Donald Wellman
Open field poetics and the practice of autoethnography
Autoethnography provides understanding of my methods and habits as a poet.[1] I have also read the practice of ethnography into the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley who have been my guides as I attempt to open a terrain that implicates the self as an agent among others agents in a field that can be likened to a social drama.[2] The self may be understood as the subject of ethnographic research. The self may also be understood as an entity materialized in the field of the poem. The word “entity” I borrow from Olson’s study of Alfred North Whitehead.[3] Associated with objective as opposed to lyrical concepts of ego, both Olson and Creeley write with a demonstrable interest in ethnography, Olson about the Mayan and Creeley about the Lacandon of Chiapas. Although neither consciously practices autoethnography, in their work, each writes by unpacking clusters of autoethnographic material. Olson’s Maximus displays a cluster of congruent identities that could be said to telescope into one larger than life figure: the Maximus figure associated with creative force, Charles Olson himself as a subject within the poem, and several heroes of historical or mythological import. Olson’s figures often resonate with childhood trauma, often shadowed by an emasculating encounter. Fenris, the wolf who bit off the right hand of Tyr, is an embodiment of castration anxiety that haunts the last pages of Maximus. Creeley’s poetry, far less engaged in mythology or Jungian archetypes than Olson’s, seems to be largely about echoes in the perceptual field, language fragments associated with his mother, father, or one of his wives.
Autoethnography is a method consciously employed in the disciplines of anthropology and composition studies. In anthropological terms, an autoethnography is an account of the writer’s experience as if the writer, himself or herself, were the subject of ethnographic scrutiny, were both self and other. The practice is a means of addressing the participant-observer dialectic that has framed ethnography since Bronislaw Malinowski’s early efforts. The warrant to undertake autoethnography as a form of anthropology is generally ascribed to the influence of Clifford Geertz. In TheInterpretation of Culture, Geertz asserts that “what we call our data are really our constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to" (9).[4] Thus the act of interpretation becomes the subject of reflection, perhaps more so than the data itself; our understanding of culture becomes a semiotic construct. As a result data in the form of clinical observations has been shoved into an unstable range, one not secured scientifically for purposes of analysis. The gain is that now that the biases influencing interpretation become available for inquiry. For instance, from his essay “Deep Play,” we learn who Geertz is, we get a glimmer of how the Balinese see him. His data on the Balinese cock fight is presented in the form of analyzing the amount of money wagered in different circumstances, providing a metrics that avoids story-telling of an identificatory sort and practicing instead supposedly objective modes of analysis and interpretation. Despite this seeming objectivity, Geertz feels obliged to compare the energy of the cockfight to the drama of Shakespeare’s Lear. The reading of his observations is finally subjective and rooted in western notions of self-destructive willfulness. It is because of hovering instability with respect to data and its interpretation that processes of psychological transfer and counter-transfer haunt ethnography. Autoethnography offers options for exploring subjective processes of this order.
Additionally autoethnography is sometimes employed as a genre in the English composition classroom. In her critique of the practice of autoethnography as a method of composition and a model for teaching writing, Mary M. Reda asks,
Can we utilize memory in an autoethnographic project in the same way we use observation, interviews, and material records
in an ethnography? Memory is a self-selecting process, creating patterns through elision, emphasis, forgetfulness. Such
transformations radically alter the "data." We read the writer's retrospective reconstructions .... patterns of memory.
