Charles Olson
Encyclopedia
Charles Olson was a second generation American modernist
poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound
and William Carlos Williams
and the New American poets
, which includes the New York School
, the Black Mountain School
, the Beat
poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance
. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of a language school
, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."
, where his father worked as a mailman. Olson spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts
, which was to become the focus of his writing. At high school he was a champion orator, winning a tour of Europe as a prize. He studied literature and American studies, gaining a B.A and M.A at Wesleyan University
. Olson profile at Academy of American Poets. For two years Olson taught English at Clark University then entered Harvard University in 1936 where he finished his coursework for a Ph.D. in American civilization but failed to complete his degree. He then received a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of Herman Melville
. His first poems were written in 1940. Stringer, Jenny (1996) The Oxford companion to twentieth-century literature in English OUP p511 ISBN 0192122711
In 1941, Olson moved to New York and joined Constance Wilcock in civil marriage, together having one child, Katherine. Olson became the publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union
. One year later, he and his wife moved to Washington, D.C.
where he worked in the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information, where he spent the rest of the war years, eventually rising to Assistant Chief of the division. (The chief of the division was future senator from California, Alan Cranston
.) In 1944, Olson went to work for the Foreign Languages Division of the Democratic National Committee
. He also participated in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaign, organizing a large campaign rally at New York's Madison Square Garden
called "Everyone for Roosevelt". After Roosevelt's death, upset over both the ascendancy of Harry Truman and the increasing censorship of his news releases, Olson left politics and dedicated himself to writing, moving to Key West, Florida, in 1945.Charles Olson Biography (University of Connecticut Libraries) From 1946 to 1948 Olson visited poet Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital
(sic) in Washington D.C., but was repelled by Pound's increasingly fascist tendencies.
In 1951, Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, working and studying here beside artists such as John Cage
and Robert Creeley
. At about this time, he married his second wife, Betty Kaiser. Olson's ideas came to deeply influence a generation of poets, including writers such as Denise Levertov
, Paul Blackburn
, and Robert Duncan
. At 6'8 (204 cm), Olson was described as "a bear of a man", his stature possibly influencing the title of his Maximus work. Olson wrote copious personal letters, and helped and encouraged many young writers. He was fascinated with Mayan
writing. Shortly before his death, he examined the possibility that Chinese and Indo-European languages derived from a common source. When Black Mountain College closed in 1956, Olson settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He served as a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1963-1965) and at the University of Connecticut
(1969). The last years of his life were a mixture of extreme isolation and frenzied work. Olson's life was marred by alcoholism, which contributed to his early death from liver cancer
. He died in New York in 1970, two weeks past his fifty-ninth birthday, having completed The Maximus Poems a month earlier.
's novel Moby Dick, was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University
. In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the poet's breathing and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax
and logic
. The poem "The Kingfishers", first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), is an application of the manifesto.
His second collection, The Distances, was published in 1960. Olson served as rector of the Black Mountain College
from 1951 to 1956. During this period, the college supported work by John Cage
, Robert Creeley
, Allen Ginsberg
, Robert Duncan
, Fielding Dawson
, Cy Twombly
, Jonathan Williams
, Ed Dorn
, Stan Brakhage
and many other members of the 1950s American avant garde. Olson is listed as an influence on artists including Carolee Schneemann
and James Tenney
.
Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers", "In Cold Hell, in Thicket", and The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of" are more immediately accessible and manifest a sincere, original, emotionally powerful voice. "Letter 27 [withheld]" from The Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns (a short film of Olson reading this poem in the kitchen of his house in Gloucester is available on You Tube). Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley.
and specifically the city of Gloucester
where Olson had settled. Dogtown
, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann
, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside on a tree stump in Dogtown.) The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre
, an itinerant Greek
philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The final, unfinished volume imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones.
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...
poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
and the New American poets
The New American Poetry 1945-1960
The New American Poetry 1945–1960 was a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a...
, which includes the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
, the Black Mountain School
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...
, the Beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of a language school
Language school
A language school is a school where one studies a foreign language. Classes at a language school are usually geared towards, but not limited to, communicative competence in a foreign language...
, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."
Life
Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary Hines Olson. and grew up in Worcester, MassachusettsWorcester, Massachusetts
Worcester is a city and the county seat of Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. Named after Worcester, England, as of the 2010 Census the city's population is 181,045, making it the second largest city in New England after Boston....
