OlsonNow

Charles Olson: Only One Poem

2010-09-27T10:52:00.000-04:00

If you could choose only one poem by Charles Olson—for inclusion in an anthology, or to teach to undergraduates, or for a graduate seminar, or as your personal favorite, or as his very best, or his most significant—which would it be? The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a roundtable discussion at the May 2011 American Literature Association conference in Boston. Six roundtable participants will be invited to offer ten-minute justifications or explications or celebrations of one poem by Charles Olson. Some might argue that Olson’s poems don’t stand alone as well as, say, Frost’s or Stevens’s—that Olson needs to be read in bigger chunks. This roundtable challenges that assumption, and asks us to consider the criteria by which we value an individual poem. What makes it matter? Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by December 1, 2010. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

Olson 100 in Gloucester

2010-05-12T21:30:00.002-04:00

To the extended Charles Olson community:

Gloucester's Charles Olson Society, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, is organizing a series of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Olson's birth. The main events will take place in downtown Gloucester on Columbus Day weekend (Friday, October 8 through Sunday, October 10), though other events will be held before the main festival. We need your donations to make it all happen.

Events will include a Charles Olson study group of local citizens meeting once a week for five weeks prior to Columbus Day weekend; nightly readings at venues throughout Gloucester in the week prior to the main events; symposia and panel discussions; a marathon reading at the Independent Church on Middle Street on Friday, October 8; featured readers on Saturday, October 9; an Olson walk with readings highlighting sites in the Maximus Poems on Sunday, followed by a performance of Apollonius of Tyana.

These events, and several others being discussed, will complement an Olson exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum, which will open the first weekend in October. In addition the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library is sponsoring a special catalog/exhibition of rare, inscribed, and out-of-print books, letters, magazines and broadsides by Olson, curated by Greg Gibson of Ten Pound Island Book Company.

The Olson centennial celebrations in Gloucester in October will provide people with an opportunity to extend and intensify discussions and debates begun in Worcester in March and at Simon Fraser University in June. The Gloucester events will also provide a unique opportunity for Olson's readers to encounter many Maximus sites in the company of other poets, scholars, and enthusiasts. The ways contemporary poets, artists, teachers, and activists are responding to Olson's work -- exploring, extending, critiquing, revising-- will be at the core of the Gloucester events. With your help we can make Gloucester's Charles Olson centennial events challenging, nourishing, and of essential use to those who attend.

Please send checks to Charles Olson Society c/o Kent Bowker, Treasurer, 11 Indian Rock Lane, Essex, MA 01929, with "Olson 100" in the memo line. Those interested in contributing toward the establishment of the Vincent Ferrini/Charles Olson Writers Place should send donations to The Charles Olson Society c/o Henry Ferrini, 5 Wall Street, Gloucester, MA 01930.

Sincerely,

The Charles Olson Society of Gloucester
Olson100.blogspot.com

Olson Events This Week

2010-03-25T16:07:00.001-04:00

Project Verse:
Wednesday March 24th

A Reading by Students in Worcester Area Colleges
Led by Susan Richmond and Ian Williams
Clark University 7:00 PM
Jefferson Hall, Room 218

Thursday March 25th

Anne Waldman
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Discussion: Activism and Poetry, 3:00 pm. Higgins Labs Room 116.
Poetry Reading: 7:00 PM, Salisbury Labs 115

Friday March 26th:

Dana Commons, Clark University

Registration and Morning Reception 9:00 - 10:00

Opening Remarks: John Bassett, President, Clark University

Opening Discussion: 10:00 Moderator: Mark Wagner

Ammiel Alcalay and Fred Dewey: Olson as Public / Political Figure

Olson and Politics of Place: 11:00 - 1:00: Moderator: Ken Gibbs

Fred Dewey

Jim Fay: Olson in Worcester in Pictures

Laura Jehn Menides: Charles Olson and the Blackstone Canal.

Peter Anastas: Charles Olson's Call to Activism

Lunch: 1:00 - 2:00

Photographs of Denny Moers.

Olson as Educator: 2:00 - 4:00: Moderator: James Cook

Jim Cocola: Olson as Educator

Bernard Horn: Olson's Last Class at UConn

Edmund Schofield: Anna Shaughnessy, Teacher to Kunitz and Olson and Donald Baker.

Friday Evening: Clark University

4:00 PM: Poetry Polis: Moderator: Rodger Martin and Eve Rifkah

Readers: Sasha Steensen, Pierre Joris, Bill Tremblay, Don Wellman, Dan Lewis, Robert Cronin, Anne Waldman, Jonathan Blake, Charles Stein and others . . .

Centenary Dinner: 6:00. Dana Commons, Clark

******************************************************************************************

Saturday March 27:
Dana Commons, Clark University

Registration and Morning Reception 9:00 AM

Presentation: 9:30 - 10:45

Charles Olson Society of Gloucester presents:
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
w/ Filmmakers Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf. Q&A will follow the hour film.

The Body and the Personal: 11:00 : Dr. Stephen Gilson

Ammiel Alcalay and Kate Tarlow Morgan: The Body is a House

Donald Wellman: Olson and Autobiography

Roy Skodnick: Olson, language and gesture.

Lunch: 1:00 - 2:00

Olson's Influence of Anxiety: 2:00 - 4:00 : Moderator: Jonathan Blake

Richard Owens: The Practical Limits of Daylights: Charles Olson and Cambridge Poetry.

Pierre Joris: Olson's Influence on Contemporary European Poetics

Kenneth Warren: Charles Olson's Grail of Intuition

Sasha Steensen: "Great Mother, Cow or Whore: Charles Olson's Unlikely Influence on Contemporary Female Poets"

Influences on Olson: 4:00 - 6:00 Moderator: Gina Ortiz

Don Byrd: TBA

Carla Billiteri: Olson's Politics/Poetics of Transnational Utopia

John Woznicki: Myth, Magic and Movement in the work of Charles Olson

Charles Stein: The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum: Olson and Jung

Closing Event
Saturday evening: 7:00 pm.
Fuller Theatre, Worcester State College

Kim Spurlock: In Cold Hell In Thicket

Dance-Play: Apollonius of Tyana . . . Stage Direction: Sarah Slifer; Music: Bob Jordan, Elote Maldanado, Derek Byrne, Mark Wagner and Atom Xelny.

Ed Sanders Sings and Talks and Plays

Olson at Eoagh

2009-10-14T13:43:00.002-04:00

A PANEL, READING, & EXHIBITION

CHARLES OLSON: LANGUAGE AS PHYSICAL FACT

Tenney Nathanson
Cole Swensen
Steve McCaffery
Barbara Henning
Anne Waldman

A CHAPBOOK

Nothing is in Here, by Andrew Levy

READINGS/ARTICLES

An Interview with Kevin Killian, by Tony Leuzzi
TEXT FOR A CUL-DE-SAC, by Wystan Curnow & Lawrence Weiner
The Functional Art of Bruce Nauman, by Jessica Hullman
A Topological Memoir by Penelope Bloodworth
Poetic Ecologies in Bruxelles, by Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Composition as Exposition: A Case File, by Bill Marsh
Paradox: The Diminishing Increase of an Author, by Tom Clark
Field Poetics (a compleat history of de-individualizing practices), by Donald Wellman
Raymond Roussel’s (New) Africa, by Louis Bury
Iterative View (of Brent Cunningham’s Bird & Forest), by Jesse Seldess
Double Review of Amy King, by Matthew Rotando
Review of Brenda Iijima’s Rabbit Lesson, by Geoffrey Olsen
Metapoetic Speculation In/On Tom Beckett’s “This Poem,” by Thomas Fink
Reading Julian Poirer’s Poetry, by Filip Marinovich
Review of Joseph Lease’s Broken World, by John Chavez

POETRY BY

Samuel Ace & Maureen Seaton, William Allegrezza, Renee Angle, Robyn Art, Ari Banias, Emily Beall, Roberto Bedoya, James Belflower, Graeme Bezanson, Carlos T. Blackburn, Kate Broad, Julian T. Brolaski, Ethan Saul Bull, Tetman Callis, Sean Casey, Stephen Chamberlain, Cheryl Clark, Kate Colby, Thomas Cook, Lisa Cooper, Barbara Cully, Mark Cunningham, Shira Dentz, Amanda Deutch, Michelle Detorie, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Moses Eder, Will Edmiston, Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason, Greg Fuchs, Kristen Gallagher, Lawrence Giffin, Giles Goodland, Noah Eli Gordon, Stephanie Gray, Arpine Grenier, Gabriel Gudding, John Harkey, Jeff Harrison, Nathan Hauke, Stefania Heim, Derek Henderson, Michael S. Hennessey, Chelsea Hodson, N. M. Hoffman, Erika Howsare, Paolo Javier, Adeena Karasick, Michael Kelleher, Vincent Katz, Amy King, Paula Kolek, Mark Lamoureux, Dorothea Lasky, Gregory Laynor, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Ruth Lepson, Joel Lewis, Eric Lindley, Hillary Lyon, Kimberly Lyons, Jami Macarty, Majena Mafe, Jill Magi, CJ Martin, Filip Marinovich, Kristi Maxwell, Rachel May & Joshua A. Ware, E.J. McAdams, Pattie McCarthy, Chris McCreary, Nicholas Messenger, Benjamin Miller, Carol Mirakove, Rajiv Mohabir, Emily Moore, Glenn Mott, Uche Nduka, Gale Nelson, Maurice Olivier, Geoffrey Olsen, Monica Peck, Jennifer Petersen, Lance Phillips, Siri Phillips, Nick Piombino, Lanny Quarles, Jessy Randall & Daniel M. Shapiro, Karin Randolph, Karen Randall & Ross, Priddle, Michael Rerick, Christie Ann Reynolds, James Sanders, Sam Schild, Kyle Schlesinger, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Paul Siegell, Sandra Simonds, Joel Sloman, Rick Snyder, Alan Sondheim, Leah Souffrant, Sparrow, Christopher Stackhouse, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Eileen Tabios, Paige Taggart, Anne Tardos, Jeremy James Thompson, Elizabeth Treadwell, Matt Turner, Mara Vahratian, Nico Vassilakis, Andi Werblin, Sara Wintz, and Deborah Wood

VISIT EOAGH

KATHLEEN FRASIER ON OLSON AT PENNSOUND

2009-10-03T09:58:00.001-04:00

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Fraser/9-22-09/Fraser-Kathleen_Olson_KWH-UPenn_09-22-09.mp3

Call for Papers: Charles Olson and Influence

2009-10-03T09:50:00.000-04:00

Call for Papers: Charles Olson and Influence

American Literature Association, Hyatt Regency San Francisco, May 27-30, 2010

Charles Olson’s work gathers a vast range of sources that influenced his thought and poetry. Major influences on Olson’s work include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Melville, Carl Sauer, Jung, Hesiod, Alfred North Whitehead, Herman Weyl, and many others. Influences also include methods, concepts, and disciplines such as archeology, dance, projective geometry, and serial music. Olson’s work in turn influenced a number of poets, including Creeley, Duncan, Susan Howe, and others often overlooked in discussions of Olson, such as Rosemarie Waldrop and Amy Clampitt. Papers on these types of influence and the work of Olson are welcome.

Proposals of 250 words or less should be sent to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu and to Jeff Gardiner at Jeffrey.Gardiner@Sun.COM and jeffreyjgardiner@gmail.com by December 1, 2009. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

Henry Corbin & American Poetry

2009-05-19T10:19:00.002-04:00

We were alerted to these two links on Tom Cheetham's blog:

http://henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com/2008/11/henry-corbin-and-american-poetry.html

http://henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com/2009/05/henry-corbin-american-poetry-part-2.html

He would like to hear from anyone with an interest in Corbin ikn the context of writing, poetry, poetics.

tcheetham@gmail.com

News From Gloucester

2009-05-18T10:48:00.002-04:00

Councilors withdraw rezoning plan for Fort

By Patrick Anderson
Staff Writer
May 07, 2009 05:50 am

—

Amended, maligned and stripped of its hotel by more than a year of withering criticism, the city's plan to rezone the Fort neighborhood and ease restrictions on development is dead.

City Council withdrew the plan Tuesday after the latest round of talks with planners and Fort stakeholders failed to produce an acceptable compromise.

The plan had already been almost completely refashioned from the proposal drawn up by Mayor Carolyn Kirk's administration last year that centered around language clearing the way for a hotel on the former Bird's Eye warehouse building on Commercial Street.

Councilors on Tuesday said all of the changes and modifications to the plan had rendered it almost unrecognizable and at this point there was confusion about what the plan was supposed to accomplish.

"After a year-and-a-half of meetings, we all can agree a change is needed, but have lost all focus on what the change would be," Councilor Joseph Ciolino said.

"I think what became clear is that we were all heading in different directions," Councilor Philip Devlin said.

The Fort is zoned for marine industrial use, but includes dozens of non-conforming residential units.

While some property owners have looked for economic relief from zoning changes that will allow them to bring in residential and mixed uses, residents and other business owners argued that the changes would lead to condominiums, gentrification and a threat to the fishing industry.

The loudest outrage in the historic neighborhood, central to the city's fishing community and industry, has been reserved for the idea of a hotel.

Councilors indicated that they will request the Planning Board begin work on a new Fort rezoning plan.

Patrick Anderson can be reached at panderson@gloucestertimes.com

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.

CHARLES OLSON CENTENARY CONFERENCE

2009-05-04T10:59:00.000-04:00

CHARLES OLSON CENTENARY CONFERENCE
June 4-6 2010
Simon Fraser University
Vancouver British Columbia

One hundred years after his birth, and fifty years after The New American Poetry anthology transformed the landscape of contemporary poetry, Charles Olson, arguably one of the most influential figures in twentieth century literature, remains a puzzlingly marginalized figure. As Ben Friedlander writes in Olson’s Collected Prose, it is “as if the unread Olson were the necessary ¾ submerged berg making possible the ¼ ice floe.” In the spirit of bringing Olson back into the polis—and delving into the “3/4 submerged” portion of this “maximal” figure—the Charles Olson Centenary Conference seeks new readings of Olson’s poetry, poetics, and his influence on twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture. Topics to be addressed could include (but are not limited to):

● Black Mountain College reconsidered
● The New Canadian Poetry? Olson north of the border
● Olson, economics, and democracy
● Olson, geography, and the spatial turn
● Olson and American history
● Olson and the archive
● Olson / Melville / Shakespeare
● Olson and Mexico
● Olson, Women, and the Feminine
● Olson and his contemporaries
● Olson and 21st century poetry
● Olson’s influences/Olson’s influence
● Poetry as research
● Poetry and the polis
● The politics of poetic form

Please submit abstracts of 250-500 words to Stephen Collis at olson-conference@sfu.ca by October 1 2009. More information and conference updates will be available at http://www.sfu.ca/olson-conference.

POLIS IS THIS ON PBS DURING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

2009-03-11T13:39:00.004-04:00

From Henry Ferrini:

When Charles Olson wrote about television, he spelled it “tell-a-vision." Filmmakers Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf surpass the challenge of creating a vision of this giant and his ideas in cinematic form while expanding our awareness of how much the universal is contained in the local. For Olson, the local was Gloucester, Massachusetts, the polis (a body of citizens in a particular place) that shaped his life and poetry while creating a unique vision of America. It airs on selected PBS stations during National Poetry Month.

3/30 9:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00PM Iowa PTV World 3
4/2 8:00pm Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/3 2:00am KET-1, Kentucky
4/3` 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/4 2:00am Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/5 3:30pm KACV Amarillo,TX
4/5 4:00pm Detroit PTV
4/5 7:00pm WGBH-Boston, MA
4/5 8:00pm WKAR-E. Lansing MI
4/7 7:00pm Ozarks PTV-KOZK, Springfield, MO
4/8 11:000pm WCVE, Richmond, VA
4/10 10:00pm WGCU- Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 6:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 8:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/12 9:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/11 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/12 11:00pm WSIU-Carbondale
4/13 9:00pm Rhode Island PTV
4/13 10:30 WCNY-Syracuse, NY
4/15 8:00pm KMOS- Warrensburg MO
4/15 10:00pm KVCR-San Bernardino, CA
4/19 1:00pm WGBY- Springfield, MA
4/22 11:00pm KCSM - San Mateo
4/24 2:30am WNET, NYC
4/24 12:00pm KCTS-Seattle
4/24 1:00pm WHYY-Phila
4/24 8:00pm WDSC-Daytona, Fla
4/26 7:00pm CET-Cincinnati
4/26 8:00pm Utah Edu. Network, Salt Lake
4/28 midnight KTEH, San Jose/San Francisco
4/29 10:00pm VermontPTV
4/29 11:00pm KUAT Tucson
4/30 8:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers

Process Magazine

2008-12-19T21:57:00.003-05:00

Process is a Gloucester lit mag with a post-Olson awareness, and many of the writers they've published were directly influenced by him.

The Process online presence is: http://processliteraryjournal.blogspot.com/

More on Gloucester Harbor

2008-12-04T10:07:00.002-05:00

Click here for editorial linking Olson to Gloucester's future.

POLIS IS THIS at Woodland Pattern

2008-11-27T10:23:00.004-05:00

Sunday, December 7, 1-4pm

FREE TO THE PUBLIC

Come celebrate another year with Woodland Pattern at our Annual Open House on Sunday, December 7th! As always, there will be baked goodies and beverages, good conversation, books to browse, and an opportunity to check out Configurations, an exhibit featuring the artwork of Jane Dalrymple-Hollo and Anselm Hollo in the Woodland Pattern gallery!