History gives these constructions a teleological imperative: to explain the present though the past. There is no alternate
source against which to "test" the hypotheses presented as inarguable.[5]
Contrary to the self-justifying endgame just described, I argue that embedding autoethnographic data within a poem composed by means of field poetics, as defined by Olson or Robert Duncan, frees the text from slavery to teleological constructs. It transforms time into space to intone the usual Olsonic mantra. As archaeologist, Olson sifts among the contents of his texts to disinter figures in the poet’s psychodrama: the son’s obsession with his father’s death and the husband’s responsibility for the death of his second wife, Bette. An epitaph closes Maximus, “my wife my car my color and myself” (M 635). A symbolic birth begins the epic, “a metal hot from boiling water (M 5).[6] Events of this order implicate the poet in multiple ways that echo throughout Maximus, providing the spine that unifies the epic.[7] Much of this symbolism hinges on a form of primordial guilt, the refusal of the son to lend to his father a suitcase that symbolized for Olson his own stature in the world. He had acquired the suitcase for his European travels as the youthful winner of a national oratory prize. His ego seems to have been invested in this bag. Among multiple variations, it becomes “a box upon the sea” (M 373), the image that closes Maximus II. Karl Olson had requested to borrow his son’s suitcase for his trip to a convention of postal workers (and that trip to was a matter of some pride, the father hoping to set the record straight as to how his supervisors had hounded him in the last years of his postal career), but Charles refused and Karl died soon thereafter, at 53, “too young,” of a stroke, before he could attend the convention in Cleveland, the father blaming the son it seems for his refusal of the loan and the son feeling guilt over how his action was implicated in his father’s death.[8] This is the subject of Olson’s essay, “The Post Office.” There Olson wrote:
It was to be a big thing and when he was leaving he waked me to ask if I would let him take my suitcase which was bigger
and newer than his . I had a use for it that coming weekend which seemed important to me, and I refused. He went away
sore, and the curious thing is, that though my mother and I drove the hundred miles to the hospital the moment we heard
he was sick and though I was with him much of the time until he died. I do not remember that he ever addressed me or
seemed to notice I was there. He pinched my mother’s nose and said something unintelligible from the twist of his mouth
but it is only now that I realize at no time did he admit a notice of me. Or do I exaggerate and punish myself anew for the
guilt of my refusal of the suitcase. (CP 235)
“The Post Office” was written in 1948, fourteen years after the death of Karl Olson. At age 52, Olson reflects on “The Postal Union of the Son with the Father” (M 390). (Date Dec. 62.) And the theme is present in the remarkable Stevens’ song, where Stevens (Gloucester’s first Maximus), Olson’s father and the King, Tyr, and the Fenris, constellate into a figure of the son cannibalizing the father’s body (M 399, Jan. 1964). The pages of Maximus III, beginning with the line “I have been an ability—a machine” (from 1966) were written thirty one years after the death of his father, Olson’s mourning for the loss of his wife Betty in a tragic car accident is here displaced upon memories of the father, sexual insecurity preoccupying the son’s address to loss. Here again are lines implicating the son in the father’s tragedy and the remarkable visual poem dedicated to “My Beloved Father” (M 499). The typography suggests both a rose and a penis as I have argued elsewhere.[9] I have cited these texts to prepare for the entrance of melancholia into the fields of Maximus. [10] I am claiming that these archaeologies of mourning and implicit guilt are a form of autoethnography. The differences and overtones among the contents of an autoethnography constitute a deep reading or embodiment of obsessions and other formative impulses, as if the different times indicated by chronology or mythic allusion, occupied one time or composite field.
Olson combines both the anthropology of the other and personal forms of ethnography as he explores the meaning of his “tribe” or “world” (M 209), his “Human Universe.” His description in that essay of the unselfconscious ways in which the Mayans carried their bodies, like his description of the toddler Kate, “She wears her own face / as we do not (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 19 - A pastoral Letter,” M 92) represents his formulation of an ego-ideal that is narcissistic necessarily but not as damaging to the child as it can be for an adult: this is Freud’s opinion when he distinguishes a “primary and normal narcissism” from adult regressions to the narcissistic stage, regressions possibly to an oral and cannibalistic stage (CPW. 14: 73 ff). The role of narcissism in mourning and melancholy is decisive with respect to Olson’s ability to love and his ability to write.
Is it only by accident that Avicenna writes that melancholics “imagine themselves made kings or wolves” among other obsessions, including an obsession with coitus, when these images or practices are so central to the last pages of Maximus? Consider the appearance of Fenris, after Tyre who is a figure for Olson himself, has put his hand in the mouth of the wolf:
Stevens
went away across Cut Bridge
my father
lost his
life the son
of the King of the Sea walked
away from the filthy wolf
eating the dropped body, the
scavenger (M 403).
I have elsewhere written that Olson suffers from melancholia.[11] It seems to be a disease endemic to New Englanders, Hawthorne and Creeley, as well as Olson. For Freud, melancholia is distinguished from mourning because the libidinal investments have been internalized. In mourning, grief reconciles the subject to loss. That would be the way in which one deals with the loss of the father, and perhaps this is largely true of how both Creeley and Olson experience loss. In melancholia however the subject of loss has become internalized, it is no longer precisely identifiable. Freud writes of it as a shadow upon the soul (CPW 14: 249). It may be that for Olson this shadow has the multiform appearances so often invoked when the subject of the father enters the poem.
