“The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock” reprinted to further the education of the general public about the works of T.S. Eliot.
The six “Maximus” poems of Charles Olson reprinted by permission of the University of California Press and the Charles Olson archive at the University of Connecticut.
The poem by Amanda Cook is reprinted by permission of the author.
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T. S. ELIOT AND CHARLES OLSON
YOUNG TOM AND CHARLIE:
TWO AMERICAN POETS AT HOME IN GLOUCESTER
Young Tom Eliot, top, with a toy boat on the porch of his family’s summer house, Gloucester c.1896-7; above, young Charlie in Gloucester, c. 1930
T. S. ELIOT AND CHARLES OLSON
YOUNG TOM AND CHARLIE:
TWO AMERICAN POETS AT HOME IN GLOUCESTER
SEVEN POEMS BY T.S. ELIOT AND CHARLES OLSON AND TWO COMMENTARIES BY AMANDA COOK AND SAMUEL
CHARTERS
SELECTED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANN CHARTERS
Vincent Ferrini at the end of the Breakwater in Gloucester, photographed by Janet Knott
THE GLOUCESTER WRITERS CENTER
proceeds from the sale of this book benefit The Gloucester Writers Center. Founded in 2010, the Writers Center hosts a multitude of year-round programs, from workshops and classes to open mics and readings.
In 1948, poet and picture frame-maker Vincent Ferrini (1913-2007) moved with his family to Gloucester. Here for nearly six decades, he wrote thirty volumes of poetry, plays, and an autobiography, as well as — like his friend Charles Olson — countless letters to the editor of the Gloucester Daily Times. Prolific and outspoken, Ferrini became Gloucester’s first poet laureate.
After his death, a group of friends organized an effort to preserve his work studio at 126 East Main Street as the Gloucester Writers Center. A living memorial, it is a place for writers to gather in the spirit of poetic inquiry and civic engagement.
Gordon Parks took the cover photograph of the Fisherman’s Memorial for the FSA in 1943
Dedicated to Henry Ferrini and the memory of George F. Butterick and Vincent Ferrini
“I might find a peach pitted w/sand along the beach, but Mermaids singing each to each stay underwater and out of reach.”
— H.F.
Another of Gordon Parks photographs at the Fisherman’s Memorial in Gloucester
The Eliot summer house, East Gloucester; Olson with Ann on Stacy Boulevard in 1968, photographed by George Butterick
INTRODUCTION BY ANN CHARTERS
For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round… — Herman Melville
It was The Gloucester Notebook of T.S. Eliot that connected the writing of Young Tom and Charlie for me, after I found the newly published book while browsing on a warm, summer afternoon at the Dogtown bookshop on Main Street in Gloucester. Though the two poets T.S. Eliot and Charles Olson never met, they are connected in my mind by their strong responses to this coastal city. Their poetry contains highly imaginative references — sometimes clear, sometimes obscure — to the city itself, its history, the geography of Cape Ann, and the Atlantic Ocean. The seven poems in this anthology written by Eliot and Olson suggest this connection. With their words, they gave voice to the spirit of the place.
In 1968 I first came to Gloucester to talk with Olson while I was writing a book about his interest in Herman Melville, and for the past several summers I’ve been a guest at the Gloucester Writers Center. I knew that since 2016, the large old house in East Gloucester built by Eliot’s father had also become a place, supported by the T.S. Eliot Foundation in England, where visiting writers could stay. This discovery gratified me, because seventy years ago, as a college freshman, I was introduced to the study of poetry as a possible (if distant) career when I’d fallen in love with Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
It is still one of my favorite poems. Over the years, re-reading it has the power to bring back memories of my own adolescence, somewhat like the taste of Proust’s delicate madeleine evoked his Remembrance of Things Past. My own immature self, still present in my consciousness, is awakened whenever I read Eliot’s descriptions of young Prufrock’s social and sexual anxieties. In the table of contents of The Gloucester Notebook, I found not one but three Prufrock titles. I knew that Eliot had been a young man when he wrote this early, landmark poem, but reading it again in The Gloucester Notebook made me wonder, had he perhaps actually written it in Gloucester?
Back at the Gloucester W riters Center on East Main Street, when I settled down to explore my copy of the book, I found
that the poem I had loved for so many years was dated July-August 1911. Eliot would have been 21 years old at that time. Later Robert Crawford’s biography Young Eliot informed me that young Tom, having graduated from Harvard University, was traveling in Europe that year instead of sailing around Gloucester and Cape Ann, as he had during most of the summers since his childhood. He was actually in Munich, Germany when he wrote and dated the fair copy in black ink of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on the pages of the notebook he’d purchased in a stationery store in downtown Gloucester. He must have taken the notebook with him when he went abroad.
Until I read the introduction to the Notebook, I didn’t know that Eliot considered Gloucester “the most beautiful harbor for small ships.” Young Tom didn’t evoke images of this provincial Massachusetts city in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In 1960 Eliot explained that in writing it, he had used his native city of St. Louis for its urban imagery, “upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed.”
Crawford understood that “maritime images rooted in Gloucester reverberate throughout Eliot’s work,” and what the young poet might have had in mind in this early poem was the harbor’s connection to the sea. When I re-read the poem, I was struck at mid-point, after Eliot’s descriptions of the streets and smoke of the city, by the startling image of Prufrock as an ocean creature, a crustacean in the midst of the poem’s claustrophobic urban imagery — “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
The conclusion of “The Love Song of J. A lfred Prufrock” is unforgettable, when middle-aged Prufrock, the solitary singer of his love song, walks along the beach in his rolled-up white trousers and hears “the mermaids singing, each to each.” Painfully conscious that the seductive mermaids in the water are paying no attention to him, he listens as they sing to each other and finally turn their backs on him while they intimately comb “the white hair of the waves” on their ride seaward. Following the “sea-girls” of his imagination into “the chambers of the sea,” Prufrock re-emerges at the sound of human voices, but in the last word of the poem, he drowns after coming back to reality.
When young Tom wrote these lines, in my imagination he could have been visualizing the strip of Niles Beach and the expanse of ocean below his family’s summer house, located among the granite boulders on Eastern Point.
Young Tom Eliot seated third from left with the staff of the literary magazine in the 1910 Harvard yearbook
Crawford considered “Prufrock” was “one of the bravest poems about gender ever authored.” The poem “confronts, mines and metamorphoses anxieties that lay deep within Tom and may lie within some of his audience.” Responding to the complex tone of the poem, the critic Helen Vendler wrote that Eliot was “a lacerating ironist of his own emotions.” The poem’s epigraph is a quotation from section xxvii of Dante’s Inferno. “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.” It suggests how Prufrock speaks the truth about himself to an unnamed “you” (his reader?) in his opening line.
Niles Beach — Winter bathers looking south
Until I had spent several summers in Gloucester and read The Gloucester Notebook, I had never thought much about how this poet’s boyhood vacation home beside the sea was connected to his writing. In Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he had insisted on the necessity of the poet’s severance of personal details from his poetry, though later in life he said that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was “partly a dramatic creation of a man about forty … and partly an expression of feeling of my own through this dim, imaginary figure.”
Reading the poem in The Gloucester Notebook changed its associations for me. It confirmed Eliot’s attachment to the coastal landscape of his childhood home. Finally I appreciated what the critic F.O. Matthiessen had realized about Eliot’s poetry in 1946, “How often a sudden release of the spirit is expressed through sea-imagery which, with its exact notation of gulls and granite rocks and the details of sailing, seems always to spring from his own boyhood experience off the New England coast.”
The Eliot family’s summer house at 18 Edgemoor Road in East Gloucester is located alongside huge granite rocks on a gently sloping hill. Originally the property extended down to the ocean and offered an unobstructed view of Eastern Point. The elegant shingled house with its broad wrap-around porch was built in 1896, when young Tom was eight. It was sold after his father’s death in 1919. After the Second World War, Eliot made brief visits to Gloucester to see the house. He even explained to the then-current owners that he’d been given the smallest bedroom, because he was his family’s youngest child. After his death in 1965, his widow Valerie Eliot wanted to buy the house, since young Tom had been so happy there.
W hat did Olson think of Eliot’s poetry? In Gloucester after Olson’s death in 1970, his biographer Ralph Maud visited one of his neighbors near the modest apartment the poet had rented at the Fort, after learning that he had left a box of books with her for safekeeping. Among these books was a volume of Eliot’s poetry. Olson admired the work of Ezra Pound and
The porch on The Downs Tom and Henry Ware Eliot Sr sailing c.1900s
The Eliot family sailing the boat Elsa in Gloucester c.1910
William Carlos Williams, Eliot’s Modernist contemporaries. He had always said that he despised Eliot — whom he nicknamed “Reverend” — possibly because of Eliot’s high church literary style after “Prufrock,” or because of Eliot’s reverence for tradition, or because the finished perfection of Eliot’s poems such as “The Waste Land” was so widely admired throughout the world that many readers considered his poems “gospel,” the highest standard for modern poetry written in English.
Olson had kept the volume of Eliot’s poetry in his library, though he didn’t consider it necessary for his work on The Maximus Poems, his long poem about Gloucester. The 635 pages of Olson’s epic poem are regarded as one of the high achievements of twentieth-century American letters. Literary critics have regarded Olson’s work as “returning poetry to its Homeric and Hesiodic scope”; it is regarded as an essential poem in the postmodern canon. Eliot’s lyrical Prufrock poems in The Gloucester Notebook, in comparison, couldn’t be more unlike Olson’s epic project.
