Searching for the lost Aphrodite Sequence

This is an interesting visual interpretation of Aphrodite by Claude Verlinde.




I spent two hours searching again, for the rise of Aphrodite in Charles Olson's, Maximus poems to no avail. I love the brilliant angelic and oracular voice of Olson. The power and breath in his poetry is everything that trite American poetry is not and that includes most derivative beat poets and after Ginsburg they were pretty much all derivative. Not that there weren't differences in their choices of addictive substances. I am going to put a good word in for Gary Snyder and Michael McClure not to mention the infamous Crispin Edgewood.

But back to Olson- who is one of the most brilliant of all American poets. I am asking myself why it is I long for these particular words he wrote so long ago; the encapsulated uncoil of an archetypal mermaid turned Goddess into bitter gold light, dazzling with beauty and impermanence. I just do. Poets need poetry and dreams the way others need bread.

Her is a snippet of an interesting discussion about Olson.

Poetry, like any art, must renew itself continually. Charles Olson’s manifesto "Projective/Verse", published in 1950, describes poetry’s need to recover the energy of its sources from the exhausted (in his view) formal practice of Eliot and the New Critics. Projective verse, a.k.a. "composition by field" and "objectism," sees the poem not as words in lines upon a page, but as a field of energy-charged objects representing the poem’s psychic content in a state of immediacy, before laziness and habit have conspired to turn it into mere verse. Olson exhorts poets to attend to language with their ears, to compose according to the measure of their breathing (spiritus), to work with the "elements and minims of language...to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical," and so to fix the pulse of energy before it reaches the stasis of conventional form.



Below is a small poem from Maximus.



flower of the underworld



to build sand out of sound the walls of the city
& display
in one flower the underworld so that,

by such means the unique

stand forth clear itself
shall be made known