For Creeley in turn the object of loss has become language itself, words. The obsession with words is an internalized mourning for the father whom he only knew from the accounts of others. In the poem, “The Doctor” from Memory Garden (1986), images of the father, whom Creeley lost at the age of 4, are vague, a smell of cigarettes. The words that pertain to the father are those of his sister and his mother, words whose realty is echoes, “Nothing said / to me, no words more // than echoes, a /smell I remember (CP 2: 275). Words that are empty signifiers, shadows of unspoken trauma. In his brief Autobiography, Creeley is very trenchant about the facts of his life. He writes “I have no reifying memories that tell me this is where I was then and there. They are far more echoes … . It is the pleasure and authority of writing that it invents a life to live … .[12]
The tenor of Creeley’s melancholy is better perceived in the autoethnographic inflections of his poetry. In “Friends,” a poem from Pieces, he writes “I listen. I had / an ego once upon / a time – I do still, / for you listen to me” (CP 1: 411). Identity is bound up with those semiotic structures identified by Geertz and others. In “Alex’s Art” from the volume Echoes, he concludes the poem by asking, “Can you see me?” The suggestion is that art like memory always takes as its subject the past, “As each so-called moment, each plunge and painful recovery / of breath echoes its precedent, its own so-called raison d’être (CP 2: 430-31). In Windows, the volume immediately before Echoes, Creeley writes of the limits of expression, evoking a profound loneliness and desolation. More cruelly some might call this self-absorption diffidence. In the poem “Wall” we find the lines, “You can push as hard as you want / on this outside side. // It stays limited / to a single face” (CP 2:351). And in a poem entitled “Echoes” from Windows, addressed to William Bronk, he writes, “Was it always you as one, and them as one, / and one another was us, we thought a protestant, a complex // determination of this loneliness of human spaces” (CP 2: 360). We cannot trace this melancholy to the loss of a father as with Olson, although we cannot discount the trauma associated with loss of the father and the loss of the poet’s own eye from an automobile accident for which it could be felt that the father was guilty. Creeley doesn’t dwell on guilt as Olson does. Instead, his poetry is a record of multiple invented conversations with wives and lovers and other poets and artists and in these conversations loss and the difficulties of communication are central.
Charles Altieri has written that in the “conative” style of Creeley’s art, “The poetry dramatizes the affects involved in finding words that do not falsify the energies making direct description an inadequate rendering of the poets world” (41).[13] Altieri prefers the conative to the notational sequences found in much of Creeley’s poetry, described by Altieri as a seemingly endless series of observations. In contrast meaning can be said to come to be in the moment of conative language. In one such moment, the poem finds a song that echoes the immediate presence of sunlight on a landscape described as “miles of spaced echo.” Language finds its form: “Sing me a song / makes beat specific, / takes the sharp air, / echoes this silence”(CP 2: 389-90). I hope to have briefly indicated Altieri’s reading of “My New Mexico,” the first poem in the volume Echoes (1994). For me, moments such as these seem carefully balanced resolutions. The notational is the stuff of autoethnography. It is the sorting among echoes and flickers of light at the edge of consciousness that is the preliminary data in a poetry of resolutions and coherences.
Creeley’s quality of attention to small complex things has been a constant of his poetry. His poems are not little machines like those to which William Carlos Williams aspired in the Preface to The Wedge. They enact the physical presence of small glimmers like that “magnesium flash” presented in “The Way,” the first poem of If I Were Writing This:
There wasn’t choice if one had seen the light,
not of belief, but that soft blue glowing fusion
seemed to appear or disappear with thought,
a minute magnesium flash, a firefly’s illusion.
That “if” (in “if one had seen the light”) moves reality into a personally-marked subspace, from Altieri’s notational to the conative realm. In a tract of Puritanical religious origin to deny that light would be to deny the Lord. The light here is specifically not that “of belief.” Instead Creeley parodies such sensibilities. Still, as in a conversion illumination, there are no options (no ghost of choice because that word “choice” has been so eroded by our consumerist system). Consciousness for Creeley is simply factual (factually embodied), not discursive. It is composed of syllables and lines, measured by hesitation and ellipsis. Disjointed perception has always marked his prosody, sketching a syntax of attention, not exactly similar to Kerouac’s or Ginsberg’s, but akin to these in its insistence on proceeding without revision, in its concentrated bop ethos.[14]
CONCLUSION: Autoethnography is not about identifying or analyzing the self as an internally generated psychological construct, for instance, but about an individuation that would separate the domain of the “Self” from that of the ego in Jungian terms.[15] It is about recording and classifying cultural data that form a terrain and mark the passage of a self through or over that terrain. It is about the data that impinge upon an individual’s life experience and different ways of constructing that data. When viewed poetically, these constructions have a depth, a coherence of their own, are a matrix, but are not in any sense the self itself. It is impossible for a self to identify itself; but with a poetry that incorporates autoethnographic analysis, the individual can begin to account for patterns in his or her lived experience.