It's also a great way to get a jump on your holiday gift buying and to sign up for the 15th Annual Poetry Marathon & Benefit (To be held on January 31st).

At 2pm, as part of the open house, Woodland Pattern in conjunction with the UWM Department of Film will be showing:

Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place.
(Henry Ferrini, 57 min., 2007)
a film by Henry Ferrini & Ken Riaf, featuring John Malkovich

http://www.woodlandpattern.org/gallery/open_house08.shtml

Gloucester Harbor: Insuring the Future

2008-11-05T14:43:00.001-05:00

A video by the Citizens for Gloucester Harbor, Gordon Baird, Marcia Hart and Ferrini Productions.

HOLD THE FORT!

2008-09-30T10:00:00.005-04:00

An emergency call to save Gloucester’s historic Fort Square

A group of people from Gloucester (David Rich, Peter Anastas and others mentioned further on) recently sent us the following material on new zoning and urban renewal/destruction plans for Gloucester, things that Charles Olson fought tenaciously against. Let us always remember that Olson’s legacy is as much on the ground, among the people of real places, as ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gift is on the page. Think of any imaginative coalitions, venues for publicity so that this story can get off Cape Ann to a wider constituency.

If you want to get involved, please contact:

Peter Anastas
panastas@comcast.net

or

Bill Johnson
willyj1281@yahoo.com

Ammiel Alcalay

________

First e-mail from David Rich:

The local press and controversy on the rezoning has been intense and consuming. Much written, but nothing that's made it off Cape Ann. Here's an article written by art critic Greg Cook about photographer Ernie Morin's advocacy through his art:

http://gregcookland.com/journal/2008/07/ernest-morin-and-future-of-gloucester.html

here's an article from the Gloucester Times about the very heated and contentious city council meeting where Fort residents showed up en masse to protest the proposed rezoning:

http://www.gloucestertimes.com/punews/local_story_267225505.html

On top of this, the mayor wants to lift the entire DPA: the designation that keeps Gloucester an industrial port, to transform the entire harbor into a recreational yachting and hotel center. For that she needs state approval, but to take Fort Square, which falls outside of the protected zone, she needs only a city council vote. We had a week's worth of meetings in Gloucester with a power-point presentation showing us renditions of what a 'renewed' Gloucester would look like: there was nothing left! All boardwalks and pleasure boats and quaint shops.

I could try to dig up those articles, regarding the DPA, from the summer. Right now, the Fort is her most vulnerable target.

Two articles that Peter Anastas sent in:

Fort residents deserve better than city's lip service

September 23, 2008 04:45 am
Gloucester Daily Times

To the editor:

This city is not a corporation that can be run by a CEO — and the rezoning of the Fort is a clear example of how not to conduct our business.

The residents and businesses were not consulted until September in a process that started in January and was conducted in an ivory tower. The city's economic development office did not visit the largest business on Commercial Street, an abutter to the hotel site, until the day after my slide show presentation to City Council on Aug. 19.

As far as I know, none of the residents were apprised of the city's work on the rezoning either. Posting something on a Web site for a neighborhood that is "old-school and offline" is not inclusive management.

An unprecedented 200 people showed up at a City Hall, organized, articulate, stating multiple times and for multiple sound reasons a strong and over-arching opposition to the hotel in a way that clearly was not merely a not-in-my-neighborhood stand, but one suggesting this would not be best for the city.

Yet, our mayor writes in her e-mail memorandum (The Times, Friday, Sept. 19), that "concerns raised about a potential hotel at the Birds Eye site I heard as questions — questions about traffic, coexistence, protecting the business interests, beach access, etc."

That is a problem; you cannot dictate from above to residents and the strongest part of your working waterfront.

Kirk makes the claim "I still believe a hotel is the highest and best use of that property." Yet the city has produced no financial data to back that claim — nor should it rezone based on one parcel's best use, even if she were correct, which is a moot point.

A city is a community of people first. We are not employees. This is not how you conduct public policy. Harbor hearings where you have three minutes to speak about "your relationship to the water" are nice events, but when you cannot ask questions, are told not to speak about zoning, and cannot have rebuttal — that is not a forum for generating this type of public policy proposal.

The people of the Fort are not living in denial. They know they need some change. But they want slow change, responsible, compatible change. They want what is best for their families, their businesses and for their city.

They have contributed a lot to this city. They love Gloucester — they have to live with circumstances most of the city would never want to endure in terms of traffic, noise levels, fish smells, and Fiesta's thousands of tourists — and they have learned to live and let live with the industry.

They deserve better from the city, and the city hasn't done jack for that neighborhood in years. Go look at the sidewalks, ask about water pressure, ask about the age of the sewer line, ask about the contaminated land, ask about the utilities for the industry, ask about the dredging, ask about any number of infrastructure issues.

These issues go back 25 or more years. The city wants to solve it with a quick fix. Well, the cure may well be worse for the patient than the disease.

We do not need political spin, we need and deserve a real analysis before we grasp at the quick fix.

The people of the Fort do not deserve a mayor who does not hear them speak when they speak in 100 percent unison. Anyone in Gloucester will tell you how impossible it is to get conflicted parties to an agreement. Here you have them in agreement with industry in a neighborhood where they have argued with each other for years. That should speak volumes.

This neighborhood should have the right to self determine what is an appropriate rezoning. I have trust in the Planning Board and Planning and Development Committee. They will now allow for a real process and involvement at this stage.

Ernest Morin

Gloucester

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.

Fort residents on hotel plan: 'No, no', 'no and never'

By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer

September 24, 2008 05:35 am

—

Worried about being gentrified out of their neighborhood and angry at a plan engineered elsewhere to rezone their world, residents and businessmen of the Fort mixed soaring rhetoric and pep rally techniques to tell city planners to go away and leave them alone.

"Everybody say 'no'," resident Clayton Sova implored in the middle of the three-hour meeting Monday night. "No, no," responded nearly everybody in the crowded Kyrouz Auditorium at City Hall.

They were saying no to the widespread notion that what the office of Mayor Carolyn Kirk and her Community Development Department have in mind for the Fort is an eminent domain sweep and new purpose — as the future home of a Marriott hotel on the site of the former Birds Eye Foods property and condos that will rob the isolated neighborhood of its gritty authenticity and soul.

City officials conceded that the hotel — a well-publicized possibility for months — played into the decision to begin the economic redevelopment of the waterfront at the Fort. But they did what they could to shoot down the rumors of condos, property takings and a try at ending the way of life on the Fort.

"There are deep-rooted misconceptions and lots of unfounded fear," Shawn Henry, a member of the Planning Board, which was meeting in conjunction with the City Council's Planning and Development Committee, said in an interview yesterday.

"They think they're getting the bums' rush," the Planning Board's Rick Noonan said yesterday.

A third meeting was scheduled for Oct. 20. The Planning Board is obligated to recommend a rezoning plan to City Council which has the authority to change the present all-encompassing marine industrial zone.

The passion of the moment was even hotter Monday night than it was a week earlier as the board and committee resumed the task of inching toward modernized zoning for a marine industrial enclave that includes archaic infrastructure and homes overlooking heavy-duty fish processors and empty lots. Kirk had raised the intensity with an e-mail following the first rezoning meeting a week earlier. In her message to the Planning Board and council, the mayor revealed that she hadn't heard adamant opposition to the hotel.

"I did not hear a resounding 'no or never,'" she wrote.

She did Monday night.

"Mayor Kirk," said Leonard McCollum of Ocean Crest Seafoods, one of the industries of Commercial Street, "I am here tonight to make sure you hear us this time. I give you my resounding 'no and never.' A luxury hotel and luxury condos would be a huge mistake on a road called 'Commercial Street.'"

He predicted the sensibilities of hotel guests would be offended by the sight, sound and smell of the industrial port, which has established a powerful line along the pier properties of Commercial Street.

Yet Kirk, the audience and city officials also heard a plea for a year-round hotel as an economic stimulus for the city from group tour operator Linn Parisi, who this summer created Seaport Gloucester, a destination marketing organization.

"We're not reinventing the wheel, there are hotels all over the universe," said Parisi, who this summer brought more than 400 motor coaches into the city and guided many of their passengers on foot through the Fort to get the flavor of the port.

She estimated each bus load was worth $10,000 in an overnight stay in a future hotel.

"It's a real place with real people and a working community," she said. "Because of what we are," reaction to the experience is "stellar," she added.

Hotel developers, who have met with Kirk, are watching the rezoning hearings carefully, according to Sargent Goodchild, the agent for the Illinois bank that last month took title to the former Birds Eye property from longtime owner Peter Maggio, Maggio continues to operate a cold storage business in the building where the concept of flash-frozen fish was perfected in the 1920s.

"A week to 10 days ago," Goodchild said, "negotiations were proceeding smoothly. Recently, they seem to have slowed down."

Kirk told the gathering that anyone for $3.5 million could acquire the property, which — while it is in a marine industrial zone — cannot be rebuilt as a hotel or used in ways that don't fit snugly with the row of businesses across Commercial Street. Those include Intershell, Mortillaro's Lobster Co., Felicia's, a full service facility for draggers, North Atlantic Seafood, Ocean Crest, Neptune's Harvest's fish product fertilizer, Cape Pond Ice and Parisi's off-loaded and retail fish.

"I don't think a hotel is going up there in six months, one year, five years or 10 years based on what I heard tonight," said Councilor Jason Grow.

The prospect of a hotel in the Fort is the most compelling but far from the only zoning dilemma facing the board and the council committee.

The marine industrial zone also encompasses the Fort's citadel of more than 70 closely packed, non-conforming homes and apartment buildings.

Residents objected to the Kirk administration's proposal to make the enclave a neighborhood business zone that welcomes residences and allows small businesses, an option that became the R-4 residential zone. But it would come with noise ordinance protection that could give residents a weapon to use against the industrial base along Commercial Street and Harbor Cove.

Then, there is the trial balloon for a theoretical harbor district zone along the largely derelict wharves along the outside of the Fort, where fishing boats off-load into Parisi's facility for shipment to the Boston Seafood Display Auction.

The new zone would add to the marine industrial zone use schedule by allowing recreational as well as commercial boating business activity. But property owner Rosalie Parisi said she preferred to keep the limitations of the old zone, except for a liberalization to allow for residential use on the second floor.

In contrast to the elected City Council, which writes zoning, the appointed Planning Board, charged with making recommendations, is expected to "look past the emotional arguments and do what's best for the city and the neighborhood," Henry said.

Board members Henry McCarl and Noonan used nearly similar words to assert their willingness to insulate their thinking from expressed emotion.

"People of the Planning Board definitely feel that way," said McCarl.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.

Peter Anastas, Gloucester:
Testimony for joint meeting of Planning Board and City Council P&D
September 15 and 22, 2008
City Hall, 7 p.m.

There are two questions about the proposed rezoning of the Fort—and of the waterfront itself—I'd like to address briefly.

The first is about the language we're using. Slogans like "putting the harbor back to work" or "turning the lights back on on the waterfront" presuppose that the harbor isn't working and that the lights of commercial activity are out. Neither statement is true. Even with the worst federal regulations ever imposed on the fishing industry we're still working on Gloucester harbor. Millions of pounds of fish are being landed, boats from other Massachusetts ports, Maine and Rhode Island are unloading, there are two fish auctions, businesses like Neptune's Harvest are thriving and new businesses are starting up. This is not a dead seaport; neither is the fishing industry moribund or the waterfront "stagnant." These negative myths need to be refuted because they don't provide the facts on the ground we need for intelligent planning. Instead, they create a crisis atmosphere that allows only for knee-jerk solutions.

What I'm suggesting is that we reframe the issue, from crisis to opportunity. The collapse of stocks and the advent of restrictive federal regulations to ensure they recoup has forced the industry to downsize, creating hardship for boat owners, processors, ancillary businesses and individual fishing families. Fishing is not what it was thirty years ago. But Gloucester, a city of courageous, inventive people accustomed to hardship, has kept its waterfront working, knowing that our city still is and will continue to be an important hub port. We want to renew existing infrastructure and invest in new docking and processing facilities, not only because we need them now (every docking space assigned to fishing is currently in use—and we need more, right now) but because when the stocks recoup (scientists tell us they will by 2014—only six years from now) we want to be the people fishing for them, landing and processing them, not some other community.

Meanwhile, we're all working together, planning together, to protect our maritime heritage, our hardy character, and to bring in new marine industrial business, creating by-products and value-added commodities and encouraging hi-tech, research and bio-genetic facilities, all related to the sea. What we want to tell the world, and ourselves, is not that Gloucester is on the way out, but that we've turned crisis into opportunity and we're on the way up. Come and see for yourselves!

This is just a sketch, but I can envision it as the basis for a whole new pitch for Gloucester—re-branding the city, if you will, from a negative image of "the town where fishing once was," as so many people around the country have been led to believe by the Media, to a positive picture of Gloucester as "one of the premiere hub ports in the country," where citizens have taken their future into their own hands while preserving the best of their historic past.

With this in mind, let me turn to the zoning. The current proposal for the Fort puts the cart before the horse. It doesn't look at the fact that there are currently thriving businesses on the Fort, with the potential for more to come (how do we help them to stay here and grow); or the fact that real people with real lives live on the Fort, people who pay their taxes and are committed to their neighborhood. It is really a re-zoning proposal that would primarily open the way for a hotel with condos to be developed, no matter what negative social or economic impact they would have on the residents and business owners of the Fort. It is disingenuous to think otherwise. It's a case of development driving planning. Jam in a hotel and let the chips fall where they may.

This is not good planning. Real planning lets the community say what it wants where it wants it, and from there we go out and get what we need. Real planning looks at what's currently working, what is its history and how does it fit into the total ecology of the community. Real planning is not a knee-jerk response to a myth: fishing is dead, the waterfront is stagnant, let's sell it out for a hotel.

Real planning asks what should we be doing to promote Gloucester as a place to move or start a business in. Real planning asks how can we make it easier to get permits to fix up and maintain current properties. Real planning asks if we need to change the DPA, or if under the current DPA we already have the flexibility we need to keep the waterfront working. Real planning answers the question of how we get businesses to come to Gloucester right now, businesses that are compatible with the economic, social and physical character of the city; business that create year-round jobs with good pay and comprehensive benefits, not the service jobs of hotels that depend on the ups and downs of tourism.

Let's address these questions before we start rezoning the Fort and the rest of the waterfront out of existence.

I received an email last week from a close friend, a Gloucester native, who lives with her family now in Florida. She writes: "If Gloucester becomes soulless, then what hope is there for the rest of the country? This is what is wrong with the place where I live. It doesn't have a soul, and there is no one I've met who would even know what I'm talking about. It's heartbreaking." The Fort is the heart and soul of Gloucester. Let's keep it that way.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

The Fort and our Sense of Place, by Ernest Morin

A few weeks ago, I presented a slide show at City Hall to a few hundred people on a stormy Thursday night.

That show is rooted in a deep sense of place — the place being the Fort section of Gloucester. It is a part of town you could drive past and never really notice on land, yet it is quite prominent by sea or from the Boulevard.

One of the points I made during the introduction was that you could cut the Fort away from Gloucester and it would still be Gloucester.

It would still contain all the essential elements we have come to hold together as our notion of place.

It has industry, a tight-knit neighborhood with economic diversity, fishing boats, fuel docks, ice company, lobster sheds, a beach, the greasy pole, a brewery, a deep freezer, a playground, artists in residences, even a synagogue now, the Chamber of Commerce, Tally's Towing, St Peter's square ... How much more Gloucester could it be?

But if you take the Fort out of Gloucester then what does she become?

It is a valid question to pose because the mayor has asked the city to "fast track" a rezoning proposal for the area which inevitably will foster a lot of change.

What type of change is a matter of concern and deserves far more public debate.

The city wants to grow tax base, which is understandable; the question is how can you move forward and yet retain your sense of place?

How do you allow for change and yet retain your core values? How do we do it without selling our soul?

The fort is the most interesting place in the city — visually, economically and culturally it is a major contributor to the life of Gloucester.

The businesses on Commercial Street work at night or in the wee hours of the day while we sleep.

They generate more revenue and jobs than the State Fish Pier does for the city and they are family owned and operated local businesses.

They ship product world wide every day. If you drive down there though, you would swear it is empty because the activity is not visible on the street side — you have to go indoors to see the action.

The neighborhood has a long and rich history and a way of life and quality of life that is hard to match. It is perhaps the last working class neighborhood with ocean views and reasonably priced apartments on the entire East Coast.

The people are very real, know each other, help each other and look out for each other, which is rare in 2008. It is not a gated community of cookie cutter condos.

It is the neighborhood that contributes strongly to produce the Fiesta — that has a real cultural and economic value for Gloucester.

Can the area use improvements? Sure it can. Is there a way to move forward without clearing the decks and gentrifying the area? That is a real question for Gloucester.

So please go read the proposed changes for zoning on the city Web site and think about what the city is wanting to fast track. Are we indeed going to go forward in a way that retains our sense of place? Or are we going to begin the end and become another Newport, R.I., Monterey, Calif., or future bedroom community?

Will the rezoning affect and act to push out the waterfront business? Will they move to lift the DPA once they rezone?

We have real advantages as a regional hub port with our own fish auction.

We should not give up on our working waterfront quite yet, nor do anything that would serve to weaken our most economically viable area of the waterfront, either.

