Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics

2. Olson’s Archives: Fieldwork in New American Poetry

Olson’s Archives 45 2 Olson’s Archives Fieldwork in New Ameri­ can Poetry [A] poet, now, must be as full a culture-­ morphologist as any professional. —Charles Olson, letter to Louis Martz, 1951 The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world. —Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, In the summer of 1944, Barnett Newman, exhausted from the work of curating his Pre-­Columbian Stone Sculpture exhibition that spring at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, retired to the Massachusetts coast to take in the sea air. In Gloucester, one of the earliest points of contact between the European world and America, where sixteen years before the Plymouth colony, English fisherman had visited, and attempts at colonies began as early as 1624, Newman contemplated another deep history of the new world that was embodied in the formal mastery of his stone sculptures—sketching in crayon and pastel those objects from the recent exhibition that were part of his own collection.1 As with Pollock, Rothko, and other abstract expressionists , Newman sought a source for his own abstraction in pre-­Columbian art.2 Newman, however, was willing to go further and, during a general upswing in interest, present himself as a curator of this work. Though he consciously avoided the kind of scholarly attention to his­ tori­ cal and cultural contexts that might, he thought, trap the aesthetic thrust of this art within the category of the “ethnographic artifact” (insisting instead that the sculpture be seen “on its own terms” as art), Newman was, of course, practicing the role of ethnographer even in framing the work in the context of a New York art gallery. Writing in 1996 about shifts in the art world “over the last two decades at least,” Hal Foster notes that “a new ethnographer envy consumes many artists and critics . . .[who] aspire to fieldwork in which theory and practice seem to be reconciled.”3 Whether one locates this in the 1970s (as Foster 46 chapter 2 does), understands it as emerging earlier in the practices of an artist like Smithson in the late 1960s, or traces it all the way back either to the explosion of artists’ interest in Native Ameri­ can and pre-­ Columbian artwork around World War II, or even before that to cubism, it is safe to say that ethnography and art have had a generative exchange through­ out the century .4 However, if 1940s and 1950s artists like Newman were not conscious ethnographic fieldworkers, if they resisted the mantle of anthropology for that of art, and if Gloucester remained a seaside backdrop to their sketches, then a significantly different relation to ethnography and place was already afoot among Ameri­ can poets of that generation. Indeed, by the time that the general shift toward a conscious and widespread ethnographer envy occurred in art—let us settle, provisionally, on the late 1960s or early 1970s— Gloucester itself could be seen as an exemplary site of this new inquiry of the poet-­ ethnographer—an inquiry that began, explicitly, to link the history of the seaside town to a series of remote an­ thro­ po­ logi­ cal sites, like pre-­ Columbian digs in Mexico.5 Having traced how Williams’s ethnographic poetics of place in Paterson in the 1940s was reinterpreted by Smithson in Passaic in the late 1960s, we must now consider the explosion of ethnographic “fieldwork” in the period between these moments—that of the New Ameri­ can poetry, named after Donald M. Allen’s 1960 anthology of that name. Doing so will take us not only temporally into a his­ tori­ cal moment in which versions of fieldwork drive a wide range of innovative poetic practices but also spatially beyond the narrow (if entropic) confines of New Jersey, beyond the “the long, long skies over New Jersey” that Kerouac’s Sal Paradise had seen at the end of On the Road, out toward the “raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast”—across the United States, south into South and Central America, and over the Pacific to Asia.6 As poets made these journeys, they did so within a climate of renewed enthusiasm both about the powers of anthropology in general and about their specific relevance for an expanded concept of poetry. In the same year Allen’s anthology appeared, the commercial publisher George Braziller would publish The Golden Age of Ameri­ can Anthropology, edited by Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel. Part of a four...