WORKS CITED:
Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1982 (abbreviated as CP 1).
- - - - -. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005. Berkeley: U Cal P, 2006 (abbreviated as CP 2).
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” in the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. v. 14: 237-258. London:
Hogarth Press 1957 (abbreviated as CPW).
Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1997 (Abbreviated CP)
- - - - -. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: U Cal P. 1983 (abbreviated as M).
END NOTES:
[1] I address my poetic use of autoethnography in the opening pages of The Cranberry Island Series (Loveland: Dos Madres 2012), “Seen or felt, the self is a product of interactions, a product of the field of shifting and counter-posed physical and communal forces. The self is always partial. An aspect without substance, an ego, only this; but there may be more, spirit for example. Uncountable elements. The practice of ethnographical poetics can be understood as the process of mapping the field of action in which the self becomes aware, uniquely or differently, of its own existence” (5).
[2] Victor Turner defines social drama as "a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type." The stages of social drama include: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism. The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988), 33.
[3] Olson’s study of Process and Reality (NY: Macmillan, Free Press, 1957) is much deeper than mine. I find the following comments by Whitehead on the notion of an entity to be helpful for an appreciation of Olson’s poetry, “An entity is actual, when it has significance for itself. By this is meant that an actual entity functions in respect to its own determination. Thus an actual entity combines self-identity with self-diversity.” Identity and function are bound up with notions of process, “Thus becoming’ is the transformation of incoherence into coherence.” Also: “An actual entity is called the subject of its own immediacy” (25). Actual entities have been compared to Leibniz’s monads. Whitehead himself makes a cursory mention of Leibniz’s monad, identifying it as “a mental state” (19); he also draws on the notion of the ‘compossible” (32). Giles Deleuze has noted this comparison, “How remarkable that Whitehead’s analysis, based on mathematics and physics, appears to be completely independent of Leibniz’s work even though it coincides with it” The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1983), 77. Note also that Miriam Nichols helpfully elaborates some of the common features of Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s philosophies, Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Tuscaloosa: Alabama 2010).
[4] The Interpretation of Culture (NY: Basic Books, 1973), 9.
[5] “Autoethnography as Research Methodology” in Academic Exchange Quarterly (Spring 2007).
[6] And soon thereafter “the thing is born / born of yourself” (M 70).
[7] Following his discussion of the line. My views differ from others grounded in an appreciation of Olson’s objectism. Concerning the text, “When a man’s coffin is the sea,” (where Olson projects the inseparability of death and creation), Paul Bové writes, “Perhaps it is paradoxical, even nonsensical to say that the texts of Olson and the world of texts takes real unity from the ego. In theory Olson passionately denounces the ego. An early essay, “This is Yeats Speaking,” a defense of Pound in 1946, reviles the language of false self-esteem: crowing over, bragging about a triumph over mere personal incoherence Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays (Durham: Duke, 1995), 160 .
[8] See Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (NY: Norton, 1991) 28.
[9] See my “Olson and Subjectivity: 'Projective Verse' and The Uncertainties of Sex,” Olson Now: Documents. Electronic Poetry Center. SUNY Buffalo. Dec. 8, 2005. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/. A revised version appears in Olson's Prose, Gary Grieve-Carlson editor, (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 47-61.
[10] Giorgio Agamben argues, “Nevertheless, an ancient tradition associated the exercise of poetry, philosophy, and the arts with the most wretched of all humors. ‘Why is it,’ asks one of the most extravagant of the Aristotelian problemata, ‘that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the disease arising from the black bile?” Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1992), 13.
[11] "Olson and Melancholy," Worcester Review (Fall 2010).
[12] See Clark, Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place including “Autobiography” (NY: New Directions, 1993), 122-44.
[13] Altieri, Charles. “What Does Echoes Echo” in Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work, ed. Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery (Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2009), 36-49.
[14] An extended for of this argument appears in my essay “Creeley’s Ear,” Jacket Magazine 31(October, 2006). http://jacketmagazine.com/31/rc-wellman.html, 27 Oct. 2014.
[15] To clarify the meaning of Self as used here, I quote Charles Stein, “The Self, the pre-existent totality of the psyche, is both the source of the psyche’s own potential structural stability and the goal of its inward journey. Thus, when the ego is threatened by the manifestation of overwhelming libidinal forces, the Self is able to create compensating conditions … . It does this by causing symbolic images representing its own internal structure to manifest themselves. … The process of individuation, then, is initiated by the Self, and has the Self as its goal. As Olson says, ‘people / don’t change. They only stand more / revealed.’” (M 9). See The Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson and His Use of the Writings of C. J. Jung (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1987), 138.
