J ulius g reVe Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 1 “The thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying�” —Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist” “What it comes to is ourselves, that we do not find ways to hew to experience as it is, in our definition and expression of it, in other words, find ways to stay in the human universe, and not be led to partition reality at any point, in any way� For this is just what we do do, this is the real issue of what has been, and the process, as it now asserts itself, can be exposed.” —Charles Olson, “Human Universe” Given the highly suggestive arsenal of metaphors Ezra Pound mounts in one of his most important early essays, “The Serious Artist,” what could the word “radioactivity” possibly mean in the context of modern American poetry, and what are the consequences of that term for the latter? How is Charles Olson’s insistence “to hew to experience as it is” connected to his twofold poetological process that aligns the notion of breathing with the technological intricacies of the typewriter—this recording instrument he hails as revolutionary for the practice of poetic expression and innovation? Does the reconsideration of this process come at the cost—or, rather, in the form of a revision—of Friedrich Kittler’s insight that contemporary “media determine our situation” (Kittler xxxix) in a seemingly univocal fashion; meaning, that the study of cultural practices would require an examination of the media-technological transformation of the human sensorium in its entirety? If the first of the two epigraphs above is relatively straightforward, the other is deliberately obscure� In what follows, I hope to clarify these two conundrums of radioactivity and what I call “the breath of the typewriter” with respect to what could be termed Pound’s and Olson’s respective forms of “practical aesthetics�” I am interested in the connection between the practical aspect of poetry—that is, of poetry as an activity, a performance or simply as something that one does rather than defines—on the one hand, and, on the other, the notion of the aesthetic in poetry—that is, at least according to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s multi-volume Aesthetica (1750/ 58), the realm of sense, of perception, and of corporeally being in the world and knowing the world� 1 A slightly different version of this contribution is appearing in Practical Aesthetics, ed� Bernd Herzogenrath (Bloomsbury, 2019)� 156 J ulius g reVe In the wake of Baumgarten and his contemporary heirs, I want to address a set of issues, and, specifically, their examination in the work of the aforementioned modern American poets, Pound and Olson: How to determine the relation between doing (or praxis), making (or poiesis), and sensing (or aisthesis)? How is thinking (or theoria) to be reconceived along the lines of a firmly practical approach to the realm of literary activity, in general, and to that of poetry, in particular? I am invested in the ways in which we might describe poetry as a material articulation of thought—meaning both a consequence of its immediate and intermediary environment, and a technique for generating concepts of materiality as such� In other words, I consider poetry’s capability for both enacting and conceptualizing the material conditions of its mediation and remediation, on the one hand, and its ostensible channeling of affective immediacy, on the other� Finally, I attempt to think the reciprocity of social and aesthetic activity in early to mid-twentieth-century poetry� With these more general issues used as a conceptual backdrop, I will trace the adamantly practice-oriented strands of thought in Pound’s and Olson’s works (meaning, their respective emphases on the poetic act as a form of doing that is imbricated in a social, political, and historical circumstance), thus delineating what might be called their practical aesthetics� I will do so, first, by briefly contextualizing the question concerning the return of or to aesthetics in contemporary theory—or, rather, the continuous emphasis on the aesthetic at least since what has been called “the affective turn” 2 —in order to address the cleavage between practice and technique that both Pound and Olson seem to circumvent in their respective projects� Second, I will discern the main assumptions of Pound’s essay fragment “Pragmatic Aesthetics” (written around 1940-1943 3 ) and then compare these with two of Olson’s most influential essays, “Projective Verse,” (1950) and “Human Universe” (1951). Third, I seek to examine the pragmatic lineage of Pound and Olson by looking at how their poetry stakes out specific conceptions of materiality that include distinct visions of the social. This examination will entail looking at what