Despite the occultation of Olson’s reputation, a return to his ideas and
writing is more urgent than ever. What are the stakes of polis in an imminent world of neo-Liberalism, the quantitative
accumulation of wealth in a small coterie of corrupt malefactors, the rise of
fundamentalist ideals proactively eroding the boundaries between State and
Church, and the immersion of heterogeneities into the economic and fiscal
homogenous condition dubbed globalization? Olson is the poet who introduced
scale and ontology into poetics, radically revising natural history into the
human universe, seeing the earth as our home. His Copernican revolution within
poetics (“man is himself an object”) together with his commitment to a theory
of communication and information that goes far beyond the centralized
cerebellum of the Cartesian cogito, rendered him the exemplary poet of the
Cybernetic Age. And with the earth on the brink of ecological disaster and
language enmeshed in the age of informatics, Olson appears as a prophet and
perhaps a destroying angel. (We should also pay credit to Olson’s pioneering
work in what later emerged as Ethnopoetics. His studies of Mayan glyphs, though
hardly resulting in a decoding, do inflect an interest in non-Romanic writing
systems and in pre-Columbian culture that offers an eccentricating parallel to
his theory of proprioception). (Steve McCaffery, “Introduction”)
With talk of Frank Davey’s Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory winding down
after some forty-plus years comes an issue guest-edited by Steve McCaffery, “Olson
@ the Century” (Fifteenth Series, Number 2, Spring 2013). As McCaffery writes
in his introduction: “With the exception of Frank Davey’s, Stephen Fredman’s,
and Miriam Nichol’s articles, the present collection of essays is based on
papers initially presented as part of Olson@ the Century. An Archival and Projective Reconsideration, a symposium held
at the University at Buffalo October 14-16, 2010. Conceived less as an homage
to or an attempted reinstallation of Olson’s ideas and theories, the symposium
was envisioned as a double-vectored reassessment along the two trajectories
named in the title: archival and projective. The ‘projective’ reassessments are
presented first; three archival contributions end the gathering.” The issue
comes at an interesting time, when most of the current attention on that
particular period of American poetry is focused on Robert Duncan, with the
publication of Duncan’s The H.D. Book
(eds. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman; University of California Press, 2011),
The Collected Early Poems and Plays
(ed. Peter Quartermain; University of California Press, 2012) and The Collected Later Poetry and Plays
(ed. Peter Quartermain; University of California Press, 2013), and the collection
of essays, Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (eds. Stephen Collis and Graham Lyons;
University of Iowa Press, 2012), as well as Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus (University of
California Press, 2012). Given that the conference happened three years ago,
why is this collection only coming into print now?
Place, as it unrolls in The Maximus Poems, is not simply a geographical point; it is an intense,
multi-dimensional nexus of vectors that include a prehistory, a geological narrative,
a geography, multiple human histories and criss-crossing myths, technological
mediators, and as well the individual’s own genealogy and inner landscape. Olson
draws on state of the art contemporary discourses such as Einsteinian physics,
Jungian psychology, Sauerian geography and Whiteheadian philosophy to put
together a locus that is complexly alive. He then suggests that individuals
hold themselves responsible to it. (Miriam Nichols, “The Closing of the Field:
Modernism at the Wall”)
There is an interesting selection of letters
from Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, four letters stretching from 1953 to 1970,
selected from The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley that Kaplan Harris, Rod
Smith and Peter Baker have put together for the University of California Press,
to appear this fall. The letters highlight aspects of Creeley’s encouragement,
shaping and working Olson’s image. One footnote reads, “The letters chronicle
the fact that Creeley was instrumental in shaping the Olson canon. We see
Creeley take an active hand in the publication and promotion of Olson’s
writing. We also see Creeley continue to be involved with Olson legacy for the
duration of his own life, from editing Olson’s Selected Poems (University of
California Press, 1993) to advising friends and colleagues on approaches for
