Charles Olson

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Charles Olson American Literature Analysis

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One of the important keys to understanding Olson’s highly complex prose and poetry is the fact that he was also one of the greatest and most effective teachers in the history of American pedagogy. The success of his students as writers and artists attests his powerful classroom presence. His essays and poetry also consistently teach his readers the most important lesson: learning how to learn on their own. His advice to the young poet Edward Dorn at Black Mountain College in 1955 is a case in point. Dorn had asked Olson for a list of required readings, and Olson showed him how to use it: “Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more about that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you’re in, forever.”

Edward Dorn did exactly that after leaving Black Mountain: He devoted years of research to the American West and specifically to the Shoshone Indian tribe. Olson had taken his own advice and began gathering information of all kinds on his own hometown, Gloucester, Massachusetts, which eventually became the subject matter for his monumental Maximus poems.

Olson had published a radically new book on Melville’s Moby Dick in 1947 called Call Me Ishmael, which he had abstracted from his proposed doctoral dissertation at Harvard on the affinities between Shakespeare’s King Lear and Moby Dick. He had submitted the original to his mentor, Edward Dahlberg, who deleted half the text and urged him to rewrite it completely. Not only did Olson follow his teacher’s advice, but he also refocused his entire thesis. Call Me Ishmael departs from the usual symbolic interpretations of Moby Dick in terms of “good versus evil” or viewing the sea as the existential void. Olson reinterprets Moby Dick as an economic blueprint of the relationship of various classes in society; that is, economic factors lie beneath everything and are the key to understanding the real themes of the novel and the history of that period. He viewed Moby Dick as one of the most compelling documents to date of America’s perennial attempt to conquer nature by the sheer force of its will as expressed in destructive patterns of industrialization and mechanization.

Human attempts to control the powers of nature and the resulting chaos that such self-destructive behavior produces became one of Olson’s principal themes throughout his poetry and prose. Olson perpetually used various versions of the mythic motif of the Fall, disengaging it from any specifically Christian contexts. He traced it back to humankind’s fatal separation from a condition of oneness with nature that resulted from the fall into consciousness. In Olson’s next prose work, “Projective Verse” (1950), he addressed humanity’s fallen condition as it manifests itself in the kind of overly self-conscious, totally subjective poetry that practitioners of the poetics of the New Criticism were writing during the 1930’s and 1940 s. Such anti-Romantic poets often described their mental anguish in traditional rhyme and meter and lamented a world completely cut off from anything but a subjective reality. Olson proposed that the spirit of Romanticism reassert itself in what he called “objectism” (a term he created) as a more radical alternative to William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound’s “objectivism”:Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which...

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western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creatures of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For man is himself an object.

Olson further exhorts people to recognize themselves as objects among the other objects in nature and to do so with an attitude of humility. Only when one becomes conscious of one’s proper position within nature’s laws will one be able to stop destroying nature as well as oneself; one may even become of use.

Part of Olson’s project to reenergize American poetry was very much connected to a humble recognition of humanity’s place in nature, which, Olson hoped, would constitute a radical modification in the human stance toward reality. Because reality, as viewed from a Romantic perspective, is always a “process,” then poetry must engage in that process. For Olson, poetry was not the “mirror held up to nature” that the pre-Romantics had proposed but a physical engagement with life’s very energies and, therefore, an enactment of life itself. Olson redefines what poetry is in “Projective Verse”: “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it . . . by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay.”

For many modern artists and philosophers in the early twentieth century, knowledge had become an open field in which an observer recognizes patterns rather than creating them. Olson believed that the poet must follow suit and must work in the open; he must avoid the old rules of the iambic pentameter line, regular rhythm, and rhyme. “He can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself . . . FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.” The rhythm should be established by the “musical phrase” that Pound exhorted and not by the stultifying regularity of the metronome that traditionalists follow. The length of the line should be determined “from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes.” His evidence for what more conservative critics saw as an outrageous oversimplification of the rules of prosody was to go back to the etymological root of the word “is” and point out that the Aryan root “as” meant “to breathe.”

