To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Halden-Sullivan's intriguing short study of
his poetics shows. bpNichol will eventually
be recognized as a similarly engendering
figure in Canadian and contemporary writing,
but as yet there are only two studies of
his work, plus a couple of special issues of
journals (Open Letter and Line). George
Butterick edited both The Collected Poems
of Charles Olson and The Maximus Poems
(both with University of California Press)
as well as publishing his massive and necessary
A Guide to The Maximus Poems of
Charles Olson, and most of the rest of Olson's
vast writings are available to the interested
reader. In contrast, Nichol's equally vast
oeuvre is scattered widely in small press
publications, and even The Martyrology has
been mostly out of print for some time
(although Coach House Press is reprinting
it over the next few years). Halden-Sullivan's
essay on Olson's poetics is the 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 ofbpNichol'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 M A 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" (33). 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-theworld":
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
H9