teaching his work to a new generation of students.” What becomes clear about
this collection of pieces on Olson and his work is in how each contributor to
the collection manages to talk about Olson directly by dealing with him
indirectly, nearly through the works and words of others. Miriam Nichol’s
essay, “The Closing of the Field: Modernism at the Wall traces a compelling
thread from Charles Olson’s views of history and identity through Ezra Pound to
Erin Mouré’s work on the idea of the citizen. As Nichols writes:
Elsewhere, in the
poetry collection O Cidadán, and in
her essays, My Beloved Wager, Mouré
links her on-going meditation on such transformative properties to a study of
citizenship. For Mouré, the inequity and suffering caused by globalization do
not call for a return to nationalism in the traditional sense because
nationalism implies entitlements and exclusions dependent on a concept of
origin. She writes that “historical and national entitlement (a notion warped
and split by colonialisms) always seems to mean some people have to die or be
denied full citizenship in the policy, denied use of their language, because of
their origins. Faced with this, what use are ‘origins’?” (159). Instead, Mouré
speaks of “assemblages of the person” or “coalects”
(MBW 156, original emphasis); borders that are porous and leaky, bodies that
are permeable, identities that are fluid, wonderstruck and eager for transport.
The self, she says, has its “two avenues (that of autonomy, standing before the
self, and that of the other, standing before those who precede one)” and those
“play through and against each other […].”
A particularly interesting essay is Davey’s end-piece,
“Olson in Canada,” writing about Olson’s influence on Canadian writers and
writing, particularly his lack of influence on writers in eastern Canada, such
as Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek. The influence Olson had on writers in the
west, particularly Vancouver, is well-known and Davey names names, including
Ottawa poet William Hawkins, who drove west with Roy MacSkimming to participate
in the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. Considering that Souster brought Olson
up to Toronto as part of his infamous Contact Reading Series, the lack of
change in Toronto poetry reads as particularly willful by some. As Davey
writes, “Overall, this period of Olson’s contact with Canadian writers appears
to do little more than make them aware of his poetics and of the formal
possibilities they offered. Only Dudek shows any significant understanding of
them, and is unimpressed. Souster is impressed but seemingly unable to
understand well enough to make sustained use of them.” The interaction made
little difference on Souster’s writing, but impacted his editorial
significantly, as Davey notes a number of future Contact authors who picked up
elements of Olson’s writing, including George Bowering and Davey himself. Still,
one of the most striking parts of Davey’s essay is the clarification of how
exactly Olson’s work influenced Canadian writing: “One of the oddities of
Canadian attention to Olson is that even though most of it occurs during the
1960s, it is the Olson of the 1950s – of ‘Projective Verse,’ written in the
late 1940s and first published in 1950, and of the first three books of ‘The
Maximus Poems,’ that are most influential. Only those who followed him to
Buffalo – Wah and Hogg – seem to have found much to learn from in the later
books.” About Souster, Davey writes:
Souster’s lack of change, however, may not have been as conscious or
deliberate as Whiteman hints. There are several places in his letters to Olson
where he appears to regret not understanding Olson’s poems and theories as
fully as he would like, or where he apologizes for the limitations of his own
poems – in one instance sending Olson a new poem and commenting “not much, I’m
afraid, but I suppose typical stuff right now, not really making it” (78).
Acknowledging one’s own limitations does not necessarily mean that one has
choen to have them. Moreover, Olson seems to have received positively what
poems Souster did show him. When Donald Allen proposed to include Irving Layton
and Gael Turnbull in his The New American
Poetry 1945-1960 anthology in order to show that the new poetry had
international reach, Olson quickly replied “lawd if you are going to include
Canadians, above all pick Souster for yr center, there – especially for
such an anthology, for he and not that Englishy slicky Layton or that nice
Migrant Gael: lawd Souster is the one who has for years caught on that
the American thing exists for use: ex/ his Contact-Combustion,
as against anything Montreal etc” (Maud 60).
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