Olson and I exchanged comments about all sorts of things, including the linguistics of poetic composition. It was clear to me that he’d been a very *influential and powerful teacher. It was also clear, at one point, that Olson was thinking that if I’d been on the scene ten or fifteen years earlier, he would’ve invited me to join him on the Black Mountain team. Having read enough and heard enough about the way things were done there, I asked *myself if I would have accepted such an invitation. I was quite clear that I would not have done so. It was not an institution that I could have willingly associated myself with, partly because they were such bullies. Olson and the others practised ascendency over the students and dominated their development, and offered themselves as exemplary models to be followed, not as choices to be made. Partly, too, because their knowledge of scholarship, and their understanding of things outside the ambience of personal interest and behaviour, was extremely casual. There were papers in the Black Mountain Review by Creeley that were grossly erroneous with regard to basic information. There was an absurd discussion about someone called Putnam, as I recall. It was meant to be George Puttenham. Creeley had heard the name spoken and he propagated this absurd misidentification. I was incensed by the absurdity. Didn’t they have a library? Weren’t they able to check up on information? No, they weren’t interested in any sort of reliable connection with the data of literary practise. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. I remember thinking, rather priggishly I may say, that it was something I wouldn’t have done. For I was at a serious institute, and I’d been surrounded by serious scholars who had serious habits. And even though I used these habits in my own interest, and explored them in my own way, it was a very stabilising framework.
INTERVIEWER
Could you say something about poetry and scholarly responsibility? What’s the moment at which poetic license reaches the limit of its virtue?
PRYNNE
Well, that’s an extremely important question. It’s very difficult to know when you’ve reached such a boundary. Sometimes if a poet is lucky, he has friends who will take it upon themselves to point a few things out. One of the features of Pound’s isolation in Rapallo was that he separated himself from clever friends who could say, Come off it, Ezra, for heaven’s sake, wise up, pay attention, don’t be so stupid, read a few things, let me tell you what I think as a reader of your stuff. But he isolated himself. He was surrounded by people who believed in these crackpot economic ideas. And none of them told him that he was going off the rails.
I’m afraid the same would have been true with Olson. Some intelligent friend should have said, Look, Charlie, it’s all very well, but there comes a point where you’re answerable for certain uses of material. Your readers and students are going to say, Are we to follow down these roads, and if so, where are they going to take us? If you don’t care about these questions, then you’ve abandoned one of the important things that it means to be a poet. Yeats made a regular ass of himself in his adoption of spiritualist blarney, even if he was mostly just playing with it.
After all, one of the few things that was to be said for Davie and Empson was that they kept their mental equipment at work. And Olson vandalised his intellectual equipment as his career went along. He took all sorts of archaeological material and bungled it around to make these farragoes of Nordic mythology. It was very uncomfortable to me, because not only had I read all these German texts which he couldn’t read, but I’d studied as an undergraduate the Old Icelandic corpus, and I’d learned Old Icelandic as a language. I could just about read these Old Icelandic poems. Olson would go off onto a romance about them and he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. And I would think, Why doesn’t he read this material? Well, he can’t read this material. Why doesn’t he learn to read this material? There are translations he could read. He could start to understand things. But by that stage it was too late for him. The Mayan stuff, for example. He had no real understanding of how glyph languages work. It was a romantic, liberational idea for him, but it took leave of historical record rather early and rather freely.