In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

T H E T R O P I C S , & T H E T R O P E 2 3 19503. The engagement with the generative arrived at in the "Chiasma" lectures is civic and psychological:"only by obeying the total self in all its idiosyncratic direction is morality &concord established, both for the individual &by the total of the individuals, in the society" (40). And,in a reformulation ofthe premise underlying TheMaximus Poems—and specifying its particular political ground: "Because of the agora America is, was, from the start, the moral struggle" (Maximus Poems, 62). The tropics, & the trope For many generations "America" was sheer verbal invention: a provocation of the advertising circular and the conceptual challenge of a newly discovered realm. But" 'Discovery' was a double concept, since it referred both to the act offinding and to the later act of revealing what had been found" (Franklin, 182). In calling many of his Maximuspoems "letters," Olson wedges himself into that exploratory stance in which each notation redefines the utility of perception. "[O]ne realcenter in American experience has been the isolated self"—recalling Olson's "Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I, Maximus, address you"—"which is given some connection to presumed communities (and thereby an identity) by its engrossment of America as an elaborate, even arcane, sign of where it stands and what it means" (Franklin,183). America is the name for what language does in the world. As long as there is a struggle for freedom within language, that struggle will be tropical inasmuch as it solicits its occasion from language in heat. The trope of this struggle (or rutting) makes it, if not American, at least of the Americas (rendering South American Spanish and Portuguese, along with North American French and English, so distinct from their transatlantic origins). "For, in the end, America has been a series of competing stories told by figures who ought to have seen their community precisely in their parallel efforts at narrative persuasion, in their exuberance of faith, their diligence of speech" (Franklin, 203).* The discovery of America was an accidental by-product of a European ambition to open trade routes to the Orient. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, * This turning, this tropikos, meaning "turn" or "belonging to a turn," also comes to mean "figure of speech" in Greek tropos and Latin tropus. Another series of permutations places this business of troping firmly in the hands of poets: late Latin tropare, "to versify," becomes trovare in Italian, trovar in Spanish, trouver in French: "to find, devise, invent or make up poetry." The Provencal form, trobar, gives us the agent, troubador. 24 T H I S C O M P O S T Columbus felt certain that the land of the Great Khan and the Emerald City was just over the ridge, down the river, or farther along the shore. This conviction was excited by a cartographic coincidence: on Columbus's maps, the south coast of Cuba bore a superficial similarity to the Chinese province of Mangi, east of the long-sought Malay Peninsula ("the Golden Chersonese"), regarded as the ultimate trading zone. On his second voyage Columbus explored the Cuban coastline until he reached the point where the MalayPeninsula was presumed to bear southward . Rather than confirm this by continuing his exploration, the admiral opted instead to return to Spain. Under threat of severe bodily punishment and heavy fines, in the presence ofthe fleet scribe, the crew wasforced to take an oath that the coast they had explored could not possibly belong to an island because of its size. Columbus also compelled assent to the fantasy that "a few leagues hence, sailing along this coast land would be found where civilized people exist, and who know of the world" (^ oorman, 89). Columbus's desperate commitment to the Orient reflects aEurocentric appetite for expansion, a craving for contact with others who "know of the world," but whose knowledge would confirm Europe's estimate of its own centrality. The rotundity of the globe, after all, was a recent postulate. The antipodes and the infernal regions—given the fact of such a world—were now places to be encountered on the way home, not eccentric zones to which an aberrant course might lead.By the same token, such desirable places as the Golden Chersonese might as readily be encountered en route. Diversity and difference, the sheer fact of otherness, were henceforth to be raw material for self-affirmation. History tends to be perceived aseither topological (Greece, Rome, British Empire...

Share