Wisdom of the Master

Charles Olson to Robert Creeley, 8 March 1951
(from C.O. & R.C. : The Complete Correspondence, Vol. 5)

Ez [Pound]'s epic solves problem by his ego: his single emotion breaks all down to his equals or inferiors (so far as I can see only two, possibly, are admitted, by him, to be his betters -- Confucius, & Dante. Which assumption, that there are intelligent men whom he can outtalk, is beautiful because it destroys historical time, and

thus creates the methodology of the Cantos, viz, a space-field where, by inversion, though the material is all time material, he has driven through it so sharply by the beak of his ego, that, he has turned time into what we must now have, space & its live air

((secondary contrast is Joyce [...] he tried to get at the problem by running one language into another so as to create a universal language of the unconscious [...] Joyce, the Commercial Traveler: [...] this internationalizing of language is more relevant to commerce, now, than it is to the aesthetic problem[...]

the primary contrast, for our purpose, is, BILL [Williams]: his Pat[erson] is exact opposite of Ez's, that is, Bill HAS an emotional system which is capable of extensions & comprehensions the ego-system (the Old Deal, Ez as Cento Man, here dates, is not. Yet

by making his substance historical of one city (the Joyce deal), Bill completely licks himself, lets time roll him under as Ez does not, and thus, so far as what is the more important, methodology, contributes nothing, in fact delays, deters, and hampers, by, not having busted through, the very problem which, Ez, has, so brilliantly faced, & beat

First, a moment to acknowledge the incredible brilliance of Olson's understanding of (I argue) three of the greatest practitioners of the project of the Modern Epic.

A note: Olson goes on to examine the problem of approaching the Epic from a single perspective (ego, locality, emotion, history) & comes to the conclusion that all three of the Greats fail in that their progress is collectively tied up in a stagnant history. Olson's working toward an active history, post-Marxian, which is what sets him apart.

A professor, an Important Pound Scholar, told me that my choice to tackle Maximus before the Cantos was courageous & overly ambitious, as "Pound is much easier than Olson." I countered by pointing out that Olson, while dense, experimental & almost impenetrable in his referential poetics, gave us an epic in English (or more precisely, American). Call me lazy, but I much prefer the Maximus project, Butterick always at my side, than the monumental task of deciphering Chinese ideograms, ancient Greek & Italian. What I did not say, & would have sd had I the newly acquired vocabulary, is that Olson manages to leap out of that stagnant history, rooting his epic in a multi-lingual collage of voice, moving from a Patersonian locality in Gloucester to a global consideration of identity with fluidity & poetic grace, cementing the theories he laid out in ProVerse & Human Universe & wrestling, without apology or hesitation, with the problem of Ego that all poets inevitably confront. & that's why he's readable, because he admits his struggle.

Pound, Joyce & Williams are masters, & it's my contention that Olson dismisses Paterson somewhat unjustly, as Williams manages with his epic (in my reading) to create a poetics both in- and outside-of-time. The only thing rolling, to me, is the Passaic. But aside from that, Olson outdoes his predecessors as a cultural archaeologist. Where the Fathers scratch the surface, Olson goes strip-mining. He's learned the lessons hidden inside of Ulysses, the Cantos, Paterson, the lessons the Fathers were likely unaware they were teaching, & through experience (both on the page & on the ground) has formulated a new approach to the epic, an approach that allows, simultaneously, an examination of LANGUAGE, HISTORY, CULTURE, LAND, EGO, TIME, ECONOMICS, POLITICS

... all of which Pound, Joyce & Williams tackled, but which Olson approaches without privileging a single problem over another. This is where he steps outside, digs deeper, gives us something more comprehensive, less limiting. The Olsonian dogma, much like Mao's, was rooted in a fierce anti-dogmatism. And that's the key: the palpable paradox, the weight of history & inheritance informing each & every defiant, innovative choice. The ambivalence of the great revolutionary.

Maximus, to himself

I've made it to page 57 of Maximus. Distractions & laziness are partly responsible for the slowness of my progress. Mostly, though, I found myself feeling too close to the text & not quite understanding why. Despite its confusing & fascinating references to history & ancient mythology, there was something beneath the surface that felt familiar to me, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. So I walked away for awhile.

