I have developed my thoughts about autoethnography as an aspect of understanding my own methods and habits as a poet. Here I will attempt to read this practice into or against the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. These poets have been my guides as I have attempted to open this terrain, a terrain that implicates the self as an agent among others and as an object in the field of the poem. Both Olson and Creeley write with a demonstrable interest in ethnography. Neither practices, consciously, what I here call autoethnography.
During his stay in the Yucatan, Olson learned to respond to the cultural differences and deep similarities between self and other. He wrote that the Mayan sensibility may have declined from what it once was, but that its profound human-ness was also evident in how the Mayans carried their bodies. Creeley wrote in a similar fashion about his meeting with a Lacandon Indian in Chiapas. A lesson about the self in action is crystallized. We are neither as open physically nor as alert and quick as the native subject, the “other” of the imagination. Does such a feeling register only a moment of exoticism or nostalgia for a lost capacity? Problems of transference infiltrate possibilities of truly knowing the other. An embrace of this set of problems torques the process of autoethnography as I understand it. Autoethnographic poetry is an investigation into the nature of self or ego as a phenomenon that arises in the interactions between the one and the many, the body and the polis, the moment of apprehension formed by the in-swirling of cosmic and historical forces. These fault lines, fractures really, score the surface of the text.
Seen or felt, the self is a product of interactions, a product of the field of shifting and counterposed physical and communal forces. The self is always partial. An aspect without substance, an ego, only this; but there may be more, spirit for example. Uncountable elements. The practice of ethnographical poetics can be understood as the process of mapping the field of action in which the self becomes aware, uniquely or differently, of its own existence.
On certain sunny days, with a chop of whitecaps, blowing in from the WSW, I ask, does the self exist apart from the text? does it exist as an object apart from the text? Is it only a presence that arises in discourse? What about the endless arguments that divide my mind when I cannot sleep or the fears that grip me when I wake?
I am revising here what I have written before. I am integrating new material in a process that is accumulative, accretive. At some point I will start to cut back as the field begins to define itself. I will cease editorializing, and I will accept what I have been given by the languages that I use (this assertion is a nod to the important work of Robin Blaser). My conversation is with a ghost of myself and with Omar Pérez. Yesterday Omar and I sat on a terrace overlooking the Malecón in Havana. Omar can be trenchant, a line from one of his poems reads, “Lo que no embarra no goza.” His poem traces the connection between slime and pleasure, shit and joy. What are the forces that lead me to this garden with its vista? To continue this theme means I will have to reach a long way back through the contingencies of my life. That would be narrative of a different sort than what I mean by autoethnography, although many useful conjunctures might emerge, each a possible impetus to poetic analysis. For Omar poetry is an exact science.
When I was a boy on Cranberry Island, at the age of eleven or twelve, we had no plumbing in our house. The winter winds were ghost-ridden, carrying the voices of tortured sirens. To relieve my bowels I had to thread my way through the chambers of an ancient barn to an outhouse behind the animal stalls. Is it thus that unless you dirty yourself there is no pleasure? How I came to these words is a result of poetic analysis, inflected with autoethnography. The process of how I came to Cuba, making a connection in Montreal, is not so very relevant to any of this, nothing in that string of contingencies is more than a chronology. Autoethnography begins with an identification of break points and elisions.
Poetry understood in this way is a process of instantiations, the becoming of fields traversed by multiple vectors, or as Giles Deleuze would put it “lines of flight.” But there are knots and vortices, monads, where threads tangle or overlap. Maximus, Charles Olson, John Stevens and Enyalion each has a relation with Fenris the wolf. Creeley’s poetry often seems to be largely about echoes.