Open field poetics and the practice of autoethnography
Autoethnography provides understanding of my methods and habits as a poet.[1] I have also read the practice of ethnography into the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley who have been my guides as I attempt to open a terrain that implicates the self as an agent among others agents in a field that can be likened to a social drama.[2] The self may be understood as the subject of ethnographic research. The self may also be understood as an entity materialized in the field of the poem. The word “entity” I borrow from Olson’s study of Alfred North Whitehead.[3] Associated with objective as opposed to lyrical concepts of ego, both Olson and Creeley write with a demonstrable interest in ethnography, Olson about the Mayan and Creeley about the Lacandon of Chiapas. Although neither consciously practices autoethnography, in their work, each writes by unpacking clusters of autoethnographic material. Olson’s Maximus displays a cluster of congruent identities that could be said to telescope into one larger than life figure: the Maximus figure associated with creative force, Charles Olson himself as a subject within the poem, and several heroes of historical or mythological import. Olson’s figures often resonate with childhood trauma, often shadowed by an emasculating encounter. Fenris, the wolf who bit off the right hand of Tyr, is an embodiment of castration anxiety that haunts the last pages of Maximus. Creeley’s poetry, far less engaged in mythology or Jungian archetypes than Olson’s, seems to be largely about echoes in the perceptual field, language fragments associated with his mother, father, or one of his wives.
Autoethnography is a method consciously employed in the disciplines of anthropology and composition studies. In anthropological terms, an autoethnography is an account of the writer’s experience as if the writer, himself or herself, were the subject of ethnographic scrutiny, were both self and other. The practice is a means of addressing the participant-observer dialectic that has framed ethnography since Bronislaw Malinowski’s early efforts. The warrant to undertake autoethnography as a form of anthropology is generally ascribed to the influence of Clifford Geertz. In TheInterpretation of Culture, Geertz asserts that “what we call our data are really our constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to" (9).[4] Thus the act of interpretation becomes the subject of reflection, perhaps more so than the data itself; our understanding of culture becomes a semiotic construct. As a result data in the form of clinical observations has been shoved into an unstable range, one not secured scientifically for purposes of analysis. The gain is that now that the biases influencing interpretation become available for inquiry. For instance, from his essay “Deep Play,” we learn who Geertz is, we get a glimmer of how the Balinese see him. His data on the Balinese cock fight is presented in the form of analyzing the amount of money wagered in different circumstances, providing a metrics that avoids story-telling of an identificatory sort and practicing instead supposedly objective modes of analysis and interpretation. Despite this seeming objectivity, Geertz feels obliged to compare the energy of the cockfight to the drama of Shakespeare’s Lear. The reading of his observations is finally subjective and rooted in western notions of self-destructive willfulness. It is because of hovering instability with respect to data and its interpretation that processes of psychological transfer and counter-transfer haunt ethnography. Autoethnography offers options for exploring subjective processes of this order.
Additionally autoethnography is sometimes employed as a genre in the English composition classroom. In her critique of the practice of autoethnography as a method of composition and a model for teaching writing, Mary M. Reda asks,
Can we utilize memory in an autoethnographic project in the same way we use observation, interviews, and material records
in an ethnography? Memory is a self-selecting process, creating patterns through elision, emphasis, forgetfulness. Such
transformations radically alter the "data." We read the writer's retrospective reconstructions .... patterns of memory.
