Charles Olson Changes Objects: A Reinterpretation of Projective Verse

This article argues that what Charles Olson called objectism was not the mere
rehashing of objectivist poetics, as has sometimes been supposed, but
involved the working out of a position that was diametrically opposed to
objectivism, with respect both to objects in the world and objects in the poem.
Central to objectism was what I call here the rule of interchangeability. It is
this principle of interchangeability, I argue, that both grounds poetry’s open
form and frees up its dynamic relational energy. In the second half of the
essay I consider how these findings bear upon the poetry through detailed
close reading of some of the earlier Maximus poems.