Both poets came to Gloucester as young children with their parents for summer vacations, though they had little else in common. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, close to the Mississippi River, and his parents were proud of their distinguished New England heritage. Olson was born in 1910 in the land-locked city of Worcester, Massachusetts; his maternal grandfather was from Ireland, his father had immigrated from Sweden.
Eliot’s parents were wealthy; his father owned the largest brick manufacturing company in the Midwest. Olson’s father was a postman who delivered mail on his city route until his retirement. Eliot was the youngest child in a large family; Olson was an only child. Eliot spent the summers in a spacious house built at great expense by his father in an exclusive neighborhood bordering the ocean; Olson’s parents rented a small cottage in a campground on Stage Fort Avenue, not far from the fisheries in the harbor.
Olson was bulky and tall, achieving the height of six feet eight inches. Eliot, born with a hernia, wore a truss. His medical condition kept him out of sports, though at an early age, after he learned how to sail in Gloucester, it became his favorite summer pastime off Cape Ann and the coast of Maine. As Maximus, Olson
The Downs, the Eliots’ summer home
described how he came late to sailing, and admitted that he was clumsy at it.
Their poetry and their careers differed as much as their life experiences in Gloucester. Eliot’s early poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” made him well-known after its publication in 1917. Olson didn’t achieve a significant reputation for his poetry until, in middle age, he published the first of the three volumes of The Maximus Poems in 1960. He continued working on his poem until his death from liver cancer a decade later. The lives and the writing of these two American poets couldn’t have been more different, but the Gloucester notebook was evidence to me that living in Gloucester had made both men feel at home.
Eliot and Olson never published memoirs about their early experiences in Gloucester, but their lives are well documented. Growing up in St. Louis, Eliot spent most of his time in the midst of his large family and their staff of servants in their home on Locust Street. The youngest of six surviving children, his four sisters Ada, Margaret, Charlotte, and Marian were many years older, and his brother Henry Jr., nine years older. His parents were middle aged, both forty-five when he was born, and they were very protective of him.
Tom was close to his mother, who also wrote poetry, though when he was eleven, she admitted that he was the better writer. Before that time, he wrote his first extant letter to his father in St. Louis from their newly built house in Gloucester. A successful business manager, president of his firm and director of several companies, Henry Ware Eliot joined his family later on holiday and taught his sons how to sail.
23-24 June 1898 Gloucester
Dear Papa,
It is very cool here when we get up — that is, indoors, outdoors it is just right. We have no sunflowers, there were two in the rose bed, and Marian weeded them up. I found the things in the upper tray of my trunk all knocked about. A microscope was broken and a box of butterflies and a spider.
Charlotte and I hunt for birds. She found an empty nest yesterday (23rd). Marian, Margaret & Henry are going to Class-day.
Yours Truly, Tom
Young Tom’s self-possession (“outdoors it is just right”) was evident at an early age. Photographs of him destined for the family album
Views inside the Eliot House
show a thin, gangly boy in long trousers perched on a wall, or hunched inside a sail boat in tall rubber boots, or standing stiffly at the end of a crowd of elaborately dressed sisters and New England cousins lined up for the camera. My favorite snapshot, taken in 1907, is of Young Tom during his freshman year at Harvard, wearing white flannel trousers on the porch in East Gloucester.
Young Tom’s avid love of sailing became his passion on Cape Ann. He and his brother learned to sail on the catboat Elsa and honed their skills off the granite shore of the ocean near their summer home. By 1909 at Harvard, he had met Harold Peters, an expert sailor, who became his favorite sailing partner. Peters introduced Young Tom to cruising in his sailboat the Lynx, “a 19-foot knockabout, before the days of power.”
Their most ambitious trip was sailing around the small group of rocks with a beacon, the Dry Salvages off Rockport, and then up to Mount Desert Rock, now part of Acadia National Park, in heavy fog and a rough sea, mooring overnight at Duck Island. Later Eliot’s biographer described this navigation of Mount Desert Rock in the Atlantic Ocean as “death-defying.”
His experiences at sea made a deep impression on young Tom. Years later, in addition to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” they gave rise to images in poems such as The Wasteland and the
A contemporary photograph of The Downs, now called Eliot House
Young Tom standing in a corner of the porch, Gloucester, 1907
third of The Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages,” with its description of a measurement of time off Cape Ann more ancient than any human time: “The tolling bell/measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried/Ground swell, a time/Older than the time of chronometers …”
R eading the first volume of Eliot’s letters gives a strong impression of his closeness to his family. His parents expected him to continue studying at Harvard and complete a doctorate in philosophy for an academic career. Instead, before finishing his degree, Eliot moved to London in 1914 and insisted on going his own way as a poet. Later he recalled beginning to write “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” while he was an undergraduate in 1909-1910 and finishing it while travelling in Munich and Paris.
Young Tom used his Gloucester notebook to write fair copies of his early poems until 1917. It was a leather-bound notebook with marbled-paper sides, measuring 7-3/4 inches by 9-3/4 inches. In 1922 the young poet gave it as a gift to the New York lawyer John Quinn, to show gratitude for Quinn’s help getting his poetry published. In 1958 Quinn’s heirs sold the Gloucester notebook to the New York Public Library. Inside on the upper front cover of the book, Eliot pasted in a tiny piece of printed paper from the store where he’d purchased it: “From Procter Brothers co. Old Corner Bookstore. Blank Books. Stationery. Cameras. 108 Main Street. Gloucester.”
On its flyleaf he printed in bold capital letters, inventions of the march hare. [After 1914, on the previous blank page across from the pasted stub of paper from Procter Brothers, he wrote, perhaps as a joke, complete poems of t.s. eliot.]
The notebook’s seventy-two pages contained over thirty early poems, with the titles “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (continued)” placed midway in the table of contents. After Eliot had shown these three poems to his new friend Ezra Pound in London, Pound suggested the editorial changes that merged them into a single poem.
As a young writer, Eliot had tried to imitate the dramatic monologues of the
The view from Eliot’s childhood bedroom window
Victorian poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), such as “My Last Duchess,” in which Browning invented the character of a cold-blooded Duke who described how he had issued orders for the murder of his wife.
Dissatisfied with the conventional language of American poetry at the turn of the twentieth century, Eliot later said that Browning had been “more than a hindrance than a help, for he had gone some way, but not far enough, in discovering a contemporary idiom.” As Pound understood, Browning set his poems “mostly in Renaissance Italy … t.s.e. has gone further and begun with the much more difficult job of setting his ‘personae’ in modern life, with the discouragingly ‘unpoetic’ modern surroundings.”
Eliot credited the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) as “the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech.” During the previous century the young Laforgue had admired the poetry of Walt Whitman. In Eliot’s last semester as an undergraduate at Harvard, he read the French poet, translated his poetry into English, and became a “Francophile before he ever set foot in France.” In 1946 Eliot claimed there was no poet writing in English who could have been of use to an American beginner in 1908. “The only recourse was to poetry of another age and to poetry of another language.”
What young Tom appropriated in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in addition to Laforgue’s images of industrial smoke, were, as he admitted, “broken conversations punctuated by three dots.” More important, he used contemporary settings and captured the questioning, ironic, inconclusive tone of Laforgue’s language. It resulted in the language of “Prufrock,” suggesting the sound of everyday speech that Eliot was searching for.
W ho was Prufrock? I always thought that Eliot invented the name in the title of his poem, to suggest his narrator’s prudish, inhibited, fastidious, slightly old fashioned (frock coat) personality. Literary scholars discovered that an actual person with that name had lived in St. Louis. In 1868, twenty years before Eliot’s birth, William Prufrock left Germany to settle in the midwestern American city. He married, had three children, and established the William Prufrock Furniture Company, inherited by his son Harry
The 22-cent postage stamp honoring T.S. Eliot was issued in 1986
before 1910. The company’s name frequently appeared in newspaper advertisements while Eliot was growing up in St. Louis.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry magazine in 1915. Two years later, it became the title poem in Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations. With that poem, he was regarded as a serious talent. His next book, The Waste Land, published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, made him famous with his depiction of the contemporary sense of chaos, disequilibrium, and insecurity following the First World War. These two Modernist writers, along with many of their gifted contemporaries such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf, created a new international literary style.
Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Vendler understood that “There are only a few persons in any generation who can make inner human emotions visible in a rhythmic linguistic structure bearing aesthetic feeling, conveying, in a transhistorical way, the sensation of being alive at a particular historical period. We call such persons poets; in becoming such a person, Eliot became a crystallizer of emotional response for his whole epoch.”
Though Olson praised the work of Pound and Williams, he went his own way as a poet. Resistance was one of his fiercest principles. As he wrote in “Song 3” of The Maximus Poems,
In the land of plenty, have nothing to do with it take the way of the lowest, including your legs, go contrary, go sing
In particular, Olson was critical of Eliot’s use of what the older poet termed the “objective correlative.” This was an object such as the fruit in Prufrock’s question “Do I dare to eat a peach?” The peach became a symbol that objectified emotion, its fuzzy skin suggesting Prufrock’s sexual inhibition earlier in the poem, when he was unnerved by the sight of a woman’s arms in the lamplight “downed with light brown hair.” In Eliot’s poetry, things weren’t only meant to be themselves;
they could also serve as abstract symbols of other things.
