The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

kind of book one can write after a lot of
preliminary critical work has been done;
Irene Niechoda's A Sourcery for Books 1 and
2 of bpNichol's The Martyrology is, in fact,
the first installment of an equivalent to
Butterick's Guide or Edwards and Vasse's
Annotated Index to the CANTOS of Ezra
Pound, and it is as important and necessary
as those were.
Judith Halden-Sullivan knows Olson's
work (her MA thesis was a study of Olson's
letters), but her purpose in The Topology of
Being is not to add to the close readings of
Olson's poems but to investigate the
grounds of his poetics in the context of her
reading of Martin Heidegger. Intelligent,
coherent, and compressed, her book does
well what it sets out to do. Hers is not an
influence study, for there is no evidence
that Olson read Heidegger; nor does she
offer "a simple case of analogy. I do not
intend to pair likenesses between these two
thinkers, but to use Heidegger's hermeneutic
phenomenology as a context in which
Olson's canon finds a firm foundation—a
ground that does come to support the
coherence of Olson's ideas". In order to do
this, she examines Olson's prose more than
his poetry, seeking to show that his various
statements on poetry, history, mythology,
and language do (contrary to what many of
his negative critics have argued) make up a
coherent poetics, and a valuable one.
Perhaps her major point is that Olson, as
both poet and thinker, represents an
answer to Heidegger's heartfelt question:
"'... what are poets for in a destitute time?'".
Part of her argument is that Olson
thought in a Heideggerian manner (if also a
specifically American one), that his
approach to the world was similar to
Heidegger's even if neither of them really
knew of the other's work. In some cases,
Heidegger's terms—his particular way of
thinking "world" and "planet," for example—can
help us understand how Olson
approached a "comprehension of Being's
presence". In others, she simply discovers in
Olson a stance towards the human and the
natural that Heidegger shares. For example,
Olson's interpretation of Herodotus's use of
the term historein ('"istorin" as he wrote it)
as meaning "finding out for oneself" or
"'looking for the evidence' of what has
been said" is, for her, "closely aligned with
Heidegger and the Greeks who speak of
truth as aletheia—the uncovering of beings
or non-concealment". In other places,
Heidegger's particular philosophical language
helps her explicate Olson's stance.
What strikes her most forcefully is how
both "Olson and Heidegger delineate several
'basic structures' that distinguish
humans" in "their being-in-the-world":
these include, "human beings' participation
in the disclosure—the truth—of their
world," "their 'care' or concern for the
world, their 'thrownness' or their being cast
into an unchosen world of things, their
'projection' or ability to project multiple
possibilities for defining both things and
themselves, and their 'fallenness' or being
in a world already made complete with traditional
established truths and untruths".
She also argues that Olson and Heidegger
share an attitude toward logos, what is said,
that stands them in opposition to deconstructive
modes of thought and analysis
(although I would suspect that a closer
reading of Derrida on Heidegger might
cause her to differentiate his work more
carefully from that of his followers;
nonetheless, she does argue forcefully that
her two thinkers are defiantly unnihilistic
in their approach to the potentials of
human language). As these quick glances at
her argument suggest, Halden-Sullivan's
The Topology of Being crams a lot into its
150 or so pages. What she does, in both her
use of Heidegger's thought and her critiques
of the limitations of some of Olson's
interpreters, is provide a thoughtful background
to a renewed reading of Olson's
many writings. Demonstrating that they