Avian Poetics in Charles Olson’s “Merce of Egypt” and Robert Creeley’s “The Birds”: Projective Experimentation as an Eco-Vision

Form and content in poetry are two interconnected elements. Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley are two exemplary originators who orchestrate ‘projective verse’ and jazz prosody in their poems. Their works represent new poetics out of Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina as the experimental school of arts and literature in the 1950s. This article discusses Olson and Creeley’s avian poetics since some of their poems depict the image of bird as well as trees. Despite the avant-garde poetic experimentation, the nature of interconnected elements in their poems evokes a biocentric view of the need for conserving nonhuman beings such as birds and vegetation since these natural agents have pivotal roles in sustaining an ecosys-