Charles Olson: Closet Musician?

At one point in “Projective Verse” Charles Olson refers to a poet as “the composer.” He also writes that Cummings, Pound and Williams “each […] used the machine as a scoring to his composing.” He further imagines poetry being read much like a score: “If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time.” Certainly poetry and music are historically closely related, but what does Olson mean to do by highlighting this explicit turn? In other words, why does Olson insist on this vocabulary?

Olson’s anti-grammatical and anti-descriptive stance coupled with his famous definition of a poem as “energy transferred” also supports what we may see as Olson’s call for a musical bent in poets. After all, what does music—at least in the traditional way of viewing it as the “universal language”—do but transfer energy non-grammatically and non-descriptively? The way that Olson talks about the typewriter, as an instrument particularly suited for the projective writer, should also be taken into consideration. “For the first time,” writes Olson, “the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had.”

The argument that a machine needed to be invented for a writer to be able to “record the listening he has done to his own speech” still seems quite spectacular. The notion that a machine enabled bodies to mimic speaking bodies to a greater extent leads to a number of other speculations. This argument turns Olson away from an oral tradition that, at first, one may think he is trying to reclaim to a new understanding. Not one in which voice and word combine, but one in which voice is played through, or scored by, a particular instrument which leads me to wonder what particular aspects of this instrument led Olson to make such a startling claim? Or, what did we lose once we started typing on a computer?


P.S. to Self: It is surprising or obvious that he is writing this near the same time that Cage is doing this?