Olson's push, to use his own emphatic and often self-characterizing word, is important. This may be gauged by the fact that anyone wishing to understand recent poetry and writing—post modernism, literature since World War II—has sooner or later to come to him. He is a central figure, a "vortex," rightly compared with Ezra Pound, one of his masters in a preceding generation. (p. xv)

[Olson] was determined to recover beginnings, the origins of new possibilities. His push involved the double work of the great intellectual effort since romanticism—that of reconceiving the nature of the cosmos and the nature of man, to the end not only of overcoming our estrangement from the familiar world (he frequently quotes Heraclitus' "Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar") but, as was not always the case in earlier attempts to do this, of restoring the humility, care, and letting-be necessary to its very existence. According to Olson (and others: Heidegger, for example), estrangement and dominance began with the redefinition of logos in the time of Socrates. Both, accordingly, are phenomena of western civilization, and their rectification calls in question the very basis of its discourse and humanist habits of thoughts. This is enough to indicate the magnitude and centrality of Olson's concern(s)—concerns that involved, among other things, his reconsideration of history and tradition, mythology, poetry (especially its physiology, its oral impulse, its nature as act), place and polis; concerns that he brought together in an ecological vision (image of the world) that expresses ultimate concern. (p. xviii)

"The Kingfishers" is one of the longest and most accomplished of the early poems, of special importance for Olson because it is, like some other poems of his emergence, a position poem…. Only by announcing his position could he make a start, and what is notable in the early poems—and essays—is the extent to which he feels and responds to this necessity, finds in it the initiative act.

Temperament has much to do with it. Olson's essential stance is resistant, as Robert Creeley recognized when, in editing Olson's writing, he placed "The Resistance" first. In this brief essay, Olson takes up his body, his house, his citadel, and resists a besieging death. Not only is time the enemy … but the environing world, or the pressure he feels it exerts on him…. It's the "smother" he resists, as the frantic conclusion of "The Story of an Olson" tells us: "to breathe, to breathe!" is what he wants. And this may help us understand how much the need for breath as a resistant force informs his conception of projective verse, why breathing (declaration) is the initial act and in that time of general death a cry of birth. (pp. 1-2)

The earliest poems—"Lower Field—Enniscorthy," "A Lion upon the Floor," "Troilus," "Only the Red Fox, Only the Crow," "Pacific Lament," "In the Hills South of Capernaum, Port," "Name-Day Night"—are chiefly exercises, somewhat stiff and formal, mostly in tutelage to Williams and Pound, and still dependent on Elizabethan music and "metaphysical" discourse. These poems often strain in a "poetic" way and sometimes lack the charged emotion Pound asks of poetry. Olson is concerned, as he would always be, with the visual shape of the poem, with its format … and with its design (to use Frank O'Hara's distinction between design and form, outer appearance—"shape of content"—and inner movement). (p. 4)

The early poems insist on natural physical being and resistance to death, and poetry is the option in behalf of them. Fuller being: the life of the body, the senses, gusto, love; location in the world: ground, roots, salt; new attentions—these are his demands. Olson also looks for models, to his friends, the Greek dancers of "Name-Day Night"; to Jesus, whose words he transposes to his own ends in "In the Hills South of Capernaum, Port."… And so, with all this for his burden, the early poems are evidence of difficult beginning: to begin by resisting the world and by enacting radical change, tasks compounded in the poems by resistance to his masters and by the need to find new poetic means. Perhaps this is the reason the poems are small and stiff. They work against themselves, as he too worked against himself, their energy not yet liberated, free to enter the "open" of larger forms. (pp. 5-6)

Y & X (1948) also exhibits this struggle and the resolution of what Olson at this time felt were "unresolved 'amours'" with Cagli and Pound. (p. 6)

Of the five poems in Y & X, three deal explicitly with problems of emergence. "The K," among Olson's very earliest poems and the best among them—the "go-away poem" he said was written just after the Inauguration in 1945—is his "answer." It asserts his need to become the "tumescent I," to live fully and not in fear of his family's "fatal male small span," and to retain in poetry his primary interest in "the affairs of men." (p. 7)

No other poem by Olson responds so directly to World War II [as "La Préface"] and so clearly tells us that his work originates in the moral collapse of western civilization—tells us that history, which he measures here in terms of Altamira Cave and Buchenwald, has made him a counteragent in combat with it. The poem is as important to his work as "The Second Coming" is to Yeats's…. (p. 8)

