In 1983 a massive work was published, The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, edited by Olson's younger disciple, the late George F. Butterick of the University of Connecticut. The books brought together in the volume were The Maximus Poems (1960); Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968), and the posthumous Maximus Poems: Volume Three (1975), all long out of print. Twenty-nine new poems, previously uncollected, were added, errors in the previous editions were corrected, and the sequence of the final poems was modified through research. Olson thus received the kind of treatment that is usually allotted a poet only after he has been gone from the scene for a century at least.
Charles Olson, like his fellow townsman and close contemporary Elizabeth Bishop, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1910. He died at the age of sixty in 1970. Olson was educated at Wesleyan University, at Yale, and at Harvard where he took his BA in 1932 and an MA in 1933. He began teaching as an instructor at Clark University and at Harvard from 1936-9, but the peak of his academic career came when he was "Instructor and Rector" of the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, from 1951 to 1956. As Rexroth pointed out, the school drew to itself many members of the generation that called itself "Beat" in other contexts, and folklore, a mythology developed around it that became archetypal over the years.
Robert von Hallberg wrote in his book Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art that the poet, after the dissolution of Black Mountain College in 1956, could no longer rely on having a captive audience for his work, but when Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 appeared Olson instead began to build a nation-wide audience and following, his work appearing particularly in the experimental little magazines of the period. Although it was larger, this audience was less well-defined than it had been when his colleagues and disciples contributed their work to Cid Corman's little magazine Origin and its sibling The Black Mountain Review. However, once "avant gardist" poets had appeared in these pages they were thereafter identified as members of the group even though, like Denise Levertov and Amiri Baraka (q.v. both elsewhere on this blog), they may not have attended the school itself, and they constituted the shock troops of Olson's advance toward literary acceptance.
Thus, when the College failed and its residents scattered, Black Mountain's presence continued to be felt in the literature of the 1950s and 1960s. The members of the movement kept in touch with one-another, published each other, followed each-other about until Olson landed, finally, at the State University of New York at Buffalo where his colleague and friend Robert Creeley (q.v. elsewhere on this blog) continued to teach through the 1980s. Though Olson died at the end of the decade of the 1960s, the so-called "Black Mountain College II" continued as a sort of academic unit at the Buffalo university, and it sent out rhizomes to various other schools including the Universities of Connecticut and Maine, S.U.N.Y. at Albany, and other places in the eastern and western United States, not to mention Canada where the movement eventually practically took over poetic practice by the 1990s.
If Olson was the post-Modernist guru of Black Mountain, as Kenneth Rexroth and others pointed out it was Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams among the Modernists who were his idols to the extent that Olson has been characterized by some critics (and, in fact, by himself) as "the poor man's Pound." His baffling theories of composition were widely circulated, but they were derived — to the degree that they can be comprehended — from the theories of Williams. The chief essay exposing his "composition by field" theory was titled "Projective Verse" (1950). In it Olson repostulated Ralph Waldo Emerson's nineteenth-century "organic poetry" opinions regarding form as an extension of content and fleshed them out with remarks about the association of syllables with "breath,” a la Williams.
Prosodics and poetics were never the chief selling points of Black Mountain philosophy or practice, however, for in fact the poets associated with it were a heterogeneous group and the school was nothing if it was not a "cult of personality." Olson was a huge man physically — well over six feet tall and built on a massive scale. His mere presence was overpowering. His "lectures" were famous — interminable, rambling peregrinations over masses of territory — Von Hallberg has characterized a good deal of his productions as "rhetorical" and "didactic." They were filled with oracular pronouncements, sighs and rumblings in the style of the great and scrofulous 18th-century British scholar-lexicographer-poet Samuel Johnson, incoherences, references and jests for the initiates; yet for those who were apostles they remain some of the most memorable moments of a lifetime. For the unconvinced and uninitiated, they might be characterized, to quote another word Von Hallberg used to describe some of the poetry, "pompous." Speaking from personal experience (I heard one of these interminable effusions at a S.U.N.Y. Writers’ Conference back in The Day), I can attest that they were all of those things.
