Precis
June 4, 2010
I like the way the blog plays around in the writing with memory. I did it after reading Susan Schulz’s Dementia Blog in which she points out that a blog is written forwards but read backwards.
So the coagulation around “Place; & Names” (the “complementarity’” in Olson’s equation) of memory viz history viz event viz body viz name/naming viz dementia, detoxify (i.e. de- as opposed to re-) viz time/timing viz cleft and juncture viz experience viz bio viz doorway viz verb, noun, etcetera viz “Mountain” and back to the False Laws of Narrative.
So, to begin again, the blog sets up off of Olson’s reading the morning of July 29, 1963 at the Vancouver Poetry Conference of his “short piece” called “Place; & Names” in answer to Creeley’s question – “what is history.” I was as struck by that piece as I had been earlier by Snyder’s poem “Riprap” for the possibilies of engaging the local, the immediate, and the physical. In other words, I could write about the Kootenays, about the palpable surfaces of the place, and, eventually, about a self that wasn’t contained by someone else’s history.
Apropos of “Place; & Names,” I point to a discussion I had with Louis Cabri for his edition of my selected, The False Laws of Narrative, around some notions about “naming” that arise from a discussion of my poem “Akokli (Goat) Creek.”
Then, reading forwards, I shift to “Proprioception,’” mentioning how that whole run that Leroi Jones published in Kulchur and Yugen (Proprioception, Postscript to Proprioception and Logography, Theory of Society, Bridge Work, the hinges of civilization to be put back on the door, and GRAMMAR – a book.” So the contiguity of the physical and the linguistic (verb, noun, nominalize, etc.) came into the scene.
I get briefly, with the help of reading Meredith’s hit on “simultaneity” for this roundtable, to the biotext and the “axe” of synchronicity.
I shift here to Charles Stein’s book on Olson’s “Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum” and Jung and synchronicity and the White Queen saying to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” The resonating questions re my mother’s dementia.
All those “places” mentioned above (event, body, history, nominative power, and so forth) start to swirl around one another and I’m reminded again of the multiple and generative expanse of Olson’s intellect.
What has all been so OPENING for me. Not that these puncta are always apparent, but somehow have become embedded (somagenetically?) into what is, for me, some kind of soul food.
