 Charles Olson, 2007-02-08
if i told you where if first saw this poetry volume you won't believe me :-)
usually my attention to new or other authors comes from books or authors i've previously read or on occasion on a friend's recommendation. however, watching the movie "Bob Dylan: No Direction Home" on DVD i saw this book among a stack of papers on Izzy Young's desk during him being interviewed.
pageing through it at first glance one detects a couple of blank pages and one thinks 'whatta cheat?'. on scrutinizing the contents further one finds that Charles Olson not only wrote the poetry, but was also being very particular about the publication of his writings, and the setting up of the same.
i personal seem to prefer his later poetry writings. as an author he's completely new to me and finds his marked place among my modern american poets and writers.
JohPWilbrand
The masterpiece of a new poetic, 2006-08-14
This is mid twentieth century American EPIC poetry. It is not a collection of pretty little lyrics. If you want that, you came to the wrong place. It does have some lyric poetry embedded within, however. But for those who think all poetry should be lyrical, turn back now.
What is an epic? Pound said it was a poem with history. Olson disagrees. Olson visited Pound, argued with him, and Pound said Olson saved his life. But Olson disagreed with Pound on many issues. Pound was a Fascist, Olson was a Democrat. Pound sought to establish a sort of neo-Confucianism, while Olson's philosophy comes straight from Alfred North Whitehead (as well as Jung's psychology and other "new sciences of man"). Pound wanted to establish a cultural elite, while Olson seeks to establish the workers (in this case the fishermen) as the indomitable spirit of forward directed hard-boiled Yankee go-get-it-ism, if there really is such a thing, is spite of any doings by the self-styled elite, or mistaken directives from ship owners. As such, his epic is barbaric, and certainly dirty. Olson's epic has a main character. Aristotle suggested that definition about 2500 years ago.
Olson accepts the techniques of Pound, and he accepts the techniques of Williams in Paterson. Another reviewer mentions Zukofsky, but there really seems to be no such influence at work here. If the techniques of Pound are interesting to you, but you find his opinions repugnant, try this book. It is, in my opinion, the final success of all that modernistic attempt at redefining the epic we get from the above men.
Some reviewers here have shied away, citing naughty words or even difficulty. Can you imagine anyone writing a review to whine that something is difficult? What is that about? Some sort of glorification of ignorance? And the naughty words are by no means prevalent. PG-13 at best.
OK. I said this was a new poetic. I must explain. It begins with Whitman, of course, just writing what he darn well pleased. And it grew with William Carlos Williams who was in France as a teen and was exposed to the French poetry of the late 19th century. So Williams, like most people his age, had to react to Whitman, in light of that exposure to the French. The result was "Spring and All" in which Williams seeks new forms in the American language and tries to find poetry in the common barnyard objects, for instance. Meanwhile in Europe several friends of Williams come up with some silly rules (Imagism) to make lyrics seem new, and Pound writes them down and gets them published. Well, that didn't work because the minute one person states a rule, someone is inclined to break it. But Williams in Spring and All is not making rules. He's thinking out loud. This is where many discussions that include the two most important words (form and content) begin: in "Spring and All" in 1921. Twenty years later, Olson and Robert Creeley are young writers and, of course, they are discussing form and content and how they relate. The result, after several letters back and forth, is that form is an extension of content (Creeley) with Olson caveat, that (this may not be the exact wording) the best form is the most natural extension of content. And Olson wrote about this in an essay called Projective Verse, itself a poem from my point of view. Projective Verse then touches off several responses, as Olson had the minds of many young writers in his care during the existence of Black Mountain College. Over the next 20 years or so, many poets are affected by these theories, which are by them being labeled "postmodernism". Until finally it all came to a head in Vancouver, BC in 1962 when many of these poets gathered at a poetry conference and read their works. As one can see from the works read there, projective verse was in full swing. Again, it was not a set of rules. It was a discussion of where things come from and how to get them where they are going. The different writers who embraced these new ideas all wrote in totally different ways. If nobody ever said that Creeley, Blackburn, Duncan, Olson, etc. were all operating from the same idea of form and content, one might never be able to tell. If that isn't proof that an idea about form is solid, I don't know what is!
Olson actually began working on an epic in the 40s, but for some reason was unsatisfied. The remnants can be found in his first book of poems, "In Cold Hell, In Thicket" which was published around the same time as the first ten Maximus poems.
If, like me, you are an American Humanist, a student of Whitman, you wonder what's the great American poetry of the 20th century, and you really have no stomach for fascists and other elitists, this book is the end of your searching.
Don't sweat the fragmentary sentences. They make sense if you read it aloud. There are plenty of free audio recordings of Olson reading these Maximus poems on the net, so you can easily get his voice going in your ear. It is all very sensible, unless you were looking for some excuse to be thought better than other people. There's plenty of that out there, but not to be found in here. Here is where you get your hands dirty digging around in old cellar holes or boning fish on the line with old men listening to their stories, or listening to an old postman who has it from the widows up the hill that such-and-such happened. They don't speak grammatically correct English. They use, as Dante put it, de vulgaris loquentia, the common speech.
p.s. I realize that speech was Aristotle's defining characteristic of drama, but Olson makes it work in the epic.
Dear Dellaphon, 2003-10-03
A masterpiece (and an ample illustration of Gertrude Stein's answer to "why there are so few of them"). One wonders how Jacob Dellaphon (reviewer from RI) could manage to come away from his reading having allowed himself to LEARN absolutely nothing. Don't let any initial impressions of Olson's difficulty (or his pretention, or the pretention of some of his more zealous readers) steer you away from what he has WITNESSED. "Polis is eyes."
olson's maximus, 2003-02-05
"In the land of plenty, have
nothing to do with it"olson was a large man & the maximus poems is some of what he got down on paper. "he and I seeming
the only ones who know
what we are doing, where
we are going" it is a big book that requires time and care of attention it's also a reference, something that can be "dug up" to serve as signs or points. the lyric passages are often very low to the ground "the forests,
behind, transparent
from the light snow showing
lost rocks and hills
which one doesn't, ordinarily,
know"
 Relief for Insomniacs - The "Poetry" of Charles Olson, 2002-06-14
I was forced to read this dreck for an architecture(?) class. Although I love to read, and so usually approach unknown materials with an open mind, I quickly lost any illusion of interest once the first few pages were read. This "poem" is hard to follow, impossible to translate, boring to read. Now if I could only find someone to take this book off of my hands.
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