each poet means by “pragmatic” or “practice�” As will become apparent, they do not always mean the same thing when it comes to both material practices (or praxis) and a pragmatic understanding of discourse about the sensible (or aisthesis)� In any case, neither for Pound nor for Olson do literature and the arts exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, poetry and poetics become diagnostic and quasi-gnostic tools with which to intervene in the social fabric� In this sense a practical aesthetics is one that links literary and media-technological technique with its social and political complement� Emphasizing the thematic intersections of history, philosophy, and scientific method in the idiosyncratic styles of both poets, I will delineate the conditions of possibility for thinking their poetics as individual attempts at a pragmatic “science of the human” by poetic means� 2 See Clough and Halley� 3 I take this assumption from Maria L� Ardizzone (164-65)� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 157 I A contemporary understanding of aesthetic discourse in reference to Baumgarten may be seen in a variety of contexts. One of these, unsurprisingly, is critical and cultural theory—or what has also been called “Continental philosophy.” In the past few decades, Jacques Rancière has spoken of the “distribution of the sensible [le partage du sensible],” a notion of the aesthetic determination of everyday experience, that is, in terms of participation and non-participation, inclusion and exclusion in regard of the dynamics of the social� It is important here to note the etymology of the original French, insofar as “a partage,” which “is a principle of aggregation that configures the forms of participation in a political community … , is at once a sharing and a division” (Panagia 96). This term, which is central to Rancière’s project as a whole, is highly productive in the present discussion of Pound’s “radioactive” poetics, as will become clear� For the moment, however, it is important to mention that Rancière’s notion—which evokes direct interventions in the political arena he calls the “aesthetic regime of art” (Rancière 22-23)—indexes modes of sensing, making, and doing that intersect in reciprocal kinds of human activity by which social life comes into being and perpetuates itself� Importantly, this broad definition of the aesthetic realm and its political nature is strictly opposed to what Rancière calls “the political (le politique)” or, in a more provocative inflection, “the police order” (29-30, 89, 2-3). Before Rancière, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have conceived of the realm of art as one of three specific modes of thought, working in terms of affects and percepts, rather than concepts or propositions—as would be the case in the adjacent realms of philosophical or scientific practice, according to them. 4 Both of these comparatively recent approaches to the problem of aesthetics are directly linked to the long trajectory of aesthetics as a discipline, as Christoph Menke’s important book Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology (originally published in 2008) has shown by implication� 5 While others have linked Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of art to Baumgarten’s notion of aesthetics as the analogon rationis 6 —thus, as a different kind of thought that is practical rather than theoretical or rational, yet which is nonetheless analogical to the latter—I am specifically interested in the way in which Deleuze and Guattari’s work, but also Rancière’s approach, corresponds to the problem pointed out by Menke with respect to Johann Gottfried Herder’s critique of Baumgarten’s discourse, because it neatly prefigures my argument concerning Pound and Olson. Herder’s critique, in a nutshell, points to the crucial Baumgartenian definition of artistic practice as a mode of thought, rather than a mode of feeling� In other words, for Herder, as Menke demonstrates, aesthetics does not need reason to serve as a legitimizing force, thus realizing the “force” inherent to artistic practice and its discourse. Even if aesthetic cognition is defined vis-à-vis the domain of the 4 See Deleuze and Guattari� 5 See Menke, Force� 6 See, for instance, Haferkamp 62� 158 J ulius g reVe sensible, Baumgarten’s concept of the analogon eschews art’s emphasis on human feeling� Instead, from Herder’s point of view, aesthetics harbors a “dark” or “obscure” component that is determined thus because of its indefinably non-practical, non-social, and consequently unreasonable character (Menke, Force 32-33)� This is the point, also with respect to Deleuze, Guattari, and Rancière, at which I want to distinguish between “practice”—the social realm of human activity, of habit and disposition—and “technique”—the realm of activity that may or may not entail a social or political element, and which refers to the concrete manufacture or construction involved in the poetic act� In other words, while practice imbricates aesthetics and politics, technique may or may not combine notions of the sensible as feeling or affect with its political consequence. The difficulty of differentiating between specific practices and their techniques and vice versa points to the way in which practice and technique, conceptually speaking, reciprocally presuppose each other in the context of modern American poetry I am concerned with here. 7 This is also how Rancière’s conception of distribution (partage) comes to bear on the terminology employed in my discussion, first, to point to the difficulty of distinguishing between practice and technique and thus to acknowledge their both shared and divided space of thinking social and artistic forms of articulation, and, second, to note the etymological vicinity of partage in a political context to partage in the context of the history of broadcasting. 8 Menke’s commentary on the conceptual developments from Baumgarten all the way to the late nineteenth century also distinguishes between aesthetics in the light of “force” and practice in terms of “faculty” or capability� This distinction ultimately arrives at an idea of aesthetic articulations and artistic expressions as the realm in which what is at stake is “human freedom”—the freedom of choosing between useful and useless activity within the social realm and the reciprocity between force and faculty that is the precondition of that choice (Menke, Force 98)� In this sense, aesthetics deals with an ethicopolitical panorama of practices and medial and material relations (which also entails intermedial and intermaterial relations) within which a quasianthropology—or “science of the human”—becomes possible with respect to sensible and social experience. 9 7 My account of the reciprocity of practice and technique is similar to, yet not entirely isomorphic with, contemporary theories of practice (cf� Reckwitz)� 8 Cf. Selena Savicic, who connects Rancière’s notion concept to that history from a contemporary perspective, shedding light on the politics of sharing and separation also in terms of sharing and dividing frequencies in multiple technologies of wirelessness (49)� 9 The notion of “intermaterial relations” is derived from Christoph Kleinschmidt’s Intermaterialität, whereas I take the idea of a quasi-anthropology from François Laruelle’s conception of non-philosophy as a “science of the human” (cf� Laruelle)� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 159 II It seems that the issue of defining social practice in contradistinction to (or in tension with) aesthetic technique in the context of modern American poetry would apply to the majority of twentieth-century authors, not just to Ezra Pound or Charles Olson� The cleavage between practice and technique— between act and form—and the struggle between aesthetic autonomy and engaged literature are the hallmarks of modern verse; that is, versified literature responding to or assimilated in the reality of the modern� Yet, in this case, Pound and Olson, figuring as what could be called the hubs of influence when it comes to modern American poetry, explicitly react to that cleavage, namely by dissolving it in unique identifications of the one with the other. Pound’s essay fragment “Pragmatic Aesthetics,” which he jotted down into a notebook in the early 1940s and which was published as part of Maria L� Ardizzone’s edition of Pound’s work on aesthetics in 1996, called Machine Art & Other Writings (comprising work from several decades), is a highly unsystematic, albeit instructive text. It suggests, in retrospect, the clear direction Pound assumed with regard to aesthetic discourse from his early prose onward� Some of the doctrines to be found in his Imagist phase, and in particular in his 1913 piece “The Serious Artist,” via Vorticism and his engagement with Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1919), can be rediscovered in the form of fragmentary notes and queries, as well as a few unmistakably declarative sentences� Recalling Imagism’s earlier dictate “Go in fear of abstractions,” Pound’s tone has changed slightly in congruence with the timeand site-specific “structure of feeling” in the late 1930s and early 1940s—both in Europe and the U�S� The writer no longer “goes in fear of” but vouches for an “Attack against abstraction” (Pound, “Pragmatic Aesthetics” 157)� Not just harkening back to “A Few Don’ts” but especially to “The Serious Artist,” Pound is deeply involved in what, back then, he had called “an art of diagnosis” that was correlated to “the cult of ugliness,” and the revelation