TRUTH AND METHOD ON BLACK MOUNTAIN: THE HERMENEUTIC STANCES OF CHARLES OLSON, ROBERT CREELEY, AND ROBERT DUNCAN Except where reference is made to the work of others, the work described in this dissertation is my own or was done in collaboration with my advisory committee. This dissertation does not include proprietary or classified information. ____________________________________ Nicholas S. Boone Certificate of Approval: _____________________________ ______________________________ Dan Latimer Jeremy M. Downes, Chair Professor Associate Professor English English _____________________________ ______________________________ James Emmett Ryan George T. Flowers Associate Professor Interim Dean English Graduate School TRUTH AND METHOD ON BLACK MOUNTAIN: THE HERMENEUTIC STANCES OF CHARLES OLSON, ROBERT CREELEY, AND ROBERT DUNCAN Nicholas S. Boone A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama December 17, 2007 TRUTH AND METHOD ON BLACK MOUNTAIN: THE HERMENEUTIC STANCES OF CHARLES OLSON, ROBERT CREELEY, AND ROBERT DUNCAN Nicholas S. Boone Permission is granted to Auburn University to make copies of this dissertation at its discretion upon request of individuals or institutions and at their expense. The author reserves all publication rights. ______________________________ Signature of Author ______________________________ Date of Graduation iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT TRUTH AND METHOD ON BLACK MOUNTAIN: THE HERMENEUTIC STANCES OF CHARLES OLSON, ROBERT CREELEY, AND ROBERT DUNCAN Nicholas S. Boone Doctor of Philosophy, December 17, 2007 (M.A., Auburn University, 2003) (B.A., Harding University, 2001) 251 total typed pages Directed by Jeremy M. Downes This dissertation examines the poetry and poetics of three poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan) who taught at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school, in the 1950s. It examines these poets’ work through the lens of the hermeneutic ontology developed by Martin Heidegger and his student, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Besides uncovering a number of similarities regarding each of these thinkers’ “stance toward reality” (as Olson terms it), this dissertation shows how Black Mountain poetry and poetics can be better understood through the perspective that Heidegger and Gadamer provide. More than a few critics have discussed both Olson and Creeley in terms of Heidegger’s thought, but no one has yet made extended reference to the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer when interpreting these poets. In the case iv of Duncan’s poetry, no one has yet made an extended study of how his work can be interpreted in the light of hermeneutic ontology. Thus, this dissertation contributes to the ongoing critical discussion on how Olson and Creeley can be seen within the framework of Heidegger’s thought, and it extends beyond that discussion by including the poetry of Robert Duncan and the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer. v Style manual used: Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. Computer software used: Corel Wordperfect 10 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION “A Whole New Series of Recognitions” . 1 CHAPTER ONE “A Complex of Occasions”: Charles Olson’s Hermeneutic Stance . .19 CHAPTER TWO “What to say / when you see me”: Robert Creeley’s Hermeneutic Stance . 77 CHAPTER THREE “Open out like a rose”: Robert Duncan’s Hermeneutic Stance . 140 CONCLUSION “Limits / are what any of us / are inside of”. .210 NOTES . 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY . .229 vii INTRODUCTION “A Whole New Series of Recognitions” “Verse now, 1950, if it is to be of essential use must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings” (Olson, “Projective Verse” 239). With this, the initial sentence of his manifesto “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson inaugurated a major school of postwar American poetry–the Black Mountain School. Originally published in Poetry New York, Olson’s manifesto began attracting major attention after it was published in Donald Allen’s important anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. In his anthology, Allen grouped Olson with a number of younger poets who eventually became known as “The Black Mountain School” because of their association either with Black Mountain College or with its publication, The Black Mountain Review. Allen explains that some poets in this group never had any official relationship with the college (such as Denise Levertov, Paul Carroll and Paul Blackburn), some were students at the college (such as Joel Oppenheimer and Ed Dorn), and three (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan), were at some point employed as faculty at the college (xii). Allen devotes the most space in his Black Mountain grouping to the three faculty members, and these three poets have consistently been linked together as important poets whose poetry 1 was shaped, at least in part, by their experiences together at Black Mountain College. Because this study of the poetry of Olson, Creeley, and Duncan is focused upon philosophical affinities between these poets and the important Continental philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, a detailed exploration of the historical situation of Black Mountain College and the poets’ relationships to each other and the college would be an unneeded detour. However, I use the “Black Mountain” as a label for these poets not merely for the expediency and economy such labels afford, but also because of the descriptive weight the term carries as it implicates these poets in a project that has its roots in the American avant garde. Some critics have questioned the term “Black Mountain” as an effective label because of the obvious differences in style and technique employed by these poets.1 However, Martin Duberman explains, in his history of Black Mountain College, the historical contingencies associated with the mere existence of the college was without a doubt a strong force behind the literary production of these writers (388-9). For instance, Olson decided to publish The Black Mountain Review as a way to gain publicity for the college since its enrollment had been shrinking and the college was desperate for income. The Black Mountain Review, in turn, became an outlet for many writers who are now often classified under the term “Black Mountain.” Thus, regardless of differences in style and ideology, the label “Black Mountain” does seem appropriate, especially for Olson, Creeley, and Duncan, each of whom worked for the college. However, the link between these three poets is not primarily rooted in their experiences together at Black Mountain, but rather in their convictions about art, which 2 Donald Allen describes as “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse” (xi), that positioned them all firmly against the prominent New Critical aesthetics of the time and that placed them all at Black Mountain College where experimental artists had been welcomed since the 1930s. Olson was drawn to the creative energy of the college in the late forties, and Olson, himself, was the main attraction for Creeley and Duncan to come to Black Mountain, since Olson, acting as rector of the college, invited them to join the faculty in the mid-fifties. Creeley, in an interview with Martin Duberman, describes some of the basic contours of the poetry of Black Mountain writers, and his statement also shows how important Olson was in shaping those contours: We did use Olson as a locus without question. [ . ] [W]e were using a premise which he of course had made articulate in projective verse. We were trying to think of how a more active sense of poetry might be got, and that’s I think the coincidence we share, or rather the coincident commitment: that each of us felt that the then existing critical attitudes towards verse, and that the then existing possibilities for publication and general activity in poetry particularly, were extraordinarily narrow. We were trying in effect to think of a base, or a different base from which to move. And though we’ve all, each one of us, I think, come up with distinctive manners of writing . what’s taken to be the case in writing is something we share very much. That is, we each feel that writing is something we’re given to do rather than choose to do; that the form an 3 actual writing takes is very intimate to the circumstance and impulses of its literal time of writing . that the modality conceived and the occasion conceived is a very similar one. (qtd. in Duberman 390) Though Creeley is speaking here of the various writers classified under the Black Mountain name, his description could more specifically apply to the artistic aims of himself, Duncan, and Olson. Creeley, in the above statement, refers to the temporal aspects of writing–the attention the writers pay to “the circumstance” of “the literal time of writing,” which is what Olson proclaims as a key ingredient of “projective verse,” as opposed to the more academically oriented “closed verse” when he says, This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by. And it involves a whole new series of recognitions. From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION–puts himself in the open–he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined. (“Projective Verse” 240) One of the key ingredients of what I will call in this study the hermeneutic stance of each of these poets is their insistence on a temporal, historically contingent perspective. They do not seek to produce an art of ideals, where art becomes an ideal realm removed from time and the contingencies of history or the moment at hand.