A few days ago, I decided to get back into the swing of things by exploring some of Olson's correspondence, particularly his epistolary relationship with Frances Boldereff, a lover who became his muse & literary confidante. Many of Olson's letters to Frances contained the beginnings of some of the best Maximus poems. It was in my exploration of those letters that I discovered the familiarity that had startled me before.

In Frances & Olson's correspondence, I began to recognize myself in Frances' response to the poet. The two of them, the dynamic of their relationship, appeared allegorical to an epistolary relationship of my own. If I saw myself in Frances, I saw my counterpart in Olson. It was the appearance of echoes of this other person in Olson's poems that gave me pause. The letters between Olson & Frances only magnified this parallel. It was painfully clear in one upsetting exchange between the two, in April 1950:

on April 15, Frances writes:

I am very shocked not to have a note from you...
I have no money
I have no work
I have no companionship
I have no library
And I receive from you in the darkest hours I have lived through one small note.
Do you think it is kind Charles?

...The human thing is made of blood. Sometimes what is needed is not words-- it is the sight of a human eye. I need no sex now -- I am far too torn for that. I do need you.

If you cannot come to me now Charles when I need you not out of weakness...but because I need human-- I need to see the eye -- the words are just like thin odorless water to me--

Two days later, Olson writes:

you have made me cold as ice-- by attacking my words, language, this communication between us which i believe in so deeply, as thin odorless water... you must, because you do have the reach in you, understand that i would understand anything you do-- you must protect yourself, darling...

i don't care who the hell olson is or what the hell he says or does, or does not, you just got to take care of yourself... so you don't get this screwed up...

aw, fuck the whole business: you have made imagery and words wry in my mouth, sound like lie

fuck it, frances, just fuck the whole business

And less than 24 hours later, another letter from Olson:

have nothing to do with poets/ they know nothing about human reality as it is some one else's...

in my mouth this morning like ashes is a phrase: image more than person, more syllable than image...

what, from the start, i suppose i could offer you was, the images you invoked in me, both as they took the form of [poems written for you] and as they took the form of letters written to you with all the solids of verse, if not the final shapings such action would... be love

Frances is filled with need, a desperate desire to feel a human connection that cannot be created with letters alone. But Olson is incapable of providing her with his physical presence. What becomes clear in the other letters is Olson's paralysis. His love is sincere, & his connection with Frances is very real. But the relationship is conducted entirely on his terms. In many cases, in fact, Frances' declarations of love & longing are met with requests for advice on his writing, for an editorial eye. This, it seems, does not indicate an imbalance of affection, but instead an unshakable selfishness on Olson's part. He will never, ever meet Frances halfway, no matter how much he knows he should.

While the connection I felt to this situation initially compelled me to distance myself from Maximus, it's now drawn me back in. Because I deal with an Olsonian character in my life outside the poems, I feel a newer & more powerful connection to the text. Personal identification equals investment.

So today, when I returned to Maximus with a newfound stake in the poet & his alter-ego, imagine my surprise at finding a poem that deals directly with the tensions exposed in Olson's letters to Frances.

I have made dialogues,
have discussed ancient texts,
have thrown what light I could, offered
what pleasures
doceat allows

xxxxxxxxxxxxxBut the known?
This, I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world

xxxxxxxxTokens.
xxxxxxxxBut sitting here
xxxxxxx iI look out as a wind
xxxxxxxxand water man, testing
xxxxxxxxAnd missing
xxxxxxxx some proof

I know the quarters
of the weather, where it comes from,
where it goes. But the stem of me,
this I took from their welcome,
or their rejection, of me

aaaaaaaa lAnd my arrogance
aaaaaaaaawas neither diminished
xxxxxxxxl nor increased
llllllllllllllllby the communication

This is Olson's mea culpa, or the closest thing to it, in the first section of Maximus: the admission of failure, the acknowledgement of his fatal flaw. Olson is, admittedly, a Man of Ideas, incapable of creation outside the realm of verse & philosophy. He's trapped in his seaside cabin-equivalent of an ivory tower, "looking out" only when he is alone with nature. (So disillusioned by academia was the poet that he rejected a much-deserved & hard won Ph.D from Harvard.) The most telling stanza, I think, is the one that begins "But the known?," with its clear admission of paralysis. Love, life, even the world itself, must be given, not found. Olson, eternally in search of the meanings of these three words, admits in 1953 that he cannot find them on his own, that he relies on the generosity of others to aid in his pursuit, while he lies back, static in his "arrogance." If his selfish introspection isn't clear enough in the poem itself, its title gives it away: "Maximus, to himself." The Bigman admits his failure, yes, but only to himself. He laments not the suffering he inflicts (however unintentionally) upon others, but his guilt at such egocentrism.

