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    Selected Poems of Charles Olson
    Selected Poems of Charles Olson
    Selected Poems of Charles Olson
    Ebook177 pages1 hour

    Selected Poems of Charles Olson

    By Charles Olson and Robert Creeley

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    "I have assumed a great deal in the selection of the poems from such a large and various number, making them a discourse unavoidably my own as well as any Olson himself might have chosen to offer. I had finally no advice but the long held habit of our using one another, during his life, to act as a measure, a bearing, an unabashed response to what either might write or say."—Robert Creeley

    A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry embraces themes of empowering love, political responsibility, the wisdom of dreams, the intellect as a unit of energy, the restoration of the archaic, and the transformation of consciousness—all carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and coolly demanding.

    In this selection of some 70 poems, Robert Creeley has sought to present a personal reading of Charles Olson's decisive and inimitable work—"unequivocal instances of his genius"—over the many years of their friendship.


    "I have assumed a great deal in the selection of the poems from such a large and various number, making them a discourse unavoidably my own as well as any Olson himself might have chosen to offer. I had finally no advice but the long held habit of our usi
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2023
    ISBN9780520920422
    Selected Poems of Charles Olson
    Author

    Charles Olson

    Charles Olson (1910-1970) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. His first career was in politics, but he soon turned to writing and by the late Forties his work had received major attention. He was writing teacher and then rector at Black Mountain College, where Robert Creeley came to teach as well. Iconoclastic and controversial, Olson, along with Creeley, launched a postmodern, free-verse revolution, and his work opened new pathways in thought and language to a generation of dissident writers. Other volumes of Charles Olson's poetry are published by the University of California Press: The Maximus Poems (1983) and The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (1987). Robert Creeley has long been an advocate of Charles Olson's work. Nine volumes of their correspondence have been published by Black Sparrow Press. The University of California Press publishes The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 (1982), his Collected Prose (1988), Collected Essays (1989), and Selected Poems (1991).

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      Book preview

      Selected Poems of Charles Olson - Charles Olson

      SELECTED POEMS

      A CENTENNIAL BOOK

      One hundred books

      published between 1990 and 1995

      bear this special imprint of

      the University of California Press.

      We have chosen each Centennial Book

      as an example of the Press’s finest

      publishing and bookmaking traditions

      as we celebrate the beginning of

      our second century.

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      Founded in 1893

      SELECTED POEMS

      CHARLES OLSON

      EDITED BY ROBERT CREELEY

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      BERKELEY

      LOS ANGELES

      LONDON

      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      First Paperback Printing 1997

      © 1960 Charles Olson, renewed 1988 the Estate of Charles Olson

      © 1968 the Estate of Charles Olson

      © 1975, 1987 the Estate of Charles Olson and the University of Connecticut

      © 1983 the University of Connecticut

      © 1993 the Regents of the University of California

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Olson, Charles, 1910-1970.

      Selected poems / Charles Olson; edited by Robert Creeley.

      p. cm.

      A Centennial book.

      Includes index.

      ISBN 0-520-21232-0

      I. Creeley, Robert, 1926- II. Title.

      PS3529.L655A6 1993

      811’.54—dc20 92-23838

      Printed in the United States of America

      987654321

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution provided by the General Endowment Fund of the Associates of the University of California Press.

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. (g)

      CONTENTS

      CONTENTS

      Move Over

      La Chute

      The Kingfishers

      At Yorktown

      In Cold Hell, in Thicket

      For Sappho, Back

      The Moon Is the Number 18

      To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things of Which He Has Written Us in His Brief an Creeley und Olson

      The Ring of

      An Ode on Nativity

      The Thing Was Moving

      Merce of Egypt

      The Death of Europe

      A Newly Discovered ‘Homeric’ Hymn

      As the Dead Prey Upon Us

      Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele

      The Librarian

      Moonset, Gloucester, December 1,1957,1:58 AM

      The Song

      The Distances

      Cross-Legged, the Spider and the Web

      May 31,1961

      The Lamp

      Maximus, to himself

      The Twist

      a Plantation a beginning

      Maximus, to Gloucester

      Some Good News

      John Burke

      April Today Main Street

      MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—I

      Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]

      Maximus Letter # whatever

      Maximus, at the Harbor

      A Later Note on

      CHRONICLES

      THE GULF OF MAINE

      West Gloucester

      Stevens song

      Maximus to himself June 1964

      COLE'S ISLAND

      Maximus, in Gloucester Sunday, LXV

      Maximus of Gloucester

      Got me home, the light snow gives the air, falling

      Hotel Steinplatz, Berlin, December 25 (1966)

      Celestial evening, October 1967

      The Telesphere

      INDEX OF FIRST LINES

      Move Over

      Merchants, of the sea and of finance

      (Smash the plate glass window)

      The dead face is the true face

      of Washington, New York a misery, but north and east the carpenter obeyed topography

      As a hand addresses itself to the care of plants and a sense of proportion, the house is put to the earth

      Tho peopled with hants, New England

      Move over to let the death-blow in, the unmanned or the transvest, drest in beard and will, the capillary

      Seven years with the wrong man, 7 yrs of tristus and vibullation.

      And I looked up to see a toad. And the boy sd:

      I crushed one, and its blood is green

      Green, is the color of my true love’s green despite

      New England is

      despite her merchants and her morals

      La Chute

      my drum, hollowed out thru the thin slit, carved from the cedar wood, the base I took when the tree was felled

      o my lute, wrought from the tree’s crown

      my drum, whose lustiness was not to be resisted

      my lute, from whose pulsations not one could turn away

      They

      are where the dead are, my drum fell

      where the dead are, who

      will bring it up, my lute

      who will bring it up where it fell in the face of them where they are, where my lute and drum have fallen?

      The Kingfishers

      1

      What does not change / is the will to change

      He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He remembered only one thing, the birds, how when he came in, he had gone around the rooms and got them back in their cage, the green one first, she with the bad leg, and then the blue, the one they had hoped was a male

      Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat. He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat, I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter, he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself

      in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, The kingfishers! who cares fortheir feathers now?

      His last words had been, The pool is slime. Suddenly everyone, ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened, he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought The pool the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth why did the export stop?

      It was then he left

      2

      I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere"

      but the kingfisher

      de l’aurore"

      but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous!

      he got the color of his breast from the heat of the setting sun!

      The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous.

      But not these things were the factors. Not the birds.

      The legends are

      legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting, still the waters, with the new year, for seven days. It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters. It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There, six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds.

      On these rejectamenta

      (as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born.

      And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes a dripping, fetid mass

      Mao concluded:

      nous devons

      nous lever et agir!

      3

      When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive

      Or, enter that other conqueror we more naturally recognize he so resembles ourselves

      But the E

      cut so rudely on that oldest stone sounded otherwise, was differently heard

      as, in another time, were treasures used:

      (and, later, much later, afine ear thought a scarlet coat)

      "of green feathers feet, beaks and eyes of gold

      "animals likewise, resembling snails

      "a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots, and worked with tufts of leaves, weight

      3800 ounces

      "last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills gold, the feet

      gold, the two birds perched on two reeds

      gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds, one yellow, the other white.

      "And from each reed hung

      seven feathered tassels.

      In this instance, the priests (in dark cotton robes, and dirty, their dishevelled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly over their shoulders) rush in among the people, calling on them to protect their gods

      And all now is war

      where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields.

      4

      Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law

      Into

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