History gives these constructions a teleological imperative: to explain the present though the past. There is no alternate
source against which to "test" the hypotheses presented as inarguable.[5]
Contrary to the self-justifying endgame just described, I argue that embedding autoethnographic data within a poem composed by means of field poetics, as defined by Olson or Robert Duncan, frees the text from slavery to teleological constructs. It transforms time into space to intone the usual Olsonic mantra. As archaeologist, Olson sifts among the contents of his texts to disinter figures in the poet’s psychodrama: the son’s obsession with his father’s death and the husband’s responsibility for the death of his second wife, Bette. An epitaph closes Maximus, “my wife my car my color and myself” (M 635). A symbolic birth begins the epic, “a metal hot from boiling water (M 5).[6] Events of this order implicate the poet in multiple ways that echo throughout Maximus, providing the spine that unifies the epic.[7] Much of this symbolism hinges on a form of primordial guilt, the refusal of the son to lend to his father a suitcase that symbolized for Olson his own stature in the world. He had acquired the suitcase for his European travels as the youthful winner of a national oratory prize. His ego seems to have been invested in this bag. Among multiple variations, it becomes “a box upon the sea” (M 373), the image that closes Maximus II. Karl Olson had requested to borrow his son’s suitcase for his trip to a convention of postal workers (and that trip to was a matter of some pride, the father hoping to set the record straight as to how his supervisors had hounded him in the last years of his postal career), but Charles refused and Karl died soon thereafter, at 53, “too young,” of a stroke, before he could attend the convention in Cleveland, the father blaming the son it seems for his refusal of the loan and the son feeling guilt over how his action was implicated in his father’s death.[8] This is the subject of Olson’s essay, “The Post Office.” There Olson wrote:
It was to be a big thing and when he was leaving he waked me to ask if I would let him take my suitcase which was bigger
and newer than his . I had a use for it that coming weekend which seemed important to me, and I refused. He went away
sore, and the curious thing is, that though my mother and I drove the hundred miles to the hospital the moment we heard
he was sick and though I was with him much of the time until he died. I do not remember that he ever addressed me or
seemed to notice I was there. He pinched my mother’s nose and said something unintelligible from the twist of his mouth
but it is only now that I realize at no time did he admit a notice of me. Or do I exaggerate and punish myself anew for the
guilt of my refusal of the suitcase. (CP 235)
“The Post Office” was written in 1948, fourteen years after the death of Karl Olson. At age 52, Olson reflects on “The Postal Union of the Son with the Father” (M 390). (Date Dec. 62.) And the theme is present in the remarkable Stevens’ song, where Stevens (Gloucester’s first Maximus), Olson’s father and the King, Tyr, and the Fenris, constellate into a figure of the son cannibalizing the father’s body (M 399, Jan. 1964). The pages of Maximus III, beginning with the line “I have been an ability—a machine” (from 1966) were written thirty one years after the death of his father, Olson’s mourning for the loss of his wife Betty in a tragic car accident is here displaced upon memories of the father, sexual insecurity preoccupying the son’s address to loss. Here again are lines implicating the son in the father’s tragedy and the remarkable visual poem dedicated to “My Beloved Father” (M 499). The typography suggests both a rose and a penis as I have argued elsewhere.[9] I have cited these texts to prepare for the entrance of melancholia into the fields of Maximus. [10] I am claiming that these archaeologies of mourning and implicit guilt are a form of autoethnography. The differences and overtones among the contents of an autoethnography constitute a deep reading or embodiment of obsessions and other formative impulses, as if the different times indicated by chronology or mythic allusion, occupied one time or composite field.
Olson combines both the anthropology of the other and personal forms of ethnography as he explores the meaning of his “tribe” or “world” (M 209), his “Human Universe.” His description in that essay of the unselfconscious ways in which the Mayans carried their bodies, like his description of the toddler Kate, “She wears her own face / as we do not (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 19 - A pastoral Letter,” M 92) represents his formulation of an ego-ideal that is narcissistic necessarily but not as damaging to the child as it can be for an adult: this is Freud’s opinion when he distinguishes a “primary and normal narcissism” from adult regressions to the narcissistic stage, regressions possibly to an oral and cannibalistic stage (CPW. 14: 73 ff). The role of narcissism in mourning and melancholy is decisive with respect to Olson’s ability to love and his ability to write.
Is it only by accident that Avicenna writes that melancholics “imagine themselves made kings or wolves” among other obsessions, including an obsession with coitus, when these images or practices are so central to the last pages of Maximus? Consider the appearance of Fenris, after Tyre who is a figure for Olson himself, has put his hand in the mouth of the wolf:
Stevens
went away across Cut Bridge
my father
lost his
life the son
of the King of the Sea walked
away from the filthy wolf
eating the dropped body, the
scavenger (M 403).
I have elsewhere written that Olson suffers from melancholia.[11] It seems to be a disease endemic to New Englanders, Hawthorne and Creeley, as well as Olson. For Freud, melancholia is distinguished from mourning because the libidinal investments have been internalized. In mourning, grief reconciles the subject to loss. That would be the way in which one deals with the loss of the father, and perhaps this is largely true of how both Creeley and Olson experience loss. In melancholia however the subject of loss has become internalized, it is no longer precisely identifiable. Freud writes of it as a shadow upon the soul (CPW 14: 249). It may be that for Olson this shadow has the multiform appearances so often invoked when the subject of the father enters the poem.