Olson, true to his philosophical belief that “things” precede theory, had written one of his greatest poems the previous year, “The Kingfishers” (1949), from which he had derived the principles of his new poetics. This poem’s form is indeed an extension of its content, thereby fulfilling the major requirement of an open-field composition. The poem refocuses T. S. Eliot’s “wasteland” motif by including natural cyclicity as redemptive rather than relentlessly mechanistic. It also proposes a major reorientation away from the despair and ennui of the last stages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Eliot’s The Waste Land documents, toward a revaluation of the ancient civilizations of the West as Olson explores the Mayan ruins of Yucatán.

Olson consciously moved away from his Greco-Roman academic orientation and found a more viable path in pre-Socratic ideas, particularly in Heraclitus’s proposition that reality is in constant flux and that any attempt to categorize or systematize flux is doomed from its inception. Olson visited the great Mayan ruins to see for himself the destruction that the “civilized” Europeans had brought with them. Olson embraced change in all its fluidity and found his vocation as a poet and archaeologist in his commitment to hunting among its stones. Although Olson was disturbed by the Mayan ruins, he perceived himself as an object among other objects within nature, and he dug even deeper into nature’s endless change. Salvation consists of probing more deeply into the actual earth rather than resorting to Eliot’s retreat into the comfort and security of English history and the Anglo-Catholic Church.

Olson published many poems and essays during the 1950’s, the most notable of which were In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), Mayan Letters, “As the Dead Prey upon Us” (1956), and The Maximus Poems 11-12 (1956). “As the Dead Prey upon Us” expresses his anguish over the death of his mother as she appeared to him in recurring dreams. The ultimate fear that a soul must face in a demythologized world is the necessary descent into Hell: “What a man has to do, he has to do, he has to/ meet his mother in hell.” Olson demonstrates exactly how projective verse works by using the raw material of his own dreams and then juxtaposing images of his broken-down car with a next-door neighbor and a mysterious “Blue Deer.” He lyricizes all these disparate elements, thereby fusing them into his own surrealist but lucid narrative.

Two major volumes of poetry appeared in 1960: The Maximus Poems and The Distances. Olson’s collected essays, titled Human Universe, and Other Essays, were published in 1965. The Distances encapsulates perfectly in its title the themes that Olson addressed throughout the remainder of his writing career: the sense of loss of a common consciousness and the disengagement of humankind from a direct experience of reality. Many of the poems in this volume lament humankind’s fall into consciousness, a condition that automatically induces feelings of isolation and alienation from a primordial center. The poet alone possesses the power to enact a consciousness that can rediscover what “science has run away with . . . discovering this discarded thing nature.”

Olson’s enemy is the same one that troubled Ezra Pound, the penchant of the mind to abstract itself from the body, to systemize and categorize the essential wholeness of experience into endless classifications which people then mistake for life itself. Olson’s definition of “the absolute” in “Human Universe” is uncompromisingly existential: “If there is any absolute, it is never more than this one, you, this instant, in action.”

It is this very disengagement of people from the direct experience of reality that becomes the principal subject for the massive work Olson began to publish in 1960, The Maximus Poems. Only a restoration of humankind to the energies of the local could begin to mend the split, the “iron-dealt cleavage” that Hart Crane hoped to heal in his long poem The Bridge (1930). There is little doubt that Olson saw his epic poem as a timely successor not only to Crane’s huge work but also to other large efforts, such as Pound’s Cantos (1917-1970) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). Most important, perhaps, he saw it standing beside William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-1958).

The Maximus Poems

First published: 1960

Type of work: Long poem

The voice of “Maximus” awakens the citizens of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to their own potential.

The first volume of what eventually became a three-volume, six-hundred-page poem was called The Maximus Poems. It was published by the Jargon Society, a press which had been created by poet (and former student of Olson) Jonathan Williams. The keys to an understanding of the entire Maximus project are the specific maps that Olson placed on the covers of the first two volumes. A U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey map of Gloucester, Massachusetts, appears on the cover of the first volume, immediately grounding the reader in the specific geography of the place where Olson spent his childhood summers and was to live the last ten years of his life.

Olson’s major models for The Maximus Poems were Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Pound’s Cantos, and (especially) Williams’s Paterson. Williams’s poem was an unequivocal reaction to the gloomy abstractions of Eliot’s apocalyptic The Waste Land, which lamented, by means of literary fragments, the fractured consciousness of a European civilization that had lost its religious center. Williams proposed his own hometown, Paterson, New Jersey, as the subject of his epic poem, insisting that an authentic American poet, following the lead of Whitman, must begin with an activation of the energies of the local. Olson thoroughly agreed, and though both poets admired Pound’s Cantos, they found them, Williams said, “too perversely individual to achieve the universal understanding required.”