Neither Olson nor Creeley use autoethnography as a method consciously employed, as many academics have now come to do in the disciplines of anthropology and composition studies. In anthropological terms, an autoethnography is an account of the writer’s experience as if the writer, himself or herself, were the object of ethnographic scrutiny, both self and other, a means of addressing the participant-observer dialectic that has framed ethnography since Bronislaw Malinowski’s early efforts. The liberty to undertake autoethnography as a form of anthropology is generally ascribed to the influence of Clifford Geertz. In The Interpretation of Culture, Geertz asserts that “what we call our data are really our constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to" (9). Thus the act of interpretation becomes the subject of reflection, perhaps more so than the data itself and our understanding of culture becomes a semiotic construct. As a result data in the form of clinical observations has been shoved into an unstable range, one not secured scientifically for purposes of analysis. The gain is that now the biases influencing interpretation become available for inquiry. For instance, in his essay “Deep Play,” we learn who Geertz is, we get a glimmer of how the Balinese see him; nonetheless his data on the Balinese cock fight is presented in the form of analyzing the amount of money wagered in different circumstances. Despite this seeming objectivity, Geertz feels obliged to compare the energy of the cockfight to the drama of Shakespeare’s Lear. The reading of his observations is finally subjective and rooted in western notions of self-destructive willfulness. It is because of hovering instability with respect to data and its interpretation that I have used the word “transfer” in my definition of autoethnography above.
In her critique of the practice of autoethnography as a method of composition and a model for teaching writing, Mary M. Reda asks,
Can we utilize memory in an autoethnographic project in the same way we use observation, interviews, and material records in an ethnography? Memory is a self-selecting process, creating patterns through elision, emphasis, forgetfulness. Such transformations radically alter the "data." We read the writer's retrospective reconstructions … . patterns of memory. History gives these constructions a teleological imperative: to explain the present though the past. There is no alternate source against which to "test" the hypotheses presented as inarguable.
Contrary to the self-justifying endgame just described, I am arguing that the embedding an autoethnographic data within a field poetics, frees the text from slavery to such teleological constructs. It transforms time into space to intone the usual Olsonic mantra. As archaeologist, Olson sifts among the contents of his texts to disinter those figures like Maximus, Stevens, Merry, Enyalion and Tyr who are figures in the poet’s psychodrama as it relates to the son’s obsession with his father’s death, an event that implicated the son in multiple ways that echo throughout Maximus, perhaps as the spine that unifies the epic.[1] Much hinges on the refusal of the son to lend to his father a suitcase that perhaps symbolized for Olson his own stature in the world (Clark 28). He had acquired the suitcase for his European travels as the youthful winner of a national oratory prize. Symbolically, Charles’ ego seems to have been invested in this bag. Among multiple variations, it becomes “a box upon the sea” (M 373), the image that closes Maximus II. Karl had requested to borrow the suitcase for his trip to a convention of postal workers (and that trip to was a matter of some pride, the father’s hoping to set the record straight as to how his supervisors had hounded him in the last years of his postal career), but Charles refused and Karl died soon thereafter, at 53, “too young,” of a stroke, before he could attend the convention in Cleveland, the father blaming the son it seems for his refusal of the loan and the son feeling guilt over how his action was implicated in his father’s death. This is the subject of Olson’s essay, “The Post Office.” Of all this, Olson wrote:
It was to be a big thing and when he was leaving he waked me to ask if I would let him take my suitcase which was bigger and newer than his . I had a use for it that coming weekend which seemed important to me, and I refused. He went away sore, and the curious thing is, that though my mother and I drove the hundred miles to the hospital the moment we heard he was sick and though I was with him much of the time until he died. I do not remember that he ever addressed me or seemed to notice I was there. He pinched my mother’s nose and said something unintelligible from the twist of his mouth but it is only now that I realize at no time did he admit a notice of me. Or do I exaggerate and punish myself anew for the guilt of my refusal of the suitcase. (CP 235)
“The Post Office” was written in 1948, fourteen years after the death of Karl Olson. At age 52, Olson reflects on “The Postal Union of the Son with the Father” (M 390). (Date Dec. 62.) And the theme is present in the remarkable Stevens song, where the Stevens (Gloucester’s first Maximus), Olson’s father and the King, Tyr and the Fenris, constellate into a figure of the son cannibalizing the father’s body (M 399, Jan. 1964). The pages of Maximus III, beginning with the line “I have been an ability—a machine” (1966) were written thirty one years after the death of the father, Olson’s mourning for the loss of his wife Betty in a tragic car accident, displaced upon memories of the father, sexual insecurity preoccupying the son’s address to loss. Here again are lines implicating the son in the father’s tragedy and the remarkable visual poem dedicated to “My Beloved Father” (M 499). The typography suggests both a rose and a penis as I have argued elsewhere.[2] I cite these texts now to prepare you for the entrance of melancholia into the fields of Maximus.[3] I am claiming that these archaeologies of mourning and implicit guilt are a form of autoethnography. The differences and overtones among the contents of an autoethnography constitute a deep reading or embodiment of obsessions and other formative impulses, as if the different times indicated by chronology or mythic allusion, occupied one time or composite field.