"The Kingfishers" is … a Poundian poem, and Pound is everywhere in it. The issue upon which it turns is Pound's particular faith in historical renewal, a faith for Olson that forecloses the future and demands that he open it not only by hunting among stones—by becoming an archaeologist of morning—but by an attack on Pound nothing less than destructive…. His task, like that of the "elder" poets (Pound, Eliot, Williams) who figure in the poem, involves the crisis of civilization, and like them, though of another generation, he is a poet of culture, a poet burdened by history. This is why the need to act, to enter on the work of beginning again, is the personal crux of the poem.

Olson does not disguise but honors his debt to Pound in "The Kingfishers." (pp. 9-10)

When Olson begins the poem with the memorable proposition rallying his generation, "What does not change/is the will to change," he has Pound—and his associates—already in mind. For Pound is an exception to this rule, a reactionary who, Olson believed, feared "anything forward" and built his career on "remembering," on "nostalgia." (p. 10)

The opening line, set off by itself, is, as often with Olson, a text for meditation, containing the poem that activity of thought unfolds. Ideogrammic form enables this activity, permits the poet to explore the field of thought, to cluster and hold in tension the many elements cast up by thought in its movement. It is an open form permitting the poet, as Allen Ginsberg says, to score the development of his ideas, their "exfoliation, on the page organically, showing the shape [and shapeliness] of thought…." Such form exposes thought, and when we enter the poem and become participants in its activity, as we must, we discover that what makes it a large (and important) poem is the extent of its field, the number of elements that in fact comprise it and, finally, meaningfully cohere and bring the poem to resolution, not only to closure but to the decision to act. For the poem, above all, is an action, as most of those who have exegeted it forget, and what matters is the movement of thought that makes it "a starter," that moves Olson to further action….

The will to change, asserted here, is itself changeless; it is the permanent motive of history because it is the moving force in men and women, tropos, the urge of self-action; and it is the will Olson possesses and later attributes to all men and women in the conception of "actual willful man." (p. 11)

Olson's kinship, as he goes on to explain—and exemplify [at the end of "The Kingfishers"]—is not with Pound's tradition but with his courage. It may be, he says, that not standing within the classical tradition is a "disadvantage"—especially in regard to "beauty," which Pound said, in a refrain Olson copied from The Pisan Cantos, "is difficult." Nevertheless Olson has stepped outside this tradition and taken other risks, and has found another model in Rimbaud, one of his great moderns (with Melville, Dostoevski, and Lawrence) and, incidentally, a forebear to whom Pound himself once turned.

That Olson puts Rimbaud against Pound, who early recognized his modernity and made him known in translation, is easily explained. Olson is not attacking Pound's defense of antisymbolist art but his restricted tradition…. Olson refuses "the generalizing time" Socrates initiated—Western civilization, Europe, the classical tradition—and he stands with Rimbaud not only because he shares his "taste" for something besides "beauty," but because he is about to follow his example of going outside the European tradition. (pp. 27-8)

[Olson] went back to the Sumerians and Hittites and outside to the Mayans, thereby escaping the "Western Box" in which he felt Pound was trapped…. For Olson the first World War marked the end of "Yurrup (West, Cento, Renaissance)"; that tradition was played out, offered no feedback, and nothing useful, no honey, he believed, would emerge from its rot, from fascism.

Pound therefore was no longer a guide to culture. So breaking with Pound; Olson turns to Mexico…. Here Olson will hunt among stones in order to recover … some valuable lessons of renewal. One lesson was that there were people who were not estranged from the familiar, who lived in the physical world and knew how to attend it closely, to make it a "human universe." Another was the realization that since time does not alter the fact that they were like us, there is no "history." In the enthusiasm of his discovery of the Mayan world, the only "history" Olson acknowledged was the "second time…." This does not mean that he transcends history. Instead it tells us what his preparatory poem declares: that civilizations decline when there is no will to change; that the decline of civilization is not necessarily followed by the rise of another—only the agency of "actual willful men" opens that possibility; and that there is ground for hope and reason to act because all history is present and what linear history and restricted tradition have denied us is still there to be used. (pp. 28-9)