, where his father worked as a mailman. Olson spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts
Gloucester, Massachusetts
Gloucester is a city on Cape Ann in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. It is part of Massachusetts' North Shore. The population was 28,789 at the 2010 U.S. Census...
, which was to become the focus of his writing. At high school he was a champion orator, winning a tour of Europe as a prize. He studied literature and American studies, gaining a B.A and M.A at Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
. Olson profile at Academy of American Poets. For two years Olson taught English at Clark University then entered Harvard University in 1936 where he finished his coursework for a Ph.D. in American civilization but failed to complete his degree. He then received a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
. His first poems were written in 1940. Stringer, Jenny (1996) The Oxford companion to twentieth-century literature in English OUP p511 ISBN 0192122711
In 1941, Olson moved to New York and joined Constance Wilcock in civil marriage, together having one child, Katherine. Olson became the publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
. One year later, he and his wife moved to Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
where he worked in the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information, where he spent the rest of the war years, eventually rising to Assistant Chief of the division. (The chief of the division was future senator from California, Alan Cranston
Alan Cranston
Alan MacGregor Cranston was an American journalist and Democratic Senator from California.-Education:Cranston earned his high school diploma from the old Mountain View High School, where among other things, he was a track star...
.) In 1944, Olson went to work for the Foreign Languages Division of the Democratic National Committee
Democratic National Committee
The Democratic National Committee is the principal organization governing the United States Democratic Party on a day to day basis. While it is responsible for overseeing the process of writing a platform every four years, the DNC's central focus is on campaign and political activity in support...
. He also participated in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaign, organizing a large campaign rally at New York's Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, often abbreviated as MSG and known colloquially as The Garden, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in the New York City borough of Manhattan and located at 8th Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets, situated on top of Pennsylvania Station.Opened on February 11, 1968, it is the...
called "Everyone for Roosevelt". After Roosevelt's death, upset over both the ascendancy of Harry Truman and the increasing censorship of his news releases, Olson left politics and dedicated himself to writing, moving to Key West, Florida, in 1945.Charles Olson Biography (University of Connecticut Libraries) From 1946 to 1948 Olson visited poet Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital
St. Elizabeths Hospital
St. Elizabeths Hospital is a psychiatric hospital operated by the District of Columbia Department of Mental Health. It was the first large-scale, federally-run psychiatric hospital in the United States. Housing several thousand patients at its peak, St. Elizabeths had a fully functioning...
(sic) in Washington D.C., but was repelled by Pound's increasingly fascist tendencies.
In 1951, Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, working and studying here beside artists such as John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
and Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
. At about this time, he married his second wife, Betty Kaiser. Olson's ideas came to deeply influence a generation of poets, including writers such as Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...
, Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn (U.S. poet)
Paul Blackburn was an American poet. He influenced contemporary literature through his poetry, translations and the encouragement and support he offered to fellow poets.-Biography:...
, and Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
. At 6'8 (204 cm), Olson was described as "a bear of a man", his stature possibly influencing the title of his Maximus work. Olson wrote copious personal letters, and helped and encouraged many young writers. He was fascinated with Mayan
Mayan languages
The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...
writing. Shortly before his death, he examined the possibility that Chinese and Indo-European languages derived from a common source. When Black Mountain College closed in 1956, Olson settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He served as a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1963-1965) and at the University of Connecticut
University of Connecticut
The admission rate to the University of Connecticut is about 50% and has been steadily decreasing, with about 28,000 prospective students applying for admission to the freshman class in recent years. Approximately 40,000 prospective students tour the main campus in Storrs annually...
(1969). The last years of his life were a mixture of extreme isolation and frenzied work. Olson's life was marred by alcoholism, which contributed to his early death from liver cancer
Liver cancer
Liver tumors or hepatic tumors are tumors or growths on or in the liver . Several distinct types of tumors can develop in the liver because the liver is made up of various cell types. These growths can be benign or malignant...
. He died in New York in 1970, two weeks past his fifty-ninth birthday, having completed The Maximus Poems a month earlier.
Early writings
Olson's first book, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman MelvilleHerman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
's novel Moby Dick, was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
. In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the poet's breathing and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
and logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
. The poem "The Kingfishers", first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), is an application of the manifesto.
