The term ["postmodern"] was first used, apparently, by the historian Toynbee, although Olson—and this is not generally known—may have actually been the first to use it in its current application, and the first to use it repeatedly if not consistently….

As Olson uses it, the designation serves not merely to advance beyond an outmoded modernism, but it seeks an alternative to the entire disposition of mind that has dominated man's intellectual and political life since roughly 500 B.C. As early as Call Me Ishmael, published in 1947, Olson felt that logic and classification betrayed man…. Olson sought to restore man from his egocentric humanism to a proper relationship with the universe…. [In his essay "Human Universe"], he explains how logic and classification intervene between man and the universe, "intermite our participation in our experience." And the only way out is to restore mythological participation in the laws of nature through a language which is "the act of the instant" rather than "the act of thought about the instant."… The result is an intensified syntax which fuses man with natural processes. In an effort to break free, postmodern poetry requires almost a total and systematic disordering or disorientation—not so much of the senses, as Rimbaud proposed—but of syntax, at the same time accompanied by a demand for a re-orientation to a new, a "human universe." As we shall see, the expanded syntax is a manifestation in language of the post-modern demand out of which any advance is made. (p. 5)

The science that Olson discovered to take him beyond modernism was mythology, assisted by Jung and Kerényi's suggestion in the title of their book together, Essays on a Science of Mythology, that mythology could indeed be a science. The term or the notion stopped Olson at first; he resisted it…. But what he could not reject was that myth, in the definition he found in the introduction to the Jung and Kerényi book…, from Malinowski's Myth in Primitive Psychology, was a "reality lived." (p. 12)

This was followed by Olson's discovery around the same time of classical scholar J. A. K. Thomson's identification of mythology as "muthologos," or "what is said (of what is said)," which also had the advantage … of linking that with the "history" Olson had always been interested in, and being at the same time a definition that corresponded to the one he knew from Jane Harrison (myth as mouth, mythos as muthos)—which got in narrative, the story, the spoken equivalent of act, art as dromenon or enactment—so that his aesthetics of the "instant" could emerge intact.

These, then, are the principal sources for Olson's understanding of myth, in addition to Freud and Frazer earlier, and what he knew genetically, instinctively, in his blood…. These sources of understanding supply and support him until the end. (pp. 12-13)

[There] can be little doubt that Maximus himself is named in part autobiographically. There were indications all along that this might be so. Who else does Olson seek to begin his story of America with, when taking his first steps toward the proposed narrative (alternatively a long poem) to be called West—which itself evolved into The Maximus Poems—but Paul Bunyan. (p. 15)

Maximus fulfills Olson's mythic ambitions. He absorbs the disorder, grows large on it. Maximus is saved from the presumption of his name by his ties to Gloucester and to an historical namesake, Maximus of Tyre, that both relieves him of egotism and allows him to participate in the past. He is a man, not an allegorical Everyman or Red Cross Knight; or if allegorical only in Keats's sense that a man's life, to be of any worth, must be a "continual allegory." It is Gloucester that gives Maximus dimension, a Gloucester of his own creation. Maximus is a proposition, a proportion to be filled, a challenge thrown ahead from the moment of its naming. Maximus is the sum of man; he grows by what all men—Lou Douglas, John Smith, John Winthrop, Enyalion and the other heroes of the poem—contribute to him. He is a model not a mirror; an "image," not of a man, but—the poem "Maximus of Gloucester" … is careful to say—"of man." He is a magnification, a metaphor for human possibility. All men can be Maximus if they practice themselves like William Stevens, if they "make things, / not just live off nature" …, if they resist.

And he succeeds, even though in the final poem of the series—"my wife my car my color and myself"—the forces are finally equal to the hero, have caught up with him. Maximus yields back to the man, the heroic is pinched down to the human by the pain of having been alive and the bewilderment of being about to lose that life. The components of the poet's life are put to rest, at ease in their simplicity. This does not mean any need to bemoan like a sad trumpet the poems as a failure. It is such a commonplace that all modern long poems have been failures, including The Waste Land, The Bridge, The Cantos, Paterson, A—if that is ever a helpful way to talk about them. They are only failures because we no longer know what success is.