For Creeley in turn the object of loss has become language itself, words. The obsession with words is an internalized mourning for the father whom he only knew from the accounts of others. In the poem, “The Doctor” from Memory Garden (1986), images of the father, whom Creeley lost at the age of 4, are vague, a smell of cigarettes. The words that pertain to the father are those of his sister and his mother, words whose realty is echoes, “Nothing said / to me, no words more // than echoes, a /smell I remember (CP 2: 275). Words that are empty signifiers, shadows of unspoken trauma. In his brief Autobiography, Creeley is very trenchant about the facts of his life. He writes “I have no reifying memories that tell me this is where I was then and there. They are far more echoes … . It is the pleasure and authority of writing that it invents a life to live … .[12]
The tenor of Creeley’s melancholy is better perceived in the autoethnographic inflections of his poetry. In “Friends,” a poem from Pieces, he writes “I listen. I had / an ego once upon / a time – I do still, / for you listen to me” (CP 1: 411). Identity is bound up with those semiotic structures identified by Geertz and others. In “Alex’s Art” from the volume Echoes, he concludes the poem by asking, “Can you see me?” The suggestion is that art like memory always takes as its subject the past, “As each so-called moment, each plunge and painful recovery / of breath echoes its precedent, its own so-called raison d’être (CP 2: 430-31). In Windows, the volume immediately before Echoes, Creeley writes of the limits of expression, evoking a profound loneliness and desolation. More cruelly some might call this self-absorption diffidence. In the poem “Wall” we find the lines, “You can push as hard as you want / on this outside side. // It stays limited / to a single face” (CP 2:351). And in a poem entitled “Echoes” from Windows, addressed to William Bronk, he writes, “Was it always you as one, and them as one, / and one another was us, we thought a protestant, a complex // determination of this loneliness of human spaces” (CP 2: 360). We cannot trace this melancholy to the loss of a father as with Olson, although we cannot discount the trauma associated with loss of the father and the loss of the poet’s own eye from an automobile accident for which it could be felt that the father was guilty. Creeley doesn’t dwell on guilt as Olson does. Instead, his poetry is a record of multiple invented conversations with wives and lovers and other poets and artists and in these conversations loss and the difficulties of communication are central.
Charles Altieri has written that in the “conative” style of Creeley’s art, “The poetry dramatizes the affects involved in finding words that do not falsify the energies making direct description an inadequate rendering of the poets world” (41).[13] Altieri prefers the conative to the notational sequences found in much of Creeley’s poetry, described by Altieri as a seemingly endless series of observations. In contrast meaning can be said to come to be in the moment of conative language. In one such moment, the poem finds a song that echoes the immediate presence of sunlight on a landscape described as “miles of spaced echo.” Language finds its form: “Sing me a song / makes beat specific, / takes the sharp air, / echoes this silence”(CP 2: 389-90). I hope to have briefly indicated Altieri’s reading of “My New Mexico,” the first poem in the volume Echoes (1994). For me, moments such as these seem carefully balanced resolutions. The notational is the stuff of autoethnography. It is the sorting among echoes and flickers of light at the edge of consciousness that is the preliminary data in a poetry of resolutions and coherences.
Creeley’s quality of attention to small complex things has been a constant of his poetry. His poems are not little machines like those to which William Carlos Williams aspired in the Preface to The Wedge. They enact the physical presence of small glimmers like that “magnesium flash” presented in “The Way,” the first poem of If I Were Writing This:
There wasn’t choice if one had seen the light,
not of belief, but that soft blue glowing fusion
seemed to appear or disappear with thought,
a minute magnesium flash, a firefly’s illusion.
That “if” (in “if one had seen the light”) moves reality into a personally-marked subspace, from Altieri’s notational to the conative realm. In a tract of Puritanical religious origin to deny that light would be to deny the Lord. The light here is specifically not that “of belief.” Instead Creeley parodies such sensibilities. Still, as in a conversion illumination, there are no options (no ghost of choice because that word “choice” has been so eroded by our consumerist system). Consciousness for Creeley is simply factual (factually embodied), not discursive. It is composed of syllables and lines, measured by hesitation and ellipsis. Disjointed perception has always marked his prosody, sketching a syntax of attention, not exactly similar to Kerouac’s or Ginsberg’s, but akin to these in its insistence on proceeding without revision, in its concentrated bop ethos.[14]
CONCLUSION: Autoethnography is not about identifying or analyzing the self as an internally generated psychological construct, for instance, but about an individuation that would separate the domain of the “Self” from that of the ego in Jungian terms.[15] It is about recording and classifying cultural data that form a terrain and mark the passage of a self through or over that terrain. It is about the data that impinge upon an individual’s life experience and different ways of constructing that data. When viewed poetically, these constructions have a depth, a coherence of their own, are a matrix, but are not in any sense the self itself. It is impossible for a self to identify itself; but with a poetry that incorporates autoethnographic analysis, the individual can begin to account for patterns in his or her lived experience.