We are now truly standing at the crossroads, Gloucester. What is a city or its people without a deep sense of place?

This city is a very real place. We should be working to keep it that way.

(Ernest "Ernie" Morin is a Gloucester photographer, engaged in documenting the American experience, focusing first and foremost on the working life of his native city, especially Gloucester's marine-industrial waterfront, which is endangered by a fishing industry in transition and current plans for rezoning that could, if not carefully undertaken, threaten the heart and soul of the city. The above essay by Ernie appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times and the Cape Ann Beacon just as the city is poised to consider new zoning proposals for the Fort area of Gloucester Ernie writes about and has documented in individual photographs and a highly acclaimed slide show. Below is a review of Ernie's slide show by artist and critic Greg Cook, from his blog The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.)

Watching my Gloucester photographer pal Ernest Morin's "Sight Lines" slideshow at Gloucester City Hall Thursday night, I was struck again by how comprehensively and richly and honestly he has captured the city of Gloucester. It starts with his sharp eye (note the careful arrangements of lines and shapes, the use of signs to comment on the scene) and technical excellence, and winds up with him getting so deep into the marrow of the community that his photos, as a group, seem (even to Gloucester's residents) like some essence of the city itself.

We don't have artist laureates, but if we did, Morin would have to be the artist laureate of Gloucester. It is rare for an artist to be so thoroughly and successfully engaged with the nature of a community. In Gloucester, it's something of a tradition – from painter Fitz Henry Lane to poet Charles Olson to photojournalist Charles Lowe to poet laureate Vincent Ferrini (a great character, excelling more as a laureate than as a poet, who died last December). There is something about Gloucester being big and complex enough to be a city, but also finite because it is ultimately an island (there are only two roads – bridges – in or out of the place) that make it seem both intriguing and possible for a person to know it in its entirety (or at least feel they do). Its artists are drawn to take up this challenge.

Morin grew up in Gloucester, lives downtown, and haunts its streets. He's come to know the city as a boy and as a man, to know it with his feet and his camera. The result – if I may be allowed a pretentious literary allusion – reminds me of a passage from T.S. Eliot's (who summered in Gloucester while growing up) "Little Gidding":

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

--Greg Cook, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research

And this, sent in from Peter Anastas,
the testimony of a Fort Square resident:

To add to the material we sent re Fort rezoning, here is testimony presented by a Fort resident at Sept. 15 public hearing. It was great to hear the neighbors speak up, dozens of them all wearing "Hold the Fort" T-shirts, which Bill had created for the campaign to save the Fort. Bill lives next door to where Olson lived at 28 Fort Square.

Hello,

My name is Bill Johnson, my wife Jennifer and I own 26R Fort Square. The property has been in her family since the 1930’s, I have to admit, I am a transplant from Pigeon Cove, my grandparents worked for the quarries and the B&M railroad- but I love the Fort, I personally don’t think there is any place like it. Jen is the fourth generation to grow up in our home, and we are hoping to begin raising a fifth there very soon. Jen’s uncle owns the house next door, where her Aunt and Cousins live. The situation is not dissimilar all the way around Fort Square, many of the families have been in their homes for several generations, and many of those families have their working roots in the currently faltering fishing industry. We are both working class people, Jen is a visiting nurse, I am a technician at Varian- we run our household on a budget. Most of the neighborhood is composed of working people. It is truly a unique area; and I am still learning to appreciate all of the relationships and workings of the neighborhood. I have to make it clear to everyone here that our house is our home, and what I mean by saying that is it is not a starter house or an investment property- if we can help it we intend to live out our lives there, and hand the property on to our children, or grand-children.

That being said, I feel as though the zoning plan which the city is proposing harbors dark consequences for maintaining this atmosphere. I have seen the harbor scenarios PowerPoint; it appears to have been created by people who are not familiar with the neighborhood. It seems as if someone thinks that by rezoning the neighborhood portions of the Fort to allow businesses in (shops, boutiques) that people will come and shop and enjoy the view. This sounds very much like another neck of land on Cape Ann which we are all familiar with- Bear Skin Neck.

The zoning proposal also brings many questions to mind- Has the city fully studied the economic impacts of these changes to existing businesses? A disturbing portion of the harbor plan shows a rendering of Commercial Street, across from the Fort Square entrance where several fish based businesses are operating and putting their land within the DPA to good and appropriate use, turned into shops! When the shops on Main St. can barely survive as it is, and the upcoming development of Gloucester Crossing threatens to potentially take even more business from Main St, Why do we need more shops? More shops are exactly what Gloucester doesn’t need. A question to the Planning board, does the current zoning proposal take these factors into account?

What of the 1999 harbor plan, and it’s 2003 addendum which states that the fishing industry will be in an upswing in 2014, when groundfishing quotas will increase…. Will this city’s waterfront be prepared to accommodate the increase in volume, or will the fish have to be landed and processed elsewhere? I am sure there are people in Boston, New Bedford, and Portland who would be glad to land that business, will the fleet have to be serviced elsewhere? All because we have re-zoned a vital Marine Industrial space to accommodate for the perceived need of tourism?

As for the hotel, does Gloucester need more hospitality jobs? Jobs which probably do not pay enough to pay rent let alone a mortgage on Cape Ann? We should look to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard to our south, there are charities on those islands to try and maintain a population of native, skilled working people who cannot afford to live there due to median home prices being too high. Why can’t the city, perhaps with help from a citizens group, or a state grant for high tech jobs find an investor who would be willing to develop a mini business park here? Real, skilled jobs- let us look to the future, there are companies out there right now, working to develop algae that can grow diesel fuel as a renewable energy source- wouldn’t Gloucester be the logical place for a company like that to develop real, renewable energy from the city’s greatest natural resource- the Atlantic ocean? Let’s find a use for this property which coincides with the businesses and neighborhood which already exist on the Fort.

Do we need another hotel property which must closed in winter time, or worse, must develop condos and time shares to make its business plan work? Has the city studied the year round realities of the proposed hotel on Commercial St? Will the tenants and condominium holders of such a property put up with the 24/7 traffic which exists there? The occasional smells of a working waterfront? I personally think that what Neptune’s Organic does with fish waste is fantastic both environmentally and economically, but, it does smell once and a while….. If the former Birdseye property becomes inhabited by a hospitality based industry, with potentially high priced clients, how long will it take before complaints are made about noise and the traffic and the smells? These are all things that all of us on the Fort are familiar with, and for the most part embrace as coming with the territory.

If Gloucester really and truly needs a hotel downtown, why not work to make I4C2 (the abandoned lot between Gloucester House and the Building center) more attractive. The infrastructure in that area lends itself better to supporting a large business, it is centrally located, and there are less conflicting interests with abutters. There is even a dock there where the often mentioned shuttle from Boston could land, sheltered from the waves of the outer harbor, and also allow the dock to continue to operate as it is now. There must be a way to work with the state to cut through the red tape to put that site to an appropriate use.

How will Commercial St support the proposed Central Business Zoning and the myriad of traffic it could bring? In case anyone here is not aware, it is a dead end, which has only one way in and out- past Tally’s, where the tow trucks are perennially double parked, as those guys are just doing their job. Anyone here who has tried to get onto Fort Square at any point on any given day knows that the trucking traffic from the functioning fish based industries which currently exist on the street creates tie ups as it is. If a multi-story hotel is built on the Birdseye property, how wide will Commecial St have to be? And, If it must be widened, will the cuts be made into the Chamber of Commerce?, or perhaps Mortillaro’s…..is that really productive? Does the city leadership really prefer to make further hardships for companies which are currently doing their best to make a profit during the fishing downturn the industry is living through? I would also like to pose a question to the entire assembled group here- have you ever tried to make a left hand turn from Commercial St onto Western Ave on a Saturday during the summer? It is very difficult, as the local ecomomy exists now- this will no doubt become exponentially more difficult should further traffic load be added. These changes will also effect traffic on Washington St, Rogers St, and Western Avenue. This topic deserves much study before such drastic changes are enacted.

.How about Parking? If Fort Square and the eastern side of Beach Court are zoned to allow shops, where will their customers park? Obviously some will walk in, but we all know the city is not prepared to offer any more parking than already exists in the downtown area, this is another problem we are all familiar with. The zoning proposal on the table mentions no solutions to this obvious problem, this must be addressed before moving forward.

Not to mention the effects to the people of the Fort, whose families have been inhabiting the area for so many years. And what of the hotel which Sam Park intends to place at Gloucester Crossing- How many hotel rooms can exist in one place in the current business environment?

It strikes me that this change is a move for the quick money which the city so desperately needs- this need is undeniable. But, also to be considered is the bigger picture- the picture where our economy whether it be local, state, or federal is becoming increasingly service based. I don’t think we need more shops, more hotels, more restaurants, more boutiques, or more banks. We need industrial and technical jobs, in industries that don’t easily wax and wane with the state of the economy, the price of fuel, or whatever happens to be chique at the moment. We need to find and encourage jobs and industry which provide food, and the staples which everyone needs in their lives regardless of the state of the economy. Let’s find a company which does that and offer them a TIF, let’s not make it any more difficult for businesses already struggling to stay afloat. This is not done as easily as it is said, but, if the city continues to increase tourism’s piece of the local economy I believe we will see even greater swings in revenue than we do now. The importance of a local economy which is diversified cannot be ignored. Places with less resource and built in skills and talent come to mind, like Jamaica, where an impoverished lower class works in an almost completely tourism based economy. We have skills and resource here in Gloucester to do better than adding a handful of $10 per hour chambermaid and desk clerk jobs that could come with a hotel.

It is amazing to me that this proposal was put together without anyone asking direct questions to the residents of the Fort up to this point- money and time were spent drawing this proposal- city resources were used! Why weren’t I or my neighbors contacted directly, as we have a very large stake in what happens to our neighborhood.

What about character and originality? The current rezoning proposal represents a slippery slope towards taking away one of Gloucester’s greatest assets- it’s uniqueness. The friendlier we make our waterfront to high end condos, the more attractive it will become to this development-and a precedent could be set. It would not be an incredible reach to see the waterfront start to unzipper and fold under the attractive and lucrative one time profits that waterfront condos represent. Let’s keep the working waterfront working. Let’s work on the recommendations of previous harbor plan revisions- don’t toss them out for the possibility that a Marriot could end up in Gloucester.

All of the issues above are of great importance to the city, in both the long and short term, and decisions on issues of this magnitude should not be rushed. I respectfully submit the following requests:

-A traffic study, with full details showing how Central Business Zoning could exist on Commercial Street.

-Within that traffic study, an explanation of where and how parking will work, not just for the CB zoning on commercial street, but the proposed NB zoning on Beach and Pascucci courts, as well as Fort Square.

-An Economic Impact Study, for both Main St, and the Marine Industrial Businesses which are making their living already on Commercial St.

-Alternative concepts- give the citizens of Gloucester more than one option- this land can be put to good use, we need to be responsible about how we do that. I feel that there is a use for this space which compliments the existing conditions of the area.

-Direct contact and involvement with the citizens who lie directly in the area to be rezoned is critical- we have a lot to lose or gain from these changes.

- I personally want to know what is going to happen to my taxes if this zoning change takes place- I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only one.

- How exactly, specifically legally, is Pavillion Beach affected? Who owns the water, the sand, and to what level? How will access to the beach be guaranteed to the public after development begins? Will a seawall have to be built on the beach to protect such a property? Are we, as an entire city, willing to give up this beautiful beach?

- How are rights of way affected?

There are a lot of groups on the Fort with sometimes conflicting priorities, but we all seem agree on one thing- the zoning proposal as it stands does not work for any of us. I would like to finish by re-iterating my position, which is that I just want to live here peacefully, and raise my children on a piece of property which will have been in their family for five generations. I would like to see the neighborhood preserved for what it is, a culturally unique enclave. I would like to see the city move forward, and some development is necessary for that motion- but let’s look really closely at it, don’t disregard former harbor plans and input from citizens and businesses, especially those most affected by the changes.

I thank the Council and the Planning Committee for their time and consideration.

Call for Papers

2008-09-24T11:32:00.000-04:00

Call for Papers: Charles Olson’s Poetry in “This now. This foreshortened span.”

American Literature Association, Boston, Westin Copley Place, May 21-24, 2009

Given Olson’s statement in The Maximus Poems—“an actual earth of value to / construct one”—the Charles Olson Society seeks proposals from emerging poets currently engaging specific elements of Olson’s poetics, such as use, measure, breath, line, sound, and speech. Proposals should address the direct relations between the poet-writer’s developing poetics and Olson’s prose or poetry—and how such a relation to Olson still projects itself, still figures, now, 38 years after his death in 1970.

250-word proposals should be sent to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by December 15, 2008. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

The New American Poetry: Call for Work

2008-04-09T10:59:00.001-04:00

Essays are sought for a collection of critical essays on Donald Allen’s 1960 seminal anthology, “The New American Poetry,” an anthology that Marjorie Perloff called in a 1995 essay, “[…] the fountainhead of radical American poetics.” Such an edition should be very well received and will add greatly to poetry scholarship today due to the monumental influence the original collection has had. Allen’s anthology was the first to widely distribute the poetry and theoretical positions of poets such as Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and it was the first to categorize these poets by the schools (Black Mountain, New York, San Francisco, etc.) by which we know them today.

As you may have recognized, Allen’s anthology is approaching its fiftieth anniversary. This collection, The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, will seek a variety of scholars and artists to speak of the influence of Allen’s text in the literary and academic world as it reaches this landmark date. This anniversary provides a unique time for reflection; this volume will generate great interest in renewed study of the American avant-garde, past and present, by literary scholars and historians of American culture.

Though the book has not yet been contracted, it is believed a major (university) press will sponsor this anthology. Query letters are in the process of being considered.

Completed essays will range from 7,000 to 10,000 words, though provisions may be made for longer essays. The aim is to
complete the manuscript by early 2009 for 2010 publication.

Interested authors are to submit a 500-word abstract, as well as a current CV, in MS Word format by May 15, 2008.

For submission of proposals and/or inquiries, please contact:

Dr. John R. Woznicki, Associate Professor of English, Georgian Court University:
woznicki@georgian.edu

Alternate email: jrwoznicki@gmail.com

Essay: Towards a Theory of Time in Olson

2008-04-09T10:57:00.002-04:00

http://jacketmagazine.com/35/olson-by-pritts.shtml

Towards a Theory of Time in Olson by Nathan Pritts

Charles Olson Centennial Conference

2008-02-24T12:48:00.005-05:00

Curriculum of the Soul

Charles Olson Centennial Conference

4 - 6 June 2010

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

The call for papers will go out about a year from now. The conference will combine scholarly papers with poetry readings, a display of materials in Special Collections at SFU, and other events.

Paul Delany, Professor Emeritus
Department of English, Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive, Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6
Tel: 604 264 1113

olson2010-1@sfu.ca

Vincent Ferrini, 1913-2007

2007-12-27T09:57:00.001-05:00

Vincent Ferrini has died. His nephew, the filmmaker Henry Ferrini, sent me the following obit, which he wrote himself:

Vincent Ferrini died December 24th. His death was the result of a recent heart attack and bout with pneumonia. He resided at Den Mar Nursing home in Rockport since last May after returning from his latest reading at Beyond Baroque Literary Art Center in Los Angeles. He was 94 years old. For anyone who knew Mr. Ferrini his passion and engagement for the art of living will always be remembered.

If the poet were writing this obit he would say he did not die but rather merged into the pleroma. The pleroma was a word on his mind during the last few years. In Greek it means, "fullness.” The early Christian Gnostics saw it as the dwelling place of spirit and to scores of people in his community Vincent was the spirit & conscience of Gloucester.

Venanzio Ugo Ferrini was born in Saugus, Massachusetts on June 24, 1913 to John and Rena Ferrini. His parents emigrated separately from Abruzzi, Italy to work in the shoe factories of Lynn. Vincent’s own experience in the shoe factories and during the Great Depression instilled a great sensitivity for the life of the working poor.

In high school he found that books contained the keys to discovery and it was then that he resolved to become a writer. Ignoring his father’s admonition that a son of a shoe worker could never become a poet, he graduated from Lynn Classical and not having the money for college, pursued his education in the Lynn Public Library spending each day reading, studying, looking for answers to illuminate why humanity settled for poverty and war. When the Great Depression hit, the young bard worked as a teacher in the WPA as he worked his first volume of verse about the people of Lynn. In 1940 at the age of twenty-seven he published “No Smoke.”

A simple poem by the poet tells a great deal about the man.

Folk Song.

I pass
by day
and by night
no one has
seen me

If you ever
want to find
me and know me
leave behind
yourself
and enter
the caves
of other
people.

There you
will find
me
who is
yourself.

Mr. Ferrini married Margaret Duffy a schoolteacher in 1942. The couple had three children Sheila, Owen and Deirdre. In 1948 his young family left Lynn for Gloucester. Working at the GE by day, he soon gave up the security of a weekly paycheck to make a living as a frame maker. As he said in his 1975 autobiography, Hermit of the Clouds, being an independent craftsperson provided “the freedom to write when the poem is hot within.”

Mr. Ferrini’s move to Gloucester marked a shift in his poetry from the political and social to the personal and cosmic. Gloucester became a dream place that he made his place. Here his poetry and his life would find no separation.

In the late 40’s after reading a Ferrini poem in a small magazine the poet Charles Olson paid the poet a fan call. Olson first addressed the Maximus Poems as letters to Mr. Ferrini and even after an excoriating attack; the two men remained lifelong friends.

