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332 Western American Literature be taken as a “casebook” nor a collection of the poet’s major reviews. The editor has pulled together a series of essays which range from popular sources, such as Time magazine, through scholarly sources, such as transcripts of symposia, to critical assessments by fellow poets William Stafford and Robert Duncan. Everson’s work as a printer is also discussed. The essays are arranged in chronological order with an editorial intro­ duction to each, which helps establish the rationale for its selection, and shows how the essay fits in the development of Everson’s career. Just before each essay a quotation from it serves as an abstract or points up an important aspect of both Everson’s work and the particular critique of it. As one might expect, the essays are not of uniform quality or interest, but range from murky to genuinely enlightening. Despite their uneven character, however, they all reinforce the picture of a man being constantly born anew, the violence of continual metamorphosis of careers and personal trauma, the growing pains reflected in a poetry of rich imagination, energy and power — a poetry which has effected the work of many others who have come to know and value it. For those who do not know Everson’s work, and for those who are interested in tracing the development of the poet’s career in order to under­ stand where Everson is “coming from,” this is a useful and interesting book. GARY HOLTHAUS, Anchorage, Alaska Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael. By Paul Christensen. Foreward by George F. Butterick. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. 244 pages, $12.95.) With the original appearance of “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson’s classic manifesto for a post-modernist poetry, now almost thirty years away, the time is arrived for a critical assessment of Olson as poet and thinker. Aptly enough, scholarly studies are beginning to weigh and measure Olson’s work and reputation, to gauge his bid to follow Pound and Williams as the master forces of an American poetic. He is more often referred to than read, but George F. Butterick’s annotation of the Maximus poems makes them easier going, and Paul Christensen’s Charles Olson provides a solid standard introduction to his ranging doctrines. Following a useful sketch of Olson’s life, Christensen tracks the “new reality” Olson was after. In his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael, he develops a “typology of consciousness” that rejects the enclosed, power seek­ ing solipsism of Ahab for Ishmael’s open and inclusive apprehension, replacing the will to control nature as an instrument of the ego with the will to cohere the phenomenal world as the creative activity of the self. Reviews 333 The problem, for Olson, starts with the Greeks, when philosophy imposes abstract systems of discourse on the natural continuum of life, cutting language off from the sensuous formation of experience. Projective verse, Christensen lets us see, is not just a corrective to what Olson called “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego,” but more importantly an alternative to habits of thought implicit to Western civilization: a return to the pre-Socratics and direct encounter with the world in all its particularity, a mode of perception that involves the whole body in the reception of stimuli, dictating a poetic language of “organismic response” and an expressive form of registering the interpenetration of self and world. Archeologist of consciousness, searching prehistory and archaic cultures for clues to the recovery of touch with the world, Olson confronts the condition he finds posed by Heraclitus: “Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar.” Moving backward and inward, Olson’s criticism of Western subjectivity restores a proper sense of scale, where “SPACE” is “the central fact” and the world becomes large again. Despite the parallels Christensen draws between Olson’s thought and modern intellectual trends — the Frankfurt school, phenomenology, structuralism — Olson makes more sense as an ecologist of myth and history, tracing the diffusion of culture and the migration of people across the continents. His affinities reached toward men like the American geographer Carl O. Sauer, a contact for Olson Christensen misses altogether, whose work, especially...

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