Toby Olson

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Changing Appearance assembles the work of Toby Olson's five previous small-press books plus material unpublished in book form, from the period 1965–70…. (p. 50)

The means by which Olson gets at central concerns—and his poetry deals always with the essentials—is well-illustrated in Maps (1969), the first book in Changing Appearance. Taking as occasion various kinds of maps … he explores the difference between what is measured and represented graphically, and a state of being which cannot be measured. The analogue is to that which sets up tensions between formal attempts at representation—in art, in literature—and experience…. The "reading" of a map becomes a means toward establishing connections between events and objects and the makeup of the human psyche—a way of perceiving the self both as individual and as part of an organic process. Though the occasion may at first glance seem literary, the poetry is the poetry of experience and conveys always a strong sense of place and circumstance. In fact, this is the source of the poetry's power…. The language of the poems is also "natural"—not casual of sloppy, but the language of a man talking to you or thinking aloud, having paced himself and concentrating on particulars.

The movement of these poems, as in most of Olson's work, is most often inductive: he casts a line with a hook on it, and you are drawn immediately into the world of the poem. Starting with what can be described as the generative particular—the assertion or image expressed indicatively which requires illumination or extension—he builds the poem deftly out of the materials supplied by autobiographical reflection and the concrete, sensual image…. (pp. 50-1)

Making the conceptual statement which is realised perceptually involves the loss of innocence, a penetration at once carnal and imaginative. It is this process which gives the poem its momentum. The poems of Maps proceed by the collaging of one perception "instanter, on another," done rather carefully and formally in "The Globe," and with greater flexibility in the best poem in this section—and one of the best poems in the book—, the longer "The Mapping of the Currents."… The casual ingathering proceeds more from Whitman, the carefulness from the shorter poems of W. C. Williams and from Robert Creeley, the flexibility from Charles Olson (no relation) and Paul Blackburn, and the contemplative, philosophical rhetoric from William Bronk—diverse poets in a by now well-recognised American tradition. But almost from the beginning, Toby Olson has had his own voice—rigorous, familiar, tough and meditative by turns.

He is a poet for whom the language needs continual renewing: he takes it as he finds it. But our language is always more than we find it. The poem "Hair" in Worms into Nails, also published originally in 1969, is a good example of the way Olson deals with the inputs that make our language a living one. (p. 51)

Starting with a locution typical of the proverb, Olson sets up a range of expectations stemming from its rhythms and constructs, though making it new. The poetics of the proverb has to do with fulfilling its rhythms, with wit in the use of metaphor—to place the dissimilar in apposition with the similar, in such a way that the idiosyncratic quality instead of sounding strange, appears inevitable, and even in the best examples, worth committing to memory…. There is in Olson's work a clarity, a directness, even simplicity of vision more characteristic of American Objectivists such as George Oppen, though again, the voice is typically Olson's. It is a voice that speaks of the love of the world, that supplies no ready and facile answers to the emotional turmoil of human relationships, that speaks with humour and candour of sexuality, that is not condescending to any form of human experience, that acknowledges doubt and confusion, that deals uncompromisingly with the difficulties of living as it does with its joys.

Part of my great pleasure on reading and hearing Olson's poetry arises from the recognition that concerns of process underly most of the poems but that these concerns move in one's consciousness—recede and gather strength—so that they are never dominant but always exist in a state of tension. Concern with process reveals a poet who has a serious attitude towards the materials and therefore a poet who repays serious attention, but these poems are never written to exemplify a poetic…. "From A Window," one of the longer poems in Changing Appearance, has an impressive range and flexibility while at the same time the concentration and unity of the tightly-constructed, more delimited work. It represents Olson at his best. The language is supple and relaxed, and the materials are handled unobtrusively and surely. The poet allows objects, images, conclusions their own space and time to shape the construct…. (pp. 52-3)

Other longer poems in addition to "From A Window" which should receive equal mention … are "The Brand," printed as a book … in 1969, "The House" (1968–69), and "Provincetown: Short-Suite" (1970).

Pig/s Book (1970) is a dense, strange, metaphysical bestiary in which the animals are described from Pig's point of view. But Pig is more than a dispassionate observer, he is also an actor in a series of small, sometimes deadly encounters….

The tone of Pig/s Book is generally ironic, but not heavily so. The traditional method of the bestiary—to speak of human qualities under the guise of animal ones—is employed in a manner in which the allegorical teaching does not expound conventional morality…. (p. 54)

What one learns from this bestiary is not always relevant to a sense of what one feels one should be learning, which is the source of much of the humour in these poems; the intent is, after all, not overtly didactic, as in the medieval form, but to use the form to avoid judgmental statements about behaviour.

The poems of Pig/s Book represent a change of pace: they are generally shorter, more pungent, less personal, more philosophical and hermetic, and funnier, but Olson's skills in making the form suit the content are hardly less evident in these curious and provoking poems. Pig/s Book also is evidence of Olson's abilities in constructing the poem-sequence—better unified than the slightly earlier Maps poems, with an accordingly sharper focus and a more consistent tone amongst the various poems of the sequence.

The penultimate poem in Changing Appearance is "Crazy," one that combines the tight construction of those in Pig/s Book (and the allegorical animals) with a more direct manner of presentation, prefiguring the method of the poems in Home. (p. 55)

The images in this impressive poem are more overtly archetypal than is usual in most of Olson's poetry … and the poem [speaks] … in almost Freudian terms of the death-wish. But having said this, one recognises at the same time that the poem does not by any means depend on mythic, literary or clinical allusions. It is a self-contained construct in which the archetypal figures enter the contemporary ground of the psyche, as in dreams. This poem reveals Olson's interest in the psychic and metaphysical energies represented by such figures as Jesus, and which he explores in his brilliant and poetic first novel, The Life of Jesus (1976)…. (pp. 55-6)

The poems of Home (1976), Olson's most ambitious and outstanding poem-sequence to date, are plainsongs or variations on the theme "That each poem written derives from love". They concern the marital state, the domestic circumstances, relationships with women, the spaces in one's life and home occupied by friends, the pleasures and difficulties of love. Though the impression is one of simplicity and directness, they must not have been easy poems to write …; they grapple with attempts to define the undefinable…. Home is a work of great achievement. It exemplifies Olson's abilities to perceive himself, others and the world with a clarity, depth and toughness seldom achieved in contemporary poetry. There is no "apparatus of the persona" behind which the poet lurks in his need to adopt disguises, as in Berryman's Dream Songs or Hughes' Crow, and though these poems are often intimate and personal, there is no striking of histrionic poses in the effort to come to terms with the self, as in Plath, Sexton or Lowell. The poems of Home share with some of William Bronk's and Creeley's work a general willingness to forgo metaphor in an effort to "talk straight". Olson's voice has developed into an instrument capable of giving shape in an extended form to the range of the experience of living with others (and himself)…. (p. 56)

Robert Vas Dias, "Toby Olson" (copyright by Robert Vas Dias; reprinted by permission of the author), in Poetry Information, No. 16, Winter, 1976–77, pp. 50-6.

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