In the sixties after the death of his daughter Deirdre from leukemia, Ferrini’s marriage ended. He later married the artist Mary Shore. When his second marriage ended in divorce he moved back to his frame shop at 126 East Main Street. The little shop became a nexus for many artists and writers who came to Gloucester.

Vincent’s view of the individual, the family, the community and the nation working together for the common good compelled him to write not only to the Gloucester paper but the Globe, the New York Times and the Nation. At city hall he voiced his concerns at hundreds of council meetings. His focus was always the preservation of his city from the wildfire greed that will destroy the spirit and originality of his city.

Overcoming all odds Mr. Ferrini chose life as a poet. He was an academic outsider who lived with no financial remuneration from his labor. His vigor, unbound creativity and compassion kept him publishing for over 67 years producing 31 volumes of poetry, four volumes of plays and an autobiography. He is the subject of his nephew Henry Ferrini’s film, “Poem in Action.”

Mr. Ferrini leaves his daughter Shelia Ferrini of Boston, his son Owen Ferrini from Gloucester, two grandchildren, Ben and Cara Ferrini and dozens of extended family and friends whom he will continue to inspire. His younger siblings Yolanda, Dante and Lindo predeceased him.

A celebration of Vincent Ferrini’s life will be held at a forthcoming date. His upcoming book of poetry “Invisible Skin” is slated for release in the spring of 2008. Literary requests can be sent to Sheilaferrini@aol.com

--Henry Ferrini

You can also read the Gloucester Times obit here:
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/punews/local_story_361000712.html

New Olson Title from Stanford U Press

2007-10-11T10:52:00.000-04:00

Beyond Maximus
The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry
Anne Day Dewey

Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry is the only study of Black Mountain poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn—to explain their association from the 1950s to their break-up after the Vietnam War.

Dewey uses the poets’ correspondence and other archival materials to illuminate their mutual influence and the crucial significance of “field poetics” to their careers. While previous criticism has focused on the poetics of the force field as a model of nature, Dewey understands the force field as a model of social force that all five poets articulate and incorporate into poetry in ways that compete with artistic craft. Their different conceptions of social force explain their divergent careers. The development of “field poetics” also sheds light on these poets’ attempts to create an alliance between experimental poetics and public voice, a difficult agenda that speaks to Black Mountain poetry’s crucial contribution to the artistic and political struggles of New American poetry.

“Beyond Maximus is the most perceptive and informative analysis to date of the poets conventionally grouped under the label ‘Black Mountain.’ Virtually every page of the book opens up fresh and exciting ways of looking both at the works of these poets as individuals and at the relationships among the poets. We have here a book that makes a vitally important contribution to the critical study of twentieth-century American poetry.”
—Burton Hatlen, University of Maine

Learn more...

Cloth ISBN: 08047-5647-3 $60.00

New on the Documents Page

2007-10-11T10:48:00.000-04:00

Peter Bearse discusses Henry Ferrini's Film in an essay on the documents page.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/

Call For Papers

2007-10-11T10:47:00.001-04:00

Call for Papers: Charles Olson: Extra-Literary Influences on His Poetry and Poetics

American Literature Association, San Francisco, Hyatt Regency at Embarcadero Center, May 22-25, 2008

The Charles Olson Society invites proposals that focus on the extra-literary influences on Olson’s poetry and poetics: non-Euclidean geometry, serial music, dance, philosophy, or any of the “new sciences of man,” such as archeology, mythology, history, psychology, and geography.

250-word proposals should be sent to Jeffrey Gardiner at Jeffrey.Gardiner@Sun.Com and to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by December 15, 2007. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

MICHAEL BOUGHN/REVIEW OF POLIS IS THIS

2007-08-08T15:21:00.000-04:00

Olson at work: a review of Polis Is This by Henry Ferrini
by Michael Boughn

Undertaking to make a film about Charles Olson is a bit like deciding to take the Ford out for a Sunday drive—in Afghanistan. At first glance, it seems like a straight-forward idea. But before you know it, you’re facing a, shall we say, explosive situation. In the case of Olson, the minefield has to do with the expectations of the community of Olson’s readers. They are a loyal and sometimes even obsessive bunch. Perhaps more so than any other poet of his generation, Olson invoked extraordinarily passionate responses from his readers. Partly this was due to his immense magical presence. And partly it was due to the power and provocations of his writing. Both facts instill many of his readers with a kind of intense, focused concentration most poets can only dream of.

That’s the up side. The down side is that the knowledge that comes with that concentration of attention has been known to breed a sense of—say, ownership, or identification. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It would be a wonderful world if more people felt that way about more poets. But knowing obscure details about Olson’s geographies, or equally obscure details about his life or the proliferating significance of some gnomic utterances sometimes leads Olson’s readers to assume their Olson has an authority that trumps all others. It can lead to an obstreperous narcissism that fails to see other possibilities. For this reason alone, we owe Henry Ferrini an enormous vote of thanks for his courage in undertaking such a project at all, knowing as he no doubt must have, that many of the people who should have been supporting him would instead be condemning him for not making a film about “their” Olson.

This obviously raises the question of “which” Olson Ferrini gives us in Polis Is This. I would actually restate the question and ask, for whom has he made this film, because you can’t understand which Olson he gives us without understanding to whom that Olson is addressed. Not to put too fine an Arnoldian critical point on it, this is an absolutely crucial move as a basis for having anything useful to say about the work, as opposed to general griping that finally amounts to nothing more than the complaint “this Olson isn’t MY Olson.” As Alice famously pointed out when the baby in her arms turned into a pig, “If it had grown up, it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes a rather handsome pig, I think.”

Ferrini’s baby is a complex occasion, but I think it’s fair to state a couple of obvious points right off the bat. It is not a film that was made for the specialists of the Charles Olson Society (which, let’s hope, doesn’t turn into the kind of beast Olson excoriated in the Melville Society). Nor is it a film made for the MLA, that other group of different specialists. Neither of these bunches really needs more information on Olson. For better or for worse, they have plenty, and if they want more, they know how to get it. The film is not even, I would argue, primarily for poets, although it’s full of wonderful images of them, including Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Ed Sanders, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, and a terrific reading of Olson by Gerrit Lansing. Given the film’s defining gestures, its structure, its imagery, and its tone, it seems primarily addressed to people who not only are unfamiliar with Charles Olson, who in fact probably never even heard of him, but are resistant to the very idea of reading poetry: young, curious, but ignorant, not just of poetry, but of history—unsatisfied with many of the circumstances they find themselves in, but largely unaware of how they came to be.

Into this condition, Ferrini’s film intercedes in a number of ways. It uses the occasion of presenting a view of the life of the poet as an opportunity to make a basic argument for—not just the importance of poetry, but its absolute, Emersonian centrality to the lives of ordinary people. It does this quite effectively by making many of the spokespersons in the film ordinary people from around Gloucester: a barber, a waitress, a fisherman, a truck driver. Some of the interviews may have been less spontaneous than the film makes out, but ultimately that seems irrelevant to the force of their presences. For me, the biggest knock-out was the waitress who quotes, not Olson, but Emily Dickinson, in order to talk about Olson’s lack of self-aggrandizement: “I am Nobody / Who are you” she recites from memory in her diner with exquisite delight and recognition. It is equally marvelous when the truck driver talks excitedly of inhabiting the landscapes of Olson’s poems with his friends when they were kids, noting that Olson even included them in the work. You don’t get much further away from the self-confirming coteries of inbred poetry than that. And it usefully locates Olson exactly where he wanted to be.

Ferrini doesn’t stop with making an argument for the importance and relevance of poetry, however. This is an activist film. It is deeply concerned with the intersection of Olson’s poetry and politics. But it doesn’t simply present Olson’s politics as an academic abstraction. Rather it intervenes directly into the issues that so concerned Olson, especially as they circulate around the loss of place to a criminally careless and stupid adoration of development at any cost. This is the sense of polis that anchors the film. It is not primarily a technical exposition of the complexities and contradictions of Olson’s thinking on place. Rather it is an invocation of an actual sense of loss aimed at making that connection in the minds of its viewers.

Ferrini approaches this issue through very powerful imagery of the actual physical destruction of Gloucester juxtaposed with passages from Olson’s poetry and a commentary on his local political engagement. The effect is to present Olson as a deeply human, approachable character, appealing in his commonness, his commitment, his concern, and his language. Many of us who live and work with poetry, or who have long been committed to Olson’s work, may forget how terribly esoteric it all can seem to the uninitiated. Many of us may no longer care. But this film does, and that is its strength.

Ferrini’s portrait of Olson moves persuasively between theses various dimensions, linking together the magic of poetry, the ornery immediacy of Olson’s politics, and the world which is the daily experience of ordinary people. Someone who has never even heard of the Pleistocene will find themselves introduced by this film to an astonishing moment in which it shines through the present, locating them not just in history but in a moment in history when suddenly their own anxiety and uneasiness about the way things are going takes on a depth and resonance previously unsuspected to them. The final scene of the young people in Ammiel Alcalay’s poetry class animatedly discussing their discovery of Olson and his significance to them is in that sense a particularly fitting and moving close to the film. Ferrini has carefully crafted a tool for reaching precisely the uninitiated, arguably those who, if not in need of poetry in general and Olson’s poetry in particular, might at least have some scales drop from their eyes by their exposure to it.

Ben Friedlander's Photos

2007-06-01T08:47:00.001-04:00

From the Olson Panel at the ALA in Boston:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mongibeddu/tags/ala/

Fall Screenings of 'Polis is This' in Boston

2007-06-01T08:42:00.000-04:00

Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place

Screenings:

Thursday, Sept. 20 6:30 pm
Sept 22 2:00pm

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
website: www.mfa.org

New website for the film: www. polisIsthis.com

NEW ON THE DOCUMENTS PAGE

2007-05-30T14:15:00.001-04:00

Cick the "OlsonNow Documents Page" link to the right to see a new piece by Andre Spears.

Ben Friedlander's Buffalo Photos

2007-04-24T22:23:00.000-04:00

Ben's "Mongibeddu" Photo Gallery of Buffalo

R.D. Pohl Report on OlsonNow 3

2007-04-17T14:49:00.000-04:00

Buffalo News Poetry Beat Blog

OLSONNOW @ BUFFALO LINKS

2007-04-16T11:32:00.000-04:00

Photos of the event from Geoffrey Gatza

Michael Kelleher's review of Henry's Ferrini's Film

Michael Kelleher's article on Olson in Artvoice

Buffalo News article by Jeff Simon

OlsonNow 3 Saturday!

2007-04-11T10:38:00.001-04:00

OlsonNow 3: Charles Olson @ Buffalo_
April 14, 2007, 1 p.m._
Hallwalls Cinema at the Church_
341 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY_
$6, $4 members of Hallwalls or Just Buffalo/Students with I.D.

Schedule:

1 p.m. Presentations and discussion of Olson
4 p.m. Screening of Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place and Q & A with Henry Ferrini.
6-8 Break for food, etc.
8 p.m. Poetry readings by Anne Waldman, Ammiel Alcalay, Benjamin Friedlander, Jonathan Skinner, Michael Basinski, Bill Sylvester, David Landrey.

The third installment of OlsonNow: Charles Olson @ Buffalo will take place on April 14 at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center Cinema in Buffalo, New York. At this event, we hope to highlight Olson's brief but important tenure at the University at Buffalo. Confirmed guests include Anne Waldman, Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Basinski, Robert Bertholf, William Sylvester, Michael Kelleher, David Landrey, Jonathan Skinner, Benjamin Friedlander and others. Michael Basinski, Curator of the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo will talk about the Poetry Collection's recent acquisition of the papers of Jack Clarke. The event will also include a screening of Henry Ferrini's Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place. The filmmaker will be on hand to introduce the film and to answer questions afterward. All are welcome to participate in the discussion that will take place throughout the afternoon. If you would like to make a brief, informal presentation at the event, please click the contact link to the right.

Sponsored by Just Buffalo, Hallwalls, UB Poetry Collection, Talking Leaves Books, and UB Humanities Institute, with a major grant from the New York Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

NEW ON THE DOCUMENTS PAGE

2007-02-23T14:05:00.001-05:00

New on the Documents Page at OlsonNow:

Paul Nelson/The Sound of the Field and Organic Poetry and Dualism and Olson's Antidote

Kelly Matthews/Letter toi Maximus From Cassandra

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/

A NOTE FROM HENRY FERRINI

2007-02-08T10:02:00.000-05:00

Dear Olson Society members and film supporters,

I wanted to give everyone a new year's update. I'm spending the next couple of weeks in an audio studio tweeking and prepping for a February sound mix. This is the last major technical piece of work to be done. I am hopeful some donations will come through between now and then to fund the mix otherwise.... I'll go fish. I'm committed to a March wrap. This train is not making any more stops. I hope the following screenings will help toward pay off the dept.

My target is March 3rd at Beyond Baroque in LA. If you know people in the LA area please let them know. They can check www.Ferriniproductions.com for updated info. The big push is slated for April. The first screening is set up for April 10th at Bridgewater State, next off to Buffalo on April 14th. I'm working on screenings in Worcester(Clark or WPI), Salem State, Wesleyan, Uconn and Harvard (Gerrit's been in touch with Don Share at the Poetry Room and I will be following up). If anyone has other ideas about where the film can be shown drop me a line.

Poetry Month could be busy so I'm thinking the Gloucester opening at the Historical should be in May. We should consider having a short live component. I sent Bo Smith, film curator at the Museum of Fine Arts film program a rough cut and he's gung ho about having a screening either in May or June. Bo had read Olson but had never seen him. I want to talk with Bill Corbett about helping with the live component there. When I get the film burned to DVD I'll send it to Malkovich, If he's in town maybe he'll want to read at the MFA or in Gloucester.

Kenny Riaf and I have been fine tuning the piece over the last couple of months and feel the changes made have made for a better film. We hope it connects to a new audience who have never heard of Charles Olson.

Best,

Henry

RICHARD HAISMA/OLSON DANCE PERFORMANCE

2007-02-08T09:56:00.000-05:00

PROJECTIVE KINETICS PRESENTS:

AS THE DEAD PREY UPON US:
The Poetry of Charles Olson Performed as physical theater by Richard Haisma

Saturday, March 10 at 5 & 9 PM &
Sunday, March 11 at 2 & 5 PM

PHYSIKOS
In Village Gate
302 N. Goodman Street
Rochester, NY 14607
North Building, Unit 201, 2nd Floor
(Enter from outdoor courtyard, to the left of Houghton Bookstore or enter from the Parking Lot on the north side).
Wheel chair accessible.

Tickets: $7, Students & Seniors: $5.
No admission for youth under 16.

Charles Olson (1910-1970) was a seminal and commanding force in contemporary poetry. He coined the term ‘post-modern’ and influenced a generation of major poets and writers, including Amiri Baraka, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, and Robert Duncan. The range of his interests, from paleontology to physics to art history to psychology gave him an epic, lyric and freshly dramatic voice.

Ed Dorn called Olson “… a creative gambler, a great intellectual punter constantly at the gaming tables of thought and literature.” William Carlos Williams said of Olson: “A major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me.”

With this performance, actor-dancer Richard Haisma reveals the kinetic and dramatic depth of Olson’s vision. From The Maximus Poems and the Collected Poetry a selection of the most moving, visceral and clairvoyant poems are performed with vocal virtuosity and theatrical vigor. While most writers are familiar with Olson’s legacy, the physical viability of his voice now has a champion for reaching a larger audience in a publicly radiant and moving manner.

For more information: 585-527-9033

KYLE SCHLESINGER/OLSON'S MELVILLE BIBLIOGRAPHY

2007-02-08T09:46:00.000-05:00

A few years ago I typed up a bibliography for a reading group with Bob Creeley on Olson and Melville. Ralph Maud printed it in The Minutes a few years later. I'm interested in updating it now, so please drop me a line if you're aware of any primary or secondary sources that should appear below.

Thanks!

Kyle Schlesinger

kyle@cuneiformpress.com

PRIMARY TEXTS:

Moby-Dick and Call Me Ishmael

"The Growth of Herman Melville: Prose Writer and Poetic Thinker"
(photocopy)

"Lear and Moby-Dick" Twice A Year, 1 (Fall-Winter 1938) 165-189.

"Letter for Melville 1951" Published in late August 1951. Printed under the
direction of Larry Hatt at Black Mountain College in an edition of 50.

"The Mystery of What Happens, When it Happens" Storrs Archive.

"David Young, David Old" Western Review, XIV (Fall 1949) 63-66.

"The Materials and Weights of Herman Melville" New Republic, CXXVIII (8
September 1952) 20-21.

"The Materials and Weights of Herman Melville II" New Republic, CXXVIII (15
September 1952) 17-18, 21.

"Equal, That Is, the Real Itself" Chicago Review, XII, 2 (Summer 1958)
98-104.

In Adullam's Lair Provincetown, Mass. : To the Lighthouse Press, 1975

SECONDARY TEXTS:

Bertholf, Robert J. "Charles Olson and the Melville Society" Extracts: an
Occasional Newsletter 10 (1972): 3-4.

Bertholf, Robert J. "Melville and Olson: The Poetics of Form" Extracts 17
(1974) 5-6.

Bertholf, Robert J. "On Olson, His Melville" Io 22 (1976) 5-36.

Charters, Ann. Olson/Melville A Study in Affinity. California: Oyez, 1968.

