Charles Olson Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas F. Merrill

Critical Essay by Thomas F. Merrill

Once at a poetry reading at Brandeis Charles Olson "got so damned offended" that he screamed at his audience, "You people are so literate I don't want to read to you anymore." To underscore the seriousness of his point, he added, "It's very crucial today to be sure that you stay illiterate simply because literacy is wholly dangerous, so dangerous that I'm involved everytime I read poetry, in the fact that I'm reading to people who are literate—and they are not hearing. They may be listening with all their minds, but they don't hear." (p. 38)

Illiteracy, or to use its more respectable name, the "projective," is no mere peevish kicking of syntax in the teeth to spite Aristotle; it is a humanist attempt to subvert the inhuman rigidities and inflations of reality that lie embedded in classical "humanism" itself. The specific rigidities and inflations it seeks to purge are:...
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