Olson combines both the anthropology of the other and personal forms of ethnography as he explores the meaning of his “tribe” or “world” (M 209), is “Human Universe.” His description in that essay of the unselfconscious ways in which the Mayans carried their bodies, like his description of the toddler Kate, “She wears her own face / as we do not (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 19 - A pastoral Letter,” M 92) represents his formulation of an ego-ideal that is narcissistic necessarily but not damaging to the child as it can be for the adult: this is Freud’s opinion when he distinguishes a “primary and normal narcissism” from adult regressions to the narcissistic stage, regressions possibly to an oral and cannibalistic stage (CPW. 14: 73 ff). I move rapidly to the conclusion that the role of narcissism in mourning and melancholy is decisive with respect to Olson’s ability to love and his ability to write.
Is it only by accident that Avicenna writes that melancholics “imagine themselves made kings or wolves” among other obsessions, including and obsession with coitus, when these images or practices are so central to the last pages of Maximus? Consider the appearance of Fenris, after Tyre who is a figure for Olson himself, has put his hand in the mouth of the wolf:
Stevens
went away across Cut Bridge
my father
lost his
life the son
of the King of the Sea walked
away from the filthy wolf
eating the dropped body, the
scavenger (M 403).
I have elsewhere written that Olson suffers from melancholia.[4] It seems to be a disease endemic to New Englanders, Hawthorne and Creeley, as well as Olson. For Freud, melancholia is distinguished from mourning because the libidinal investments have been internalized. In mourning, grief reconciles the subject to loss. That would be the way in which one deals with the loss of the father, and perhaps this is largely true of how both Creeley and Olson experiences loss. In melancholia however the object of loss has become internalized, it is no longer precisely identifiable. Freud writes of it as a shadow upon the soul (CPW 14: 249). It may be that for Olson this shadow has the multiform appearances so often invoked when the subject of the father enters the poem.
For Creeley in turn the object of loss has become language itself, words. The obsession with words is an internalized mourning for the father that he only knew from the accounts of others. In the poem, “The Doctor” from Memory Garden (1986), images of the father, whom Creeley lost at the age of 4, are vague, a smell of cigarettes. The words that pertain to the father are those of his sister and his mother, words that lack any realty other than echoes, “Nothing said / to me, no words more // than echoies, a /smell I remember (CP 2: 275). Words that are empty signifiers, shadows of unspoken trauma. In his brief Autobiography, Creeley is very trenchant about the facts of his life. The tenor of melancholy is better perceived in his poetry. In “Friends,” a poem from Pieces, he writes “I listen. I had / an ego once upon / a time – I do still, / for you listen to me” CP 1: 411). Identity is bound up with those semiotic structures identified by Geertz and others. In “Alex’s Art” from the volume Echoes, he concludes the poem by asking, “Can you see me?” The suggestion is that art like memory always takes as its subject the past, “As each so-called moment, each plunge and painful recovery / of breath echoes its precedent, its own so-called raison d’être (CP 2: 430-31). In Windows, the volume immediately before Echoes, Creeley writes of the limits of expression, evoking a profound loneliness and desolation. More cruelly some might have called this self-absorption diffidence. In the poem “Wall” we find the lines, “You can push as hard as you want / on this outside side. // It stays limited / to a single face” (CP 2:351). And in a poem entitled “Echoes” from Windows, addressed to William Bronk he writes, “Was it always you as one, and them as one, / and one another was us, we thought a protestant, a complex // determination of this loneliness of human spaces” (CP 2: 360). We cannot trace this melancholy to the loss of a father as with Olson, although we cannot discount the trauma associated with loss of the father and the loss of the poet’s own eye from an automobile accident for which it could be felt he father was guilty.” Creeley doesn’t dwell there as Olson does. But his poetry is a record of multiple conversations with wives and lovers and other poets and artists for whom loss and the difficulties of communication are central.