thereof, at a specific historical moment (Pound, “Serious Artist” 45)� And yet, curiously, this type of diagnosis seems to be non-negotiable in any inter-subjective mode whatsoever: “The point is not to agree or disagree but to show … true thinking is ideogrammic in the sense that the general is composed of definite particulars known directly by the thinker� Art is the particular declaration that implies the general; and being particular … may not divert, distract, melt and muddle like an abstract declaration which becomes a party cry; or cloak or mask for a hundred different ideas” (Pound, “Pragmatic Aesthetics” 158)� Pound is alluding to multiple aspects here, one of which is the amplification of precision and the concrete in the art of poetry� From Imagism’s “direct treatment of the thing” that would be referred to in the making of a specific poem, such as “In a Station of the Metro” (published 1913, the same year as “The Serious Artist”), what we have in Pound’s “Pragmatic Aesthetics” is a well-nigh denunciation of other forms of thought, and one in particular: “Philosophy, philosophical expression” he describes as “nothing but vague 160 J ulius g reVe fluid approximation; art achieves a MORE PRECISE manifestation” (159). 10 Which type of thinking, however, does he align with poetic practice and which kind of practical consequence of that type may be found in society at large? In other words, what about the materialization of that specific mode of thought? The answer to the first question is given in the diagram Pound employs to clarify the new handmaiden of poetry: mathematics, the writing arithmetic algebraic geometric analytic� (157-58) This alignment of poetry with mathematics, in accord with his earlier reference to “the fourth dimension” of non-Euclidean geometry vis-à-vis a certain literary pastoralism in Canto 49 of his epic poem’s 1937 section The Fifth Decad of Cantos, is not a new gesture at all in the trajectory of Pound as a writer (Pound, Cantos 245)� It is the distinctly social and political usage of mathematical science in the form of technology that is of interest to Pound� Human technology—and specifically its ancient Greek etymology of technê as “skill in art, in making things” (Pound, Kulchur 327)—from the mid-1930s onward becomes increasingly important for the poet who begins to regard his practice and form of writing as functionally important in political terms� As he states in his 1938 book of criticism, Guide to Kulchur: “The history of a culture is the history of ideas going into action” (44)� If Pound’s image of “the serious artist” was already characterized by an exceptionally “scientific” disposition (Pound, “Serious Artist” 46), during World War II poetry ought to become imbricated in politics in order to stay relevant: practice and technique, act and form, become one� And for Pound it is in the context of a specific technological apparatus—the radio—that political action (or praxis), literary making (or poiesis), and lived experience (or aisthesis) converge� 11 It is important to remember at this point that Pound was at first skeptical with regard to this new communicational medium. On March 31, 1940, in a letter he wrote to the philosopher George Santayana from his home in Rapallo, Italy, he mentioned that a few of his “Blasted friends left a goddam radio here yester� Gift� God dam destructive and dispersive devil of an invention� But got to be faced� Drammer has got to face it, not only face cinema� … Anyhow what drammer or teeyater wuz, radio is� Possibly the loathing of it may stop diffuse writing” (Selected Letters 342)� Moreover, he complained about “the personae now poked into every bleedin’ ‘ome and smearing the mind of the peapull” (343)� Ironically, it is this “poking” and “smearing” that he himself set out to do in the form of anti-Semitic speech-acts “broadcast over Rome Radio between 1941 and 1943” (Flory 10 Compare with Laruelle’s contention: “We begin with the real that has no need of philosophy…” (Laruelle 70)� 11 On this convergence, see also Bacigalupo 230� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 161 284), showing his endorsement of Fascist Italy—speeches that eventually led to his arrest as a traitor to the United States and collaborator with Benito Mussolini’s regime� One of the poet’s particularly anti-Semitic Cantos—that is, Canto 46— broadcast on Rome Radio, in early 1942, refers to the essential concept “usury” or “usura”—in this case “hyper-usura”—which he identified as the sin of making money from nothing, or, as he himself writes elsewhere: “Usury: a charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production, sometimes without regard even to the possibilities of production” (“Gists” 355), thereby almost quoting verbatim from an earlier section of his