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  • Open Form in American Poetry: Essays by Burton Hatlen
  • Alec Marsh
Open Form in American Poetry: Essays by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

I’m sure many of my generation of scholars remember Burt Hatlen’s large, homely, smiling presence as he arrived, somewhat disheveled, at a podium in some hotel ballroom B, with a brilliant talk composed on the plane and written out in long-hand on a yellow legal pad. Burt was the man I was always most glad to see, listen to, and learn from at any conference; one who had forgotten more about modern poetry than I ever knew. Always busy as an editor of Sagetrieb, which he founded, and Paideuma, which he inherited from Carroll Terrell, a full-time teacher, sometime department head, Hatlen was enviably prolific; he once wrote me a bibliography of his published and unpublished essays that went on for eight single-spaced pages. Books were planned on Pound, H.D., Williams, a huge tome about the Objectivists; he “would leave, for another day,” he told me regretfully, “his writings on Olson, Spicer, Levertov and other ‘post-Objectivist’ poets.” [End Page 234] Now we have an intriguing selection of his stimulating thinking and his intense, at times exhausting, always richly informed, close reading, in a book of polished, well-edited essays.

Open Form in American Poetry is a long-anticipated selection of Hatlen’s essays on American poets and poetry expertly curated and introduced by Bruce Holsapple, author of an important book on William Carlos Williams and Burt’s former student. It contains ten essays: two each on Pound, Olson and Oppen; there are single essays on H.D. and another on Robert Duncan’sH.D. Book (2011); there is a long piece on Williams’s “Asphodel,” on Zukofsky and A 1–10; as well as on the outlier Objectivist, (because not American) Basil Bunting and Briggflatts.1 Altogether this is a rich exploration of the procedures and implications of open-form poetics stressing the “intersection between poetry and ideology” (8). In an essay on Oppen’s The Materials, the first of the two lengthy pieces on the poet that form the middle of the volume,2 Hatlen asks: “What is the relationship between poetry and politics? More specifically, what is the relationship in the context of twentieth century America, between a radical poetics and a radical politics?” (146). There is an assumption that radical—i.e. “open form”— poetry is indicative of a radical sensibility, usually assumed to be a poetics of the progressive and even Marxist Left. Open form somehow is casually equated to ‘open-minded’; it is supposed to be the expression of freedom: personal, poetical, and political. Pound’s enthusiastic fascism to the contrary, there is a lot to this idea. Still, it was Pound, Hatlen shows, who in the Pisans created an “open text”: which, sparked one of those miracles that galvanize culture when Pound handed the corrected typescript of Cantos 74 and 75 directly to Charles Olson, when Olson visited him in St. Elizabeths on February 14, 1946 (37).

The Pisan Cantos are, Hatlen argues persuasively, “the prototypical ‘projective’ text” (39); virtually all of what we call ‘Olson’ (and much ‘open form’ poetry) flows from that February moment. One of the things that interests Hatlen is how, “given the liberal democratic politics of Olson himself” (he was an FDR Democrat) “and given the vigorously anti-authoritarian stances of the other ‘new American poets’ of the 1950s” (a reference to Donald Allen’s famous anthology), “what does the admiration of these writers for Pound tell us about the ways in which Pound’s poetry, especially The Pisan Cantos, is and is not ‘Fascist’” (39–40). It was not the ideological content, that’s for sure; but the technical mastery of a new way of poetical thinking—a whole new way of doing a poem—that energized the younger [End Page 235] poets. Olson’s famous essay on “projective verse” originally put down in a letter to his girlfriend Frances Boldereff in February 1950, may be...

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