WORKS CITED:
Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1982 (abbreviated as CP 1).
- - - - -. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005. Berkeley: U Cal P, 2006 (abbreviated as CP 2).
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” in the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. v. 14: 237-258. London:
Hogarth Press 1957 (abbreviated as CPW).
Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1997 (Abbreviated CP)
- - - - -. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: U Cal P. 1983 (abbreviated as M).
END NOTES:
[1] I address my poetic use of autoethnography in the opening pages of The Cranberry Island Series (Loveland: Dos Madres 2012), “Seen or felt, the self is a product of interactions, a product of the field of shifting and counter-posed physical and communal forces. The self is always partial. An aspect without substance, an ego, only this; but there may be more, spirit for example. Uncountable elements. The practice of ethnographical poetics can be understood as the process of mapping the field of action in which the self becomes aware, uniquely or differently, of its own existence” (5).
[2] Victor Turner defines social drama as "a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type." The stages of social drama include: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism. The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988), 33.
[3] Olson’s study of Process and Reality (NY: Macmillan, Free Press, 1957) is much deeper than mine. I find the following comments by Whitehead on the notion of an entity to be helpful for an appreciation of Olson’s poetry, “An entity is actual, when it has significance for itself. By this is meant that an actual entity functions in respect to its own determination. Thus an actual entity combines self-identity with self-diversity.” Identity and function are bound up with notions of process, “Thus becoming’ is the transformation of incoherence into coherence.” Also: “An actual entity is called the subject of its own immediacy” (25). Actual entities have been compared to Leibniz’s monads. Whitehead himself makes a cursory mention of Leibniz’s monad, identifying it as “a mental state” (19); he also draws on the notion of the ‘compossible” (32). Giles Deleuze has noted this comparison, “How remarkable that Whitehead’s analysis, based on mathematics and physics, appears to be completely independent of Leibniz’s work even though it coincides with it” The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1983), 77. Note also that Miriam Nichols helpfully elaborates some of the common features of Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s philosophies, Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Tuscaloosa: Alabama 2010).
[4] The Interpretation of Culture (NY: Basic Books, 1973), 9.
[5] “Autoethnography as Research Methodology” in Academic Exchange Quarterly (Spring 2007).
[6] And soon thereafter “the thing is born / born of yourself” (M 70).
[7] Following his discussion of the line. My views differ from others grounded in an appreciation of Olson’s objectism. Concerning the text, “When a man’s coffin is the sea,” (where Olson projects the inseparability of death and creation), Paul Bové writes, “Perhaps it is paradoxical, even nonsensical to say that the texts of Olson and the world of texts takes real unity from the ego. In theory Olson passionately denounces the ego. An early essay, “This is Yeats Speaking,” a defense of Pound in 1946, reviles the language of false self-esteem: crowing over, bragging about a triumph over mere personal incoherence Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays (Durham: Duke, 1995), 160 .
[8] See Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (NY: Norton, 1991) 28.
[9] See my “Olson and Subjectivity: 'Projective Verse' and The Uncertainties of Sex,” Olson Now: Documents. Electronic Poetry Center. SUNY Buffalo. Dec. 8, 2005. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/. A revised version appears in Olson's Prose, Gary Grieve-Carlson editor, (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 47-61.
[10] Giorgio Agamben argues, “Nevertheless, an ancient tradition associated the exercise of poetry, philosophy, and the arts with the most wretched of all humors. ‘Why is it,’ asks one of the most extravagant of the Aristotelian problemata, ‘that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the disease arising from the black bile?” Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1992), 13.
[11] "Olson and Melancholy," Worcester Review (Fall 2010).
[12] See Clark, Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place including “Autobiography” (NY: New Directions, 1993), 122-44.
[13] Altieri, Charles. “What Does Echoes Echo” in Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work, ed. Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery (Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2009), 36-49.
[14] An extended for of this argument appears in my essay “Creeley’s Ear,” Jacket Magazine 31(October, 2006). http://jacketmagazine.com/31/rc-wellman.html, 27 Oct. 2014.
[15] To clarify the meaning of Self as used here, I quote Charles Stein, “The Self, the pre-existent totality of the psyche, is both the source of the psyche’s own potential structural stability and the goal of its inward journey. Thus, when the ego is threatened by the manifestation of overwhelming libidinal forces, the Self is able to create compensating conditions … . It does this by causing symbolic images representing its own internal structure to manifest themselves. … The process of individuation, then, is initiated by the Self, and has the Self as its goal. As Olson says, ‘people / don’t change. They only stand more / revealed.’” (M 9). See The Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson and His Use of the Writings of C. J. Jung (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1987), 138.