Churchill, Tom. "From Melville to Olson to Metcalf: The Double Play" The
Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (2) Summer (1981) 273-285.

Friedman, Andrea. "Driven By That Destiny Home: Herman Melville, Charles
Olson, Robert Creeley, and the Problem of Knowledge in a World of Flux"
Diss. State University of New York at Buffalo 1976.

Golding, Alan. "Pursuing Olson Pursuing Melville: The Beginnings of Call Me
Ishmael" Melville Society Extracts 86 September (1991) 1-6.

Howe, Susan "Where Should The Commander Be" Writing Magazine 19 November
(1987) 3-20.

Maud, Ralph (editor). "A Melville Issue" The Minutes of the Charles Olson
Society 5 (September, 1994): 1-32.

Pops, Martin L. Home Remedies Amherst, Massachusetts: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1984. Note: "Charles Olson: Obeying the Figures of
the Present Dance" p. 37-54 Note: This article was originally published in
Modern Poetry Studies, Buffalo, NY (1971).

Pops, Martin L. "Melville: To Him, Olson" Boundary 2: A Journal of
Postmodern Literature 2 (1973-4) 55-84.

Sealts, Merton M. "Olson, Melville, and the New Republic" Contemporary
Literature 22 (2) Spring (1981) 167-186.

OLSONNOW 3

2007-01-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

OlsonNow 3: Charles Olson @ Buffalo
April 14, 2007, 1 p.m.
Hallwalls Cinema at the Church
341 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY
$6, $4 members of Hallwalls or Just Buffalo/Students with I.D.

Charles Olson taught at the University at Buffalo from 1963-1965. His presence at the University continues to reverberate in Buffalo. His many contemporaries brought in for readings or for teaching gigs (Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, John Wieners, Gregory Corso, Amiri Baraka, et al) helped create a unique atmosphere in which innovative poetry could flourish. Many of his students and colleagues from Buffalo went on to make important contributions to poetry and scholarship, including: Charles Boer, Harvey Brown, George Butterick, Jack Clarke, Albert Glover, Duncan McNaughton, Stephen Rodefer, Fred Wah and others. Perhaps even more important, his replacement, Robert Creeley, who arrived in 1966, kept that spirit alive for 40 years. His influence lead directly to the founding of Just Buffalo in 1975 as a venue to present poetry in the community rather than in the academy, and to the creation of the Poetics Program at the University in 1989.

The third installment of OlsonNow: Charles Olson @ Buffalo will take place on April 14 at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center Cinema in Buffalo, New York. At this event, we hope to highlight Olson’s brief but important tenure at the University at Buffalo. Confirmed guests include Anne Waldman, Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Basinski, Robert Bertholf, Michael Kelleher, David Landrey, Jonathan Skinner, and others. Michael Basinski, Curator of the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo will talk about the Poetry Collection’s recent acquisition of the papers of Jack Clarke. The event will also include a screening of Henry Ferrini’s Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place. The filmmaker will be on hand to introduce the film and to answer questions afterward. All are welcome to participate in the discussion that will take place throughout the afternoon. If you would like to make a brief, informal presentation at the event, please click the contact link to the right.

Sponsored by Just Buffalo, Hallwalls, UB Poetry Collection, UB Humanities Institute

Call For Work

2006-12-11T09:38:00.000-05:00

FlashPoint Magazine

http://www.flashpointmag.com/

an online journal is seeking papers on Charles Olson for its February issue. If anyone has a paper or other critical material they would like to contribute contact Carlo Parcelli at alphavil@ix.netcom.com or Jack Foley at flashpoint@hotmail.com

Iconoclasts welcome. CP

Call For Papers

2006-10-18T09:47:00.000-04:00

The End of the Maximus and the Late Prose

American Literature Association, Boston, May 24-27, 2007

The Charles Olson Society invites proposals that focus on any aspect of the end of "The Maximus Poems" or Olson's late prose (published or unpublished).

250-word proposals should be sent to Don Byrd at dbyrd1@nycap.rr.com by December 15, 2006. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

POLIS IS THIS SCREENS SUNDAY IN BAY AREA

2006-06-13T11:13:00.000-04:00

"Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place" by Henry Ferrini. 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco. For more information: (415) 978-2787 or www.sfcinematheque.org.

ALSO, SEE ARTICLE OLSON AND HENRY FERRINI IN SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/06/13/DDGBSJCBBE1.DTL

JOHN HYLAND/AN ACCOUNT OF OLSONNOW IN BOSTON

2006-06-05T13:17:00.000-04:00

The Boston area’s OLSON NOW event of 20 May 2006 seemed, to this observer/listener at least, a success on some accounts, a certain sweep of the hand toward what could/should be done now in regards to the work of Charles Olson. Held, interestingly enough, in a Socratic-style lecture hall on the MIT campus on a cool yet sunny mid-spring afternoon, the event was organized by William Corbett and Gerritt Lansing and included many participants. Not that numbers are what matters, but to give a sense of things: though I never counted—and given that some did come and go—I’d guess the number of attendees around seventy-five.

In what follows I’ll try and reconstruct (in a loosely narrative form) a few of my own impressions of the event from my few scant notes, as well as from memory: what has stuck with me if not been held and churned in mind since 20 May is all the loose ends of (or maybe arrows pointing toward?) what is to be done. At any rate—

Things got underway with opening remarks and various readings of some of Olson’s poems. Several read from both The Maximus Poems and from other sources. Fanny Howe summoned the specter of Edward Dahlberg, calling attention to the mountain that he was (is) lurking off in the distance. Joseph Torra offered an anecdote, illustrating the fact that he completely trusts Olson—one that all present must have in some way appreciated. Others, including Michael Franco, read poems and remarked generally on their first discovering of Olson. Franco, I believe, came to Olson through Duncan; he made reference at some point to the phrase “stance toward reality” from, of course, “Projective Verse.”

To open with readings was constructive, and as such reminded me of this moment from Olson’s essay “Homer and the Bible” (as it appears in the Collected Essays): “What we need is more of the text, always more of the, text, no end to the work that can be done. More light on every word, every device of syntax, each difference of morphology in structure and in form, until it’s all laid clear” (347). And while reference (often in passing) was made to the written works, much of the conversation—conversation that was lively indeed and at times had something of the manner of a town hall meeting—seemed to this listener to focus more on individual impressions, remembrances, and also the occasional posing of questions and concerns.

After these useful, prefatory moments, Benjamin Friedlander delivered some remarks in regards to Olson’s legacy, his use for poets now, scholarship on Olson, and what must be “set aside if we are going to accomplish anything of value.” In delivering his observations, Friedlander, poised and articulate, held the hall’s attention before “yielding the floor.”

Bill Corbett dutifully played the part of emcee/panel chair. At some point in all the talk, and I can’t remember exactly in reference to what, he told of a visit with Olson in Gloucester. He (Bill Corbett), young and I suppose in awe, was staring at stacks of books on the, I guess, living room floor. Olson saw him standing there, and said something to the effect of “O, you don’t got to read those. Just smell ‘em!”—and Corbett gestured with a sweep of the hand. This anecdote, as others, produced laughter and gave an informal feel to the afternoon.

The panel assembled consisted of: Fanny Howe, Joseph Torra, Gerritt Lansing, Peter Anastas, and Maureen McClane. Initially, the panel was asked to speak generally if not openly of their own encounters with and understandings of Olson. One talking point was how Olson’s work had shaped each of the participants’ own sense of the world and however he or she chose to live. Some spoke of how Olson influenced their teaching, while others spoke of their own writing practices.

While Friedlander’s remarks, which were (are) lucid and exceptionally useful, provided manifold possible talking points, two points were picked up and batted around for a while. The first was that—and I quote from the talk as posted below—“Olson was not literary in orientation; that is, he was not interested in making finished, free-standing works of art, objects to be appreciated or consumed as ends in themselves.” The second point picked up was that to “continue Olson’s work, as distinct from merely reproducing it, we must set aside the tendency, in reading Olson, to become ourselves ‘Olsonian.’”

The former point became a topic after Gerritt Lansing discussed it a bit; Ed Sanders, seated in the front and off to the side, also picked up this point. While I can’t remember the exact line of thinking in this conversation, there was some disagreement as to Olson’s relationship to the literary; the crux of the conversation seemed to revolve around the question of what one means by “literary.” I wish I made note of how this conversation intersected with Friedlander’s remark, but alas!

The latter of the two topics—to not become “Olsonian”—I don’t recall as sustaining much conversation in the larger group, but during the break, and also after, there was some expression of, say, surprise at this assertion. There was no irony—though at a glance it may have seemed so—to make such a statement; rather, it was indeed “the most important point of all” because with it Friedlander asserted that we must continue Olson’s work—no small assertion given the venue and its purpose.

(I am quickly now reminded in writing up this brief report, as I was at the time, of the closing lines of “Maximus, to himself” early in Book I:

It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet

Or from “December 22nd” much later in Book III:

. . . the rocks
melting
into the sea, the forests,
behind, transparent
from the light snow showing
lost rocks and hills
which one doesn’t, ordinarily,
know, all the sea
calm and waiting, having
come so far

—yet there was not much calm to the event per se. The general discussion, which constituted the first part of the afternoon event, consisted of several individual insights and statements. Concerns were aired. Reference was made, for instance more than once, to all the material in archive at University of Connecticut-Storrs and the need to study it, consider it—publish it. Along these lines, at one point Charles Bernstein, seated toward the very back, offered an invitation to anyone willing to edit sound files of Olson for PENN Sound.

After all the lively talking, a break was given.* Some of us ran off for coffee to return just in time for the second half of the afternoon that provided opportunity to view the nearly complete documentary Polis Is This by Henry Ferrini and [I can’t remember the other guy’s name . . . ]. It was wonderful to see the clips of Olson thumbing and walking his way through Gloucester; the film is well done, and certainly a labor of love, as was clear in the talk with the makers of it that followed the viewing.

Ed Sanders led the afternoon to some sense of closure with a performance. He did a piece based on fragments of, I believe, The Maximus Poems that he finds himself often returning to; it was an apt if not beautiful conclusion.

In the closing minutes of the afternoon, Gerritt Lansing announced the tour he would be giving of Gloucester the following day. We—Sarah and I—were sad to not be able to make it but were happy to have made it to the hall for the meeting that pointed out all that is indeed left to be done!

John Hyland
2 June 2006
Newburyport, MA

*Note: Much of the conversation I sadly do not remember the specifics of! Many good points were made by: Ammiel Alcalay, Don Byrd, Ben Friedlander, Charles Bernstein, and others. I do not trust myself to relay much of it for fear of mis-reproducing it. But maybe others can fill in all the holes that this short account describes? A more collaborative-type report seems the thing to do, at any rate.

RON SILLIMAN ON PROPRIOCEPTION

2006-06-05T13:16:00.000-04:00

Ron Silliman continues his discussion of Olson:

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

RON SILLIMAN ON PROJECTIVE VERSE

2006-06-02T01:28:00.000-04:00

Ron Silliman has devoted several blog entries this week to discussion of Olson's manifesto:

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

JOHN HYLAND/RESPONSE AND A FEW QUESTIONS

2006-06-01T09:23:00.000-04:00

Dear Ammiel Alcalay and Michael Kelleher,

Happily, I was able to attend the Olson Now event at MIT a couple weeks back. It certainly proposed what is possible. To briefly introduce myself: I studied in the English Dept. at the University of Maine for a few years. I now live and teach in the so-called Boston-area and will begin graduate work in Cultural Production at Brandeis in the fall.

As others have already noted, I found Ben Friedlander’s opening remarks very useful, quite insightful, and I’ve been mulling over my scant notes since 20 May. Thank you (and Ben) for posting them!

What I didn’t ask then, but wish to now, is: What is the relationship of the body—the physical, sensed presence of the self—to both language and knowledge in Olson? And, furthermore, how did Olson’s understanding of—his “stance toward”?—language and knowledge shape and influence his methodology?

In his opening remarks, Ben observed that for Olson “[k]knowledge . . . is located (in language, in history, on the earth) . . .” So, at the risk of repeating myself: What I am wondering is how to talk about/examine/understand the relationship between, on the one hand, the body, knowledge, and language in Olson, and on the other, his practice, a practice that, as Ben pointed out, “abandoned the book as ultimate horizon and worked instead to produce an archive.”

I’m not sure this makes sense, but that’s as clear as I can put my concerns right now. I suppose it might be possible to speak of this situation in terms of form and content; however, such a binary seems limiting and somehow, perhaps, in opposition to the notion of the archive and also collaboration.

I hope to be at more events like the one on 20 May!

Kindest of Regards,
John Hyland

Newburyport, MA

KEVIN MARZAHL/RESPONSE: ON SPECIALIZATION

2006-05-30T11:03:00.000-04:00

I would first of all like to thank the OlsonNow organizers for extending the event into the web, as the coast is not easily accessible to everyone. Since the floor is open, I would like to follow up on Benjamin Friedlander's welcoming and witty remarks with a few questions (not rhetorical) and observations.

I think it was Don Byrd who wrote that for those who embark on a study of Maximus it is easy to feel that one is falling under the influence of a "cult leader." I gather that this is more or less identical to the concern about charismatic authoritanianism expressed above (also: has Olson's "whiteness" been examined carefully? in a later interview he speaks of "my palearctic people"..., etc.), and I wonder if it doesn't point to a dilemma implicit in the outlined categories. Can one follow Olson's example (collaborative archiving, etc.) while also navigating one's way through Olson's own archive? Does one need to re-read Olson's library in order to read Olson in order to follow his example? Doesn't each of these projects demand more time in its own right than any one of "us" has? But why split the work of "poets" from the work of "scholars" given Olson's own example?

My own tentative answer would be that for the (w)holistically or transdisciplinary minded (I count myself among them), specialization seems anathema, and I think that Olson's "curriculum for the soul" has much to recommend it. But Olson recommended studying cybernetics, which allows us to see the necessity (for a modern society, at any rate) of what a systems-theoretical sociology calls "functional differentiation." Perhaps one only sees the big picture by focusing on the smallest detail--the human cell, for instance, which furnishes the model (or figure, if you prefer) of autopoiesis which Luhmann adapts from Varela (Olson, according to the Last Lectures, also looked closely at the processes of "evagination" and "mytosis" [sic]).

Let me put this another way: what does it mean to specialize--as either poet or scholar--in a syncretic, holistic cosmology?

For what it's worth, my own sense of Olson for some time has been that he was the Derrida that America never produced--an astute critic of logocentrism (so much "trash of discourse") who didn't extend that critique to phallogocentrism. I'm less certain of that now (as witness the above reference to "evagination" --something more and other than postwar male avantgarde annexing); in any case, I remain open to other arguments and it doesn't mean that I value Olson any less. His distinction in "Projective Verse" between the "pressures of the breath" and the "acquisitions of the ear" bears for me an uncanny resemblance to Bakhtin's theory of the clash of inner and outer speech, for instance, and there seems to me an at least proto-ecological ethos legible in Maximus Volume III (the most interesting part of that project, to my mind).

Thanks again to all who make this project possible. I look forward to future events.

Kevin Marzahl
Bloomington, IN
30 May 2006

BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER/CHARLES OLSON NOW

2006-05-27T10:08:00.000-04:00

In 1965, at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, Charles Olson told the crowd assembled for his reading that he felt as though he were addressing a convention. He hugged the lectern and spoke without notes beyond the endurance of most members of his audience like a nineteenth-century politician. This was not an unprovoked stance. On the first day of the conference Jack Spicer had lumped Olson together with Lyndon Johnson and JFK. Pressed later to clarify what he meant, Spicer—with an understandable mixture of hostility and respect—called Olson a “power figure,” someone occupying “the same position in poetry as Johnson…in politics.” Then again, perhaps Spicer’s comment was also provoked. Who knows what stories he heard from Olson’s students, many of whom made the trip to Berkeley by car. Fred Wah, for example, recalls Olson pounding on a table in Buffalo during a heated argument about Vietnam, shouting, “What we have to do now, is nuke the chinks!” Since Olson left the U.S. government in part over the issue of Asia—he was shocked by Hiroshima and foresaw the eastern designs of postwar foreign policy—it seems quite likely that he was acting out a role. He was amongst other things an incredible mimic of political rhetoric, witness his hilarious send-up of presidential press conferences in “Rufus Woodpecker,” written during the Eisenhower administration.

Be all that as it may, if Olson puts us—by bullying gesture or imagination—in the offices of power, I am more than happy to play my own role as a minor functionary. Here, then, in the spirit of the modern presidency, are a series of talking points arranged into four categories: Olson’s legacy, his present use for poets, what the scholars should be doing, and what needs to be set aside if we are going to accomplish anything at all:

1. OLSON’S LEGACY

If we look beyond his specific interests and stylistic habits, if we overlook his missteps and limitations, to see what is unique and still unappreciated about Olson’s practice, we find:

A. That Olson was not literary in orientation; that is, he was not interested in making finished, free-standing works of art, objects to be appreciated or consumed as ends in themselves. He was, instead, engaged in writing as an activity subservient to the production of knowledge;

B. That Olson’s ultimate subject was experience, which led him to attend as closely as possible to his own experience as a writer. Language, for Olson, was not a tool for acquiring knowledge, but one of the sites where knowledge is acquired. Knowledge, then, is located (in language, in history, on the earth), and methodological rigor requires that one attend to this location;

C. That Olson’s ideas were not static, but always in flux, as befits a practice grounded in writing as activity; and

D. That Olson produced texts as a way of sharing his findings and participating in a community of writers and researchers, but that the larger shape of his practice is only discernible in his total output, which is not a matter of books alone. In his final years, Olson abandoned the book as ultimate horizon and worked instead to produce an archive. Poems and essays, yes, but also notes, notebooks, correspondence, marginalia in books, the books themselves, files of articles, maps, and recordings of readings, lectures, and interviews.