epic. What is interesting in this context is his Jeremiad-like emphasis on the downfall of the American empire after Thomas Jefferson and, as will become apparent in the epic’s next section, John Adams. Even though this Canto, as part of The Fifth Decad, was published only a year before Pound’s Guide to Kulchur, I would argue that it is particularly in the next section, on Chinese history and Adams’ biography, that Pound’s radio-inspired poetics come to full fruition. This kind of poetics recalls the first of the two epigraphs with which I began: “The thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying” (Pound, “The Serious Artist” 49)� In his 1995 monograph, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound, Daniel Tiffany comments on this sentence thus: “In the ‘unifying’ power of ‘radioactive’ images we discover the origins of paideuma—the fascist ‘worldpicture’—in which the disparate features of history are fused into mythological coherence� More remotely, we also discover in Pound’s theory of radioactive art the origins of a conception of radio as a medium that is capable of unifying the ‘subconscious energies’ of an entire population” (Tiffany 224-25)� Pound’s organicist world-view, which is apparent throughout the majority of his writings on the level of content, and which I will revisit in the direct comparison with Olson’s work—this world-view is curiously amplified (in both senses) at the moment the poet’s writing style of documentary technique and archival accumulation goes full throttle� At this point of his career, poetic practice, on the level of “ideas going into action” via “skill in art, in making things,” means the underlining of poiesis as archeology� Yet, while others have commented on Pound’s “poetic archaeology” (Mottram 109) in the past, it is important to underline what this actually means in the context of “radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying�” While Pound had cited from literary, historical, economic, mythical, and philosophical sources long before this critical phase of his epic poem, there is a certain media-technological particularity to this “radioactive” context that sheds light on Pound’s oeuvre as a whole. In other words, what is the connection between the wirelessness of radio broadcasting and the organicism proclaimed politically and philosophically in the poet’s Cantos and his other writings? 162 J ulius g reVe I have already mentioned Pound’s ambivalent—or, rather, contradictory— relation to radio, or what he called a “destructive and dispersive devil of an invention�” Along these lines, Tiffany notes how the quasi-pre-Kittlerian Pound saw how “The insidious power of technology reaches deep into our hereditary past, the realm of the dead, as well as into the future, the realm of the unborn� What’s more, Pound’s fears about technology coincide with this condemnation of usury” (Tiffany 246)—once again, the chief factor that, according to Pound’s views, had led to the downfall of United States culture in the course of modernization� It is precisely the combination of the technological and the organic, of the modern and the archaic, and of the contemporary with the historico-mythological that defines the poet’s practical aesthetics� Tiffany helpfully suggests: “Given the historical speculations about radio’s relation to spiritualism, we might usefully ask whether Pound’s conception of radio doesn’t resemble a kind of ventriloquism originating with the dead … The exteriorization and projection of the voice that occurs on the radio has obvious parallels with the act of ventriloquism, as well as with the experience of haunting” (250). And it is as a consequence of this tension between embodiment and disembodiment, and between appropriation and depersonalization, of various controversial historical and contemporary voices in the Cantos of that time period—including Jefferson and Adams, Mencius and Confucius, Mussolini and Hitler—that Pound would turn to a fully fledged fascist and racist poetics that was more tacit at earlier moments of his career� What needs to be remembered, I claim, is not merely that he was eventually indicted as traitor to the United States because of his radio speeches, but that the latter are demonstrations, among other things, of his approach to poetic practice itself� The radio apparatus and the form of broadcasting it allowed for is key for any understanding of Pound’s fascist politics of medial distribution grounded in a univocal, rather than equivocal, notion of communication� III After being “interned [in 1945] at the US Army ‘Disciplinary Training Center’ north of Pisa, a prison and rehabilitation camp for US military offenders” (Flory 284), he was eventually found as unable to stand trial and thus transferred to St� Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC� One of the many authors and artists that visited Pound in this psychiatric hospital was Charles Olson, whose fascination with Pound’s Cantos is visibly present in many of his own writings, in particular his epic The Maximus Poems, a work that he started writing in the early 1950s� Much has been said about Olson’s debt both to the Cantos and to comparable works, such as William Carlos Williams’ long poem Paterson, yet it is the relationship between Pound’s “Pragmatic Aesthetics” and Olson’s critical work that I am interested in here� 12 Especially the text “Projective Verse,” in many ways a re-envisioned manifesto for the 12 See, for instance, Beach� Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 163 post-war generation of American poetry, provides insight into Olson’s dissolution of the chasm between social practice and literary technique, between the faculties of political life and the force of art, as Menke would have it� However, it is important to remember that, politically speaking, Olson was on the other side of the spectrum—different from Pound, his politics were guided by a left-leaning liberalism� This poet, who had worked as a political activist for the Democratic National Committee during the closing years of World War II under Franklin D� Roosevelt, had picked up on Pound’s formalisms, while inverting the political orientation of his poetics� “Projective Verse,” borrowing its name from the mathematical branch of projective geometry, also praised the poetic act itself (which, especially in Pound and Olson, includes both the composition and the recitation of poetry): if for Pound, “the history of a culture” was regarded as “the history of ideas going into action,” for Olson, it was the history and geography of a region—of the locale—that was synonymous with specific “ideas going into action.” And this locality was again connected to the lived experience of the poet himself; in The Maximus Poems, Olson depicted his home and its environment in Gloucester, Massachusetts, adding to it the history and geography of it, from an ecologically invested point of view� As Olson writes in his 1950 manifesto, “the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects,” points to a distinctly ecological ethics that presents “man [as] himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages” (“Projective Verse” 25, 24), the projective stance leading to a kind of humility with respect to the poet’s environment; a stance that would regard humankind as “participant in the larger force” that is “nature” (25)� Olson would use the notions of poetic “speech-force” and “THE LAW OF THE LINE” rather than more traditional forms of meter and rhyme� Different from many versions of high modernist free verse, however, his take on what he also called “composition by field” focused on the poet’s siteand time-specific process of breathing while making the poem. This somatic “breath poetics” would then be reflected in the lines typed onto the page, the typewriter being christened as the technological apparatus that, “being the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work,” somehow correlated with “the kinetics” and “the process of the thing” (23, 16), of the poem in the making� Therefore, rather than secularizing the process of poiesis, as Kittler would have it, media technology in general, and typewriting in particular, re-sacralizes that process to the extent that the technology at hand is deemed essential on the royal road to what Nathaniel Mackey describes as “a primordial, Edenic immediacy in poetry,” along the lines of “American poetry’s Adamic aspirations” (Mackey 128)� 13 13 On Olson and Kittler, see also Foley� In his essay, Foley contends that, unlike Kittler, “Olson’s philology, in which love (philia) joins with the word (logos), affirms that an aesthetic shudder might yet derive from an ethical and undying affection for media and for the dead they bear with them” (100)� 164 J ulius g reVe Interestingly, like Pound, in his comments on “radioactivity,” Olson, too, relies on a semantics of force: the force of speech, of poetic construction in a kind of immediacy that seemingly denies what is so central even—or especially—in the kind of poetry Olson would go on to write� Note, in this regard, that according to an idiosyncratic poetological inference of Olson’s, the word “myth” in “mythology” is derived from “mouth,” rather than “story,” as common ancient Greek etymologies would have it� 14 And it is this form of understanding the use of myth—that is to say, not merely the use of mythological references as in high modernism, but literally, the use of one’s mouth—that the alignment of a poetics of breathing in Olson with the technological particulars and practical intricacies of the typewriter lead