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in the vision, Charles Olson

luminous and large, stood over my bed

relaying the message, “UMGATHAMA” 

      —Jake Berry, Brambu Drezi 

In the novel, Gloucesterbook, one of Jonathan Bayliss’s characters has this to say about “Ipsissimus Charlemagne”—a character transparently based on Bayliss’s friend, Charles Olson (1910-1970):

“He thinks he’s a—a monk keeping the idea of theater alive in our new Dark Ages! I love him for it though. What an anthropologist! I could—I could listen to him till the cows come home. I’d rather drink with him than any man alive!” His eyes welled with affection and he turned away to gaze out the window for an instant of privacy. “I’m only—I’m only afraid he won’t outlive me. Doesn’t take care of himself. People come here from all over the world to see him.” His lips quivered. 

That, for the most part, is the Olson we see in the Ferrini/Riaf film, Polis Is This. He is perhaps also the Olson, “luminous and large,” that appeared to Jake Berry, just as Ezra Pound once appeared in a vision to Charles Olson: 

what do we not know of ourselves

of who they are who lie

coiled or unflown

in the marrow of the bone

 one sd:

 of rhythm is image

 of image is knowing

 of knowing there is

 a construct 

              (“ABCs 2”) 

Charles Olson was an immense influence on the generation of poets known as “The New Americans”—an influence that had to be strongly resisted by at least some of the generation of poets that came next: the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Poets as different as Adrienne Rich, Kathleen Fraser, Diane di Prima, Larry Eigner, Clayton Eshleman, Robin Blaser, and many others have learned from Olson. Michael McClure, referring to Olson’s famous essay, “Projective Verse” (1950), insists that he does not write in either free verse or traditional verse: he writes in Olsonian projective verse. Robert Duncan’s problematical but admiring relationship to Olson could be the subject matter of a long book—just as Duncan’s problematical but admiring relationship to Jack Spicer could be the subject matter of a long book. Olson of course has also been vehemently attacked by many: he is the target of New Formalist ire, and he has never managed to become a “mainstream” author even to the extent that his mentor, Ezra Pound, was able to do. (Olson “rejected” Pound in his poem, “I, Mencius, Pupil of the Master . . .” but Pound and the Cantos remained an enormous influence.) 

Polis Is This focuses on Olson in Gloucester, the “root place” of an early Maximus poem. The film is filled with gorgeous, changing images of the city and the landscape which punctuate the recitation of lines from Olson’s work. Diane di Prima suggests that you begin with the local—with Gloucester in Olson’s case—but you don’t stay there: your arms reach up to heaven. The film gets its title from a famous Maximus poem which begins, “I come back to the geography of it.” Resonant with echoes of Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures in Ideas, the poem concludes, 

An American 

is a complex of occasions, 

themselves a geometry 

of spatial nature. 

I have this sense, 

that I am one 

with my skin 

 Plus this—plus this: 

that forever the geography 

which leans in 

on me I compel 

backwards I compel Gloucester 

to yield, to 

change 

Polis 

is this 

(“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]”) 

Interestingly, polis—the ancient Greek word for “city”—is not merely the “place” but a relationship between humankind and “the geography”: “the geography / which leans in / on me I compel / backwards I compel Gloucester / to yield.” Polis implies activity and, for Olson, even includes the sense “that I am one / with my skin.” Nonetheless, Polis Is This traces the poet’s growing dislike of the direction in which his “root place” is moving to the point at which he is willing to leave it. 

 It is rare that a complete poem is read in the film, but Ferrini and Riaf are making a movie, not conducting a poetry recital, and something of the scope of Olson’s work emerges in the film’s images—gulls against the sky, fish, the ever-present sea. Footage of Olson reading his work with great brio is in the film—as is footage of a scruffy Olson occasionally stumbling but making his way around the town. There is, happily, no primary voice-over telling us what Olson’s poetry “meant”; instead, in the manner of an Olson poem, Ferrini and Riaf give us all sorts of people, famous and not famous, talking about Olson and his work. Olson’s barber has a few things to say, as do Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, and Anne Waldman. There is fascinating footage of young people discussing the work, trying to come to terms with it. People who knew him well and people who have never met him are present. There is much “discussion,” which would probably have pleased Olson. (He complains in “Letter 16” that there is “No noise. / And no discussion.”) 

Polis Is This is an excellent introduction to a poet who no longer commands the readership he once did but whose complex and often wonderfully affecting work deserves our attention. The only problem I have is in what is not in the film. Some personal issues might have been included. We are told about Olson’s wife Bette—the segment is interesting and moving—but his important relationship with Frances Motz Boldereff is passed over in silence. Vincent Ferrini appears in the film and praises Olson, but Olson’s cruel attack on Ferrini in the early Maximus poems is never mentioned. (Olson’s anger is an important fact of his poetry.) His alcoholism—an immense problem of his later life which climaxed in his endless, drunken remarks at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965—is never discussed. And there are issues of the work as well. Someone quotes the famous passage from Call Me Ishmael, “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.” But no one mentions that Olson revealed to Barry Miles, who was recording him for a reading eventually released on the Folkways label, that he had in fact shifted his attention away from “SPACE” and was now occupied by time. (Later Maximus poems are frequently and carefully dated.) The opening line of “The Kingfishers” is quoted and discussed as a key to understanding Olson’s work: 

