Biography
Raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in a neighborhood
called "Dogtown," Charles Olson was, as he put it, "uneducated" at
Wesleyan, Yale, and Harvard, where he received an advanced
degree in American civilization. As first a teacher, then
a rector at Black Mountain College, Olson was a leading influence
for poets such as Denise Levertov,
Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley,
with whom he enjoyed a substantial correspondence. As an
anthropologist, he explored the Mayan ruins in the Yucatán
and carried over his critical approach to his poetry: Olson
searched for the primitive energies that were the foundations
of ancient cultures and located them in contemporary society,
reflecting on how they undergird modern life. In his Maximus
poems, which he worked on throughout his life, Olson considered
the racial and geographical legacies left to him by his parents
and his boyhood home, weighing their significance in his
quest to become whole. His poetic line is governed by the
length of breath, not meter, and his words are arranged on
the printed page to suggest rhythm, gestures, and energy.
Olson's volumes of poetry include The Maximus Poems (1983)
and The Collected Poems (1987). His prose publications
include Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman
Melville, and Mathologos (1976-79), a two-volume collection
of his lectures and interviews.
Explorations
In experimental American verse since 1955, Charles Olson
and Robert Creeley are often thought of as a pair. They corresponded
vigorously for years about poetry; they taught together at
Black Mountain; and they both affirmed a poetry of great
freedom, in which form would grow naturally from meaning,
from the language of the utterance, and from the self. Out
of these shared values, the poems of Olson and Creeley evolved
in different directions. Looking at their work comparatively,
we can learn more about the tradition of "anti-tradition" and
the individual talent. 1. Read carefully the Creeley poems For Love (1962)
and Fathers (1986) and the Olson poems Maximus,
to Himself (1953) and Celestial Evening, October
1967 (1975).You will notice that in each of these poems,
there are sentences which are long or unended and arrangements
of words which are difficult to sort out grammatically.
What is the effect of these long, difficult, open strings?
Is that effect different from one Creeley poem to another?
From one Olson poem to the other? Or from the Creeley poems
to the Olson poems?
2. A long-standing debate about Walt
Whitman's Song of Myself has to do with whether
the "I" of that poem transcends the individual ego, becomes
more than "Walt Whitman," becomes disembodied and universal.
What about the "Maximus" in these selected Maximus
Poems? What of the "I" in the Creeley poems? Do they
achieve some measure of escape from the ego? If so, where,
how, and to what extent?
3. In Creeley's The Door (1959) and Olson's Where
Do Poppies Bloom (1975), we see verse in arrangements
which suggest traditional forms. The Door makes
interesting, erratic use of repetition and even of rhyme;
and Where Do Poppies Bloom is written in sprung
pentameters and hexameters. Why might these poems have
a more "formal" shape than others in the NAAL selections
from these two poets? What themes in each poem might
resonate with or find strong expression in these forms?
Other sites to consult: Charles
Olson page at the Electronic Poetry Center,
includes links to the Olson Archives, essays about
the author and reviews of his work, selected poems
and prose, and reports on the 1995 Charles Olson
Festival.
Cosmic
Baseball Association: Olson page. You have
to see this site to believe it. Includes excellent
links to other resources on "pitcher" Olson, plus
interesting background on Olson's connection to
the Black Mountain school of poets.
A
review of The Collected Prose of Charles Olson,
ed. by Allen and Friedlander. Provides useful
background on the writer (from the Boston Review,
1998).
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/olson/:
A Charles Olson site from the University of Buffalo.
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