His second collection, The Distances, was published in 1960. Olson served as rector of the Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
from 1951 to 1956. During this period, the college supported work by John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
, Fielding Dawson
Fielding Dawson
Fielding Dawson was a beat-era author of short stories and novels, a student of the Black Mountain College. He was also a painter & collagist whose works were seen in several books of poetry & many literary magazines....
, Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors...
, Jonathan Williams
Jonathan Williams (poet)
Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
, Ed Dorn
Ed Dorn
Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.-Overview:...
, Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....
and many other members of the 1950s American avant garde. Olson is listed as an influence on artists including Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the...
and James Tenney
James Tenney
James Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...
.
Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers", "In Cold Hell, in Thicket", and The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of" are more immediately accessible and manifest a sincere, original, emotionally powerful voice. "Letter 27 [withheld]" from The Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns (a short film of Olson reading this poem in the kitchen of his house in Gloucester is available on You Tube). Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley.
The Maximus Poems
In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound's Cantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writing The Maximus Poems, a project that was completed shortly before his death. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, MassachusettsMassachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
and specifically the city of Gloucester
Gloucester, Massachusetts
Gloucester is a city on Cape Ann in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. It is part of Massachusetts' North Shore. The population was 28,789 at the 2010 U.S. Census...
where Olson had settled. Dogtown
Dogtown, Massachusetts
Dogtown is an abandoned inland settlement on Cape Ann in Massachusetts. Once known as the Common Settlement and populated by respectable citizens, the area later known as Dogtown is divided between the city of Gloucester and the town of Rockport...
, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann
Cape Ann
Cape Ann is a rocky cape in northeastern Massachusetts on the Atlantic Ocean. The cape is located approximately 30 miles northeast of Boston and forms the northern edge of Massachusetts Bay. Cape Ann includes the city of Gloucester, and the towns of Essex, Manchester-by-the-Sea, and...
, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside on a tree stump in Dogtown.) The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre
Maximus of Tyre
Cassius Maximus Tyrius Cassius Maximus Tyrius Cassius Maximus Tyrius (Maximus of Tyre; was a Greek rhetorician and philosopher who flourished in the time of the Antonines and Commodus. His writings contain many allusions to the history of Greece, while there is little reference to Rome; hence it...
, an itinerant Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The final, unfinished volume imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones.
Selected bibliography
- Call Me Ishmael. Reprint. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
- The Distances. First Printing. (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1960)
- Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley, 1965)
- Archaeologist of Morning. London and New York: Cape Goliard, 1970
- Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, ed. George F. Butterick and Richard Blevins, 10 vols. (Black Sparrow Books, 1980–96)
- The Maximus Poems (Berkeley, Calif. and London, 1983)
- The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley, 1987)
- Collected Prose, eds. Donald AllenDonald AllenDonald Merriam Allen , influential editor, publisher, and translator of contemporary American literature. He is perhaps best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960 , among the several important anthologies of contemporary American innovative writing he made available to the public...
& Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, 1997) - Selected Letters, ed. Ralph Maud (Berkeley, 2001)
Further reading
- Butterick, George F. and Blevins, Richard Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence 9 vols. (Berkeley, 1980-90)
- East, Elyssa Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town
- Merrill, Thomas F. The Poetry of Charles Olson: A Primer (Delaware, 1982).
- Maud, Ralph (editor) (2010) Muthologos Charles Olson: Lectures and Interviews. Revised Second Edition. Talon Books, Vancouver, Canada. ISBN 978-0-88922-639-5.
- Buttrick, George F.: "A Guide to the Maximus Poems," (University of California Press, 1981)
External links
- Olson Biography, University of Connecticut Libraries
- Olson profile at Academy of American Poets. Retrieved 2010-12-12
- Profile at Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2010-12-12
- Olson at Modern American Poetry. Retrieved 2010-12-12
- Read Olson's interview with The Paris Review. Retrieved 2010-12-12
- The Charles Olson Research Collection (Archives) at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. Retrieved 2010-12-12
- Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place documentary on Olson by Henry FerriniHenry FerriniHenry Ferrini is an American non-fiction filmmaker best known for his portraits of Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson.Ferrini attended Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, MA where he studied music...
(1 hr). Retrieved 2010-12-12 - "Charles Olson", Pennsound, a page of Charles Olson recordings. Retrieved 2010-12-12