Monday, June 29, 2009

Maximus (Letter 1)


After several years as a reader & writer of poetry, I have begun what may become the great study of my young life. I have embarked upon a journey through the life and work of Charles Olson, American poet & father of the postmodern. The study is centered on
The Maximus Poems, widely considered Olson's masterwork, a series of over 300 poems composed over the space of twenty years. I had initially intended to tackle the Cantos of Ezra Pound, but fear & a stronger interest in Olson led me to Maximus (whether I was dissuaded by Pound's violent fascism or the impenetrability of the text is unclear; it's likely a combination of the two). After several readings of Paterson, William Carlos Williams' own epic of the American experience, Maximus seems like a logical next step. Olson is something of an inheritor of the Williams tradition; his theory of Projective Verse & general approach to poetics are both reflections of and expansions upon Williams' idea of the American Idiom & poetics of the variable foot. While Olson owes a great deal to his poetic predecessors (Pound & Williams both), Maximus asserts itself as a text of true originality, an exploration in fragments & full compositions of the questions of self & nation that characterized Olson's life.

Following a surface reading of the text during a quiet weekend in Vermont, I returned to Brooklyn armed with George Butterick's Guide to The Maximus Poems & Tom Clark's comprehensive (if somewhat biased) biography of the poet, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life, with the somewhat daunting goal of close-reading & annotating Maximus. The project involves an examination of as much related textual material as possible, including other poems, supplementary biographical accounts, correspondence and Olson's prose writing. Because Maximus nearly consumed Olson's life during the twenty years of its creation, and because Olson was one of the most intellectually curious figures of his time, the project has grown in scale since it began a few weeks ago. Inspired by Olson's own research methods as a young academic writing his analysis of Moby-Dick, the book-length essay Call Me Ishmael, I am interested not only in the text of Maximus itself, but also as much of the material surrounding the poems as is accessible. Following my completion of the annotative process, I'll have more clear ideas about the direction the study will follow, but at present I am primarily interested in one of Olson's most pervasive assertions: that of the power of the individual, both within & outside the collective consciousness. Note this excerpt from "Letter 6," which begins (beautifully) "polis is/ eyes":

And the few-- that goes, even inside the major
economics. It is not true that the many,
even in fishing, say, Gloucester,
are the gauge


Truth, for Olson, lies in the subjective perception of the individual. The collectivization & universalization of experience, the generalization of image in pursuit of "accessibility" are abhorrent to the poet, whose entire poetic (and, according to Clark, personal) life was devoted to the assertion of Self, & the surmounting of influence.

But Olson is far from solipsistic, & continuously asserts a consciousness of the World outside the Self:

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of

So each individual has the capacity to See, to reflect the experience of his polis in his own perception of the world outside.

Thirty-five pages in, this is what stands out. We'll see where the study leads, but at this precise moment in my experience of Olson, these assertions of the power of individual perception are terribly influential. Each day is another challenge to live to the fullest in the Olsonian "Human Universe," to absolutely surrender the self to its surrounding particulars, to experience the world through always-open eyes, and to reject, persistently, all generalization. Ambitious? Maybe. Exciting? Absolutely.