Hearing the Form: Breath and the Structures of Poetry in Charles Olson and Paul Celan

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the ways in which the American poet Charles Olson, and the German-speaking Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, each in relation to specific post-war cultural circumstances, experimented with new ways of structuring poetry in relation to the breath: Olson in response to new global scientific, political, and intellectual currents; Celan in response to the Holocaust. The essay discusses not only how the poets wrote but also how they realised the printed forms of their poetry in performance, contrasting Olson’s literal performance of his theories with the different relation of print to performance of his contemporary and associate William Carlos Williams. It argues that Olson’s experiments, polemically formulated in his manifesto Projective Verse, while they have influenced central currents of American poetry since the 1950s, have remained largely American, whereas Celan’s, tentatively intimated in his anti-manifesto Der Meridian, and inimitably personal in their specific forms, can also be seen as modelling ways in which a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry can be realised in reading aloud.