In The Maximus Poems, Olson wrote about Gloucester as a real geographic place. He intended his poetry not to suggest abstract “objective correlatives,” but to be read as his personal account of the history of a New England city. In part IV of Eliot’s poem “The Dry Salvages,” for example, written after the outbreak of the Second World War and the bombing of London, the poet referred to the shrine of a “Lady” standing “on the promontory” somewhere on Cape Ann, and asked her to pray “for all those who are in ships” who have put their lives at risk. Eliot envisioned this shrine as a symbol of hope during the war, when English and American ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean were targeted for destruction by Nazi planes and submarines.
When Eliot wrote that line in “The Dry Salvages,” he hadn’t been in Gloucester for decades and probably had only a vague memory of seeing the actual statue of Our Lady of Good Voyage standing on top of the Portuguese church above the harbor, cradling a model of a schooner on her left arm instead of the infant Jesus. Eighteen feet high, this statue had been visible since 1892 to the crews of all the fishing boats leaving Gloucester harbor. Olson took the statue as his muse in the creation of his Maximus poems.
As Maud realized, in Olson’s poetry, he was “trying to persuade us that we must move from the world of T.S. Eliot” and its abstraction to the particulars of life as it is lived. Olson wasn’t alone in his criticism of what Jack Kerouac called, in “The Origins of Joy in Poetry,” Eliot’s “dreary negative rules like the objective correlative.”
Olson began writing his Maximus poems about Gloucester when he was middle aged, but his connection with the city, like Eliot’s, began when he was young. Raised as an only child in a third-floor tenement apartment in Worcester, Charlie was nearly five years old when his parents began to spend their summers in Gloucester. They took a long-term lease on a cottage named
Oceanwood in a campground owned by Gloucester mayor Charles Homer Barrett.
There Charlie swam at nearby Cressy’s and Half Moon Beach and played in Fisherman’s Field, supposedly the site where the Dorchester Company had settled in 1623. An early photograph shows him standing next to his mother, a boy with long skinny arms in a bathing suit amid a group of vacationers at Stage Fort Park.
As a teenager Charlie worked a summer job in Gloucester at a fish processing plant, the first of the jobs that brought him closer to people’s lives in the city. A brilliant student orator, he graduated from Worcester Classical High School and attended Wesleyan University on a scholarship. Starting in 1930, during four summers in Gloucester, he was hired as a substitute letter carrier, walking a route through the streets of the town, following in his father’s footsteps as a postman in Worcester.
After his father died in 1935, Olson’s mother moved to Oceanwood year-round, where she resided until her death in 1950. Charlie worked briefly on a Gloucester schooner, fishing for swordfish before starting graduate work in American Studies at Harvard. Two years later, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his research on Herman Melville.
Left, Olson with parents in front of Oceanwood, 1927. Above, Olson & his father wearing postman hats, 1931. Below, Olson in grammar school class photo, 1922
Like Eliot, he left the university before completing the requirements for his doctorate in literature. He joined his widowed mother in Gloucester and wrote the first draft of his Melville book. In the 1940s, he moved to Washington, D.C., and worked in various government agencies during the Second World War.
Call Me Ishmael, Olson’s book about the influences on Melville that inspired Moby-Dick, was published in 1947. The previous year the manuscript had been rejected by Eliot, then an editor at Faber & Faber publishing company in London, who considered it, Olson later told me in conversation, as “too little, and too American, a book.” As Maud understood, in 1949 Charlie began a deliberate attempt to write a long poem that was, as he called it, “Anti-Waste Land,” as different from Eliot’s Modernist poetry as he could create, what he envisioned as a more “objective record and vista of the city.”
Olson’s biographer summarized what he called the final “basic mode” of Olson’s way of structuring his long poems as “moral statement aided by analogies and some Eisensteinian montage” (referring to the great Soviet cinematographer Sergi Eisenstein, one of Olson’s favorites).
During 1948-49, Olson began teaching at Black Mountain College, an experimental college of the arts in North Carolina. Five years later, he became Rector of the college. After it lost accreditation, Olson tried to rebuild the school with a focus on creative writing before it closed in 1957. By then he had published poetry and a widely discussed article on poetics titled “Projective Verse” (1950). This was his advocacy of the creation of poems considered as an “open field,” like the paintings of Jackson Pollock and the music of John Cage, instead of Eliot’s closed system of poems patterned upon traditionally accepted models.
As Olson wrote, “This stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to a new poetics.” Olson was insisting that new poetry should be open form. It should project and transfer energy to the
Above, a portrait of Olson at Wesleyan, 1932
reader instinctively, through the poet’s breath, not through the use of meter or other closed, “academic” forms revered by Eliot and other traditional poets.
“Projective Verse” was a manifesto anticipating the world-wide cultural revolution that blossomed during the next decades, though in 1957 Olson was relatively unknown when he returned with his second wife Betty and young son to Gloucester. They settled into an unheated, one bedroom apartment on the second floor of a house at 28 Fort Square overlooking the harbor.
Renting the apartment for the remainder of his life, Olson devoted himself to working on the ambitious project he called the Maximus poems. He conceived this work as a modern epic in the spirit of Pound’s Pisan Cantos and Williams’ Paterson. According to Olson’s editor George Butterick, when the poet began to write his epic, he “lacked a clear conception of what he was seeking,” uncertain of the form and direction of the poem, playing it “by ear.”
In May 1950, while living in Washington, D.C., Olson had written his first Maximus poem as a letter to Vincent Ferrini, a picture framer and poet whom he met in Gloucester, who was starting a literary magazine. Olson took an historical figure, Maximus of Tyre, a second century A.D. Greek philosopher who admired the philosophy of Plato, as the hero of his poem. Evisioning Maximus as an archetypal figure who addressed himself to the coastal city, Olson gave the name “Maximus” to the entire series of poems that he created over the next twenty years about Gloucester. Later he stated that “the creature [Maximus] is either me or whom he originally was intended as, which was Maximus of Tyre.” The epic was published in a series of three volumes: The Maximus Poems (1960), Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968), and The Maximus Poems, Volume Three (1975).
For Olson, Gloucester served as a “holy place in the poems, and contains hidden within itself a polis or ideal city,” which the poet will suggest “by his act of imagination as well as personal investigation into the historical reality of the place.” In this ideal city, human potential would be fully realized.
As Butterick noted, “The most difficult consideration facing Olson was the form a poem of this magnitude should take.”
His opening “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” develops the image of the sea gulls in Gloucester, flying over the city, instinctively building their intricate nests with found materials. In a similar way, the poet would construct his epic poem, building on the chosen particulars of his sense of place.
Using letters and various other literary forms to create the more than three hundred poems in his Maximus epic, Olson spoke in multiple voices. Primarily he regarded himself as an historian like Herodotus, “which means to find out for yourself.” He also considered himself an archaeologist and a mythologist. Some of the poems were set in a particular historical time, yet were meant to be timeless; others were an imaginative account referring to recent events in his own life story. They all suggest the poet’s sense of wonder at life’s mysteries — life, death, and continuity.
In the early poems, speaking as the legendary poet Maximus, Olson used Gloucester “as a bridge to Venice and back from Venice to Tyre,” the ancient city on the Mediterranean coast, one of the world’s oldest inhabited cities. The opening poem describes Gloucester as the end point of an epic human journey, “the departure from the old static land mass of man which was the ice, cave, Pleistocene man and early agriculture man, until he got moving [West], until he got towns. So that the last polis or city is Gloucester.” Olson’s initial vision of Gloucester represented “the final movement of the earth’s people” as “migration ended in Gloucester … Gloucester was the last shore” of the human push West.
In “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” [I,1], Maximus speaks “offshore,” from “further east than Gloucester to the city,” that is, from his ancient native city of Tyre. In this poem, Antony of Padua (1195-1231) was a Franciscan friar and saint who served as the
Olson, his mother and others in July 1937
patron of the Portuguese fishing community in Gloucester. “My lady of good voyage” is a reference to the giant statue on top of the Church of Our Lady of Good Voyage on Prospect Street in Gloucester. The statue became Olson’s muse because, as he told Butterick, he regarded each poem as “a voyage, and I want a good voyage.”
“Maximus, to himself” [I, 52] was written in April 1953 at Black Mountain College. Here Olson speaks personally about himself in his role as Gloucester’s Maximus. The poet is highly conscious of his lack of status in his community and the slow progress of his career. Midway in the poem, he acknowledges the help and encouragement of his fellow-poet Robert Creeley, to whom he dedicates his on-going series of poems.
The next two poems describe the historical beginnings of Gloucester in 1623 and suggest the city’s development centuries later into a major fishing port, dependent upon the abundance of fish on Georges Bank and the courage of its local fishermen. “a Plantation a beginning” [I,102], written in Gloucester during the winter of 1957-58, takes its title from a passage in the English explorer John Smith’s 1624 book The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (Travels and Works, II, 783).
Olson’s poem suggests the hardships suffered by the early European settlers of Gloucester, who barely survived the harsh conditions of their first winter. He based this description on John White’s Planters’ Plea. In addition to fishing, these fourteen Englishmen attempted to grow crops in the poor soil that was “thinnest dust” and tried to trade trinkets for beaver pelts with the local indigenous people.
Later Olson was criticized for his Euro-centric point of view in his sparse descriptions of the indigenous people, the earliest inhabitants of Gloucester. They had lived in Gloucester long before the white men settled there in the early 17th century. Since these original settlers had migrated toward the East from the Asian landmass during the ice ages more than 15,000 years ago, the coastal location of Gloucester on the Atlantic shore would have also been their “last shore.”
