Radical Affections

Book excerpt: In 1950 the poet Charles Olson published his influential essay "Projective Verse" in which he proposed a poetry of "open field" composition-to replace traditional closed poetic forms with improvised forms that would reflect exactly the content of the poem. The poets and poetry that have followed in the wake of the "projectivist" movement-the Black Mountain group, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Language poets-have since been studied at length. But more often than not they have been studied through the lens of continental theory with the effect that these high.