At this point Michael is probably the most prominent intentional practitioner of projective verse alive. Many of you will not know what projective verse is. Charles Olson regarded his own poetry as a kind of projective verse, and he published an essay about it fifty years ago, in 1950. It became a famous essay, and it influenced many people in a lot of very different kinds of ways. Among the people who are writing projective verse currently are Diane di Prima, Sharon Doubiago, and in fact a whole bunch of other people.
Some practitioners are no longer alive.
Those who have not read my poetry before will discover that I write with a breath line and that I listen to the syllable as it appears in my voice or on the tip of my pen or on my screen or on my field of energies. My family and I became closely acquainted with Robert Duncan and his lover, Jess Collins, and we spent time with them. These were practice in projective verse, which he did not call projective at the time. Robert, as I knew him personally in home sessions with him and dinners with him, ceaselessly proposed to me the stature and energy and integrity of, particularly, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. In the meantime, I was reading a lot of Olson, and one should remember that something very different was going on in that day.