2. OLSON’S PRESENT USE FOR POETS

In addressing Olson’s present use as a model for writers, I want to focus on the last point just made, that Olson abandoned the book as ultimate horizon and worked instead to produce an archive. This has long been described as a matter of dissipation or letting go, but in the age of the internet—of the automatically archived blog, with its comment streams and embedded links to listserv discussions, sound and video files, and online texts and websites—we are, perhaps, better situated to appreciate this turn in Olson’s practice as an achievement. One of the characteristics of an archive is that it exists beyond the control of any one person. An author can control the production of a book, as Olson himself did early on in his career, but archives are essentially collaborative. Letters are sent out into the world and the disposition of papers is entrusted to posterity. What might happen to our sense of poetry, then, if we came to think of books as but one term in a larger field of production and of writing as an activity that is essentially collaborative?

3. WHAT THE SCHOLARS SHOULD BE DOING

A. The scholars should be reading the archive! There is an enormous amount of unpublished writing, of uncollected correspondence, and of unexamined source texts that Olson himself accumulated. This all needs to be assimilated, not only because of its inherent interest, but because it is only by taking the measure of this material that we can recover a description of Olson’s practice, which is only partially discernible from his discrete works.

B. The scholars must revise their understanding of key concepts and find new ways to articulate key aspects of Olson’s production so as to avoid misrepresenting these concepts and aspects as static terms of analysis. “Projective Verse,” for example, may be an essential essay in the history of poetry, but the concept of Projective Verse undergoes sustained rethinking and should not be equated with the essay alone. The distinction between Maximus and non-Maximus poems, or between poems and essays, likewise undergoes rethinking. Working through this rethinking in detail, one might well conclude that “Maximus” loses all force as an organizing principle, and that the frame of the Maximus poems should be set aside altogether.

C. The scholars should take Olson, as he took himself, as an object lesson, and examine his ideas, assumptions, and experience with a critical eye. He is not, God help us, a hero to be defended against all combatants.

This brings me to the last category:

4. WHAT NEEDS TO BE SET ASIDE
IF WE ARE GOING TO ACCOMPLISH
ANYTHING OF VALUE

This is, perhaps, the most important point of all. To continue Olson’s work, as distinct from merely reproducing it, we must set aside the tendency, in reading Olson, to become ourselves “Olsonian.” Mimicking his stylistic habits or taking up his particular interests or attitudes or concepts is not the best of even a proper sign of homage. Whatever we take from him must be examined carefully and reconsidered, made fit to serve our own location, historically, on earth, and in language. Meeting as we are now, democratically, to discuss our reading and share our ideas without a predetermined agenda and without submitting to a single dominating voice, is already a hopeful sign that Olson after Olson need not be merely Olson. “This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what.”

I yield the floor.

Benjamin Friedlander
Cambridge, MA
20 May 2006

PETER ROMANOW/ON OLSONNOW AT MIT

2006-05-26T11:20:00.000-04:00

Hi

I loved the discussions on Sat. I just want to say that my slant on Maximus takes off from Olson's calling Americans, "The last first people." And my effort to get a handle on the motive behind the poem was forwarded considerably by coming across one of the first Greek poet's work (I forget who now), whose hexameters worked toward writing a foundation myth for his polis, using geography, sociology, theo-mytholoy, employments, politics to establish his place intellectually within the world. It was my AH HA moment with Maximus. I think Olson wanted really to set down an American footprint on the continent using what he knew best, Gloucester, and the men he thought most capable (most of use), the fishermen of that town and using Poundian disjunctive image-making as the stylistic entry and point of departure for his archival expostulation.

Do it again, sometime, at MIT. It was informative and fun.

OlsonNow at MIT

2006-05-04T11:53:00.000-04:00

Poetry at M.I.T. Presents: OlsonNow

Saturday, May 20, 1-6 p.m.

50 Vassar St., Building 34-101, Cambridge, MA

Featuring a screening of Polis is This, by Henry Ferrini and presentations by Peter Anastas, James Cook, Bill Corbett, Henry Ferrini, Michael Franco, Ben Friedlander, Fanny Howe, Gerrit Lansing, Chris Mattison, Maureen McLane, Joseph Torra. Others planning to participate include Ed Sanders, Ammiel Alcalay, Charles Bernstein, Robert Kelly, and more.

Sunday, May 21, 10 a.m.

Maximus Tour of Gloucester with the Charles Olson Society

More info to come as it arrives.

New on the Documents Page

2006-03-30T13:23:00.000-05:00

There's an essay by Stephen Farrell -- "Call Me Ipsissimus: Charles Olson in Jonathan Bayliss's Gloucesterbook" available for download on the OlsonNow Documents Page. Check it out.

OlsonNow in ABR

2006-03-17T14:57:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of American Book Review has a report on the December OlsonNow event by Michael Joyce. You can subscribe on their website. Also, there will be another OlsonNow event at MIT in Boston on May 20, hosted by Bill Corbett and Gerrit Lansing. Details soon....

IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE IN NYC NEXT WEEK....

2006-01-25T15:13:00.000-05:00

Michael Kelleher and Kim Rosenfeld
Reading
Wednesday, February 1, 2006, 8 p.m.
$8; $7 students; $5 members

The Poetry Project
St. Mark’s Church
131 East 10th St. (at 2nd Ave.)
Manhattan

JONATHAN SKINNER/CHARLES OLSON AND THE QUESTION OF BOUNDARIES: THE "POET-SCHOLAR"

2006-01-22T21:28:00.000-05:00

Murat's reference to "scholars or academicians interested in research projects generated by Olson," at last month's highly stimulating Olson Now Symposium at St. Mark's Poetry Project, sent me back to the unconsidered sense in which I felt the terms "poet" and "academic" were being used during the symposium, in relation to Olson. (Including, as one attendee suggested at the end of the discussion, a call to "get Olson out of the curriculum.") Yes, clearly Olson is not academic--yet what does that mean nowadays? Olson nearly completed a Ph.D., directed a "school" for poetry, and constantly advocated boundary work, pioneering and inhabiting fields available neither in academia nor in the poetry scene.

One might even argue that, with Duncan and Zukofsky (and the help of an "academic" like Donald Allen), Olson secured that "other" field--opened by the likes of Pound, Williams and Stein, amongst others--out of which poet-scholar movements such as "language" writing would later emerge.

To be a scholar poet, or even just a scholar of poetry, as Susan Howe put it so eloquently, demands all the resources of poetry, plus something. Many poets nowadays take academic jobs, not just to put bread on the table, but to cultivate such resources, and perhaps to shift the boundaries between critical and creative work. A research project generated by Olson could be the beginning of a poetic work--probably should be, if it be true to its origins.

I think some of us who ended up at SUNY Buffalo to do scholarship rightly blame (or thank) Olson for our inability to be content with the MFA or the poetry scene more generally, which certainly sustains us in other ways. Or some scholar poets probably blame Olson for drawing them out of academia--where they found him making Hesiod new in exciting, "ungrammatical" ways, etc.

The fact that, as it seems to me, Call Me Ishmael gets more recognition than The Maximus Poems, testifies to this ambiguity, and to the boundary-crossing nature of any widespread interest in Olson. Olson *was* a scholar--and he could have been an academic; certainly, many poets find him "too intellectual"--he just wanted his prose to jump into poetry. And he wanted poetry to engage prose. The feat is rare.

And, yes, as Howe also noted, poetry scholarship is nearly impossible within the academy. (Too often the academic work of poets with academic jobs is just "bread-and-butter" work, not of a piece with their work as poets--a situation Olson rightly found intolerable.) But it's also difficult in a poetry scene often ready to dismiss learned reference as "academic."

What does it take to be a "whole" poet--or, to borrow the motto of Sulfur Magazine, a poet of the "whole art," a scholar poet? Though far from taking the only viable approach, many poets nowadays choose to negotiate this position with one foot in poetry and one in academia. It's less than ideal, but so is the view from either side of what is, after all, a shifting boundary. More than ever it's important to be deliberate about how we define or enact this limit.

Of course, the fact that Olson waged unrelenting war on the logocentric underpinnings of Western academic discourse might have something to do with his intractability in the academy! A lot more than just jumping from prose into poetry kept (and keeps) Olson out. But he knew his enemy. How much interest is there in that kind of deep-ranging knowledge amongst today's poets? A thinker first credited with using the term "postmodern" would be both intrigued by and aghast at the highly specialized practices that work under that rubric nowadays.

I don't think we can get very far if we try to separate out the poet from the scholar in Olson, or divide up Olson's reception into "academic" and "poetic" interests. Olson asked more of the poet, and more of the intellectual, in a way that drawing quick boundaries between "academic" and "poetic" just won't help us to understand, let alone do the real work of the limits "any of us are inside of."

JS

H_NGM_N: CHARLES OLSON AND THE CONCEPT OF ONTIC IMMEDIACY

2005-12-15T09:34:00.000-05:00

Hi!

the new issue of H_NGM_N is up at http://www.h-ngm-n.com & it features a long essay on Charles Olson & the concept of ontic immediacy focused through Heidegger. Check it out & please consider alerting your readers.

All best--

Nate Pritts, EIC.
H_NGM_N, Intergalactic.

MURAT NEMET-NEJAT/RESPONSE TO SATURDAY'S EVENT

2005-12-09T08:03:00.000-05:00

The Olson event last Saturday was very successful, considering how many people, including myself, were chomping at the bit to add comments, ask questions, etc.

It seems to me the points of views around comments in subtle ways were divided into two or three kinds: those by scholars or academicians interested in research projects generated by Olson. A smaller number of us had thoughts about him as poets, how as a poet Olson had affected us. Susan Howe started that line of discussion by pointing to Call Me Ishmael's importance to her. Since Call Me Ishmael had a crucial impact on me as a poet, critic and translator also, I joined in the argument, saying that Ishmael led me also to Melville's Journals of Istanbul (Constantinople) and also presented a new way of writing about another writer who was important to one's work.

Susan and I continued our conversation outside during the break, arguing how the "ungrammatical" awakwardness of Olson's prose represented a juncture in American writing where prose jumped into poetry -in our views (if I am not misrepresenting Susan's views) Olson's prose -as writing- was at least as important as his poetry.

JONATHAN SKINNER/RESPONSE TO CHARLES STEIN

2005-12-08T18:53:00.000-05:00

Indeed, to look at Olson's writing practice in relation to his practice as a walker, as well as to look at the support of his writings (on, say, scraps of paper, but also blank checks, paper menus, etc.), which is to look at the environment of Olson's writings, certainly constitutes inquiry into methodology, and may constitute inquiry into what Chuck Stein calls Olson's praxis (although I'm not sure of how he's using that term).

For a gull's view of Dogtown Commons:

http://maps.google.com/

Type in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and click the Satellite button. Then zoom (click the plus end of the navigator) and go. You can pan the view by clicking and dragging the image. Zooms up pretty close, to where you can even see foot trails.

But is not Maximus Poems constructed *against* what Olson call's the "gull's eye" view? And more in line with the low-flying "cormorant's eye" view? Or at least sets up an argument between these two. The difference between the colonizers of space and the poet whom SPACE has colonized. Which gets richer when we remember that Hawthorne referred to himself (thanks once again to Susan Howe for telling us) as a "library cormorant."

Finally, the project of Olson's fragments came to my mind just a day or two ago, as well. A great model for this, in every sense (hermeneutically, methodologically, technically), has to be Marta Werner's work with Emily Dickinson, both in her book Dickinson's Open Folios and in her web archive, Radical Scatter.

I'd say a web archive of Olson fragment facsimiles would be more useful (and less expensive to produce) than a book--perhaps without the restrictions on access that the Institutions seem lamentably to have exerted over Werner's magnificent project.

I got the idea--and this is something that unites Chuck's geographical interests with his interests in the "logographic entities"--watching the rest of the Olson outtakes video and getting mesmerized by the "map" of Dogtown pinned to the wall behind Olson, made entirely of scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them, a logogeographic entity, if there ever was one. (Olson discusses this map during the interview and the film-maker even zooms in and pans so we can read some of the fragments.) I wonder how long this stayed on Olson's wall, and if some record of it was retained, beyond the film.

I would happily be a part of the project of getting Olson's fragments scanned into facsimile form.

The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum, by the way, is a great book!

CHARLES STEIN/THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MORNING PROPOSAL 2

2005-12-08T15:05:00.000-05:00

So. I think to go through the Maximus Poems, Collected Poems, Colleted Prose, plus Special View. With an eye to methodology.

What principles of praxis are articulable? How sharp are the instances? Example: Polis is Eyes--what does "limits are what any of us are inside of" mean up against "pushing the limits?" And the chocolate bar and the fisherman not looking in the sunblaze?

I' ll begin, I think with a list I made in my Olson/Jung book, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum some twenty-five years ago, of the ways in which Olson's compositional practice was "concretistic"--but one could replace this term with the word "actual" if one wished, shifting from the Jungian to the Whiteheadian vocabulary. But the point anyway would be not to emphasize the Aesthetic, in the sense of opinions about how to make poems, but rather praxis in general, how to make a culture of the concrete, of the actual, in the face of what we might want to insist IS the praxis now in place--the practice of the statistical, the universal, the application of predetermined standards, the mechanistic technology of knowing beforehand in detail the result--short-circuiting the process of desire…

Suggestion for someone with a lowflying plane or better helicopter :

Do we have a photograph of Dogtown from the air, on which one could pinpoint, say the site of Merry's demise and Gravelly Hill, to mention the two that Olson mentioned in the old film )not H. Ferrini's) we saw on Dec. 3? But really all the points in the poem? And then one from higher up, locating Dogtown precisely on Cape Ann?

Other projects. I will be driving to Storrs with Ammiel probably in January to do a final check on the new text of The Special View of History. And I want to grab or begin at least to find among the nicely catalogued folders, the literally hundreds of intensely scribbled over sheets of paper in Olson's hand, and somehow produce a facsimile book of say 100 of them. Before the papers were put in folders, summer of 1971 and 1972, Butterick and I went through boxes and boxes of the papers before they were catalogued, looking for letters from noteworthy folks. But I lingered for many hours over these intensely scribbled objects and I swear it was a deep initiation into Olson's neurology, say, and that today, after the archive has been mined for more orderly and acceptable typographic objects, it is time for us all to have a look at these crazy looking and magically charged logographic entities.

DAVID ALWORTH/RESPONSE TO MICHAEL

2005-12-08T08:28:00.000-05:00

The lively, town-hall style conversation that Michael eloquently recounts from memory began with a question from a Melville scholar, a more specific version of the general inquiry posed by the event: Where is Olson now in the Academy? Because I did not say this on Saturday, I would like to suggest, echoing Jonathan Skinner’s remarks, that Olson is alive in the Academy, at least for me. My name is David Alworth and I am an undergraduate at New York University, writing my senior honors thesis on Olson or, more particularly, the massive Olson-Creeley correspondence.

I came to Olson by way of Creeley, who provided me with an instigation, a roadmap, a “way in,” as Olson would say, to the massive undertakings of this writer, this scholar (historian), this Archeologist of Morning. If space is a first fact, then the structures of circumscription, the frames in which we operate, are of central importance to Olson; “limits,” says Maximus, “are what any of us / are inside of.”

My Charles Olson is a revolutionary, but not the kind who obliterates boundaries. He is instead one who considers the limits in which any of us exist—as if/because they pre-exist us—to reconfigure the spaces they create, an internal revolutionary, churning the gears of reform and re-conceiving the cartography of human experience as framed, but not limited; the Olson map may have boundaries and limits, but it also has richly embroidered textures, topographical force-fields. If the poem is limited by the physical features of the sheet of paper, then let us work with that, so the page becomes a score, a force field, a flux, an isomorphic instantiation of the universe as routed through the poet’s body. The Creeley Correspondence becomes/is a space; though limited by the vagaries of the posts and circumscribed by the duties of daily life, it remains a place of free-play, of wildly excited and raw articulations, of need and urgency, of companionship, of anger and joy and sadness, of vision and revision, of “FIRST FACTS,” as if, and perhaps because, limits are counterintuitively freeing. The message of Olson is that if limits—and by extension, space—is what we are inside of, then our task is to conceive of space differently: as a force field, a field of action, to make that space “of use,” whatever and wherever it is.

On December 3, 2005 at the Poetry Project—a space that has been, for me, just such a force field of intellectual and creative exchange that offers an alternative to the institutionalization and bureaucratization of NYU—I attended OlsonNow and could not help but feel like this was an instantiation of what Olson had in mind, growing from Williams, with his particular conception of the local, of using one’s space in a radical, energizing way. Michael points to one of the most touching moments of the day when he writes of the waitress’s recitation of Dickinson; although it was dark and the notes I was taking during the film are illegibly sprawled across my notebook pages, I recall an error in the Dickinson poem. She said, “I’m nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—Too? / Then there’s a pair of us! / Don’t tell! they’d banish us—you know!” Banish us. Not Dickinson’s line, but perhaps more compelling for our discussion of Charles Olson, who never fit in the normative moulds offered him, whose intellectual, creative and physiological space was perhaps too richly embroidered for traditional institutionalization. And whose project—the very kernel of it—was reflected Saturday in a radical, freeing, energized and jam-packed space.