In 1606, seventeen years before the English spent their first winter
Olson in front of a brick doorway, Washington c. 1942-5
in Gloucester, the French explorer Samuel Champlain sailed into Gloucester Harbor at Eastern Point and made camp at Rocky Neck while his ship was under repair. Champlain ordered a map drawn of the harbor he named “Le Beau Port.” His map showed the tents of approximately two hundred native people living on the shore. By 1623 only about twenty had survived. Small pox had
decimated this population in the years before the arrival of the Dorchester Company fishermen sent to colonize the land that would eventually be named Gloucester. As Smith wrote, “by Cape Anne, there is a Plantation a beginning by the Dorchester men … who also by them have set up a fishing worke …”
“1st Letter on Georges” [I,136], was written during the winter of 1957-58 in Gloucester. Olson is honoring the heroic behavior of the early fishermen under sail, whose centuries of hard work and stoic endurance made this fishing port one of the most prosperous in the United States. He took his account of a storm on George’s Bank during February 24-25, 1862 almost word-for-word from George H. Proctor’s The Fishermen’s Memorial and Record Book, published in Gloucester by Proctor Brothers in 1873.
The poet ends his narrative by blending it into another account of a storm at sea at the same location in Victorian times, during which 120 fishermen were lost. Perhaps Olson’s understated tribute to the bravery of the local fishermen was his response to the Romanticism of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1842), the famous early American poem based on a true story about a shipwreck off Gloucester. I never got the chance to ask Olson about it.
“Maximus, from Dogtown” [II,2] is from Olson’s second book Maximus IV, V, VI. Here Olson tells the epic tale of James Merry, whom the poet transforms into a mythological figure based on a resident of Gloucester’s inland village of Dogtown, located five miles from the harbor that developed later into the center of the growing city. Originally named the Commons Settlement, Dogtown was first inhabited by hardworking families in 1693. According to one of the many legends about the place, the settlement was renamed after the women kept hordes of dogs to protect themselves while their husbands were away for several years, fighting in the American Revolution.
By 1839, the desperately poor community of Dogtown was abandoned after the last resident died. As the historian Elyssa East understood, Dogtown “was a difficult place for growing much of anything,” since “the land was nearly carpeted in rocks.” In the 1930s, unemployed stone cutters were commissioned to carve inspirational inscriptions such as “help mother,” “get a job,” and “use your head” on thirty-six of the boulders scattered throughout Dogtown’s deserted, wildly overgrown meadows and pasture land.
Olson’s poem about James Merry in “Maximus, from Dogtown”
One of the Dogtown Rocks, carved in the 1930s
celebrates the man’s phenomenal physical strength, like the Grecian hero Hercules and the Old Testament hero Samson. But the young Merry has two flaws: he is an alcoholic and an egotist. Rather than serving, like Maximus, as the model of the ideal man, Merry wishes to prove, like Melville’s captain Ahab, that he can conquer Nature. The bull that Merry has raised from its birth in Dogtown has grown to a prodigious size, and Merry’s attempt to wrestle it to the ground proves fatal.
In 1961 Auerhahn Press in San Francisco printed “Maximus, from Dogtown” with a foreword by the California poet Michael McClure. In November 1959, McClure had visited Olson in Gloucester and described a walk they had taken in Dogtown shortly before Olson wrote the poem: “Around us in the cold rocky fields where once farms & houses stood, women, far away, bent picking ground growing evergreens for Xmas florals. Charles told me the story of the
handsome stocky man [James Merry] — pointing to a rock & patch of ground — ‘Here’ he said ‘where the bull’s enclosure was…’”
“Cole’s Island” [III,69] appears in the posthumously published Maximus Poems: Volume Three. Cole’s Island is a section of West Gloucester located in the marshes surrounding the Essex River. In A Guide to The Maximus Poems, Butterick states that this magical realist poem is dated 9 September 1964, nearly six months after the death of Olson’s wife in an automobile accident. The poet apparently started another version based on a dream he’d had eighteen months earlier:
Death, I am paying my respects. You come out suddenly on the path as though I am a trespasser on your land. . . .
The last time I was in Gloucester, I visited Beechbrook Cemetery, where Olson lies under a slate headstone alongside his wife Betty. I also drove to Cole’s Island because I wanted to see if it still seemed as haunted as the poet described. A half century after he walked there with his young son, I noticed a row of new mailboxes at the beginning of the winding, private road and glimpsed several recently built, large, isolated houses through the majestic trees and boulders that cover the island. The land’s serene, mysterious, transcendent atmosphere prevails.
As poets, young Tom and Charlie made very different use of Gloucester, its landscape, and its history in their writing. Eliot’s lyric poem, often anthologized, takes the reader into profoundly deep water, perhaps off Niles Beach (in my imagination). Olson’s
The Dogtown Rocks have inspirational inscriptions carved on them
epic, represented here by six poems about Gloucester, depicts various locations with his unique brilliance and power. The poems in this book by the two writers convey their intensely personal responses to the New England coast that they knew so well.
The two poets didn’t spend their entire lives in Gloucester — Eliot took British nationality, and Olson taught at the University of Connecticut in Storrs during his last months, where he wrote the final great Maximus poem about the deep geological past of the old stone walls lining the country roads. Toward the end of his life, he lost faith in the special promise of his beloved city: “Gloucester too / is out of her mind and / is now indistinguishable from / the USA.” The spirit of the times that they lived on Cape Ann, captured in their writing, lives on in their words forever.
Olson with a statue of Madonna in his yard at Stage Fort in Gloucester 1961
THE COMMENTARY AUTHORS
Amanda Cook grew up in Gloucester and lives there with her husband and their two children. She sees writing as an integral part of life. Her book, Ironstone Whirligig, was published by Bootstrap Press in 2017. Often critical of Olson’s stance in his Maximus poems, she continues to create poetry in the spirit of the open verse form he advocated in his essay “Projective Verse.” Cook began writing her Letter to Maximus, her poem-by-poem response to Olson’s Maximus poems, while teaching at the Gloucester Writers Center. As she writes in “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,”
I am trying to mark the edges of your shadow So I can see where my Gloucester falls in it.
Cook’s poem “a Plantation a beginning,” from her work in progress, is her commentary on Olson’s poem with the same title.
Samuel Charters (1929-2015), jazz and blues historian as well as poet and novelist, included his commentary on Olson’s “basic mode” in “The Maximus Poems — letter 7” in his book Some Poems/Poets (1971), essays dedicated to the memory of Charles Olson. This study contained Charters’ responses to a group of poems by ten mid-twentieth century American poets (including Olson, Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Larry Eigner, among others). In the 1960s Charters created Portents, a record company and small press. In 1968 he taped Olson at 28 Fort Square reading his poem for Melville, included in Portents 13, melville in the berkshires. Portents 19 was a photographic broadside documenting the cosmic reach of Olson’s Maximus:
When there were no depths I was born, when there were no sources
Of the fountains of the sea (sd Maximus) …
“The Maximus Poems — letter 7,” written like “Maximus, to Himself” in April 1953 while Olson was teaching at Black Mountain College, contains his discussion of the American painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), who spent the summer and fall of 1931 in Gloucester. While staying there, Hartley was impressed by what Butterick called “the curious moraine of Dogtown.”
To the artist, the landscape of this earlier settled and later abandoned section of Gloucester “looks like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge … It gives the feeling that any ancient race might turn up at any moment and review an ageless rite there … sea gulls fly over it on their way from the marshes to the sea; otherwise the place is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.”
In “Letter 7,” Olson refers to a photograph of his father, posing inside the Whale’s Jaw, a boulder in Dogtown featured in one of Hartley’s paintings. Olson felt free to criticize Hartley’s depiction of the rock, since as a poet at home in Gloucester, he was familiar with the sight of it.
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
BY T. S. ELIOT
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin — (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume? And how should I begin? . . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.” . . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Standing in Grant’s Department Store’s shipping door, 1961
THE MAXIMUS POEMS
I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood jewels & miracles, I, Maximus a metal hot from boiling water, tell you what is a lance, who obeys the figures of the present dance
1
the thing you’re after may lie around the bend of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird!
And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight (of the bird o kylix, o Antony of Padua sweep low, o bless
the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart,
And the flake-racks of my city!
2
love is form, and cannot be without important substance (the weight say, 58 carats each one of us, perforce our goldsmith’s scale
feather to feather added (and what is mineral, what is curling hair, the string you carry in your nervous beak, these make bulk, these, in the end, are the sum
(o my lady of good voyage in whose arm, whose left arm rests no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner! a delicate mast, as bow-sprit for forwarding 3
the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts! facts, to be dealt with, as the sea is, the demand that they be played by, that they only can be, that they must be played by, said he, coldly, the ear!
By ear, he sd.
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last, that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
when even our bird, my roofs, cannot be heard
when even you, when sound itself is neoned in?
when, on the hill, over the water where she who used to sing, when the water glowed, black, gold, the tide outward, at evening
when bells came like boats over the oil-slicks, milkweed hulls
And a man slumped, attentionless, against pink shingles
o sea city)
4
one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born
born of yourself, born of hay and cotton struts, of street-pickings, wharves, weeds you carry in, my bird
of a bone of a fish of a straw, or will of a color, of a bell of yourself, torn
5
love is not easy but how shall you know, New England, now that pejorocracy is here, how that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter in the afternoon, offend a black-gold loin?
how shall you strike, o swordsman, the blue-red back when, last night, your aim was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick And not the cribbage game?
