Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay articulates an approach to poetry that emphasizes open form (in contrast to closed forms of metric verse) as a new formalism in American poetry. It was written in the immediate post-WWII era, a time when traditional forms were threatening to derail the trajectory of early modernist literary experiments. However, Olson did not consider “projective verse” to be a new practice. Instead, he viewed it as a lost practice, subsumed by the metrical rigidity from the late Elizabethan era onward. He saw its resurgence in the poetry of the Imagists, in Ezra Pound’s dictum to compose to the musical phrase, not to the metronome. Articulating his thoughts, Olson provides valuable insights into the dynamic potential of modernist poetics, at the same time theorizing the personal state of mind that will create such work. More than anything, he advocates for poetry that produces living energy, that enacts the vitality of human existence both for the writer and for the reader.
Projective Verse, or Open Field Composition
By “projective,” Olson refers to the breath that reconnects individual speech to written poetry, as well as the manner in which poets can indicate that breath through poetic forms of line, space, notation, and offset margins. In the process, he establishes a unique perspective on authorial intent, one that doesn’t emphasize a poem’s sense of meaning so much as its breath and vibrancy, its sense of existence. The poem as a fully realized object (of sound, intellect, and lively human spirit) is the goal of Olson’s poetics. The process of bringing it to life makes up the heart of his essay. More than anything, he conceives of the poem as a field of high energy (channeled through a poet into the written work where it is received by readers) that must be in a constant state of movement and dynamic tension.
The Syllable
To enter the mind-set from which such poetry can emerge, Olson develops an interactive theory of hearing and breath, of mind and heart: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” More simply, he advocates for a poetry in which the practitioners develop a keen ear for the sound of each individual syllable, to the way in which these units of speech “dance” within the interactive lines of verse. Providing a floor for this dance is the breath on which the syllables move. Through an animated application of the poetic line – a precise enactment of speech - emerging forms of verse will be made to move, to become dramatic, lively, and filled with breath.
He relates this practice first to the syllable, to the working of sound through a poet’s intellect - the place from which a poem initially emerges. As verse develops on the page, it is the poet’s responsibility, while in the act of writing, to consciously enter into the dance of syllables – to mindfully follow their rhythms as they emerge. To choose words wisely, with an emphasis on their properties as interrelated aural objects, is the place in which projective verse, and its developing sense, begins to take form. It is an issue of heightened awareness, the harnessing of energy, and the creation of a formal structure derived from the substance of the poem itself.
The Line
But a poem that reflects intellect alone, in Olson’s view, is a poem that does not achieve its potential for dramatic response, or its ability to capture the human voice in epic proportions. He thus turns to breath, where the life energy of a poem is made manifest, to examine the means by which a poet indicates how a reader may, “silently or otherwise,” voice the poem. If the syllable begins in a poet’s attention to mindful hearing, Olson stresses that these initial perceptions must now travel “down through the working of [a poet’s] own throat, to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings.” He emphasizes the nuanced speech act, conveyed through line and notation, as the means by which we connect to a realization of ourselves as natural objects - not separate from a world of things, but fully part of its dynamic force and its energy. Rather than channeling intellect directly outward into verse, Olson challenges us to direct it inward, where it emerges as breath. Breath, he says, “ is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. When a poet rests in these as they are in himself … then he works” in a projective scale - and the resulting verse resonates beyond the limited ego of the poet that produced it.
In practice, Olson's line is now a familiar form of poetic technique. Where the line ends, a pause is indicated - the halting of breath. Space, as poetic notation, indicates other pauses of varying lengths. The slash, employed within the line, indicates a shorter pause, but in a manner different than a comma, allowing us to read, and thus hear, a pause separate from its grammatical, intellectualized sense. Breaking the line mid-word, on a syllable, draws the breath out, enacting spoken nuance. Offset margins, varying by line, creates further nuance of both thought and breath. When a reader recognizes the intent of these indicators, a poem's content changes, releasing nuances that extend beyond the meaning of words and rhetoric devices.
The Field
What Olson advocates is an extension of modernist practice, aided by the introduction of typewriters, to clearly indicate sound - and its absence - in the musical phrase of human speech. More than the overt meaning, or sense, of a poem, Olson is driving toward poetry as a play of aural objects in a field of human speech and action. By turning the mind inward, to the breath and heart, he sees the potential for living energy to be manifested in the form of open verse. Toward this end, Olson opposes the place of rime and meter at the forefront of formal poetics, seeking to elevate a heightened attention to syllable and line, to spontaneous practice as opposed to intellectualized, traditional structures. In other words, for Olson, the objective of verse is not to find words that satisfy a pre-established form, but rather to create original formality in a field of energy from which human life resonates.
Freed from the constraints of meter and the pre-ordained line, Olson sees poetry returning to the energy and spirit of the epic poem, a poetry that directs the mind through the heart into a voice that is at once vibrant and lively. The field is the place where this takes shape - in the act of its own transcription. Simply put, it is an open form verse that adheres to a dynamic sense of structure arising spontaneously from the act of writing. The field itself is the page on which a poet now has tools to score, as if on a musical staff, the nuances of speech.
A New Formalism
Two final principals in projective verse (attributed to Robert Creeley and Edward Dahlberg, respectively) are as follows: “Form is never more than an extension of content” and “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” High energy is the crux of projective verse - verbalized perceptions that move quickly and efficiently, leading to subsequent perceptions in a way that does not allow a poem’s energy to lag, or to be sidetracked, by poetic and intellectual conceits. In the shaping of these energies, a dynamic form emerges.
Keeping this energy moving, the poet works attentively and interactively in the field of the poem - allowing its form to arise from the human dynamics of sound, breath, and meaning. In projective verse, a poet needs to be fully aware of syllables - their dance within the breath - and allow a poem's semantic sense and structure to be shaped not by preconceived ideas, but by the fully engaged process of writing in the open field. As an articulation of formal poetics, this might seem contradictory to some, but the emphasis is on the active creation of poetic structure - how form can be integrally related to the content of a poem - in a manner that overflows with energy and human spirit.
Further Reading:
Charles Olson's "Projective Verse"
Black Mountain Poets (Wikipedia)
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