By Adam Iddings

What is the field? Was ist das Feld? Ist das Feld grün? In a letter to Elaine Feinstein Charles Olson expostulates: “I believe in Truth!” Then in parentheses, in this version I’ve got here in front of me (New Direction paperback, 1966, 13th printing, published simultaneously in Canada, $12.95 U.S.D. with an introduction by Robert Creeley), he says or I should say it is written—he writes— “(Wahrheit).” So my invocation of the German is not totally irreverent. First you’ve got the Feld, then you’ve got the truth, the Wahrheit. There are objects, and there are subjects. We are subjects, but we are meant to make objects? One of the aims of Olson’s truth is a kind of cosmic harmony with Nature, rather than a kind of enforced conformity with representations of Nature. It’s the breath—when in doubt, take a breath. 

We aren’t subjects. We’re objects. Like wood? Yes, like wood— “as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature”—Olson on a good line. We are lines. What we have unwittingly composed here is a hierarchy: cosmos / nature / man / line, and breath running all through ‘em. “Breath is man’s special qualification as an animal,” and “Sound is a dimension he has extended.” “Language,” Olson goes on, “is one of his proudest acts.” And “all act springs” from “where breath has its beginnings. Now to begin. 

I’m at my kitchen table (it’s wooden!) drinking some tea (blowing on it cuz it’s hot—breath!) trying to in my mind distance myself from these weird poetic formulas in order to come to the real prized thing (an object!): my own understanding, in my own words, in plainest (or planest) form. Basically. You breathe. And become interrelated with. A reality that has its own. Language. 

Not the language of a low low price, and not the language of a score or a click or a pick or welcome or become a member or (scrolling through my e-mail as it’s so easily found there) don’t miss this limited time offer or feed or the news or even time. The language is not a social so much as a psychic or oneiric one, you know, from before, from before the letter, before interpretation, from the trace of the soul in a dream. Right? Wahrheit. “Wahrheit: I find the contemporary substitution of society for the cosmos captive and deathly.” OK; Olson to Feinstein 1959. Bring up the breath from through and within yourself to speak a truth even the word can attest to. Project into the field the green voice of the leaves moving this morning or right now right outside the door, now or now on the screen where you will have been reading, maybe it’ll be for you the flicker of the screen when it loads or scrolls (changes from taps) so that the poem produced by the truth everywhere is it. 

Plainest form. A zen master once said When I’m hungry I eat, and when I’m tired I sleep. Nietzsche said There is no I that thinks. Somewhere in between there was Eugene Herrigel’s archery teacher who said: “The right art…is purposeless, aimless! You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.” But it’s always already happening. Down here. In the earth. In the breath. What it comes down to —I’m paraphrasing Olson again—again—again—now—is the “getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego.” How to do that is explained elsewhere in Olson, although the logic of his new projective landscape yields to pretty much no already-made plow.

Sheaf. A February Sheaf. Re, a drop of golden sun. Mi, a name I call myself. I read this book by Gerrit Lansing who was Olson’s greatest pal. Somehow the guy was along for the whole blustery business from the 50s on and this February Sheaf only breaks into the ray of the drops of the golden sun (with real concentration now) in 2003. Does it matter? Dost my prolixity belie my or mein argument? How can the I who doesn’t think read? In my life, my history, or this history anyway, the order was: Robert Rauschenberg, Black Mountain, Wikipedia, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams, and then Gerrit. After literally having finished Williams with “Onan’s Auto Service,” I was finally pleased to read in Lansing the following: “(from the Egyptian / God stiffened; / hand rubbed up and down his mighty member / world upon world cascades from his cock.” No I but the world. Maybe the differences over this same sort of stroke work to typify each of these respective projective poets, Williams and Lansing. Onan and God. Or, put another way, these two ejaculations diverge in a yellow wood. One wood is in North Carolina with the mechanics and the other is in New England, with a divine right. Williams delights in discovering the ready poeisis of an originary Appalachian America. Lansing opts for a more cosmogonic Cambridge kind of conceit. Now—now—but no hierarchies. What Lansing does is he gets way up in his head and births Athena while Williams is scrounging through a Great Olympian Yard Sale and finding the Odyssey’s muse. The road less traveled gets you to Greece, I guess. Whatever the case, I think we can at least assert that, as far as poems about come go, Lansing’s is pretty heady. That’s what I thought. But that don’t think. No I. 

I don’t know all about Lansing, but I think, explicating some more, and really (with concentrated effort) reaching respectably for no author no more, the Egyptian is the key. As in the key to the tomb of Tutankhamun. If you got it, don’t go in. It’s a joke! Or maybe it’s a trap. How am I supposed to intermediate myself from the ego if I’m all up in Egyptian Egyptology like reading damn hieroglyphics carved on the collective skull. And thence is God’s goo. Get it? Every ten thousandth thing belongs to the same one nullity, even as it poots forth a poem. Do I contradict myself? Very well then… I contradict myself. I shouldn’t be interpreting anyway. Whitman meanwhile coming again and again and again over the resonance of living and buried speech. Leaves of Grass. A February Sheaf. Is a sheaf a leaf? Wot isn’t the fold? A sheaf of paper. Nature. Same earth. Same urge. 

The best sheaf in Lansing is “In Erasmus Darwin’s Generous Light.” It is at least the most read. “For Thorpe Feidt,” a painter, who has been painting a series called The Ambiguities since the 70s. Various ambiguous explorations of narrative as any kind of outwardly expanding space. “Propounding,” Lansing says, in an essay on Feidt. Right. In which Lansing asks with the same earnestness as the question I had, “What is a series?” Context / nature / form / content, and breath running all through ‘em. Not a poem. Again. And I keep saying that because for some reason after telling Feinstein about topos Olson says—or it is written: “Place it!  again I drag it back: place…makes it possible to name.” 

I call myself back. For Thorpe Feidt. That’s the context. The context is the cosmos and the question. Nature is the movies. Do, a deer, a female deer. Bambi. Said aloud. Doh, I messed up. 

Lansing’s poem’s contents, out of order: “Fickle, fickle, document time. / False documentation is still documentation. / You idiots. I trace the history of the worship of document / to that social loss we’ve long ago suffered” / “My ‘spirit of animation’” / “Forget all derivations” / a whirligig in the within / “they dance in happiness, / the early ones down there, / and this isn’t myth of origin / or oozing essence origin / Fuck you Derrida, Erasmus Darwin said, / origin is beautiful as black” / a waterfall carving through the rock for tens of thousands years / “and centers whirl around us as we round them in.” There are about ten thousand things you could say here.

There’s a center. There. It’s a place. It’s an absence. It includes us. Like a void. Like an octopus’s eye. Like the world-nullity before the dream—the wet dream—creation. Place it!  “and in the generous light of Erasmus Darwin’s ripe exuberance / (and he knew the caves below where sun at midnight shone) / the fields,” the Field! the Feld. The open field as an instruction like learn where the light is and it’s ripe, exuberance, “the fields, his very strawberry fields, are Eleusinian.” Mysterious. Hilarious. How to place yourself so the field finds you, erases any referent before the truth, emplaces your sudden grammar with the earth. Strawberry fields forever, and sun underneath. 

You can write a poem knowing no I but the cosmos and still always be a person. It’s a good thing. And that’s how the poem ends. Time to eat!