(o Gloucester-man, weave your birds and fingers new, your roof-tops, clean shit upon racks sunned on American
braid with others like you, such extricable surface as faun and oral, satyr lesbos vase o kill kill kill kill kill those who advertise you out)
6 in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the beak in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form that which you make, what holds, which is the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect, the mast, the mast, the tender mast!
The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say under the hand, as I see it, over the waters from this place where I am, where I hear, can still hear from where I carry you. a feather as though, sharp, I picked up, in the afternoon delivered you a jewel, it flashing more than a wing, than any old romantic thing, than memory, than place, than anything other than that which you carry than that which is, call it a nest, around the head of, call it the next second than that which you can do!
to himself
I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties. Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross a wet deck.
The sea was not,finally, my trade. But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged from that which was most familiar. Was delayed, and not content with the man’s argument that such postponement is now the nature of obedience, that we are all late in a slow time, that we grow up many And the single is not easily known
It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote) I note in others, makes more sense than my own distances. The agilities they show daily who do the world’s businesses
And who do nature’s as I have no sense I have done either
I have made dialogues, have discussed ancient texts, have thrown what light I could, offered what pleasures doceat allows
But the known? This, I have had to be given, a life, love, and from one man the world.
Tokens. But sitting here I look out as a wind and water man, testing And missing some proof
I know the quarters of the weather, where it comes from, where it goes. But the stem of me, this I took from their welcome, or their rejection, of me
And my arrogance was neither diminished nor increased, by the communication 2
It is undone business I speak of, this morning, with the sea stretching out from my feet
a Plantation a beginning
I sit here on a Sunday with grey water, the winter staring me in the face
“the Snow lyes indeed about a foot thicke for ten weekes” John White warns any prospective planter
Fourteen spare men the first year who huddled above Half Moon beach or got out of the onshore breeze by clustering what sort of what shacks around the inshore harbor side of Stage Head where now lovers have a park and my mother and my wife were curious what went on in back seats and Pat Foley
was furious some guy on all four legs crawled
about, to get a better view when Pat sat spooning (where leisure occupies shore where fishing worke was first set up, and fourteen men did what with Gloucester’s nothing land
and all her harbor?
The ship which brought them we don’t even know its name, or Master
as they called a Capt then, except that that first season, 1623
the fishing, Gloucester was good: the small ship (the Fellowship?) sailed for Bilbao full
It cost the Company 200 pounds($10,000) to try these men
ashore that year, to plant a land was thinnest dust
to trade for furs where smallpox had made Champlain’s
Indians of 1606 as thin as dogs come in to hover
around what campfires these fourteen Englishmen managed
where I as young man berthed a skiff and scarfed my legs to get up rocks
this cost is all it’s made of, not soil not beaver
fish fish fish Her cargo brought the Spanish market exactly the same the Company spent Stage Fort: 200 pounds. Thus loss that season. For the ship’s own charge was more for voyage; and her cost, to buy her when they launched the adventure of the new frontier (not boom, or gold, the lucky strike, but work, a fishing “have set up”, said Smith, “this year upon the Coast about 50. English ships and by Cape Anne Dorchester men a plantation a beginning”) the ship alone small fiftie tunnes new sute of sayles amounted to more than three hundred pound. And now by Reason the Voyage
was undertaken too late, And the whole Provenue was too little, the deficit It cost $30,000 to get Gloucester started
and wife Betty in the kitchen, June 1963
Olson
February night, or August on Georges the seas are short, the room’s small. When the moon’s fullest the tidal currents set fastest
On the morning of February 14th we starred and in twenty-four hours were over the rocky bottom of the southerly part of the Bank. A hundred sail were crowded in together, half a mile, and some a mile, apart, handlining, where the cod spawn.
The fishing and the weather were good for days. Although the cold was intense we were at the rail sometimes a full hour without changing position, then, if we got a halibut, the cook would bring up a pancake with plums in it to celebrate. And coffee.
The vessel shifted its berth twice, in the first week, each time drawing nearer to the body of the fleet. The fish were more plentiful but with each move our concern grew, for we were all bunched up easterly of dreaded South Shoal. If the weather stayed fine there was no danger but if it came on a gale and even one vessel dragged her anchor, or chafed her cable and went adrift, we might all go.
At sundown on the 24th there was a sudden change. The clouds massed, and the rising wind roughened the seas. At eight o’clock the skipper was uneasy, he kept looking up at the sky and at the horizon. The wind had veered to the northeast, and was increasing. It began to snow, moderately at first, and then more.
The skipper went forward to examine the cable and gave orders to pay out ten fathom. Our lights, in the rigging, had been lit since sundown, and the rest of the fleet could still be seen, when the skipper, warning that the night would be a watch for all of us, advised those who could, to get some sleep. We went below about half-past eight.
It was now about eleven o’clock. The wind was a gale, the snow came down spitefully, and the seas were so high we could do nothing but look up the sides of them. From the short break of them in these confines of Georges, the way they snapped themselves off, one of them could break aboard us and sweep everything over the rail to leeward, or, worst, coming in too big, set down on us, bury us, smother the vessel under its weight and take it and us down in one crush.
At midnight the tide itself changed, set toward shoalwater, and now the wind, the sea and the tide were in one movement from the northeast, and the gravest strain was put on all the vessels trying to ride out the night. We were on deck to keep what lookout we could for the first vessel which might loose itself and drive on to us. The oldest hand aboard was at the windlass with a hatchet ready to cut the cable if paying it out wasn’t fast enough to let a vessel by, and we had to go ourselves.
The darkness had become impenetrable and a more dismal night none of us ever passed. We longed for morning to dawn. Once in a while the storm would lull for a little, and the snow not fall so thickly. Then we would see some of the lights of the fleet nearest us, but this was not often. During the night a large vessel did pass quite near us. We could see her lights, also her spars and sails, as she was driven swiftly along. We trembled at the thought of what she might have done had she struck us, and when we learned of the terrible disaster of the gale, we spoke of this vessel as the cause of some portion of it.
At length the east began to lighten. Morning was coming. Our danger was not over, the gale continued, but there was comfort to the light.The fearful darkness and the terrible uncertainty was relieved. We could now at least see our position.
We had something to eat, in turns, when, about nine o’clock, the skipper sang out, “Vessel adrift, just ahead of us.” All eyes were on her. On she came directly for us. A moment more and we’d have had to cut, when she passed with the swiftness of a gull, so near any one of us could have leaped aboard her. We watched her as she went on and a short distance astern she struck one of the fleet and we saw the waters close
over both vessels, almost instantly. As we looked they both disappeared.
Our own anchor began to drag, and we yaw. This was dangerous in the extreme, for if the anchors did not take hold again, find new bottom, we too must cut and once adrift go as these others had. Fortunately, the anchors bit up, found holding ground, and we rode again in safety.
All through the day of the 25th we watched. Two more vessels bore down on us, but went clear. We were saved. At sundown the gale moderated and the terror of it, which had swept so fearfully over Georges, was over.
The next day we were back at fishing, we fished through the week, had good fishing, and headed home. Eastern Point Light, when first sighted, looked good to us, but coming in by the Fort, the crowds of people waiting there to see each vessel’s name awoke it all again. Several came on board asking if we had seen such and such a vessel since the gale. The town was in commotion. Such anxiety I hope never again to witness. The wharves were full of broken ships and there was hardly a home which didn’t have a loss. The gloom was general over the town for many days. One hundred and twenty men had drowned that one night and day, and fifteen vessels gone down, all on Georges
the shoal of Georges the north, west and south
proem
The sea was born of the earth without sweet union of love Hesiod says But that then she lay for heaven and she bare the thing which encloses every thing, Okeanos the one which all things are and by which nothing is anything but itself, measured so
screwing earth, in whom love lies which unnerves the limbs and by its heat floods the mind and all gods and men into further nature
Vast earth rejoices,
deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things, everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead, the man awake lights up from the sleeping
WATERED ROCK
of pasture meadow orchard road where Merry died in pieces tossed by the bull he raised himself to fight in front of people, to show off his Handsome Sailor ism
died as torso head & limbs in a Saturday night’s darkness drunk trying to get the young bull down to see if Sunday morning again he might before the people show off once more his prowess — braggart man to die among Dogtown meadow rocks
“under” the dish of the earth Okeanos under Dogtown through which (inside of which) the sun passes at night — she passes the sun back to the east through her body the Geb(of heaven) at night
Nut is water above & below, vault above and below watered rock on which by which Merry was so many pieces Sunday morning
subterranean and celestial primordial water holds Dogtown high
And down the ice holds Dogtown, scattered boulders little bull who killed Merry who sought to manifest his soul, the stars manifest their souls
my soft sow the roads of Dogtown trickling like from underground rock springs under an early cold March moon
or hot summer and my son we come around a corner where a rill makes Gee Avenue in a thin ford
after we see a black duck walking across a populated corner
life spills out
Soft soft rock Merry died by in the black night fishermen lived in Dogtown and came when it was old to whore on Saturday nights at three girls’ houses
Pisces eternally swimming inside her overhead their boots or the horse clashing the sedimentary rock tortoise shell she sits on the maternal beast of the moon and the earth
Not one mystery nor man possibly not even a bird heard Merry fight that bull by (was Jeremiah Millett’s house
Drunk to cover his shame, blushing Merry in the bar
walking up to Dogtown to try his strength, the baby bull now full grown waiting, not even knowing death was in his power over this man who lay in the Sunday morning sun like smoked fish in the same field fly-blown and a colony of self-hugging grubs — handsome in the sun, the mass of the dead and the odor eaten out of the air by the grubs sticking moving by each other as close as sloths
she is the goddess of the earth, and night of the earth and fish of the little bull and of Merry Merry had a wife
She is the heavenly mother the stars are the fish swimming in the heavenly ocean she has four hundred breasts
Merry could have used as many could have drunk the strength he claimed he had, the bravo
Pulque in Spain where he saw the fight octli in Mexico where he wanted to show off dead in Gloucester where he did
The four hundred gods of drink alone sat with him as he died in pieces
In 400 pieces his brain shot the last time the bull hit him pegged him to the rock
before he tore him to pieces
the night sky looked down
Dogtown is soft in every season high up on her granite horst, light growth of all trees and bushes strong like a puddle’s ice the bios of nature in this park of eternal events is a sidewalk to slide on, this terminal moraine:
the rocks the glacier tossed toys Merry played by with his bull
400 sons of her only would sit by the game
All else was in the sky or in town or shrinking solid rock
We drink or break open our veins solely
to know. A drunkard showing himself in public is punished by death
The deadly power of her was there that night Merry was born under the pulque-sign The plants of heaven the animals of the sow were denied
Joking men bad laughed at Merry Drink had made him brave
Only the sun in the morning covered him with flies
Then only after the grubs had done him did the earth let her robe uncover and her part take him in
Olson and George Butterick in Gloucester in 1968
COLE’S ISLAND
I met Death — he was a sportsman — on Cole’s Island. He was a property-owner. Or maybe Cole’s Island, was his. I don’t know. The point was I was there, walking, and — as it often is, in the woods — a stranger, suddenly showing up, makes the very thing you were doing no longer the same. That is suddenly what you thought, when you were alone, and doing what you were doing, changes because someone else shows up. He didn’t bother me, or say anything. Which is not surprising, a person might not, in the circumstances; or at most a nod or something. Or they would. But they wouldn’t, or you wouldn’t think to either, if it was Death. And He certainly was, the moment I saw him. There wasn’t any question about that even though he may have looked like a sort of country gentleman, going about his own land. Not quite. Not it being He.