Maximus is a creature of language; the "Man in the Word," Jonathan Williams' editorial note to the first volume calls him. He has no life outside the poem and our memories of it. Among the six thousand or so pieces of mail preserved among Olson's papers, not one addressed simply "Maximus, Gloucester," ever reached him. Maximus is only as large as the language he can speak. He remains unbound by the fallacy of the sentence as a "completed thought." Instead, he extends the sentence—or the poetic line—increasingly onward until what must be said gets said, completes itself—often with another sentence…. The reader is released from the sentence, that cell of language, only when his "time" is up, when the meaning has been fully served. Thus the many unclosed parentheses, the proliferation of commas and relative clauses, dashes, colons in the poems…. The syntactical unit is as large as needs be. (pp. 16-17)

This is no longer a condition or question of traditional syntax but of parataxis, the recording of the order of events as they occur in nature…. (p. 17)

Syntactic strain forces the reader to perceive the world as Maximus does, to make his discoveries. It compels (his verb) us to participate in his world of language until Gloucester, too, is our own. Not of course the Gloucester of the Massachusetts coast which this very day may be having intermittent showers over its narrow streets and wharf pilings and back-lying hills, or where the smell of the frying batter General Mills developed for its Gorton's fishsticks is as pervasive in the air over Main Street as the gulls…. But the Gloucester of which I speak is a polis of the mind, built and preserved by the rhythms of knowing. The obsessiveness of Olson's syntax holds to the turns of his mind as closely as that mind does to Gloucester, archeologically, exhaustively.

Much of the difficulty in Olson's poetry—and who would have it any other way—derives from just this torsion. This is not the occasional practice of ellipses or enjambment or syncopation that Olson—like most poets, even the most formal—is also capable of. It is an effort to drive against the limits of reality itself, where the language is done violence to, and with it, inherited, conformist linearity. Syntax yields or gets broken, broken through….

But also the English—or American, actually—itself is stretched, the words written practically on top of one another in their tumble forth to get free…. (p. 18)

At the same time, Olson's language gives up neither its commonality nor its semantic intent. There is no instance in Olson I am aware of where the words do not "mean" something. To achieve a more accurate view or reality, word order is dislocated, the troops (I use military terminology here, conscious that not only "parataxis" but "avant garde" originally had that usage), the troops of words are ordered to fall out or are deployed in guerrilla position to wage a revolution of language closest to man's given shape, where language itself is a double helix. Indeed, there is that late Maximus poem … written in a swirl on the page, literally, visually, until, totally caught up in itself as the poet by his own cares, it ends in a snarl of woe. In another poem …, two lines of language are crossed over one another, demanding a simultaneity, and were it not for an initial capital on one, there would be some question which to read first.

I do not mean to suggest that this heightened, strained condition is unrelieved throughout Olson's long serial poem, or that such is most naturally satisfying to man…. It's just that reaches are called for that the old grasps or forms can not allow. (p. 19)

Often the poem contorts and twists itself, enters into digressions, all to escape anticipated patterns which are simply too facile and belie the complexity the poet knows to be in the world. It might be said that such a poem creates its own difficulties, which it then must seek to resolve, Harry Houdini-like. For example, in one not necessarily successful but somewhat curious and noticeable late poem—the next to last poem in Archaeologist of Morning …—even something so egregiously ungrammatical and confusing as a double negative is allowed and sought advantage of. (p. 20)

Such syntax is what in Donald Davie's terms might be called "subjective," that is, one "whose function is to please us by the fidelity with which it follows the 'form of thought' in the poet's mind," but goes beyond Davie's definition in one decisive sense, because the "form" may not yet be in the poet's mind…. Postmodernist poetry does not accept preconceived forms, like fourteen lines, into which its cement is poured. Rather, it is intent, like all time arts, upon discovering the space of the world for itself….

Syntactic flexibility occasionally yields sprightly economies and syncopations, such as this syntactical sharing in lines from "Letter # 41": "I run back home out of the new moon / makes fun of me in each puddle on the road,"… where instead of subordination into clauses, there occurs a "Siamese" sentence, joined head to tail, the object of the prepositional phrase in the previous sentence becoming the subject of the subsequent one. Although sometimes the openness leads to periphrasis, and eventually, perhaps, to a mannerism. Occasionally it is only the poet's great will or vivaciousness that creates a gravity enough to hold meaning in sway, or where the wheels do leave the road, pulls them back on…. (p. 21)

There will always be Battles of the Books, and the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, the struggle of any age or individual to gain self-identity. Postmodern, then, is rather an assertive term. It seeks to put distance between the preceding generation (as what cultural generation does not) at the same time to adequately engage the problems of one's own lifetime. When Olson taught a course at Buffalo designated in the catalogue as "Modern Poetry," I for one was curious to see who he would include. Would he begin with Whitman or Pound, would he have anything to say about Lowell or Roethke or would he include only his friends, Duncan, Creeley, Dorn, would there be a new orthodoxy? I was greatly satisfied when he announced, "modern is how far any of us in this room has gotten." He meant, of course, modern in the sense of contemporary, in its etymological sense of "right now." It was clearly another form of "you, this instant, in action," which is the essence of "Human Universe" and indeed of Olson's entire philosophy. (p. 24)