CHARLES STEIN/THE WORK OF MORNING

2005-12-07T15:08:00.001-05:00

If Methodology is the work of Morning
and it is Still Morning,
and Olson's archaeological spade work
opens the earth to find in archaic traces
the source of apposite methods--

can we tease out of Olson's texts
a rich enough package of such methods
to enable the declaration
THAT IT IS (in spite of everything) STILL MORNING?

The Beginning of the Rest of Time

Can a methodology be discriminated from Olson's remarks + extrapolations, say, that would resituate ourselves at the beginning of the rest of time rather than--in the
senescence of what is already vanished or vanishing or in the maturity of the Vast Machine--taking these
question as the research for resistance?

Can we point to where the Work of Morning has been sufficiently articulated, in Olson or his expositors, or the community of texts that gather about him--his references, but also those, say of Jack Clarke--or any one--without it becoming too prolix a bibliography-?

But not only texts

Instances
Activities
Actions

Can we articulate principles that Hold Ground?

Disciplines called such in his name?

And that this resistance would not be limited to the happy instances of nomadic impermanence, say, but primarily to the sustenance of Possibility--and therefore images AS actions, not image VERSUS actions

MICHAEL KELLEHER/OLSONNOW AT THE POETRY PROJECT

2005-12-05T23:28:00.000-05:00

OlsonNow at the Poetry Project was one of the most gratifying and exciting events I’ve helped put together in quite some time. Kudos to my compadres, Ammiel Alcalay and Fred Dewey. We would love to post any highlights or memories people have of the event, as well as suggestions for future events. (The place was abuzz yesterday with talk of potential happenings in Philly, Gloucester, Asheville, NC, and Buffalo). Please email them to us at olsonnow (at sign here) gmail address (dot com).

Here are the facts as I recall them:

We got going at about 1:30 and finished at 6 p.m.. Throughout the day about 150 people came. According to headcounter Douglas Rothschild – who announced this to the entire room about midway through the conversation – 33.33 percent were women, 66.666 percent men.

After I introduced Olson and the OlsonNow project, Ammiel called for those working on projects, papers, etc. on Olson to announce them to the crowd. Jonathan Skinner, Fred Dewey, Kristin Prevallet, Lee Ann Brown, Michael Hoerman, Peter Anastas and Schuyler Hoffman of the Charles Olson Society in Gloucester, Henry Ferrini and others (please forgive any omissions as I didn’t take any notes and am writing this all down from memory after the fact) all spoke up about projects they were working on. This was interspersed with messages and greetings that Ammiel read from people who could not attend, including Albert Glover, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Robert Kelly, Basil and Martha King, and John Sinclair.

We watched a clip from the Charles Olson “Outtakes” video from March 12, 1966 of Olson sitting in his Gloucester kitchen giving a growling shamanistic reading of “Maximus from Dogtown 1.” Ed Sanders followed with a musical rendition of the same poem played on a two-string dulcimer.

At that point we opened up the forum to the question: Where is Olson Now?

Apparently, that was all we needed to do, because the conversation lasted until about 3:45 and could have gone on for hours. We heard spontaneous comments from Jonathan Skinner, Susan Howe, Pierre Joris, Don Byrd, Laura Elrick, Charles Stein, a Melville Scholar whose name I can’t recall, and others. Jack Hirschman read an “Arcane” about Olson as well as a reminiscence of the man. Anne Waldman gave a fiery reading of “Feminafesto,” addressing the feminine in Olson, as well as of a cento written of lines from Olson. Conversation ranged widely: Olson in the classroom, Olson and the feminine, Olson and Melville, Olson and walking, Olson and Place, et al.

Following a quick break, we were treated to the premier of Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, a nearly completed film by Henry Ferrini. Henry received a standing ovation afterward and answered a few questions. David Amram closed the show with a stunning jazz recorder improvisation of “Amazing Grace.”

***

Many highlights -- Ed Sanders’ beautiful voice, Anne Waldman’s dynamic thought-presence, Susan Howe’s precise and heartfelt articulations, Jack Hirschman’s moving recollections – but for me the most poignant moment of the day came during a scene in Henry’s film.

A waitress at a Gloucester diner recalls that Olson often had to sign for his lunch and then pay later when he had some money. He always apologized for not tipping, she says, always paid up when he had the money, and always over-tipped in the process. She describes Olson as a man that never put on any airs or made her feel inferior. Then she goes on to say their interactions reminded her of the poem by Emily Dickinson that begins, “I’m Nobody! Who Are you?” After a brief pause, in which she seems to be trying to recall the next line, she slowly, haltingly, but with growing confidence, recites the entire poem from memory:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog.

It just gave me chills. It is so rare in American life to witness poetry (actual poetry, not poetic analogues, but the actual words of an actual poem) affecting an everyday life in an atmosphere that has not been produced for the occasion. In other words, outside the academy, outside the classroom, outside the literary organizations, outside the poetry scene – just a person receiving the poem, its energy intact, and passing it on to the next person listening.

NOTE FROM ROBERT KELLY TO OLSONNOW AT THE POETRY PROJECT

2005-12-05T23:25:00.000-05:00

(on Olson, for 3 December 2005)

When you walked through the door into his house, he wanted to know who and what you were. Who means where you came from.

Our first fight was when I refused to discuss my family background – huge, urban, undistinguished – preferring only to offer the me I supposed myself to have made up by myself. I was a spiritual Darwinian at him, I grew from what I supposed.

He wanted to know who: the family, the grace of such society as made you.

He wanted, more, to know what you are. And what, for him, it seems to me now, meant: what do you know. And what can you say of what you know. And where did you get it.

Telling an idea or a fact (God help me) to Olson was like selling some heirloom to an honest jeweler – you had to prove where it came from, where you got it.

Provenience is all, said that King Lear.

And it is just this calling us back to personal history, our own investigations, historein, into our own lives’ circumstance, that speaks so urgently now. To pull us from the theory of theory into the theory of seeing with our own eyes, as our beloved Herodotus both saw and heard men do, see and remember, see and recount – as we must do in the day of personal narrative triumphant, the endless television feigned presences of desire and despair which are talked, that tell-tale word, talked at us before the cameras. Because this is just the wrong way human testimony should work, I’m sensing Olson would have judged, it, the self-disclosure of nothing but the self, which he already detested in the confessional poets of his day, and now would have to endure every day on tv, stripped even of the merciful veil of verse.

That was the Olson Paradox: he was interested only in such knowledge of the world as a man could or did learn through his own efforts of search, research, sustained awareness – yet he was not interested in that man himself. The lyric ego he contemned vividly, the ego with which and for which most poets of modern times have worked. That left him contemptuous of most poetry – and to hear him pronounce some poem ‘literature’ was a chilling thing. So man’s self was to make its way through the world as an objective, a lens. Judgment, not description seemed the rule. This is Jeremiah stuff, not Keats, this is changing the world one shout at a time. He was fond of calling his young poets (Ed Sanders, Ed Dorn, LeRoi Jones, and he was kind enough to put me in that company) his ‘politicians’ -- who were to go out and bring about the Last Judgment of society through the clean adversities of languages. And to this day I do believe the asperities.

Olson was such a forecaster to our times, and a guide in it. He proposed a project for writing that was beyond the amenity of the pleased reader. Like any good experimentalist, he hated the reader – keeping his true love for ‘you, whoever you are’ secret, as Whitman did, naming it only the Republic. For the good of the commonwealth, the reader was to be exposed to the registration of a cognitive experiment – and by that alone would be guided through an ever-widening dance of the mute, alert, perceiving, self-perceiving self (proprioception) with the graspable world (the koinonia, history) – in a way Charles had laid it all out long ago at Black Mountain, in the lucid arrogance of the great undanceable dance play Apollonius of Tyana. To whose own arcane researches Olson made his way in the last throes of Maximus.

I wish I could be at St Marx today to say this.

RAMSEY SCOTT/OLSON'S MILK CARTON

2005-11-30T21:35:00.000-05:00

I like milk and when I was a child I drank it frequently, let’s say five to seven times a day, not one of those little cartons that they gave you at school, a so-called half-pint, but large glasses, twelve, fifteen ounces, I downed it in one shot, I remember I thought I had speed, real milk-drinking speed, but then this kid came to school, Mike from Alaska, and he was the fastest milk-drinker anyone had ever seen, he could take down a so-called half-pint in less than two seconds, somebody had a stopwatch and we timed him.

Well, I’d like to know something about this recollection, let’s say I’m intrigued by milk itself, milk history, or that name, Mike, how he got to my school from Alaska. I think his father worked the pipeline and then those jobs dried up and they came down seeking some last logging job until that dried up too, all the forests cut except the one or two somebody decided might make for decent hunting and fishing now and again, probably the same logging execs grown fat off all the other forests they carved up.

I’m trying to localize myself here, not because I think you ought to know anything about Sams Valley, Oregon, it’s not on most maps, there’s no post office, no center of town, I wouldn’t even recommend visiting, there’s no water, the crops go dry, you see people buying five hundred gallon tanks and filling them up in some other town from spring to fall, trucking water to manufactured homes set down in the middle of half-dead alfalfa and dirt and star thistle, a nasty imported Australian weed that thrives in Sams Valley, so don’t bother remembering Sams Valley but watch out for star thistle, you can’t pull it up without gloves on and if you want to get rid of it you must burn the plant, roots, seeds and all, every one of them.

And that’s what people in Sams Valley do if they still want to grow something other than star thistle. What I understand of this town that’s not a town, though if you go there and ask a local where they live they’ll say Sams Valley, at any rate, what I want to make of this non-town I think I get from Olson.

The non-town called Sams Valley’s what history is, history as Olson does it, it’s where somebody starts mapping, and what Olson says is go map it, whatever you can do to lay hold of that earth, not like a landowner or colonialist or motherfucking real estate agent (in fact, you’re lucky if one of these types isn’t already pointing a shotgun or shaking a document at you telling you to buzz the fuck off), go dig your star thistle and burn your seeds, try to dig up those transcontinental weeds until you’ve figured out how the hell your field became star thistle and your manufactured home got plunked down amidst alfalfa and dirt fields.

Good luck.

DOCUMENTS PAGE

2005-11-29T12:16:00.000-05:00

Don't forget to visit the documents page (see link to the right). There are essays, papers, poems and talks by:

Ammiel Alcalay, Don Byrd, Clayton Eshleman, Alan Gilbert, Pierre Joris, Jonathan Skinner, Douglas Spangle and Andre Spears.

THE BIG EVENT

2005-11-29T12:10:00.000-05:00

When:

Saturday, December 3, 1:00 p.m.

What:

Discussion and performances 1-3:30.
Screening at 4, followed by a reception.

Where:

The Poetry Project
St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St., NYC

Who, where, and what is Charles Olson now? Come as you are for an
open forum on Olson organized by Ammiel Alcalay and Mike Kelleher,
and co-sponsored by Beyond Baroque. See the New York premiere of
Henry Ferrini's _Poet and the City: Charles Olson and the Persistence
of Place_; listen to David Amram, Jack Hirschman, Ed Sanders, and
Anne Waldman perform Olson.

A NOTE FROM AMMIEL

2005-11-26T10:05:00.000-05:00

IF YOU’RE PLANNING TO COME TO THE OLSONNOW EVENT:

A few suggestions: if you are working on any Olson related projects, please let us know so that you can say something about it at the event.

Also, if you would like to open a discussion with a quotation from Olson, please bring it.

NEW DOCUMENTS

I am posting two essays on the documents page from my forthcoming book A little history, due out from Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles in Spring 06. Most of the book is centered on Olson or somehow related to concerns emerging from his work or my relationship to it. The first essay, “Republics of Poetry,” serves as the introduction to the book; the second “What to whom” is an exercise in investigation, looking at a selection of commentary by women poets on Olson. Please note that all the references are not included in these versions.

Ammiel Alcalay

DAVID MELTZER/WHERE IS OLSON NOW?

2005-11-22T09:03:00.000-05:00

For me, initially, it was Call Me Ishmael. The uniqueness of that text, a poet's book, a reverie on a writer I hadn't read since I was a kid. That started me off on Meltzer's Melville mania, read everything of Herman's in record time plus Leyda's great Melville Log in early '60s. Wd talk a lot about Melville w/ McClure in those days. Olson was also very present in both our creative intellective households -- those Jargon Maximus fasicles, Projective Verse (which reminded me of WCW's ongoing attempt to nail down 'variable foot' -- similar to Ornette trying to explain Harmolodics [sp?]) -- Mayan Hieroglyphs, another unique text of a poet-scholar -- always felt like a suckerfish swimming under Moby's belly -- in my world then there were two immense poet-thinkers: Olson & Robert Duncan. Both men were peers from Black Mountain days & I can only imagine the kinds of conversations they had.

Ironically, I'm still teaching in the graduate Poetics Program of New College of California, whose first five years were blessed by Robert Duncan & Diane di Prima & Duncan McNaughton who, with Louis Patler, had the vision & chutzpah to create the possibility -- another story altogether, but one deeply influence by the Big O & Robert. A quarter century of the program & neither Olson or Robert are taught in the curriculum.

During the first few years, a renewing floating opera of poets like Michael Palmer, Lynn Hejinian, Michael McClure, Creeley, Whalen, Waldman, Lorenzo Thomas, Robert Grenier, Jerome Rothenberg, Judy Grahn, Joanne Kyger, Susan Howe, Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge -- can't find the Rolodex -- almost all formed or informed by Robert &/or Olson or both -- were participants in the New College project to, in many ways, embody 'The Curriculum of the Soul'.

What happened? Was it the inability to become the fathers that the death of fathers left us to become? (Baraka nails that down in his obit for Miles: 'now we have to become the fathers.')

So many poets of my generation inspired into a pre-Internet exploration of Field. We became the invisible & invariable historians; hunters & gatherers of the constantly shattering world.

JONATHAN SKINNER/WHERE IS OLSON NOW?

2005-11-12T09:46:00.000-05:00

This question threw me off, as I have so habitually resorted to Olson as a location, his work a where rather than a where is. Nonetheless, it’s an appropriate question to ask, given Olson’s insistent focus on location.

Olson is in the syllabus for a course I’m teaching, called Imagining Open Spaces. It’s an interdisciplinary seminar exploring the multiple dimensions of urban open space (aesthetic, political, sociological, ecological). A seminar of three, intensely dedicated students—interdisciplinarity is not “popular,” these days. Nor is Olson (though Digital Dissertations does turn up eight dissertations addressing Olson in the past five years).

In this course, largely dedicated to study of Frederick Law Olmsted’s writings on landscape, their genetic and historical resonance, with injections from Robert Smithson (amongst others), we begin with a reading of Call Me Ishmael, and Olson’s declaring SPACE first fact.

It’s a particularly American fact, at that. I’m not sure about the claims for cross-cultural interest, on Olson’s part—or for the relevance of his work to postcolonial reflection or anti-imperialist discourses—though he certainly pushes the limits of what can be done within a Western framework. The Mayan Letters, for instance, one of his most potent texts, still, like his Melville, chases after firstness and immediacy, engaging the Mayans as creatures of supple stone and skin rather than of language. Olson’s informant, like Pound’s Brzeska, is a genius of direct sight rather than of dialogue.

Olson, nevertheless, is in translation. A very partial list of translated titles that I could locate online:

Appelez-moi Ismael, Call Me Ishmael translated into French by M.Beerblock, Gallimard (1962)
Maximus amant du monde, selections from the Maximus Poems, translated into French by Jean-Paul Auxeméry, Ulysse fin de siècle (1990)
Commencements, selected poetry and prose translated into French by V. Dussol, H. Dye, E. Giraud, P. Poyet, B. Rival et B. Vilgrain, 106 pp., Theatre Typographique (2000)
Vers projectifs et Martins Pêcheurs, French translations of Projective Verse and of the Kingfishers (translator unkown), Virgile-Ulysse-Fin de siècle (17 novembre 2005)
“‘The maximus poems’ de Charles Olson et la tradition épique américaine,” dissertation by Violaine Perreau, for the University of Nantes (2005)
Una antología de la poesía norteamericana desde 1950, ed. Eliot Weinberger (contains Olson selections that introduced Latin American readers to his work), Ediciones del Equilibrista (1992)
Charles Olson: Poemas, translated by Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Tres Haches (1997)

And where is the Italian Olson, the Chinese Olson, the Portuguese Olson, the German Olson, the Swedish Olson, the Russian Olson, the Arabic Olson, the Yoruba Olson? Someone needs to do a comprehensive bibliography of Olson in translation.

Olson is in the arts. Olson helps keep space open as location for thought, in ways that would be explored largely by plastic artists in the second half of the twentieth century. Whether or not it be a particularly American gesture, what Olson called the push of geography colors American postmodernism more than the over-theorized time of machinery. Be it with the smooth “no space” of the American “desert” produced by postmodern geographies, or the geological and biological recasting of cultural history, in the “compost library,” American makers habitually disrupt post-Darwinian expectations with spatial experiment. Still, even since 1968 space has had to struggle for an overt place in the discourse. Olson was unabashed in his declarations for SPACE, and this has kept him at the margins of the critical map—in spite of the fact that his spatial poetics make powerful contributions to the study of history.

