tangible at the moments when they are delivering energy, where understanding can only be formed from description and projections of probability. Images are slippery, like electrons. Electrons swirl in a field around one or more bonded nuclei, granting a small charge here, then there, and there again. Olson’s poems act similarly in that they use images from experiences to deliver instant charges of feeling.
Olson’s images seem to emerge from passing thoughts or remembered experiences, deliver momentary jolts of feeling, then pass out of view for a time or turn into something new. Take, for example, his “GrandfatherFather Poem.” It begins in mid-sentence, describing his maternal grandfather rolling in the grass near his home on Middle River Road in Worcester, “Like an overrun horse or a poor dog” (ll. 1-3), trying to cool down after a day stoking fires at U. S. Steel. This rolling image runs past, already in motion, and disappears from the poem before naturally reemerging, more clearly and plainly stated, nearly forty lines later. Again, it seems to be left behind as the poem moves through many other images and memories, teasing out the harshness of the grandfather and his place in the world—but then the grandfather rolls again as the result of a kick from young Charles (ll. 112-21). The image seems to insert itself spontaneously back into the poem. It reminds us that this memory, a unit of energy that cannot be created or destroyed, is still circulating in the poem (and in the memories of the poet’s family), where it bumps against and energizes other such particles.
Another technique of Olson’s stands out for its visual oddness. Olson often uses open parentheses without closing the parenthesis. This use reflects the similar problem of observing a ray, which is an infinite piece of a line that has a starting point and direction, but no end. Similarly, Olson’s open parenthesis symbol (() is the beginning of a ray of thought extending to infinity. The thought is soon abandoned without closing the parenthesis because what ends is not the thought, which continues infinitely, but the observation of that thought. It is impossible, of course, to observe something that travels on forever. Just as the parenthetical thought in Olson’s poem may be abandoned, so we draw a ray as a segment with an arrow to suggest continuance.
An example of Olson’s use of open parentheses occurs in his poem titled “Poem”: “Gravelly hill was ‘the source and end (or boundary’ of / D’town on the way that leads from the town to …” (ll. 1-2). Here, the parenthesis projects the idea of a “boundary” into the poem. In fact, three of the four instances of open-ended parentheses in “Poem” refer to the boundary of Dogtown, an abandoned colonial settlement outside Gloucester, Massachusetts, with a strange and colorful history. These little sparks of unresolved meaningfulness emphasize the existence of the imaginary line that Olson is drawing for us in the poem, data points on a ray that he wishes us to keep in mind.
Rays are both a mathematical concept and a scientific one, with an especially important place in nuclear science. The projection of subatomic particles from a source onto or through foil, substrate, gas, crystal lattice, or other particles are all significant experimentally in both the discovery of particles and the analysis of their behaviors. For Olson’s initial readers, rays would have been a familiar aspect of contemporary science. Concretely, radiation (the projection of energy or particles described as rays with source, direction, and effect) was commonly used in medical imaging. Microwaves were commercially available. Nuclear power for electricity production was on the horizon. Meanwhile, in popular culture, aliens and space rangers were firing ray guns across comic strips. Including the concept of rays as a form of projection within the physics of Projective Verse was a clever and natural move for Olson to make.
As a boy in Worcester, Olson grew up during a time of great scientific advancement. In his poem “An Ode on Nativity,” he describes witnessing two fireballs, at two different times in his childhood, at the same point on the horizon: a full red moon above Elm Park and the burning of the Sawyer lumber yard across town (245). I wonder if, as a teen, he also witnessed the fireballs from early rocket tests conducted in nearby Auburn, Massachusetts, by Robert H. Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester and the father of modern rocketry and space flight. Such wonders could certainly inspire a second birth, a child’s first sense of conscious awareness as described in “An Ode on Nativity.” Olson’s world was bathed in the new science that promised great things: unlimited energy, supreme power, and a view into the foundations of everything. E=mc2: Mass and energy, existence and activity, all manifestations of a single substance. It was natural for him to posit that poetry in the nuclear age should be poetry of the nuclear age. Olson rocketed poetry into the future with his projective verse, offering us all a way to incorporate the new understanding of everything into writing.
Projective Verse is a theory for thinking about poetry, influenced by twentieth-century scientific theories of relativity, nuclear energy, and subatomic physics. In Olson’s own poems, thoughts have a tendency to emerge, disappear, and then reappear again, and again, throughout a given work. This is a quality shared both with the movement of electrons and with the image of a ray. Electrons / thoughts / images all demonstrate a radical appearance, disappearance, and reappearance over time and space, traveling from point to point without touching all points in between. These energetic charges have effects on other particles, making the poem ring with energy. Finally, it is up to the observer to accept this energy, to participate in the system, and to come away having felt something.
Works Cited
“Electron.” Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/science/electron.
Olson, Charles. “An Ode on Nativity.” The Collected Poems of Charles Olson,
Excluding the Maximus Poems, edited by George Butterick, University of California Press,
1997, pp. 245-49.
———. “The Grandfather-Father Poem.” Poetry, Apr.-May 1965, pp. 90-96.
https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=30055
———. “Poem.” Poetry, Oct.-Nov. 1963, pp. 78-81, https://www.poetryfoundation.
org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=103&issue=1&page=102
———. “Projective Verse.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/
essay/237880
“Ray.” Math Open Reference, Web. http://www.mathopenref.com/ray.html Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon and Schuster, 1995.