"There is a grace of life which is still yours, my dear Europe." -- Charles Olson
Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970), was a second generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, a rubric 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 the Language School, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. Across the Atlantic, these various poetic movements have exerted a deep and ongoing influence on an important array of alternative and experimental writers, including Roy Fisher, Geoffrey Hill, JH Prynne and Edwin Morgan, behind whose works lurks Olson's ghost of language-driven inventiveness.
Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of 1949 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley. Accretions to the term since Olson coined it are voluminous, but he first used the word in a literal chronological sense, i.e., that he and Creeley and other artists of his time came after the great Modernists such as Pound, Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Stravinsky, Glenn Gould, Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertez, Kandinsky, Picasso, Marsden Hartley, Brancusi, Boccioni, Chaplin, Keaton, D. W. Griffith, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc.
"Atlantis will rise again.""Fact is based upon vulgar matter.""Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.""I am happy to have some friends here in the kitchen.""I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.""I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.""I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.""I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.""I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.""I was playing catch with the European audience.""I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.""I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.""I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.""The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.""The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.""This country has been unconscious, and it's got to awake. That's my belief.""This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.""We all want what's been suddenly disallowed.""We're all moving, moving, moving. Isn't it nice?""When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?""You can do anything, literally, right? That's one of the exciting possibilities of the present.""You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.""You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble."
Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary Hines Olson. and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts (where his father worked as a mailman) and spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become the focus of his writing. Olson studied literature and American studies at Wesleyan University and Harvard University. In 1941, Olson moved to New York, married Constance Wilcock, and became the publicity director for 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, eventually rising to Assistant Chief of the division. (The chief of the division was future senator 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.
Olson's first book was Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick which was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University. In Projective Verse, Olson called for a poetic meter based on the breath of the poet 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 outstanding 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, 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, of course, The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. Yet his shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow," "Other Than," "An Ode on Nativity," "Love," and, perhaps especially, "The Ring Of," manifest a sincere, original, accessible, emotionally powerful voice and so may be counted among the finest lyric poems of the twentieth century. "Letter 27 [withheld]" from The Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns in an extraordinary way. Olson was filmed in his kitchen in 1966 reading this latter poem; the clip is available on You Tube.
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 to remain unfinished at the time of his death. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, Massachusetts 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.
Elyssa East's book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, condenses some important information about Olson's poetry, his career, and his involvement with Gloucester and Dogtown.
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.
His height was 6'8 (204 cm).
He enjoyed hand-fishing for halibut in a small boat off Gloucester, and only in a small boat off Gloucester. If you gave him a bigger boat or a different location or a rod he would turn it down.
One of his artistic allies in Gloucester, novelist Jonathan Bayliss, modeled the character of "Ipsissimus Charlemagne" in his Gloucesterbook after Olson.
Olson owned a 1956 green-and-white Chevrolet station wagon. The vehicle had problems and needed to be replaced. One of his students at the time, Canadian poet Robert Hogg (he later taught modern and postmodern poetry at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada), offered to find a replacement car. Olson was astounded when Hogg turned up in Gloucester with an exact replica...except for some mechanical details...of his defunct Chevy wagon.
Olson's life was marred by alcoholism, which contributed to his early death at 59 by liver cancer.