 What does not change / is the will to change 

Further on in the poem, Olson insists that “change” is the “very thing you are.” Yet no one mentions this passage from “Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 2”: 

 people

don’t change. They only stand more

revealed. I,

likewise 

The progress of the I in “The Kingfishers” is of considerable interest. The poem begins with an uncertain, bewildered I: “I do not know.” In the second section, immediately after the line, “I thought of the E on the stone,” the pronoun I simply disappears from the poem. The poem is filled with various voices and quotations which flood into it, but the pronoun I does not return until the very last section, where it appears eleven times in the space of nineteen lines. Unlike the bewildered I at the beginning of the poem, this later I is authoritative, certain of itself, almost didactic: “I am no Greek . . . But I have my kin.” It is an I which has, in effect, witnessed its own dissolution and, strengthened, come back to tell about it. 

Because of Olson’s considerable tendency toward the didactic—this is a poet with opinions—people are often at great pains to elucidate his “message.” But the fact is that if we consider Olson’s work as a whole, we will find that there are many, many contradictions in it, and that the contradictions are a part of its strength. Olson definitely had a tendency towards the didactic, but the very openness of his mind meant that at some point or another he was very likely to contradict what he was being didactic about. The same poet who issued the command, “(boundary / Disappear” in “at the boundary of the mighty world” in Maximus IV, V, VI asserted that “Limits /are what any of us / are inside of” in Maximus “Letter 3.” This poet was not a consistent, systematic thinker: he was an advocate for consciousness itself—for mental movement. In Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, the titles of individual entries— “A Paper,” for example—are not seen (as they would be in a dictionary or in an ordinary book of “portraits”) as individual “subjects” to be defined by the entry beneath them but rather—the entries frequently overlap, cross back and forth—as momentary centers of a series of verbal events, of continually changing relationships: rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition of words, etc. Similarly, a passage like the following—from “The Kingfishers”—is, in terms of content, a moral judgment on the modern world. Yet if we attend to what Olson frequently asks us to attend to, the poem’s syllables (“Is it any more than / a matter of / syllables?”), the passage is also an attempt to name the reality of process, of action, of continually changing events, a reality which lies outside the realm of “morality”: 

what pudor pejorocracy affronts

how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot

what breeds where dirtiness is law

what crawls

below 

Pudor/pejor. Rot/pudor/pejor/neighborhood/affronts. Law/awe/crawls/below. Night-rest/neighborhood. Hood/how. It is only by placing his reader in contact with such a reality that Olson may hope to persuade him of the authority of his “judgments.” But I think it is less the judgments than the vision of sheer process that lies at the heart of Charles Olson’s poetry. 

The notion of the I, the “individual,” is such a part of our culture that it is difficult to think around it. As a concept it probably seems obvious, but perhaps that is only because it has been reinforced in so many ways. The emphasis on the I, the individual, the person (as in “personal”) is a way of avoiding history—one of the great efforts of our culture. “What” I am is determined by a number of factors: by where I am, by my past, by my circumstances both physical and non physical, by the pressures of other people, by what I ate this morning—by all sorts of things. These various things are history, which is not something merely in the past but a constant activity which shapes us moment by moment. History is the past, yes, but it is also the present—what is happening right now. It is even, since we are creatures of possibilities, creatures of constant expectations, the future. To think of oneself as an “I” is to abstract out of this realm of activity: it is to falsify. The personal pronoun is definitely present in Olson—even a kind of ego inflation, “Maximus”—but the massive, complex sense of history enunciated by the Maximus poems is also an indication of Olson’s deep awareness of the ways in which history permeates any “life.” He writes in Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, in a passage dated November 12, 1961, “I am making a mappemunde. It is to include my being.” The “mappemunde” is not issuing out of the poet—not a projection of his selfhood—but is a larger entity in which his being is “included”: it is not a part of him; he is a part of it. Though it is a spatial, even geographic metaphor, the mappemunde is, profoundly, Olson’s “special” understanding of history—not merely the “SPACE” in which the poet begins but the time in which he ends. Olson’s many attacks on things and people he dislikes—things and people that are not him—keep the subject/object dichotomy alive in his consciousness, but he also maintains a constant awareness that there is something more and greater than that dichotomy: 

He sd, “You go all around the subject.” And I sd, “I didn’t know it was a subject.” 

(“Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 15”) 

My best hope for this film—which contains many beautiful, fine things—is that it will generate discussion. As Olson, whom Pete Seeger described as “Big, tall man,” wrote in some gorgeous lines, 

On ne doit aux morts nothing 

else than 

la verité 

(“On first Looking out through Juan de la Cosa’s Eyes”) 

You can find information about purchasing and screenings of Polis Is This here. It is scheduled for KTEH [CHANNEL 54] on April 28, 2009 from 12:00 AM to 1:00 AM