The Persistence of “unseasonable forms”

Building off Fredric Jameson’s observation that Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson persist in using an “unseasonable form” as their long poems carry on with a Modernist aesthetic during the emergence of Postmodernism, this chapter examines how both poets self-consciously consider their relationship with objects. Closely associated with Objectivism, Zukofsky’s work, including “A”, foregrounds objects in our everyday lives. This focus on objects is informed by Zukofsky’s understanding of Marxist theory, although it is not limited by that knowledge. His debt to the materialist philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is also acknowledged. Olson rejects Objectivism in favor of what he calls “objectism” in his influential manifesto, “Projective Verse.” Olson does not become as closely associated with this concept as Zukofsky does with Objectivism. Nevertheless, this chapter shows how the notion of objectism can be used as a tool to understand Olson’s The Maximus Poems, from the poem’s early focus on the material lives of European settlers in New England to its final moments when objects take on equal value to the self, registering his speaker’s acknowledgement of vibrant matter.