to a poetics of ventriloquism in Olson, if by ventriloquism we may also denote the disassociation of a voice from its usual origin� 15 It is only by means of the typewriter that the poet may breathe and thus produce the poetry that is most pressing in the time of what Olson calls “the dispersion,” the time after a new lapse of the human in the form of all that was endured as the collective experience of World War II, the Holocaust, and, more generally, the processes of modernization that led to that lapse� Olson’s (or any projective writer’s) breath is the typewriter’s breath, because otherwise, paradoxically, it would be impossible to escape the metric grid of the modern� In order to return to the issue of a “pragmatic aesthetics” in terms of both poets’ respective bodies of work, I would like to argue that it is not just in Pound’s case that “pragmatic” means “functional” as “opposed to something merely theoretical,” as Ardizzone has stated (14)� Olson, too, will condemn the theoretical overdetermination of sensible or lived experience by any universalist standpoints whatsoever; he will also equate such a non-lived overdetermination with the process of modernization itself� 16 Pound had referenced pastoral scenes taken from Chinese literature and historiography (filtered predominantly through the Orientalist lens of the Jesuit missionary Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s Historie générale de la Chine), and he was thus concerned with the rhythms of the working day in the aforementioned Canto 49 and even more so the Chinese Cantos� This idealization of the day’s rhythms of labor, with all its political implications, can be witnessed in another sense, in a 1939 recording of Canto 56, in which Pound’s voice is accompanied by a beating drum� This time, however, the beating drum is that of the war between insurgents and imperial soldiers from the rule of the Chinese emperor Yao onward� 17 14 Compare Pattison (61-62) on this issue� 15 Cf� Connor� 16 Compare with Mark Byers’ assertion that Olson’s “This is a practice of the self which stresses the practical activity of the individual in relation to the world as the central fact of human well-being; a position which might recall the American Pragmatist tradition but which follows more directly from the independent American left’s recent reconstruction of the person-centred and, significantly, embodied radical subject” (133-34)� 17 I am referring to the recording from Pound’s 1939 visit to Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, before the publication of the Chinese Cantos and the John Adams section; that is, 52/ 71� See the PennSound webpage: http: / / writing�upenn�edu/ Radio, Typewriter, Breath: Practice and Technique in Pound and Olson 165 Olson, in a similar manner to that of the pastoral theme in Canto 49, praised Gloucester’s famous culture of fishing. The reader of both The Cantos and The Maximus Poems should take seriously the respective expressions of scorn in regard to the destructive processes of modernization, and should indeed take note of the respective versions of the aforementioned “cultural organicism” these expressions entail—in Olson’s case, “the wondership” of supposedly “older” forms of living being “stolen by, / ownership” (Olson, Maximus 13) of bigger companies, invading his beloved sea town on Cape Ann, Massachusetts; in Pound’s case, the notorious rants against “usury” from The Fifth Decad onward, and the penetrating commendations of Confucian ethics of feudal order and virtue, as well as Mencian paternalist affection or “benevolence” represented by the aforementioned historical figures Adams, Jefferson, and/ or Mussolini� 18 The identification of practice (praxis) and technique (technê), again, leads both to a skeptical take on modernity’s advantages in view of ordinary lives and to a technologically informed—that is, materially inflected—approach to literary activity in the name of the question concerning the “use” of oneself in the social realm� In this sense, for both Pound and Olson, the medial crossfertilization of modern technê—of “skill in art, in making things”—between poetry, radio broadcasting, and typewriting, also gives rise to adamantly practice-oriented strands of thought that either tend toward the imaginary of what Rancière terms the totalitarian “police order” or toward the reverence of humankind as one object among many in local geographies� As Olson writes in “Human Universe,” a text that can readily be called his critical statement on ethics, especially because it recalls the aforementioned problematic of partage: “What it comes to is ourselves, that we do not find ways to hew to experience as it is, in our definition and expression of it, in other words, find ways to stay in the human universe, and not be led to