Charles Olson at the Harbor

by Ralph Maud

Charles Olson was quite possibly the greatest, and without question the most influential, of the “New American Poets” published by Grove Press in the mid-twentieth century.

Synthesizing the experimental avant-garde of Black Mountain College with the uncompromising existentialism of the Beat generation, the new structuralism of the San Francisco Renaissance and heralding the postmodern deconstructionism of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, his spirit, mind and intellect are ubiquitous in late-twentieth-century poetry around the world. His archaeology of language unearthed classical sources and aboriginal, principally Mayan, cultures within the history of European colonialism and resulted in an absolute insistence that the public value of the human imagination is inseparable from the particulars of both the time and place of its origins and composition.

His reputation tarnished and his poetry misread 20 years after his death in Tom Clark’s carelessly biased 1991 biography, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, Olson and his work have been diminished in the study of poetics since Clark’s creation of his grotesque caricature of this great American poet as a young hustler who he irresponsibly and falsely claims became a defeated and pathetic old man in his later years.

With Charles Olson at the Harbor, Dr. Ralph Maud, a longtime Olson scholar, friend and correspondent, finally sets the record straight, insisting that Olson was as careful with his genius as any young man could be; that he achieved critical success as a Melville scholar; that his “projective verse” established an undeniable and lasting sea change in poetic thought around the world; and that he eschewed success of the ordinary kind to create a new restorative stance in the polis that can take us into a different future—all reflected in a large body of poetry that the world can no longer ignore.

Genres: Poetry, Biography

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2008

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ralph Maud lays it on the line: his biography of Charles Olson is a reactive one. He's written a biography as a corrective to Tom Clark's 1990 biography Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life, which he says is filled with misreadings, misunderstandings, and misinformation. The purpose of Maud's book is not as a study of a poet's life and work but as an argument against another biography. On every page is a refutation of some kind, often point by point. Phooey. The 2d star is in acknowledgment that Maud at least discusses Olson in an academic way. But it's hardly an advance on what we know of the poet.

[e · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading for two reasons: 1) That it offers a corrective to the canonized Tom Clark biography of Olson, The Allegory of a Poet's Life, which too often totally fictionalizes events in Olson's life for the sake of sensationalism & which takes a tack of assumed haughty superiority to the subject at hand; 2) That the caricature of Olson on display in Clark's book only serves to both stroke Clark's ego & exemplify the tendency toward constructing a martyrology around poets who give all of themselves to the public eye & not merely the sunniest aspects of their personality that so plagues the field of biography at large. As Maud says, Olson believed that a poet's speech & his reading his own work aloud should be one in the same, a totality that cannot be hewn into desirable & undesirable parts of speech but rather (& this is my interpretation, at least), an assemblage of signs & directions giving compass to what leans in on us in its terror, beauty, & chaos. I think that kind of cosmic acceptance & open palms Olson extends bespeaks why he's continued to be viewed as this imposing, sort of imperious figure in 20th century poetics, because he doesn't let anything go ignored: he rejoices in the high as much as the low; & Clark, who would have you believe that Olson is only one thing—namely, a sad, insecure, lonely alcoholic with chronic anhedonia—only contributes to the depressing western idea that contradictions of a life & its work have to be resolved into a tidy little package that can be sold wholesale with his book, which more & more seems to me to be simply Time-Life Presents: Postmodern Poetics. Aside from all that, this is a pretty entertaining, relatively short read, & Maud has a conversational tone that really shines when it serves to illuminate on some of Olson's more abstruse concepts of apophainesthai, proprioception, &c.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a necessary vindication of Olson for those who read the Tom Clark biography and came away thinking he was a sad, bumbling oaf. Some people have complained that Maud did not write his own book, but instead used the Clark biography as the framework for a point-by-point critique. I'm rather glad he didn't as this format makes the points and counterpoints come across clearly and concisely.

Olson is accessible. It is not hard to find him on Youtube reading his own poems. The Maximus poems are available in a great edition by Butterworth. The voluminous correspondence with Creeley is well worth investigating. If you take the effort to engage with him as a writer, I don't think you need either Clark or Maud. Maximus in particular writes out the poet's life. Your opinion might be that success consists in making money, owning a big house and having a conventional family, but there is something magnificent about Olson at the harbor in the small hours of the night.

Read him well and it changes your life. http://shakespeareinthemountains.podo...

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Ralph Maud's long critique of the Tom Clark Olson bio. Not so much a biography itself, with only chronology in places to substitute for narrative. Rather each chapter begins with some nit Maud picks with Clark. Added all up, I've been fascinated, can't stop reading, as Maud would challenge all those who ever said a negative thing about Maud's hero. And if we must admit that Clark was concerned to deliver Olson as pathography [the basic take of which is that Olson was a repressed homosexual], then we must admit, as well, that Maud can't simply read the letters between Olson and his first wife Connie as the post-mortem on a marriage, he has to completely ignore that Olson was conducting a torrid affair as he wrote them. I had for long accepted the view (gotten, come to think of it, from Clark) that Olson's work interested me much more than the person himself, but Maud's long sulk has me reconsidering. The sensibility behind the scholarly scruple with Clark is one with which we should be familiar from NYC publishers' bios: it was common, once upon a time, for the subject of a biography and the subject of an oeuvre to be regarded as equally worth one's time. Two different subjects, but worthy, taken as a whole, of critical biography. Maud's is not that. For example, Maud summons not a word on the meeting of Olson and Duncan in Berkeley in the late 40s. While Clark was concerned to deflate a figure within the poetry culture, Maud could surely produce a critical biography (i.e., he certainly understands his man, and no doubt he understands the poems), but would it be as interesting as this hagiographic thing meant to fill a gap? Perhaps not. What limits Maud's "biography" rhetorically can be put down to distortions in the way knowledge is structured and commoditized in our present literary field. Meantime, I liked this book.

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a response to the 'standard' biography of Charles Olson, the influential post-war American poet. It's certainly of interest to readers of Olson, even if you haven't read Clark's biography; it's shorter and much better written than that book. Maud probably goes too easy on him - it veers into hagiography at times - but much better that than whatever the opposite is. Good readings of some of the poems, too.

[Martha]

Stars are not my thing. Fascinating minutia. Worthwhile for some original documents not available to nonscholars. And great photographs. Maud loves CO as much as TC dislikes him. Somewhere in the middle an actual man emerges. Who was after all a major poet.