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Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (1983, 1990) ended by observing that Language poetry had begun to take for granted the once-surprising notion that prose could be made to infiltrate poetry in order to produce new poetic forms. Newer work may be as self-reflexive and theoretically aware, but philosophical questions about language as the ground of reality have given way to a wide-ranging dialogue between poetry and narrative. For writers at the new meeting ground of poetry and prose, the blurring of borders can be a means for transgressing social boundaries and for claiming efficacy for literary writing in a world governed by multimedia storytelling. This essay investigates how experiments undertaken by poets in fiction, autobiography, performance, verse, documentary, and mixed genres derive from and expand dramatically earlier poet’s prose.

In my article, I examine the relationship between the work of William Carlos Williams and John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and show how their shared concerns create links to post-Second World War performance artists such as Laurie Anderson, the theatrical storyteller Spalding Gray, as well as Happenings master Allan Kaprow. I examine Williams’s impact on what is regarded as early postmodernism in the United States, by tracing Williams connections to Objectivists such as Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen from the 1930s and other culture workers who display what I call a “performative ethos” indebted to John Dewey. I contextualize poetry in relation to everyday experience, but also focus on the semantics of form, in which form emerges through exigencies of a work’s creation. Context and experience produce organic forms, as in the writings of Black Mountain and West Coast poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, each of whom emphasized breath groups and the visual “field” of the page when imagining a prosody that was structural, but antithetical to accentual syllabic verse. Like performance artists who followed in his wake, I argue that Williams challenged readers to co-create texts to re-evaluate experience as art and art as experience.

I: Charles Olson (1910-1970) was such a scholarly poet that the first critical monograph devoted to him, by Robert von Hallberg, carries the apt title Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art (1978). (1) Because Olson was an avid researcher--ferreting out Melville's annotated copies of Shakespeare, digging with gusto into the bowels of archives, and reading voraciously in a range of fields such as history, linguistics, geography, and archeology--and because, like Ezra Pound, he insisted on basing the truth claims in his poetry, essays, and letters on the fruits of his research, Olson's critics have tended to follow his own lead in discussing the many influences on his work. Taking their cues also from the prodigious labors of Olson scholars George Butterick and Ralph Maud, his critics have busied themselves with tracing the impact on his work of the huge library of texts he is known to have consulted. (2) Critical attention to Olson's reading, annotation, and advocacy of texts in this library has produced much admirable work; the time has come, though, for an opening out in the exploration of intellectual, esthetic, and political traditions from which he drew. It is important to move beyond trends of thought represented in his library, in order to measure him against other significant figures and movements. (3) This more expansive approach to Olson can free his work from the grip of a coterie that has persistently claimed it and can help present its acute insights, brilliant formulations, and methodological breakthroughs to a larger world. (4) One of the major modern philosophers whom Olson can fruitfully meet in dialogue is the pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952). Although there is no mention of Dewey in Olson's published work, in the sources for his work identified by Butterick and Maud, or in the critical literature (aside from one significant contribution by fellow poet Robert Duncan, discussed below), Dewey was, during the Great Depression when Olson was in his twenties and acquiring his intellectual proclivities, a towering figure in American philosophy and education and one of the most prominent left--leaning intellectuals. For a young man whose political, pedagogical, and esthetic interests had a populist and pragmatist flavor, exposure to Dewey would have been unavoidable. In early 1931, at the same time as the appearance of the "Objectivists" issue of Poetry (edited by Louis Zukofsky), Dewey gave the William James Lectures at Harvard (published in 1934 as Art as Experience), formulating a full-fledged pragmatist esthetics that is in many ways consonant with Objectivist poetics. (5) Olson did not attend Dewey's lectures nor did he read at the time the issue of Poetry that launched the Objectivist movement, but his debt to Objectivism has been long established. Likewise, his explicit reliance on Alfred North Whitehead's 1929 Process and Reality has received ample treatment. (6) In order to assess fully what Olson took from the poetry and theory of this period, one would need to supplement Zukofsky's poetics and Whitehead's processoriented philosophy with Dewey's esthetics. In addition, an understanding of Dewey is imperative for gauging Olson's crucial role as final rector of Black Mountain College, an institution modeled specifically on Deweyan principles of education. Most basically, though, Dewey can be seen as the signal pragmatist precursor for Olson's attempts to unite art and experience in a more holistic model of culture than the hierarchical and alienated one that prevailed after World War II. Like Dewey, Olson emphasized the importance of direct experience over received knowledge; valued the rough, unpolished quality of vernacular creation over the normative esthetics of cultural institutions; believed in the pedagogical effectiveness of both experience and art; and saw artistic form as arising out of fully engaged experience. The essay that follows explores in particular three topics that bring Olson and Dewey into dialogue: 1) the gains to be made by including Art as Experience within the Objectivist background out of which Olson's poetry and poetics arose; 2) the meanings that these (and other) thinkers give to the concept of "experience" and how its loss and attempted recapture governs their work; and 3) their shared conviction that experience can only be reclaimed through a new attention to the senses, which belief has influenced not only a number of poets who came after Olson but also the entire movement of performance art. …

