Wrds
May 26, 2010
The other run in the proprioception package is language as both history (civ and its movements) and a description of parts of speech, etymons, voice, grammar/syntax. But in that sense that language is “in” whatever place, action, feeling surfaces in the poem. I got so excited by this phenomenological doubling that I did a degree in linguistics. It had started for me as prosodics but with the Olson stuff. Meredith Quartermain in her paper for this rountable talks about it as “simultaneity”and usefully quotes from “Against Wisdom as Such”:
…a poem is one example of a man-made continuum “which contains qualities or basic conditions manifesting in themselves simultaneously in various places in a way not to be explained by causal parallelisms (HU 70)
But the range of Olson’s discourse in that “Proprio” chunk was intellectually curious and inviting. The “study” became pretty much what he suggested in “Bridge-Work.”
And peppered throughout:
“creation/ a verb”
“The other knowing is NOUN, proper (proprius)
“nominal-ize”
“& roots: the linguistic values or Indo-
European languages, the
original minting of words
& syntax”
