The Beat In Allen Ginsberg?s ?America? :: essays research papers

A half century ago, American poetics redefined itself when it made some organic changes. Traditional verse, as its force-fed rhyme and meter schemes often restricts any accurate report, was subdued and chastised in favor of a more-realistic, a more human-excretory approach to writing verse. Both the Projectivist and the Beat poets, led by Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg respectively, were instrumental leaders in this mapping of future poetics. They felt communication to be a fine-tuned relationship between the mind and its environment, and as such, a writing tool naturally and necessarily void of abstraction. In fact, they considered the fruits of their labors as real, and as definite, as the material which it emerged.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Let’s take a closer look at the organic form desired by the Projectivist poet as described by Charles Olson. Primarily, the poet must compose his poem by field. In other words, instead of trying to fit the near-best word into a pre-ordained line, stanza, or form, the Projectivist poet uses an inherently-less-restrictive, open, free-style verse which relies solely on the poet’s digestion of his environment, or field. Using such verse could only prove to enhance true communication. Essentially, there are two interrelated parts to Projectivist verse, the â€Å"what?â€Å" and the â€Å"how?.†   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The â€Å"what?† can be split three ways: kinetics, principle, and process. Kinetics refers to the energy transfer from the field through the poet’s mind to his pen. The path the energy takes from field to pen is fixed and thus, as mentioned above, void of abstraction. The second part, principle, is simply a corollary to kinetics. This part of the â€Å"what?† has been best described by Robert Creeley who wrote, â€Å"form is never more than an extension of content.† Finally, the process of composing by field can be easily defined with an understanding of the domino effect. We all know that tapping thus toppling the first of a group of dominos stacked in alignment with each other will swiftly lead to a further tapped thus toppled domino. The same idea can be understood with regards to Projectivist theory of verse; as told to Olson by Edward Dahlberg, â€Å"one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.†   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The second part of the theory of Projectivist verse, the â€Å"how,† is basically the life force the energy picks up as it travels through the poets body. Olson very eloquently referred to this union of field and life as â€Å"the dance of the intellect.