Don Byrd, the State University of New York at Albany representative of the second-generation of Black Mountain poets, averred in his Charles Olson's Maximus that "Maximus is the noun-magician." Byrd claimed that "He is not simply the namer" (Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in his essay "The Poet" that the true poet was "The Namer, the Sayer"); Maximus is "'the man in the word,' the flesh made Logos," Byrd said, falling back upon another Emerson-derived priest-poet concept. "Although there are important secondary resonances," Byrd continued, "Maximus's name means, most simply, large. By implication, he is also the Neo-platonic philosopher and magician, Maximus of Tyre, as well as homo maximus, the redeemed man of alchemy, but above all, he is a big man, as large as his name, and, at the beginning of the poem, largely unknown. He is located in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a little fishing village on Cape Ann, which daily fills his eyes and ears, so it is his most common concern, but much passes there which has reference to other places and other times, frequently far away or long ago."
Olson's main model for his work was The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Olson's The Maximus Poems were often imitations, as in "Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 15," part III:
And for the water-shed, the economics & poetics thereafter?
Three men,
coincide:
you will find Villon
in Fra Diavolo,
Elberthubbardsville,
N.Y.
and the prose
is Raymond's, boston, or
Brer Fox,
Rapallo,
Quattrocento-by-the-Beach,#
429
the American epos, 19-
02 (or when did Barton Barton Barton Barton and Barton?
To celebrate
how it can be, it is
padded or uncomforted, your lost, you
found your
sneakers
(o Statue,
o Republic, o
Tell-A-Vision, the best
is soap. The true troubadours
are CBS. Melopoeia
is for Cokes by Cokes out of
Pause.
The reference to "Brer Fox" is to Ezra Pound; "Rapallo" is the city in Italy to which Pound was exiled after his long post-war incarceration in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was sent after he was deemed insane by the American courts instead of being tried for treasonous activities in behalf of Italian Fascism during the World War II. The level of diction is that of a hip wiseguy; the syntax is not much different from that to be found in the Auden style — it is ordinary speech, but jazzed up in "lineated" prose lines rather than slickly crafted in traditional verse forms as in Auden’s period style. The poem is aimed at a particular audience — the in-jokes, arcane references, and micterismal sarcasms are set like land mines and tank traps to keep at bay the bourgeois uninitiated.
Sherman Paul wrote in his Olson's Push, "...Olson's push, to use his own emphatic and often self-characterizing word, is important. This may be gauged by the fact that anyone wishing to understand recent poetry and writing — postmodernism, literature since [World War II] — has sooner or later to come to him. He is a central figure, a 'vortex,' rightly compared with Ezra Pound, one of his masters in a preceding generation. As Paul Blackburn, a poet of Olson's own generation, puts it [in his poem titled 'Shop Talk']:
"We have had our gene-
ration of innovators, 19
15 & the rest.
What Pound and Williams & Moore have done
is in the air, is, perhaps, the air.
Let the species now give rise to a few
masters
(since the fields are open
and the air cleared)
"Blackburn — his own poem is an instance of what it asserts — refers to the generation of 1915, the generation of modernists that included not only Pound, Williams, and Moore, but Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, and Yeats. And he refers to his own generation, the postmodernists, whose advent may be marked by the publication in 1950 of Olson's 'Projective Verse,' an essay comparable in importance to Pound's early essays and notes on poetry ('A Retrospect') and Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'."
Or,
to approach the question from a slightly different perspective, David Perkins
in his A History of Modern Poetry noted
Olson's self-assessment: "In a 1965 reading at Berkeley, Olson remarked,
according to the tape recorder, 'I mean, I wrote a — a flagrant autobiography
of myself imitating Ezra Pound...but every imitation stinks...I'd be proud to
have been the in-man in this century and, like, here I am dragging my ass after
Ezra'."
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