Hugo House Organic Poetry Course, April 12 – May 17, 2007

Course Outline

Week II: The Opening of the Field: Olson and Duncan.

1)      Madlib II

2)      Group thoughts after week one.

3)      Charles Olson –

a)      Born December 27, 1910 in Worcester, MA. (d-1.10.1970, NYC, Liver Cancer)

b)      Educated as Wesleyan and Harvard, taught at Harvard, Clark and Radcliffe. During WWII worked in the Office of War Information as an Assistant Chief of the Foreign Language Division. (Worked alongside Alan Cranston.)

c)      Started writing poetry after the age of 30.

d)      1947 his first book Call Me Ishmael, on Mellville’s Moby Dick published.

e)      1950 published Projective Verse as a pamphlet and 1951 William Carlos Williams published a large section of it in his autobiography.

f)        1953 – The Mayan Letters, written to Robert Creeley from Mexico where he was studying Mayan hieroglyphics, cover a range of subjects--mythology, anthropology, language, and cultural history.

g)      Taught at Black Mountain College and was rector from 1951 to 1956.

h)      Published The Maximus Poems in 1960.

i)        Read The Kingfishers, Letter 27, and The Dead Prey Upon Us. Play:

j)        Nelson’s Olson essays: Dualism and Olson’s Antidote and The Sound of the Field.

4)      Writing Exercise One – Grid exercise. Subject (Death).

5)      Robert Duncan –

a)      Born January 7, 1919 in Oakland, CA. (d 3, Feb 1988, SF, Kidney Failure). His foster parents were devout Theosophists and they chose their adopted son after consulting horoscopes and astrological charts relating to his birth…grew up in an atmosphere of seances, meetings of the Hermetic Brotherhood, and a library of occult literature…Following an accident on the snow at age three he was cross-eyed and saw double, a fact that seemed to confirm the "double vision" of his parents' world. The twinning of objects in his sight later entered his poetry as a motif of the dual realities of sight and imagination. Educated at UC Berkeley and briefly at Black Mountain College, where he also taught briefly. Discharged from the Army for homosexuality.

b)      His reputation as a major poet was established in the 60’s with three collections, The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968). Understood some of the deeper notions of emerging Field Theory and in correspondence with Denise Levertov, used the word Organic in connection to the process of composition he was developing.

c)      From Letters, read XI: At The End of a Period. From CD play Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. From Bending the Bow read The War from the introduction, Structure of Rime XXV, My Mother Would Be a Falconress (or play from CD), and Uprising: Passages XXV. From Duncan/Levertov Letters: Page 34 (on use of language to persuade), 118 (revision), 466 (on poem being beyond recognition), 405 (conventional, free verse and organic) and 669 (on the poet’s role).

6)      Writing Exercise II – Prepositional Phrase Repetition (p13 of Curriculum Guide).

       In Duncan’s work…