My own work on space, after Olson, thanks to promptings from Susan Howe, keeps leading me back to land art, earthworks, and a range of practices in landscape, from the ephemeral to the monumental—instances we currently are studying in my course. It’s significant that the post-1968 literary avant-garde (Howe’s work being a notable exception) did not take up the large questions of space. While a certain materialism of the word, and a penchant for long projects, perhaps inspired by West Coast expansiveness, did lend itself to what might be called “spatial” works, the “language” writers turned to time-based models of Marxist analysis, in a structuralism whose only spatial dimension does not significantly probe what the twentieth-century’s greatest analyst of space, Henri Lefebvre, calls the “production of space.” As always, with a bold and accelerated development of sculpture in the “expanded field,” the plastic arts appeared to be out in front. The return to Smithson, with the recent MOCA retrospective, and a profusion of new critical studies (from Gilles Tiberghien to Jennifer Roberts to Ron Graziani to Richard Sieburth to Lytle Shaw), might herald an opportunity for the literary arts to do some catching up—a convergence that also warrants returning to Olson’s still-unmined work in space, work that surely influenced Smithson. (Though there is no record of books by Olson in the list of holdings in Smithson’s library, printed at the back of the catalog for the recent retrospective, the compiler does note a copy of Donald Allen’s 1960 New American Poetry anthology. We can be reasonably sure, then, that Smithson had read at least “The Kingfishers” and “Projective Verse.”)

After our readings in Smithson (“A Brief Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape”), we returned to Olson to read his “Projective Verse” essay and selected pages from The Maximus Poems. To spiral back on Olson this way has us reading him in a light less darkened by questions of legacy or by the often ponderous interests in the archaic that have tended to grip Olson studies. What Olson does with space offers a method—more than a history or a body of knowledge, per se—for breaking the literary-professional shackles (the author, the book, the reading, the reviews, the disciples, the legacy) that continue to constrain our most “avant-garde” poets. Olson’s projective trajectory is mirrored in Smithson’s non-site, a construction that aimed to bust artworks from the four walls of the gallery, or from the four sides of the photograph, while retaining a dialectical relation to the use of those productions.

Olson is in my dissertation. I have devoted part of a chapter to Olson and Smithson, “Sites of Writing: From Frederick Law Olmsted to Robert Smithson,” where I look at the question of the where of writing, in particular at possible relations between writing, as practice, and the practices of walking, landscape architecture and sculpture, in the context of urban open spaces. The chapter is framed by a discussion of Olmsted’s Buffalo parks and their role in my own writing, with an account of the walks during which I meditated the dissertation. I discuss William Carlos Williams’s pastoral excursion in the “Sunday in the Park” section of Paterson. I go on to look at Olson’s on-foot writings, in particular at a poem from The Maximus Poems, OCEANIA, written on check stubs during the night of 5-6 June, 1966. (I am fascinated by the fact that Olson didn’t seem to use a desk, in his last years, and did a lot of writing on the move, including the use of a “writing stand” nailed to a tree-trunk in Dogtown.)

Considerations of Olson’s stance as a walking writer (“I come from the last walking period of man,” he writes, late in Volume III of The Maximus Poems) lead me to look at another break from typewriter-based “projectivism,” in the instance of Olson’s handwriting. In particular, I consider the “difficult texts” from Butterick’s Editing the Maximus Poems, the poem beginning “I have been an ability—a machine . . .” that ends with the nautilus tail of “What is the heart, turning . . . ,” and the spiraling “My beloved Father . . . ,” as well as the curling rose of “Migration in fact . . .” (The latter is printed in facsimile in The Maximus Poems, the former are diplomatically transcribed, except for three pages that apparently resisted transcription—leaving their trace in the ellipses at the end of “My beloved Father . . .”) Olson’s spirals lead me, of course, to Smithson’s spirals and, finally, to a consideration of other makers who have taken writing off the page and into the landscape. A pdf of this section of the dissertation (about 14 pages) is posted with the documents for Olson Now.

Olson is in Dogtown. Flying over the coast a few weeks ago, at night, I was struck by the darkness of the land just north of Gloucester—Dogtown. Apparently undeveloped to this day. Many of the strongest sections of The Maximus Poems come from Olson’s Dogtown wanderings—where, one might argue Olson retreated and where one might also argue he most significantly advanced his “mappemude.” I understand Olson’s attraction to neglected (“wild” or “protogonic”) open space, as a place of creative and compositional fertility. In this sense—and not just because he pioneered “composition by field” and “open form”—Olson may rank among our greatest poets of open spaces, in a lineage that passes through Whitman. (Patrick Barron has done useful work here, in a chapter on “Spaces of Representation in The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson,” in his 2004 dissertation, The construction of place-based spatial knowledge in destructive poetics: An analysis of the work of Charles Olson, Andrea Zanzotto, Edward Dorn, and Gianni Celati based on the thought of Henri Lefebvre.) As I continue to discover in discussions with my students, Olson is everywhere that our increasingly contested (and threatened) open spaces come under scrutiny. If you have a Dogtown, where you reach the “watered rock” of your own person and process, wherever and whatever it be, you walk with Olson under that open air.

Philadelphia, 11 November, 2005

ANNE WALDMAN/WHERE IS OLSON NOW?

2005-11-01T18:35:00.000-05:00

A photograph of Cancun under hurricane deep in “standing water” in the NY Times a week or so ago brought to mind Olson’s Mayan Letters and my own trips to the Yucatan in the 90’s following La Ruta Maya. Also a young friend called who had been in Chiapas recently, met Subcommandante Marcos and attended a conference that went on for several weekends with many groups (from outside, as well) presenting economic and cultural agendas. There was also discussion/analysis of the current Mexican leadership with elections coming up, and Jason my friend said the Zapatista consensus was not going to endorse anyone, at this point. I thought of the question of Olson and Now, and wondered what his take would be on the empowered Zapatista Maya, and on the breakthroughs with the Glyphs…

Maya – one of the few civilizations where artists attached names to their works…

Where books were “screen folded” of fig bark and bound with deer hide…

Olson thought that a culture, in order to survive must have a mythological dimension, and through this dimension the individual would participate in a greater inter-connected universe. He wanted to extend his own reach backward “ to fill mythological space”.

The ancient gods were “not all inventions, but disclosures of human possibilities, in other words, human necessities.” This was the backbone of “Human Universe”.

Studying the glyphs would right the balance that the bad habits of discourse & Logos kept us locked in. Too many abstractions!

“Logos, or discourse, for example, has in that time (since 450 B.C.) so worked abstractions into our concept and use of language that language and language’s other function, speech, seems so in need of restoration that several of us got back to hieroglyphs or to ideograms…”

He advocated for the “Post-logical, as is the order of any created thing…”

How uncomplicated his time in Lerma sounds although a challenge with few amenities…like running water, toilet etc.

He jostles with the Maya on the buses -

“When I am rocked by the roads against any of them—kids, women, men—their flesh is the most gentle, is granted, touch is in no sense anything but the natural law of flesh, there is none of that pull-away which, in the States, causes a man for all the years of his life the deepest sort of questioning of the rights of himself to the wild reachings of his own organism. The admission these people give me and one another is direct, and the individual who peers out from that flesh is precisely himself, is a curious wandering animal like me—it is so very beautiful how animal human eyes are when the flesh is not worn so close it chokes, how human and individuated the look comes out of the human eye when the house of it is not exaggerated”

I love that sense of the human eye. Do you see it in Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove, Scooter Libby?

One can’t but think of the torture the world continually comes to, acceptingly. when people turn a “deaf” eye. The brutal murders of Maya campesinos, the unmitigated horrors in El Salvador, the current situation in another war against darker skin and strange heathen praxes…

Sacking the museums & libraries of Baghdad… Bishop Landa burned how many Mayan “codices”? 37?

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo. Where is the human universe now? We are certainly in a post-logical universe. My stepdaughter Althea is convinced that the world is truly going to end by the Maya calculation of 2012.

DOCUMENTS PAGE UPDATE!

2005-10-22T12:26:00.000-04:00

Visit the OlsonNow Documents page

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/

to download and read Andre Spears', Warlords of Atlantis: Chasing the Demon of Analogy in the America(s) of Lawrence, Artaud and Olson.

WHERE IS OLSON NOW?

2005-10-17T09:46:00.000-04:00

Olson now is turning in his grave at the crossroads of the (American) path not taken.

André Spears, Paris, Oct 21st.

resonating from a field south of the broken whale’s jaw
a berry patch of cattle dreams
he saved

Craig Stormont, Long Island, NY

Olson is everywhere now! I am in Amsterdam....

John Sinclair

as of this moment, i have no idea, last time i saw him, he was riding across the Atlantic on the pillion seat of Rainer Maria Gerhardt's motorcycle, singing: Here I am, with Our Lady of Good Voyage, again.

Stefan Hyner; Rohrhof, Rhine Valley, Kurpfalz, Germany.

Olson is still waiting to be understood.

Amiri Baraka , Newark, NJ , Oct 05

Now That His Heart Is A Rock In The Sea

2005-10-16T18:19:00.000-04:00

The basis of art is change in the universe. That which is still has changeless form. Moving things have change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop something would be to half a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and both flit along the ground. We cannot arrest with seeing or hearing what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over things, we would find that the life of each thing itself had vanished without a trace.

~Matsuo Basho

The writing of Charles Olson embodies aesthetic and ethical insights ignored and disparaged in our contemporary world’s corporatism and rush to war as the solution to problems. The social pressures that push people out of their jobs, the competition to articulate and rearticulate relations between valued and devalued concepts and languages in circulation in a pluralistic culture, speaks to what only appears opposite, the endless complexity of personal destinies and aims. For Olson, it is the life-and-death matter of awareness. The body of the poem as subject and the subject body—both the individual elements of a poem that have lineated/poetical and political connotations, and the way those elements are organized together in compassionate meditations on place. Olson, for example, did not just complain he tried to convince his opponents with the best means at his disposal. These means frequently differed from standard professional procedures. The working poor live in the wealthiest cities in the world. There’s no metaphor of escape.

At the center of Charles Olson’s work and teaching is the question of ‘identity,’ an awareness of that tissue perceived as inextricably linked to ‘politics’. In these imaginary zones, there is not first a permanent subject, then an experience it is adding to the storehouse of its past, nor a permanent substantial thing being experienced by an equally enduring self. Consequently, the possibility of anyone living out a private existence is an egocentric illusion. As a writer involved in how writing is written, and how ideas are produced, disseminated, shared, dispersed, mutilated, or controlled and suppressed, Olson’s interest is in the generation of feelings and ideas between writer and reader in as open an exchange as possible, sensitive to the distances that separate (sometimes insensitive as well). He gives us a dialogue rather than the ‘teaching’ of ‘facts,’ or the repetition of established interpretations, the “applied” knowledge of professionals. Having no idea what we are, everything is a set of relationships reaching out to other things.

Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce useable practical wisdom. Who will call the meaning in a song? Of each word, which is analytic, who can see the structure of a verse unfold? No one has been able to isolate the link between the act of composition and the artifact that it produces. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Writing does not endow us directly with the power to act. Charles Olson understood something many never have – the local is the only possible place of peace. Its mosaic of multileveled interrelationships presents a potential incomprehensibility; its ferment is not comparable to an invasion.

Olson’s verse mirrors the difference that exists between ‘normative’ modes of representing the world, and the actual way people live and experience it. In 1926 Kandinsky noted that it’s “Not the attitude of looking out at the street through the hard, unyielding—if nevertheless fragile—barrier of the window, but rather the capacity to go-out-into-the-street. An open eye and an attentive ear transform the smallest sensations into profound experiences. Voices flood in from all sides and the world echoes with song.” An argument then, for a generative intuitive and social process as against what many have decried as the masculinization of the world—handling things badly and turning them into “objects” of commercial exchange.

Knowledge exists in the cohabitation of different systems of thought, with any number of unique discourses. Not your eligibility for shelter certified by the Personnel Director at the corporate headquarters, nearby Savings & Loan, or the Credit Profile Report generated god-knows-where, or by whom. A cleric’s consensus (the euphemistic “intelligence report” in the media’s “war on terrorism”) isn’t wanted. To create is not to know, and poetry, an art of writing, depends only indirectly on knowledge. A philosophical stance or a constellation of ideas can guide and accompany the writer; such knowledge is not for Olson simply ideas, but ideas that are immediately attached to forms, and these forms follow one another according to relationships that are, above all, quantitative and formal. Rather than seeing ideas as giving rise to forms, he recognizes that they color them, that they surround them without ever creating them.

OLSON’S RESISTANCE

Americans have a reputation for superficialness–the individual against the world. Olson wanted to hold on, weighted by materials wrote and counted yet to speak of a living space. An amiable person changes his bed. Criticism, the most fetishistic of all arts, readily employs something stronger in its shaping of an information that leads (dis)continually to new and intimate territory, or “knowledge” of moving particles, traditions, distinctions and assured reactions; which many critics bottle and sell to a public manipulated by instability and an appreciable loss of intelligence and reason, its critical mass, over brief periods of time. Meritocracies or elaborate rituals? The Best Poetry of Blah-Blah Blah. In these “debates of production” everything is washed out – the old stable stuff of the universe is no more. Olson wrote something that will never secure our leisure and it will find all the employment it wants.

Hard work, persistence of the human mind, isolates seasonable environments alongside that increasingly bastardized “eligibility” represented by matrixes of gummy reference knitted into environs inadequately equipped for our lives as partisans. Extremity passes by the office window in a raccoon coat. Is there nothing really and completely in charge? Olson is sometimes ineloquent but never complacent, he bothers to feel and think. Something the majority never sees.

“Where have you seen yourself mirrored completely?” Olson drew homologies between the social process of exclusion and the process of selection by which some are designated important, others not, and that of a more backward telegraphic availability of what was once an area of privacy protected inside the external traditional relation (a persistence of catastrophe) but now traced into the interior of the human body. Communities of all kinds possess an inherent drive toward closure, completion. Meant literally, you subscribe and submit to be disseminated (CD-ROM) as commercial speech. Apparently, with massive investment in wars and petroleum confidence in political apathy seems the right way to go. We could look only for what we really do value. There are birds singing deterrence walking down the drain and laughing. George Oppen thought value a knowledge which is hard to hold, “a meaning grasped again on re-reading.” Charles Olson’s logos and tongue is incapable of explaining the mess we’re in. Ironically, it works.

Andrew Levy, NYC

Call for Papers: “Charles Olson’s Prose”

2005-10-04T23:28:00.000-04:00

For a proposed panel on Charles Olson’s prose at the May 2006 American Literature Association conference in San Francisco, please submit a title and 250-word abstract no later than December 1, 2005. Papers may deal with any aspect of any of Olson’s prose works, e.g., The Special View of History, Human Universe, the Beloit Lectures, Projective Verse, etc. Final presentations strictly limited to 20 minutes.

Gary Grieve-Carlson
Dept of English
Lebanon Valley College
Annville, PA 17003
grieveca@lvc.edu

Submissions, Documents, Etc.

2005-09-28T19:03:00.000-04:00

We are receiving a great response so far about the event in December and great interest in the blog. We hope people will contribute and we encourage you to email submissions or to leave public comments. If you would like to submit, please email us at olsonnow followed by the at symbol at gmail dot com. Our first submission is from Clayton Eshleman: Notes on Charles Olson and the Archaic, a talk he gave in Buffalo in 2003. Because of the length of this piece and the formatting issues involved in reproducing Olson's poems on the page, we have set up a Documents page at the Electronic Poetry Center, where you can download the paper as a pdf. Thanks to Charles Bernstein for providing the space! The link to the documents page is at the top of the links list to your right.

More to come soon!

2005-09-21T10:09:00.000-04:00

OlsonNow

Thirty five years have passed since the death of Charles Olson in 1970. While all the signs were there when he died, the country he lived in is almost unrecognizable: decades of covert wars, domestic and international imprisonment on a massive scale, and the flexing of imperial muscle that now finds the U.S. military in Iraq reveal that the “pejorocracy” Olson warned of is well entrenched. As almost all forms of knowledge and culture have become administered and poetry has become a profession, the questions Olson raised about the world and the role of poetry and knowledge in it are more pointed than ever.

The first major public event emerging from this project will take place on:

December 3, 2005, from 12 to 6:30 at the
Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City
131 East 10th st. http://www.poetryproject.com

There will be two components to the event; an open symposium held during the day followed by the New York premiere of Henry Ferrini’s film-in-progress:

Poet and the City: Charles Olson and the Persistance of Place, with Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, John Malkovich, and many others. The screening will be accompanied with performances by David Amram, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, and others to be announced, followed by a reception.

Our idea is to keep the structure of the symposium as open as possible: we would like to see discussion form according to interests and affinities in the format of a town meeting.

The structural configuration of the day is still evolving and we welcome any ideas.

We have opened a blog (http:www.olsonnow.blogspot.com) to create a forum prior to the symposium and use material posted there as an entryway into the topics of the day, including:

First Fact: SPACE
Polis is eyes
The special view of history
The initiation of another kind of nation

This is not a call for papers, keynote speakers and panels, but a space for ideas in action in order to articulate our own histories and places within it. Please send material, and/or inquiries addressed to either Michael Kelleher or Ammiel Alcalay at: OlsonNow@gmail.com

There is no need to register but please let us know if you plan to attend.

The event is open to the public: admission is $8; students and seniors $7; members $5 or free.

We invite neophytes, initiates, the immersed and the curious, students and teachers, come one and all, no one will be turned away.