Letters to Myself

Read it -- in BIG GULPS -- read and move on keep on reading not stopping to read to think but let reading be the lapping thinking thought is reading on

Lines, lapping:

          It is enough Glocester,
to say where it is,
had you also the will to be fine as

          as fine as fins are

                              as firm as

          as firm as a mackerel is
          (fresh out of water)

                              as sure

          as sure as no owner is
          (or he'd be to sea)

                              as vulnerable

          (as vulnerable as I am
          brought home to Main St
          in such negligible company) (MP 24)

The LINE is enlongated by its redoubling turning in on itself. Or is it dense -- repeating its similes as textures? OR is it a schizoid LINE entangled (as a net fishing mackeral fin) pulling in jerks and spasms?

"(W)hat I want to emphasize here, by this emphasis on the typewriter as the personal and instantaneous recorder to the poet's work, is the already projective nature of verse as the sons of Pound and Williams are practicing it. Already they are composing as though verse was to have the reading its writing involved, as though not the eye but the ear was to be its measurer, as though the intervals of its composition could be so carefully put down as to be precisely the intervals of its registration." (Olson, Projective Verse)

Letters to Myself

Letter 3 --

Tansy buttons, tansy
for my city
Tansy for their noses

Tansy for them
tansy for Gloucester to take the smell
of all owners

Tansy
for all of us (MP,13)

He keeps it going, repeating an attractively SOUNDING word. Tansy = aromatic herb, buttonlike yellow flowerheads -- bitter tasting leaves -- sometimes used medicinally --
So the image is UNCONVENTIONAL -- not a rose or daffodail -- but "Tansy". Shakespeare knew his flowers and plants and herbs -- so to Olson. And I thought it was a STUPID made up word.
The Smells must be present in the space. Never a vacuum.

Tansy -- so dense -- that it must resist exploitation:

The word does intimidate. The pay-check does.
But to use either, as cheap men

o tansy city, root city
let them not make you
as the nation is (MP 15)

The "tansy city" resists commercial exploitation, resists becoming a global product. It remains aromatic in its own way, obscure in its use, not chopped and trimmed and fit land exported like ROSES or TULIPS or (one might add) ORCHIDS.

Concluding Letter 3 Olson writes:

Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I Maximus, address you
you islands
of men and girls (MP 16)

How apt.