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Projectivist poets

Movement
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Poets emphasizing open form, breath-based line, and dynamic composition

Detailed Definition
Projectivist poets are practitioners of Projective Verse, a mid-20th-century movement championed by Charles Olson that emphasizes breath-based composition, open field poetics, and the poem as energy transfer; rejecting closed forms, they treat the page as a field of action where typographic arrangement mirrors thought process and bodily rhythm.
Example
Example in poetry:
The group of American poets (such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov) who believed that a poem's form should be organic and projective, derived from the content and the poet's breath; Charles Olson's essay Projective Verse as the foundational text of the movement; Denise Levertov's emphasis on the importance of the breath and ear in determining line breaks; Robert Duncan's open field composition and use of long, energetic lines.
Additional Notes
Projectivist poets: Poets associated with the Projective Verse essay (Charles Olson, 1950), which advocated for open forms, breath-based rhythm, and the poem as a high-energy field; emphasizes the poet's own breathing as the metric guide.
Also Known As
Black Mountain poets projective verse writers Olson school poets Black Mountain Poets (US)
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