Williams, however, envisioned the American epic as a kind of newspaper: “It must be a concise sharpshooting epic style. Machine gun style. Facts, facts, facts, tearing into us to blast away our stinking flesh of news. Bullets.” Nothing could describe Olson’s style more precisely than Williams’s words. If the theme of much of Olson’s poetry in The Distances concerns what Heraclitus described as “man’s estrangement from that with which he is most familiar”—his own body—then The Maximus Poems, by the sheer weight of its geographical and historical information, puts one back into contact with one’s origins: nature as manifested in the literal ground upon which one stands. Olson was an authentic Romantic in that he believed redemption would come not from some remote, quasi-mystical center but from a proper introduction to nature itself on the most specific level.

Much of this first Maximus volume is organized in the form of letters from a fictive persona which Olson borrowed from ancient Greek literature. Maximus of Tyre was a philosopher and a dialectician who wandered about Mediterranean communities continually lecturing on Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.). The figure is also a version of psychologist Carl Jung’s archetypal “homo maximus” or “greatest man.” Olson begins by identifying himself with the figure of Maximus in the title of the first poem, which is also the first line of the poem: “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to you . . . a metal hot from boiling water, tell you/ what is a lance, who obeys the figures of the present dance.” The reference to the dance is a direct connection with one of the principal metaphors that Williams used throughout Paterson to signify humanity’s total physical and spiritual involvement with the energies of life itself.

Olson, therefore, locates his task in awakening the citizens of Gloucester to the experience of natural life in spite of being cut off from its healing powers: “when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?” Maximus continues to exhort his citizens to take drastic action against the commercialization and modernization of their soil: “o kill kill kill kill kill/ those/ who advertise you/ out.” Much of this first volume laments the loss of traditional local values, beliefs, and practices that are being destroyed by a nation corrupted by blatant materialism. He renames Muzak “mu-sick” and decries the damage done to humankind’s instinctual life: “No eyes or ears left/ to their own doings (all invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses/ including the mind . . . lulled.”

The Maximus Poems, then, can be viewed as an extended meditation of the ruins of the poet’s own origins by a civilization whose arrogance has blinded it to its obligations to both the physical and spiritual ecology. Much of the remainder of this first volume is a painstaking reconstruction of the actual history of Gloucester, using information from archival documents and early historical sources and juxtaposing its data to reveal the subtexts of greed and power that drove the original European settlers to America. Olson refuses to create fictive structures of “versions” of history and strives more than any other American poet to permit the “facts” to speak for themselves. He wants, as far as possible, an unmediated vision whose primary content consists of historical and anecdotal records and even statistical facts. He demands an empirical myth whose origins and energies are grounded in a specific locale.

Olson’s task is to arrange and organize these unconnected fragments of history in such a way that a continuity between the past and the present will become evident. His readers will, he hopes, learn from the past and improve their future. Olson firmly believed in his redemptive role as a historian when he declaimed: “My memory is/ the history of time,” for without memory, there remains nothing but the disconnected segments of an exhausted civilization that Eliot documented in The Waste Land.

The Maximus Poems, IV, V, VI

First published: 1968

Type of work: Long poem

This volume deepens and extends Olson’s attentions beyond the local and into the mythic origins of Western civilization.

The key to this second volume of The Maximus Poems, sometimes called Maximus II, is the map that Olson placed on the cover. It is a map of Gondwanaland, the name by which many geographers call the primordial or unified continent that existed before, as Olson put it, “Earth started to come apart at the seams, some 125 million years awhile back and India took off from Africa & migrated to Asia.” In this volume, Olson continues to probe the specific historical information of Gloucester but also moves inland to explore the history and origins of a section of Gloucester called Dogtown. Working, however, in an “open field” forced Olson to delve even more deeply into what preceded history, and he found himself confronting the nature and function of prehistorical forms of consciousness called myth. Much of this volume examines systems of mythic consciousness and attempts to understand how myths are encoded with essential human information and become permanent forms of human experience. Olson, an avowed believer in the theories of Jung, also viewed myths as archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Olson’s advice to Edward Dorn to “exhaust” or “saturate” one place until he knew more about it than anyone else ever could became Olson’s directive to himself in his years of examining Gloucester. It also, however, necessitated a rearrangement of the rest of the world in the light of what he learned about his origins. Immediately after declaring that his memory is “the history of time” in The Maximus Poems IV, V, VI he locates another, more onerous task: “I am making a mappemunde [a map of the world]. It is to include my being.” Such an obligation demanded that Olson explore not only history and myth but also other associated subfields such as archaeology, paleontology, geography, geology, and anthropology.