Little more than halfway through the first of Maximus' three parts, Olson's tragedy has become achingly clear. It's not so much the selfishness that saddens me, but Olson's simultaneous acknowledgement of it & refusal to change. Until he died, people came to him to offer assistance & love, never asking anything in return. When, on those few occasions when someone actually did require some sort of reciprocity, Olson retreated & let them disappear. His first wife, Connie, grew tired of the dance & walked away. His second wife died (in what may have been a suicide) after following him, unquestioningly, to the barren cold of Buffalo, New York. He accepted countless loans that were never repaid. And in the last years of his life, he relied on the kindness of his sister-in-law, without whose help he would have likely starved to death, as he never learned to cook for himself. Olson's life, though filled with occasional adventures & striking accomplishments, was little more than a series of unreturned favors & one-sided relationships. How can a man find love if he isn't willing to express it himself? The poems are beautiful, but as Frances said, sometimes words just aren't enough.

Maximus & Minimus

One of the most powerful aspects of Projective Verse is the transformation of text through reading. Olson's emphasis, in the 1950 essay that named his (& Creeley's) method, was on breath. Always breath, so that space on the page equals time in the reading:

Because breath allows all the speech-force of language back in (speech is the "solid" of verse, is the secret of a poem's energy), because, now, a poem has, by speech, solidity, everything in it can now be treated as solids, objects, things; and, though insisting upon the absolute difference of the reality of verse from that other dispersed and distributed thing, yet each of these elements of a poem can be allowed to have the play of their separate energies and can be allowed, once the poem is well composed, to keep, as those other objects do, their proper confusions.

This is magnificent. Space becomes Time in the translation of text to speech, and with Creeley, this aspect is beautifully clear. Take this reading of "The Dishonest Mailmen," an early poem that never fails to astound me:

They are taking all my letters, and they put them into a fire.

I see the flames, etc.

But do not care, etc.

They burn everything I have, or what little
I have. I don't care, etc.

The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness - this is the courage

necessary. This is something
quite different.

All the space is there in his reading. There was a time when hesitation at enjambment would frustrate me, as it interrupted the continuity of the text & resulted in my distraction from content & a subsequent focus on form. As I've developed as a reader & writer, however, it's become quite obvious that FORM, as Creeley sd, IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT, & those hesitations are just as vital to an understanding of a poem as is the close analysis of a single word & its etymological roots. When I consider Creeley's body of work as a whole, the hesitation at enjambment is not only important, it's necessary. Those forced silences are what his poems are struggling against, the voice against the void. His reading style, even toward the end of his life, is beautifully indicative of that tension.

Olson, however, is a reader in the performative vein. If Creeley whispers, Olson shouts (to borrow a metaphor from a comparison once drawn between my work and that of another, v. talented writer). They're fighting against the same void, but their delivery is fantastically different. Here, Olson reads "The Librarian," an exquisite poem, the text of which I won't quote here, considering the length of the piece:



Listen to that voice! Watch those gestures! Olson is a whiskey-swilling force to be reckoned with, a giant of poetry with Things to Say & a voice with which to say them. But, just as we saw with Creeley, rhythm & breath are paramount to his reading style. There are moments in so many Olson readings where he stops the poem, mid-line, to begin again, with a better voice, clearer breath, stricter rhythm. The loyalty to the text is clear, and what makes Olson's style so captivating is the palpable strength of his connection to the language & the shape it takes as it leaves his body. He isn't just reading that poem. He's feeling it, along with all of the source tensions that gave birth to it. Speech, as he said, gives verse its solidity. Nowhere is verse more solid than in an Olson reading.

[Hit the UPenn archives for audio files of both Olson & Creeley reading their work, including the poems cited here.]

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.