An Analysis of as the Dead Prey Upon Us by Charles Olson

As the Dead Prey Upon Us Analysis Charles Olson was an innovative essayist and poet in the 1950s-1960s. He created the idea of “Projective verse” and wrote and essay on it, asserting that a poem is a transfer of energy from the writer to reader. Projective verse allows the energy of the poem to be properly discharged. He also explained that form is an extension of the content of the poem, which is why are all breathed conditioned by his ear.

He thought the best verses were supposed to sync your ear and your breath. Olson also believed closed form and structured stanzas wasn’t conducive to expressing details and making truly original poetry. This idea of projective verse gives us an understanding when studying the form of “As the Dead Prey Upon Us”. “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” is written in projective verse using a variety of stanza patterns, from long verses to short, sparse verses.

Despite the varied form, the imagery is strong throughout. The poem begins with the perception that the ghosts who haunt humans represent those parts of people that have not had the chance to live fully. The ghost may signify a repressed or constrained part of someone’s personality or an unresolved conflict nagging at the back of the mind. When the speaker complains that his mother’s death continues to haunt him, he begins by observing that the dead are unacknowledged facts of self.

These repressed events or memories are “the sleeping ones,” and the speaker bids them to awake and thus to “disentangle from the nets of being! ” The poem is divided into two sequences of unnumbered stanzas. Usually, Olson will mark off the segments of different “acts” in a poem according to a simple pattern. Part 1 of a long lyric sequence sets up the conditions in which a thinking process will ensue, in which a variety of isolated elements taken from different sources in experience, including dreams, are carefully sifted and their internal relations worked out.

The second sequence synthesizes, imagines, and philosophically investigates the “formal” construct, a process in which the new form is woven into the context of other knowledge possessed by the poet. An Olson poem is thus the carefully staged reenactment of how the mind works to understand itself when seized by creative activity, such as dreaming. In this instance, the speaker is aroused by the irritating insistence of a dream he has had of his dead mother. The speaker has awakened and now recounts his dream to himself (and to the reader) in an effort to decipher its twisted plot.

The progression of stanzas introduces the reader to the other features of the dream: a visit to a tire store, where he may have observed the mechanic working under his car while replacing the tires; a vision of his mother surrounded by other dead souls in the living room of his house, where a film projector is showing a film against one of the walls; and in another room, an American Indian woman walks a blue deer around in circles, a deer that speaks in an African American dialect or like an old woman as it looks for socks or shoes to wear, “now that it was acquiring/ human possibilities. This latter image of the evolving deer generates the discussion on the “nets of being,” the laws that govern human identity and set it apart from other orders of nature, animals, and angels. To be human, the speaker notes, is to be limited to the “five hindrances,” the five senses of the body from which awareness derives. Human awareness is a niche in reality that dreaming expands and contradicts. The speaker must try to resolve the differences between what he has dreamed from his unconscious and what he understands as waking awareness, the world perceived by sense and logic.

The speaker’s dilemma is that he is of two minds that do not connect except here, in this poem, where the reader finds him puzzling out the meaning of a dream in his waking state. The situation is ironic, the perfect representation of the problem of divided nature Olson wishes to resolve. Personally, I did not like this poem. I took a lot of time to understand the idea and meaning behind the poem, and while I appreciate the ideas Olson was trying to address, I don’t like the way it was done and I disagree with his negativity of closed verse.

I feel like both closed and open verses have their place, and both can express creativity in a poem. I also, did not enjoy the many readings I had to do of the poem before I realized what it meant. Honestly, upon first reading, I had no idea what was going on. After several readings I began to glean the meaning of the poem behind it. While I enjoy poems that require thought to find the meaning, I felt like someone who didn’t understand Olson’s ideas on progressive verse won’t fully understand the meaning behind the format of his stanzas. Works Cited http://www. poetryfoundation. org/bio/charles-olson