A fowler, maybe — as though he was used to hunting birds, and was out, this morning, keeping his hand in, so to speak, moving around, noticing what game were about. And how they seemed. And how the woods were. As a matter of fact just before he had shown up, so naturally, and as another person might walk up on a scene of your own, I had noticed a cock and hen pheasant cross easily the road I was on and had tried, in fact, to catch my son’s attention quick enough for him to see before they did walk off into the bayberry or arbor vitae along the road.
My impression is we did — that is, Death and myself, regard each other. And there wasn’t anything more than that, only that he had appeared, and we did recognize each other — or I did, him,and he seemed to have no question about my presence there, even though I was uncomfortable. That is, Cole’s Island is a queer isolated and gated place, and I was only there by will to know more of the topography of it lying as it does out over the Essex River. And as it now is, with no tenants that one can speak of, it’s more private than almost any place one might imagine.
And down in that part of it where I did meet him ( about half way between the two houses over the river and the carriage house at the entrance) it was as quiet and as much a piece of the earth as any place can be. But my difficulty, when he did show up, was immediately at least that I was an intruder, by being there at all and yet, even if he seemed altogether used to Cole’s Island, and, like I say, as though he owned it, even if I was sure he didn’t, I noticed him, and he me, and he went on without anything extraordinary at all.
Maybe he had gaiters on, or almost a walking stick, in other words much more habited than I, who was in chinos actually and only doing what I had set myself to do here & in other places on Cape Ann.
It was his eye perhaps which makes me render him as Death? It isn’t true, there wasn’t anything that different about his eye, it was not one thing more than that he was Death instantly that he came into sight. Or that I was aware there was a person here as well as myself. And son.
We did exchange some glance. That is the fullest possible account I can give, of the encounter.
Wednesday, September 9th, 1964
Stage Fort Park, November 29, 1976.
Photograph by Lynn Swigart
COMMENTARY I
BY AMANDA COOK
a Plantation a beginning It is winter now. Not by the calendar, but by the snow underfoot, the delivery of oil, the free parking at Stage Fort Park.
It is winter. The whole world seems cold.
On the radio politicians are ruining language, among other things. Ideals. I only go to the kitchen when I need more coffee. 30,000. It took $30,000 to get Gloucester started up.
We have stayed there, with the coming and going, for years.
30,000 people on this thin soil. What is changing is who this 30,000 are.
Ask the mayor who makes Gloucester. She will tell you.
Not Dorchester. Not Plymouth. She will list
different cities altogether. Or no cities. She will list families. And people. She may even list women.
Gloucester is changing. Everything is changing.
That landing, in 1623 or 1624, that $30,000, that was not the beginning. That was a change
East Main Street,
Gloucester
Gloucester Harbor.
The building third from the right is 28 Fort Square
COMMENTARY II BY SAMUEL CHARTERS
The Maximus Poems “letter 7”
I am caught in Gloucester. (What’s buried behind Lufkin’s Diner? Who is Frank Moore?
(The Librarian)
And I am asked — ask myself (I, too covered with the gurry of it) where shall we go from here, what can we do when even the public conveyances sing?
(The Songs of Maximus)
The trouble is, it is very difficult, to be both a poet and, an historian —
(The Mayan Letters)
It is difficult — awkward — to make this kind of evaluation, but Charles Olson, I think, has to be considered one of the strongest influences, one of the most decisive forces, on an entire area of modern American poetry. No one seems to quite measure up his size, despite the brilliance and the uniqueness of much of the writing around him. It’s a sense of size and in some ways even more important a sense of place, a sense of being placed. American poetry comes out of a society that is uncertain and uneasy and the poetry has always had some of this uneasiness — not even developing traditions or any strong sense of direction. It always seems to be beginning, and every poet seems to be the beginning of a new American poetry. Olson, with his sense of having found a place, has the range and the strength to be a force — in his own way to be this kind of beginning, this kind of new American poet.
I think the feeling of place has to go beyond a personal focus. The first place a poet has to find is the ground he stands on — then he has to go out and find the distances to the places where other poets have decided to stand — to the place where they stand in the culture, and the place they stand in the society. Many contemporary poets have gotten to the first step. It’s the larger vision of a place in the culture and the society that’s beyond them. Olson got this far very early — partly by borrowing much of his early poetic stance and technique from Ezra Pound. There are early poems, important early writing, that could almost be unnumbered
Cantos — “The Kingfishers” or “The Praises.” Robert Duncan, whose work has sometimes been associated with Olson’s, like him also has this strong affinity for Pound and some of his work — “A Poem Beginning With a Line By Pindar,” sections from “Passages” — could also have been added to the Cantos. Olson found in Pound a feeling for the sweep of a culture and an angry alienation from some of the worst aspects of the American experience, and for him it was a beginning.
Olson began writing late — in his middle thirties — so Pound was of considerable use to him. There is still, in almost all of of Olson’s poetry, a suggestion of Pound’s technical devices and his artistic concerns. Pound opened him out and set him going and the feeling for Pound and his grasp of the poem will always be with Olson.
But with this strong connection there are still strong feelings of difference between the two men, especially as Olson’s work has matured. There is no strong sense of place in Pound’s work, despite his sentimental attachments to Italy and the troubadour poetry of Provence. His concern is with culture, with society as culture, and in the Cantos he has gone through everything he could reach to use as material. This has given him enormous range, but in trying to reach so much I feel that often he spreads himself too thin. He has an intellectual sense of identity with his materials, but there is often no sense of a significant emotional involvement.
With Olson his identity with the place, with Gloucester, gives his major work, The Maximus Letters, a deep emotional center. The only other American writer who gives me the same sense of responding to a place, in both an historical and philosophic sense, is Thoreau in his first book, A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers. He used the scene of the rivers and the fields and the mountains as a backdrop to his larger concern with the materials of colonial history and his own moral essays.
Olson, in one of the Letters’ most persistent themes, uses Gloucester as a poetic expression of the realities of history. Sometimes he has used materials similar to Thoreau’s, and drawn some of the same inferences from similar documents, but in Thoreau there was always a sharp moral concern with the implications of his materials and he used them in the book to give an immediate clarity to his ideas. Olson, working in a larger concept that includes a whole new structure of the poem and of literature, is more ambiguous, but in some of the suggestions of his materials still as powerful. By not clearly forcing them into a place in the
poem he has left them with their own interior force as document and history, instead of with the smaller place as example or illustration of some point.
The structure and even some of the language of The Maximus Letters has been strongly influenced by William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, but Williams’ poem is an extended allegory involving the man and the city. In some of the early letters there is an extending of the figure of Maximus into an allegorical framework, but it’s left as an ambiguous suggestion, and in the rest of the poem Maximus — Olson — stays at a distance from this kind of self-identification with Gloucester.
The sense of place in the Letters is — in a final sense — so compelling because what Olson is trying to hold on to is the sense of place in time, as well as the sense of the immediate place of Gloucester. In geometric terms he is developing place in vertical as well as horizontal planes. This gives the Letters a complex pattern of movement, as well as giving them some of their importance to contemporary poetry. It also gives them some of their difficulty. Sometimes the poetry has the clarity and the vividness — the loose, unconcerned line of the kind of American discourse that he so strongly defends and insists on.