The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, edited by Seamus Cooney. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 460 pp. $45.00 (c); $21.95 (p). When Charles Reznikoff was born in 1894 in Brownsville, the Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn, his parents, Satah Yetta and Nathan, recent immigrants from Russia, wished to name him after his maternal grandfather, Yehezqel WoIvovsky. Sarah Yetta asked the Jewish doctor, who was also an anarchist, for the English equivalent of the Hebrew "Yehezqel" (Ezekiel), and the doctor replied, "Call him Charles." Reznikoff felt throughout his life that his given name created a dynamic gap between Hebrew and English, a void he dedicated himself to filling. This symbolic space between "Charles" and "Ezekiel," English and Hebrew, American culture and Jewish culture, marks the unstable territory where Reznikoff's poetry can be found - in company with the cultural endeavors of many other Jewish intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth centuty. In a gemlike poem Reznikoff catches the emotional tenot of the quandary in which he and others found themselves: How difficult for me is Hebrew: even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion. (p. 58) Wanting him to adapt to the new land, Reznikoff's mother insisted that he speak English at home, even though the family language was Yiddish. Likewise, he was sent to public school father than to the Jewish heder, which was conducted in Hebrew. Like many children of recent immigrants, Reznikoff felt estranged from the languages and traditions of his ancestors, although he was in close enough proximity to them that a"return" of sorts was still possible. The "return" did not take the shape of Zionism, as it did for many Jews of his generation; instead, he was drawn to the history of Jewish survival in the dias- pora. Writing about Jewish history was more than an issue of identification-although he admitted the importance of an ethnic identity; what moved him most in Jewish history were the tenacity and inventiveness that made survival possible and the compassionate virtues that arose out of religious and ethical confrontations with adversity. "The Jews typify," he said, "perhaps more than any other people, constant and often victorious struggle against a hostile environment and hostile elements within itself, a struggle which has constantly evolved Jews that are symbols of the admirable" (Tom Sharp, "Reznikoff's Nine Plays" in Milton Hindus, ed., Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984], pp. 272-3). Having identified a subject matter, an American Jew of Reznikoff's generation who wanted to write modern poetry in English had few models. Eschewing Yiddish, Reznikoff chose not to follow the radical Yiddish poets of New York City, and Emma Lazarus seemed a distant, old-fashioned example. The most prominent Jewish poet when Reznikoff began publishing was James Oppenheim (1882-1932), who wrote a vatic, exclamatory verse, deeply indebted to Whitman and Freud. Although championed by critic and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, Oppenheim was as distant in temperament and style from Reznikoff as one could imagine. Rather than look to contemporary Jewish poetry, Reznikoff found a serviceable model for verse in English in the lesser-known (at that time) Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement. Imagist verse was spare and versatile, not freighted with social and cultural associations from which Reznikoff might feel excluded; it was a seemingly objective style that did not prescribe a particular subject matter or a self-conscious poetic voice. …