What The Maximus Poems, IV, V, VI became, then, was a recapitulation of the origin and development of human consciousness, a task so demanding that the structure of the poem almost collapses beneath the burden. Few literary conventions are observed as the language becomes more dense and private. Transitions between sections are either nonexistent or so personal that understanding it is impossible. The influence of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) is evident throughout, particularly in the in-process appearance of many of the poems. Olson suggested that the arrangement of the material was closer to that of a mosaic taking shape than to any kind of finished narrative product.

Many of the earlier characteristics of the fictive voice of Maximus are missing from this volume because Olson, following his own advice in “Projective Verse,”removed “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego.” This volume can be viewed as a prime example of what he called “objectism,” as his control and arrangement of the mythological, historical, and geographical data are virtually undetectable. The “facts” do, indeed, “speak for themselves,” and the structure suffers accordingly. What Olson was rigorously trying to avoid, however, was the appearance of any kind of tidy synthesis of myth and history, such as that which Joseph Campbell proposed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Olson adamantly opposed any synthesizing structure that even remotely resembled an imaginative or fictive arrangement of “facts.” Although he read and heavily annotated all of the fourteen volumes of Jung’s works in his personal library, Olson refused to impose any kind of limiting interpretive structure on the materials of history and was much closer to the structuralism of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss than to Campbell’s Jungian archetypes.

Olson defined an American as “a complex of occasions,/ themselves a geometry/ of spatial nature” and added that this definition explained his feeling of oneness with the world: “I have this sense,/ that I am one/ with my skin.” He kept coming back to the geographical, the local, and feared involvement with intellectual classifications of any kind. His grounding in Gloucester became a position from which he could measure the world.

The Maximus Poems, Volume 3

First published: 1975

Type of work: Long poem

The Maximus Poems, Volume 3 continues with the omniscient voice of “Maximus,” but the personal crises of Olson himself are evident throughout.

Volume 3 of The Maximus Poems was never completed by Olson, who died in 1970, but among the mass of material left after his death were indications of certain directions that later scholars followed in gathering the material and organizing it into a coherent form. University of Connecticut professors George Butterick and Charles Boer devoted many years to a thoughtful arrangement of the materials for volume 3. Olson had determined the first and last poems in the collection, and Butterick and Boer followed the same order that Olson had used in the first two volumes—essentially chronological—in their edition. Many of the poems included were left in an unrevised form.

Olson’s attentions had changed dramatically in this volume, and many of the poems became quite personal, reflecting the private crises that he was undergoing, specifically the tragic death of his wife in an automobile crash in 1964. The “Maximus” of this volume continues to dig into the local history and geological data of Gloucester, but he finds himself repeatedly confronting the bare earth itself. Unlike Wallace Stevens and Robert Duncan, whose imaginations found satisfaction in fictive certainties, Olson’s inability to trust the powers of the imagination drove him to search for the divine in the physical. He stated it quite directly: “I believe in God/ as fully physical.” In poem 143, “The Festival Aspects,” he rehearses the various stages of humanity’s Fall and division from sacred consciousness, but Maximus suggests that the continued force of human attentions would eventually redeem the fallen world and unify it by the almost telekinetic power of his consciousness.

Though Olson still rages against the dehumanizing encroachments of progress, he comes closer to a deeper understanding and acceptance of the essential mystery at the heart of existence. “Praise the mystery/ of creation, that in matter alone.” By the conclusion of the volume, his concerns have become completely personal. He knows that he is dying of cancer of the liver and imagines that he is a stone. He also locates himself, finally, in both his origin and destiny in the next-to-last poem of the book, “Mother Earth Alone.” The very last Maximus poem consists of only eight words that brutally summarize the attenuated range of his awareness in the final days of his illness: “my wife my car my color and myself.” Haunted by the death of his wife and jaundiced by cancer, he returned to the source of his life as a poet—his own personal consciousness, from which an entire mythic world had emerged.

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