This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of water on water as sweet as the Seth Thomas in the old kitchen my father stood in his drawers to wind
Olson in his apartment at the Fort
There are many passages in the Letters with this directness. It is, after all, Olson who wrote the essay “Projective Verse,” with its insistence on the value of the poet’s immediate expression. But more characteristic of the Letters is a complex style that involves his conception of history with his creative responses as a poet. Sometimes the association is close, directly from a moment of the poem.
I sit here on a Sunday with grey water, the winter staring me in the face
“the Snow lyes indeed about a foot thicke for ten weeks” John White warns any prospective planter
But in most of the Letters the history is the poem. “So Sassafras” begins Europe just then was being drained swept by the pox so sassafras was what Ralegh Gosnold Pring only they found fish not cure “Some Good News” how small the news was a permanent change had come by 14 men setting on Cape Ann, on the westerly side of the harbor
“On First Looking out through Juan de la Cosas’s Eyes”
Behaim — and nothing insula Azores to Cipange (Candyn somewhere also there where spices
The Letters become less of the poet’s expression and more the historian’s as they go on, even though the history is handled as poetic material. In any of the single Letters the history is almost without meaning — odd facts, lists of provisions, inserted paragraphs on the fishing industry — but with the growth of the poem as a whole it is clear that something else is involved. The same facts return again and again. He goes back again and again to look at Gloucester from every view point that the town’s history gives him. The impetus — he would call it “thrust” — is moral — a New England transcendental morality concerned with the destruction of the early American ideal by commercial growth.
From Letter 10
(as I have been witness,
Letter 3
in my time, to all slide national, international, even leaming slide
The word does intimidate. The pay-check does. But to use either, as cheap men
O tansy city, root city let them not make you as the nation is
It is a use of history beyond a recitation of names and dates, it is history as his — Charles Olson’s — own experience.
Sometimes I find myself thinking of Olson as an artisan, a worker with his hands, a carpenter, a New England journeyman. The woodworkers who did the carvings, flutings, ceilings; ship carpenters who did the bowsprit figures, as well as the trim, railings, hatch covers, and hand gear. The sense of the work being finished, of being placed. It is difficult to be both a historian and a poet, but by using some of his materials as an artisan would he is usually able to keep the two together within the poem.
His history, like the carpenter’s plank, still has its own grain and smell when he gets through with it. And he uses more than history. There is a strong set of personal responses that also have become part of the Letters. In the earlier Letters there is a more open, more direct feel of language and image — even the simple, beautiful set of “The Songs Of Maximus.” In the earlier sections it is much more Olson as artist that I feel — more poet than historian — the matter of the poetry coming out of someplace inside his own Gloucester experience.
And the whole of the poem does seem to open out from the centering of himself in Gloucester, and from the feeling of himself within this place. In the earlier poems most of the themes that dominate the later have already been outlined, even if they have only been loosely threaded on the line of his own memories of the town’s fishing fleet and the men of the boats.
Of the early Letters I think that Letter 7 opens up the longer themes in a full sense, while still keeping its own coherence as a separate poem. Olson as “I, Maximus” dominates the poem, as he does all of the early poems, but it is an open, expansive Olson. Already — and this is only the seventh Letter there is so much cross reference that in many places it’s necessary to go back to the earlier
poems, but it’s less difficult to approach than many of the other poems, since in a loose, casual way it’s about something.
(Marsden Hartley’s eyes-as Stein’s eyes
The fullest aspect of the poem is still its involvement with Gloucester, but it is also about the painter Marsden Hartley — the period of his work in Gloucester, the powerful, mythic, almost folk paintings of the 1930’s. The emphasis of the Letter is still circular — within, from, and to Gloucester — but Olson has separated out a part of this experience, and given it a distinct, separate identity outside of the main currents of the rest of the Letters.
I’ve never decided whether or not Olson considers his poems difficult to follow or if he cares, but he is difficult, one of the most difficult of the modern poets to follow. Sometimes, as in the inner references of Letter 7, it’s because he doesn’t give enough away — at other times, as in the overall structure of the Letters, because he includes a maze of only distantly related material.
Probably, since he knows the inference of of everything he’s saying he doesn’t see the difficulty at all. And even if he does see it the work is interrelated, and he could have decided that if he’s opaque at one point the same reference will come up again at a point where the light hits it a little more strongly. But I want to try to follow some of the outlines of this Letter; since even the method of construction is an aspect of Olson as artisan/craftsman
Hartley’s eyes were deeply drawn, haunting eyes — to begin with Hartley his eyes would be a good beginning — and since he was a painter his eyes are a tool — something of his craftsmanship. Stein? Helen Stein, a Gloucester painter who was a close friend of both Olson and Hartley. She has already been mentioned in the Letters — in Letter 5 — and it was her eyes, then, that Olson mentioned,
Helen Stein’s eyes, and those others, Gloucester, who look, who still can look
and the directness, the sureness of the glance that he felt in Hartley as well. Only the mention; then he’s returned to his Gloucester fishermen who are part of what he’s trying to say about Hartley.
Or that carpenter’s, (the carpenter’s eyes) who left Plymouth Plantation, and came to Gloucester, to build boats and who owned the land of “the Cut”,
until Gloucester, too, got too proper and he left … for twenty-three lines he goes back over the same historical ground that dominates much of the Letters, the first years of the Gloucester settlement; then he stops to consider for a minute. That carpenter is much on my mind: I think he was the first Maximus
Anyhow, he was the first to make things, not just live off nature and he partly opens the texture of the poem enough to let some of his own involvements become clearer. And he displays, in the record, some of those traits goes with that difference, traits present circumstances keep my eye on for example, necessities the practise of the self, that matter, that wood the self, the growth, concern of the self is central to the figure of Maximus.
Still, even when the poem’s broadest outlines are clear, still there are snags. In the next lines
Commerce with you, any of you who have tried to bend, any of you, not just the old few who wore beards, and culture — or the clean-shaven, the condottiere there seems to be the implication that all someone like his carpenter can have with the clean-shaven — is commerce. Condottiere has sometimes the meaning of bandit, but it can also mean the leader of a free band of mercenaries or sometimes simply an adventurer. But not someone like a Hartley, or a carpenter. Olson, like almost all of the poets in the American idealistic tradition, does not consider tradesmen and the craftsmen as important to the society as artists. The next four lines are an aside from the reference to the older period of condottiere, (if I let any of that time in it is Verrocchio’s cracked wood of Lorenzo, with a head like a Minnesota back or any worked schooner and clear enough. The Minnesota back is probably Nagurski. But the next five lines drift off again. Sometimes Olson is like a small town talker who doesn’t have to worry about his audience; so he doesn’t bother to explain himself as he goes along.
“Why did you give him a black hat,
and a brim” she queried, “when be wore tennis shoes, and held his pants up with a rope?
Who gave who a black hat? Who is the woman? He never says. But, again like a small town talker, something always reminds him of something else, and he usually gets back to the point, even if it takes a lifetime of writing poetry to do it. Whoever got the black hat, he reminds Olson of Al Gorman (6 lines) who also held his pants up with a rope and cadged fish from incoming boats and left a fortune of $60,000. And Al Gorman reminds him of Mason Andrews (9 lines) who sold cat-nip, shoelaces, oranges, and gum that he carried around in a basket. And both of them, like the carpenter, or like Hartley, are an essence, a piece of what he’s trying to say about the necessity of keeping the self together.
How much the cracks matter, or seams in a ship, the absolutes of swelling..
No where in man is there room for carelessnesses Or those arrogations I gave him the costume of He slowly is returning to Hartley. The poem’s second section opens, (As hands are put to the eyes’ command Hartley’s hands and eyes, Olson seems to begin talking about something else,
There is this rock breaches the earth: the Whale’s Jaw my father stood inside of but there is a Hartley painting of the whale’s jaw, and he’s already thinking about it, even though he has begun, obliquely, with a reference to his father with the same jaw.
I have a photograph, him a smiling Jonah, forcing back those teeth Or more Jehovah, he looks that strong he could have split the rock as it is split, and not as Marsden Hartley painted it so it’s a canvas glove
The glove will return, as even Olson has to allow himself some point where the imagination can work. Hartley’s rock looks like a canvas glove, and gloves, to Olson, have the inference of work, of working.
(such gloves as fish-handlers — as Olsen, say, or gardeners wear — or Ferrini ought to,
handling trash: a man’s hands, as his eyes, can get sores)
(The Olsen that he mentions was a drunken fishing boat captain who now carts fish — and has turned up in earlier letters. Ferrini, sad Ferrini, was living in Gloucester at the time and published one of the Letters in a local literary magazine. Something he did made Olson angry and Letter 5 will follow him for the rest of his days.)
But gloves — he develops the image of the glove in a reference to some of Hartley’s best known paintings from this period. such cloth he turned all things to, made palms of hands of gulls, Maine monoliths apostles, a meal of fish a final supper — made Crane a Marseilles matelot
His reference to their quality of imaginative vision. These paintings were the most intensely human of all of Hartley’s work, and the figures of the fishermen, even of the gulls were suffused with a sense of complete inner fulfillment. Olson, after describing them, suddenly pulls himself up short.
Such transubstantiations as I am not permitted.
In his prose — his essays and critical writing — he has always said that the object is, “The inertial structure of the world is a real thing which not only exerts effects upon matter but in turn suffers such effects.”
