Comments on: From Peter O’Leary: Poetry of the 1970s, Day 3

By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:05:27 +0000

I can’t really speak anymore to what Olson and Duncan might “share” (it’s been years since I read any Olson), but I am curious as to what acolytes want to save of Projectivism — and what they think should be discarded. To this end, I guess, I would have liked to hear more in-depth about the Heaving and Nichols papers.
As to the superstitions — all of the above, I suppose. All the interdictions implied.

By: Jeff Hamilton

Jeff Hamilton — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:09:06 +0000

May I ask what this superstition is — the superstition that (presumably) Duncan-Olson and projectivist poetics share? I know Ange Mlinko wasn’t necessarily making an argument she wants to defend, nonetheless I find fascinating (and difficult to fathom, from at least Duncan’s point of view) that superstitions in the way they thought about poetry resulted in “briars” upon the “desires” of Levertov or others.
Is it that projectivist poetics works out a “myth” of formal performance — perhaps the myth that performance implies a form? Or is the superstition just some more retrograde sense of how men might “project” themselves, sexually or stylistically, upon the world?

By: Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:24:09 +0000

I too am troubled by a predominantly materialist poetics — which corresponds to the materialism in the culture at large (soul-deadening scientism and economic utilitarianism). I wonder whether a poetry that opposed this culture-wide trend would be effective, or further marginalized. (Perhaps it doesn’t matter.) The greater question — whether “retrograde” mythopoeia might be brought into the 21st century — is still vexed, I think, by the dead-end armchair psychoanalyzing that goes on under that aegis. I’m not talking about your wink at the Watten/Clover/et al. patrimony, but I am thinking of, say, the Levertov-Duncan blowup which ended with a whole lotta rambling apologies for “projecting.” (What is the relation between a projectivist poetics and a “projecting” poetics? hm) I can’t be sorry that we’re over certain superstitions about poetry, which binded with briars the joys & desires of some, particularly women. On the other hand, there is a lot of strong wisdom in that Duncan-Levertov correspondence, as well as in The Poetry of Politics, The Politics of Poetry. — More so than in any book of essays by materialists.