partition reality at any point, in any way� For this is just what we do do, this is the real issue of what has been, and the process, as it now asserts itself, can be exposed” (Olson, “Human Universe” 56; emphasis added)� I want to conclude by contending that regardless of Pound’s and Olson’s idiosyncratically staged identifications of practice and technique, the identification itself relies on a unilateral determination that goes from the performance of the poetic act to that of the social objective, thus inquiring by means of versification into the ways in which “men do use / their lives” (Olson, Maximus 63)� In other words, if there is a quasi-anthropological, or, rather, pennsound/ x/ Pound.php. On Pound’s poeticization of de Mailla’s take on Chinese history, see Park 41� 18 In terms of this organicist parallelism between Pound and Olson, the latter’s “jeremiads about America synthesize, interestingly, the critique of the contemporary radical left (the hatred of capitalism, excessive consumption, racism), and of the contemporary radical right (the accusation that the work ethic has been lost)” (Stimpson 152)� Consider also Andrew Gross’s exacting observation that “Olson’s attempt to place the human subject in nature as one object among many was consistent with Pound’s efforts to let the landscape find its own poetic form through the topographical analogy he called ‘periplum’” (Gross 228)� 166 J ulius g reVe non-standard anthropological impulse in The Cantos and in The Maximus Poems—that is, a “science of the human”—it is by way of the “forwarding” (6) poetic force, of poetry as a project, and of verse as projection, that material practice, pragmatic aesthetics, and thus practical aesthetics become possible� Radio, typewriter, breath—if the blurring of the demarcation that separates practice and technique is key in the majority of U�S� American poets from the twentieth century on, it is nonetheless in Pound and Olson that such a blurring would find its experimental, radical, and, importantly, organicist beginnings� However, this does not mean that “practical aesthetics”—the correlation of praxis and aisthesis—must necessarily amount to fascist artistic practices by default, based on the theoretical elimination of non-identity� It means that the prominent and lastingly influential cases of Pound and Olson demonstrate that cultural organicism in the literary domain may turn out to be fascist or it may turn out to be regionalist; to be sure, what has been a predisposition in both cases is not only a concept of doing correlated with a notion of sensing, but a way in which lived experience and mythography become intertwined on the level of form� Works Cited Ardizzone, Maria L. “Note on the Texts.” Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years� By Ezra Pound� Ed� Ardizzone� Durham: Duke UP, 1996� Bacigalupo, Massimo� The Formèd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound� New York: Columbia UP, 1980� Beach, Christopher� ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition� Berkeley: U of California P, 1992� Byers, Mark� Charles Olson and American Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Clough, Patricia T�, and Jean Halley, eds� The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social� Durham: Duke UP, 2007� Connor, Steven� Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000� Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Trans� Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. 1991� New York: Columbia UP, 1994� Flory, Wendy S� “Pound and Antisemitism�” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed� Ira B� Nadel� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999� Foley, Abram� “Friedrich Kittler, Charles Olson, and the Return of Postwar Philology�” Affirmations: Of the Modern 2�2 (2015): 81-100� Gross, Andrew S� The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature. 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Pattison, Reitha� “‘Empty Air’: Charles Olson’s Cosmology�” Contemporary Olson� Ed� David Herd� Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015� 52-63� Pound, Ezra� The Cantos of Ezra Pound� New York: New Directions, 1996� ---� “Gists�” Selected Prose, 1909-1965� Ed� William Cookson� New York: New Directions, 1973� 354-355� ---� Guide to Kulchur� 1938� New York: New Directions, 1970� ---� “Pragmatic Aesthetics�” Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years� Ed� Maria Luisa Ardizzone� Durham: Duke UP, 1996� ---� The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941� Ed� D� D� Paige� New York: New Directions, 1950� ---� “The Serious Artist�” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound� Ed� T� S� Eliot� London: Faber and Faber, 1960� Rancière, Jacques. 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