From “Equal, That Is, To The Real Itself.” And if something is then its structure is a finite entity which has its own dimension and space, and it has to be handled carefully in something as loose as poetic metaphor. It’s as though imagination isn’t to be trusted, and its uses should be limited.
Olson’s poetry has never been difficult in its imaginative image, only in its elisions and references. So difficult in these, that he could have been — often — uncomfortably trying
Helen Stein’s Portrait of Marsden Hartley, c.1934
to conceal the ordinariness of his materials by making the form of their presentation unnecessarily obscure. There is another implication, in the rejection of the imagination, that he makes more clearly in the Letter. It is the vague feeling that there is a weakness, a softness, in the loose drift of the imagination. Olson, almost in passing, becomes an artisan, a “worker,” uneasy with the “humanness” of the imaginative vision.
Such transubstantiations
as I am not permitted. nor my father, who’d never have turned the Whale Jaw back to such humanness neither he nor I, as workers, are infatuated with
In his self-identification as worker some of the most complicated layers in the Letters become clearer. Not completely clear; since Olson is always difficult and challenging, but less opaque. His uneasiness with the imaginative vision has some of the gruffness of the New England countryman. As a poet he is also still the Charles Olson who was a fisherman, a carpenter, and postman. In this aspect of Olson is some of the poetry’s brilliance, difficulty, insistence, and uniqueness.
As he begins to sort out the threads of the poem to bring it to a close — sorting out net lines before heaving them up — he returns to the point where he started, to Marsden Hartley, and Hartley’s being within the self.
What Hartley did was done according to his lights and this accords with his Gloucester.
The men of the matter of this city … are never doctrinaires
And having made his point Olson allows himself to reminisce, to think back to Hartley in Gloucester in the 1930’s. With everything else in the Letters it becomes involved with something he remembers from the sea. The endless circling, eddying movement of the Letters, from the sea and its fishermen to Olson, his life, his conception of place and history, and this returning him to the sea, to Gloucester, to its people
(I only knew one sach other other pair of hands as Hartley’s Jake, his name was, mate aboard the Lafond’s gill-netters. When I knew him his nails were all gone, peeled away from the brine they’d been in all the days of his life
There was something about Hartley’s hands, just as there was something in his eyes. The hands were thick and clumsy, and they seemed to have little relationship to his work as an artist — except that the work was thick and heavy and strong, even in his first work as painter of New England landscapes. Even more than in the first parts of the poem Olson has become the small town talker stringing together anecdotes. Perhaps it is anecdote that he has finally settled on to carry the structure of the poems.
In the slow drifting reminiscences of older seamen and sunk boats and winter storms — even in the long recitations of local places and history — the pattern is of the casual anecdote, something suggesting something else. When the talker is an artisan, as Olson in these poems is an artisan, the handworker, the carpenter, the anecdotes have their own inner intensity, and their flow from one to another an expression of a larger emotional concern.
The glimpse that Olson gives of Hartley does have its inner intensity. Is it only for someone who knows the paintings? Who is already familiar with Hartley’s life? It could be. The response to anything in Maximus has to be personal. For someone already deeply familiar with the painter and his work Olson’s poem, with all its rambling and discursion, is a sensitive, moving portrait. He was right to single out Hartley’s eyes and hands — and to anticipate the last glance at Hartley’s hands with the earlier image of the painted rock as canvas glove.
Hartley’s fingers gave this sense of soaking, the ends as stubbed as Jake’s, and each finger so thick and independent of the other, his own hands were like gloves.
But not cloth. They stayed such rock salt as Jake’s were…
The poem, too, has its own inner force, despite its moments of obscurity. If it doesn’t open up every theme of the Letters, it leaves enough spread out for the poet to spend years developing their emotional and philosophic implications. It is this that Olson has done in the rest of the Maximus Letters. Whatever someone decides about the poem any American poet beginning to sort out his poetic background will have to find his own place in the Letters — to find his own place in the American vision of Charles Olson’s Gloucester.
SOURCES
Butterick, George F. A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Charters, Ann.
Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity. Berkeley: Oyez, 1968. Evidence of What Is Said: The Correspondence between Ann Charters and Charles Olson about History and Herman Melville. Portland,OR:Tavern Books, 2015.
(editor) Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac. San Francisco: City Lights, 1971.
Charters, Samuel. Some Poems / Poets. Berkeley: Oyez, 1971.
Cocola, Jim. Places in the Making: A Critical Geography of American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016.
Cook, Amanda. Letter to Maximus as of September 2023. [Ms.]
Crawford, Robert. Young Eliot From St. Louis to The Waste Land. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
East, Elyssa. Dogtown. New York: Free Pres/Simon & Schuster, 2009
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.
The Gloucester Notebook. Foreword by Robert McCrum. N.P.:Galileo Publishers, 2021.
The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume I 1898-1922. Edited by Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988.
The Waste Land and Other Poems. Selected and with an Introduction by Helen Vendler. New York: Signet, 1998.
“What Dante Means to Me.” To Criticize the Critic. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1965.
Journal of the Charles Olson Archives. Number 1, Spring 1974. Storrs, CT: Special Collections Department, University of Connecticut Library.
Matthiessen, F.O. The Achievement of T.S. Eliot. New York: Oxford U.P., 1959.
Maud, Ralph. Charles Olson at the Harbor. Vancouver, B.C.: Talonbooks, 2008.
Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Edited by George Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Perry, Seamus. “Poems of T.S. Eliot.” www.lok.uk. August 29, 2023.
Rich, David (editor). Charles Olson: Letters Home 1949-1969. Gloucester, MA: Cape Ann Museum, 2010.
Ricks, Christopher (editor). T.S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare. Poems 1909-1917. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1996.
Stein, Charles. Annual Charles Olson Lecture at the Cape Ann Museum, November 12, 2023. vimeo.com/event/3851984
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In my work as a literary historian, I have always believed (as T.S. Eliot understood), that “The great poets, in writing themselves, write their times.” In 2023-24, this book wouldn’t exist without the encouragement and help of several generous people. I would like to give thanks …
to Melissa Watterworth Batt at the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, for her assistance obtaining Olson photographs and permission from the Charles Olson Estate and the University of California Press to include six Maximus poems in this book; to Henry Ferrini, for his good works at the Gloucester Writers Center and for making me feel at home in Gloucester;
to Martin Colyer, for his imagination and expertise as a book designer, and for returning to Gloucester with me more than fifty years after his first visit on his way to Newport to meet Buddy Guy; thanks also to his wife, Michele, for her generous reading of my manuscript; to Greg Gibson from Ten Pound Island Book Company; to Annabel Smith, for helping in the effort to obtain early photographs of T.S.Eliot; to Amanda Cook, Jim Dunn, and Bing McGilvray, for their company, their poetry, and for sharing their views of Charles Olson in Gloucester; to Susan and Richard Quateman, for their gifts of hospitality and friendship; to Carolyn Mugar, for her friendship and for coming to see me in Gloucester; to Mallay Charters Occhiogrosso, for her insightful comments about my Introduction, and to my grandkids Duncan and Eliza Occhiogrosso, for their helpful thoughts about the contents of this book; and to Nora Charters, for being the greater driver on our trips to Gloucester and for her loving companionship.
PICTURE CREDITS
Gordon Parks — Cover, 6, 8. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information
Lynn Swigart — 66. Collection of the Cape Ann Museum Library and Archives, Gloucester, MA.
Helen Stein — 79. Portrait of Marsden Hartley, c.1934, oil on cardboard.
Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA. Gift of James F. and Jean Baer O’Gorman, 1986 (2545).
Photographs used with permission of:
Houghton Library, Harvard University — 13 (top), 38
Henry Ware Eliot Jr./T.S.Eliot Foundation — 2 (top), 15, 16, 21
Charles Olson Collection, University of Connecticut — 2 (bottom), 26, 27, 29, 31, 35, 44, 54, 73
ABOUT ANN CHARTERS AND CHARLES OLSON
A nn Charters (B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 1957; Ph.D. Columbia University, 1965), credits Charles Olson for giving her the confidence as a writer to go her own way as a Beat scholar. She has written three books about (and with) Olson. She has never forgotten the words she heard the poet say to George Butterick on June 14, 1968 during her first visit to Gloucester, when she was leaving Olson’s apartment at 28 Fort Square to drive back to New York City: “This lady runs a tight ship, let me tell you.”
[Evidence of What Is Said, 23.]
She hopes this book, compiled for the Gloucester Writers Center more than a half century after that day, confirms Olson’s reading of her character.
T. S. ELIOT AND
CHARLES OLSON
YOUNG TOM AND CHARLIE:
TWO AMERICAN POETS AT HOME IN GLOUCESTER
It was The Gloucester Notebook of T.S. Eliot that connected the writing of Young Tom and Charlie for Ann Charters, who found it while browsing on a summer afternoon at the Dogtown bookshop on Main Street. Though the two poets T.S. Eliot and Charles Olson never met, they became associated in her mind by their strong responses to this coastal city.
Their poetry contains highly imaginative references — at times clear, sometimes obscure — to the city itself, its history, the Cape Ann geography, and the Atlantic Ocean. The seven poems in this anthology written by Eliot and Olson suggest this connection. With their words, they gave voice to the spirit of the place.
Founded in 2010, the Gloucester Writers Center is a working writers’ center in a working town. Each year we host scores of programs, from open mics and readings to workshops, classes, and writing groups — all in support of our mission: To honor and celebrate Cape Ann’s rich literary legacy, and to empower individuals to engage in the writing and telling of stories in the spirit of civic engagement.
