Olson, Charles

(1910–1970)

   If kenneth rexroth can be seen as a father figure of the Beat Generation on the West Coast, then Charles Olson can be seen as a father figure of the Beat Generation on the East Coast. He was mentor to robert creeley, ed dorn (who wrote “What I See in The maximus poems,” one of the most important critical evaluations of Olson’s masterpiece), john wieners, and ed sanders (who tried to romantically involve Olson with the great blues singer Janis Joplin). His groundbreaking essay “Projective Verse” appeared in 1950. It opened up the field of poetry and continues to stimulate poetic imaginations to this day. Olson writes: It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.

   The imagination of the poet, argues Olson, should be conveyed through the poet’s breath. This essay helped modern American poetry, like that of the Beats and their contemporaries, become something more for the ears than something for the eyes. On December 27, 1910, Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, also the home of abbie hoffman and not far from jack kerouac’s Lowell. After being highly involved in the Democratic Party, Olson was inspired to pursue a literary career by his visits to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital to see Ezra Pound, for whom he acted as an informal literary secretary. (diane di prima would also visit Pound in the hospital where the treasonable old poet was kept by the government after World War II.) Call Me Ishmael, Olson’s seminal study of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick appeared in 1947, which Pound helped him publish. Olson eventually broke ties with Pound over Pound’s anti-Semitism. As the rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Olson would become the central figure of the poets known as the Black Mountain School, which included, according to Donald Allen’s The new american poetry, 1945-1960, Creeley, Dorn, Robert Duncan, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Paul Blackburn, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov. These were poets published in the important magazines Origin and Black Mountain Review. Olson also saw the Beats as fellow travelers in his poetic movement (though he would be spurred into head-butting gregory corso after a poetry reading and was jealous of the Beats’ media attention) and even predicted the success of William S. Burroughs’s prose. Ginsberg, an admirer of Olson’s poetry (though Corso was not), convinced Olson to partake in timothy leary’s psilocybin experiments, and Olson became an advocate of the drug. Dorn claims that Olson “never met a substance he didn’t like.” Leary called Olson “the father of modern poetry.” Olson also was a guide for Arthur Koestler’s psilocybin trip with Leary, though he startled the author of Darkness at Noon with a toy gun. Olson later tripped with Sanders on psilocybin that he received from Leary. Near the end of his life, Olson taught at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where the esteemed Beat scholar Ann Charters later taught, but he had to resign due to illness. Kerouac, another admirer of Olson, made a pilgrimage to visit Olson near the end of their lives. From 1950 until Olson’s death on January 10, 1970, from liver cancer, Olson worked on his masterpiece, The Maximus Poems, a monumental epic poem that examined Gloucester, Massachusetts, a place of high significance for Olson both as a child and as a dying giant of letters. Sanders, one of Olson’s poetic heirs, put a section of the poem to music to be performed by his folkrock band The Fugs. Duncan, Creeley, and Dorn visited the dying poet near the end. Ginsberg, Wieners, and Sanders attended his funeral.

 Bibliography

■ Clark, Tom. Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

■ Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. 1960. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 386–397.

   Kurt Hemmer