Charles Altieri has written that in the “conative” style of Creeley’s art, “The poetry dramatizes the affects involved in finding words that do not falsify the energies making direct description an inadequate rendering of the poets world“ (41). Altieri prefers the conative to the notational sequences, described as seemingly endless series of observations, because meaning is coming to be in the moment of conative language. In one such moment, the poem finds a song that echoes the immediate presence of sunlight on a landscapes described as “miles of spaced echo.”Language finds its form: “Sing me a song / makes beat specific, / takes the sharp air, / echoes this silence”(CP 2: 389-90). I hope to have briefly indicated Altieri’s reading of “My New Mexico,” the first poem in the volume Echoes (1994). For me, moments such as these seem carefully balanced resolutions. But the notational is also the stuff of autoethnography. It is the sorting among echoes and flickers of light at the edge of consciousness is preliminary to a poetry of resolutions and coherences.
In his Autobiography, to close now, Creeley writes “I have no reifying memories that tell me this is where I was then and there. They are far more echoes … .It is the pleasure and authority of writing that it invents a life to live … (in Clark, 122).
CONCLUSION: Autoethnography is not about identifying or analyzing the self as an internally generated psychological construct, for instance, about an individuation that would separate the domain of the Self from that of the Ego in Jungian terms. It is about recording and classifying cultural data that form a terrain and mark the passage of a self through or over that terrain. It is about the data that impinge upon an individual’s life experience and different ways of constructing that data. When viewed poetically, these constructions have a depth, a coherence of their own, are a matrix, but are not in any sense the self. It is impossible for a self to identify itself. It can account for patterns in its lived experience. As such the self can be a citizen with known properties. The private self at the public wall as Olson put it.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1992.
Altieri, Charles. “What Does Echoes Echo” in Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work. Ed. Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery. U Iowa P, 2009: 36-49.
Bové, Paul. Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays. Duke, 1995.
Brodkey, Linda. "Writing on the Bias." College English. 56:5 (Sept. 1994): 527-547.
- - - --. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Butterick, George. A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1980.
Clark, Tom. Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life. NY: Norton, 1991.
Clark, Tom. Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place including “Autobiography” 122-144.. NY: New Directions, 1993.
Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1982 (abbreviated as CP 1).
- - - - -. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005. Berkeley: U Cal P, 2006 (abbreviated as CP 2).
- - - - -. Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1973.
Dressman, Mark. "Catholic Boy: An Account of Parochial School Literacy." Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Linda Brodkey (ed.) Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996. 275-283.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” in the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. v. 14: 237-258. London: Hogarth Press 1957
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1997 (Abbreviated CP).
- - - - -. The Collected Poems of Charles Olson. Ed. George Butterick. Berkeley: U Cal P, 1997.
- - - - -. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: U Cal P. 1983 (abbreviated as M).
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession. New York: MLA, 1991.33-40.
Reda, Mary M.. “Autoethnography as Research Methodology” in Academic Exchange Quarterly (Spring 2007).
Redden, Jennifer. The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva. Cary: Oxford U P, 2002.
[1] Following his discussion of the line “When a man’s coffin is the sea,” (where he discusses the inseparability of death and creation), Paul Bové writes, “Perhaps it is paradoxical, even nonsensical to say that the texts of Olson and the world of texts takes real unity from the ego. In theory Olson passionately denounces the ego. An early essay, “This is Yeats Speaking,” a defense of Pound in 1946, reviles the language of false self-esteem: crowing over, bragging about a triumph over mere personal incoherence. (160) Paul Bové. Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays
[2] “Olson and Subjectivity: 'Projective Verse' and The Uncertainties of Sex.” Olson Now: Documents. Electronic Poetry Center. SUNY Buffalo. Dec. 8, 2005. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/. A revised version appears in Olson's Prose, Gary Grieve-Carlson editor. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, 47-61.
[3] In Stanzas, Giorgio Agamben argues: Nevertheless, an ancient tradition associated the exercise of
poetry, philosophy, and the arts with the most wretched of all humors. “Why is it,” asks one of the most extravagant of the Aristotelian problemata, “that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the disease arising from the black bile?” (13)
[4] "Olson and Melancholy," Worcester Review (Fall 2010).
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