The Maximus Poems

by Charles Olson, George F. Butterick (Editor)

A collection of modern poems probing the human feelings which penetrate life and history along the northern Massachusetts coast

Genres: Poetry, Literature, American, The United States Of America, 20th Century, Canon

650 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Charles Olson was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the Language School, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."

Olson's first book was Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick which was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University.[5] In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the breath of the poet and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic. The poem "The Kingfishers", first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), is an application of the manifesto.

His second collection, The Distances, was published in 1960. Olson served as rector of the Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1956. During this period, the college supported work by John Cage, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and many other members of the 1950s American avant garde. Olson is listed as an influence on artists including Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney.[6]

Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers", "In Cold Hell, in Thicket", and The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of", manifest a sincere, original, accessible, emotionally powerful voice. "Letter 27 [withheld]" from The Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns. Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley.

In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound's Cantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writing The Maximus Poems, a project that was to remain unfinished at the time of his death. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled. Dogtown, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside on a tree stump in Dogtown.) The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre, an itinerant Greek philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The final, unfinished volume imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones.

Reviews

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much blabbering that couldn't have been less poetic if it tried!
Not enough poems in these Maximus Poems.
Emphatic NO. Demented a bit. DNF.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Duncan, in his essay "Regarding Olson's 'Maximus,'" writes: "Olson insists upon the active. Homo maximus wrests his life from the underworld as the Gloucester fisherman wrests his from the sea." Olson's striding poetic syllables, says Duncan, are "no more difficult than walking."
What is an epic? Pound said it was a poem with history. Olson disagrees. Olson visited Pound, argued with him, and Pound said Olson saved his life. But Olson disagreed with Pound on many issues. Olson actually began working on an epic in the 40s, but for some reason was unsatisfied. The remnants can be found in his first book of poems, "In Cold Hell, In Thicket" which was published around the same time as the first ten Maximus poems.
Olson did not consider himself "a poet" or "a writer" by profession, but rather that nebulous and rare "archeologist of morning," reminiscent of Thoreau. He wrote on a typewriter. "It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pause, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work."

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This, is no bare incoming
of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,


Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle

Honestly it was closer to two stars. The ruminations on ocean floor topography were fascinating but the colonial history less so. This is an epic poem (cycle) devoted to Glouchester and thus devoted (and ever informed by) prevailing winds and the points of the compass. Attempts to bridge with mediterranian basin proved a mixed affair. The biographical notes were intriguing -- especially the visit to Pound at St Elizabeth's. I thought of Auden and his attention to Goethe. Olson certainly wasn't looking for an idol, he just regretted humping a mail sack.

Paterson is far superior, at least to this slackjaw huckleberry.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Olson's heroic long poem in tribute to Gloucester, Massachusetts and to the people who lived there in which he tells much of its history as a fishing port, even going back to its place in the original Pangaean continent. The poem connects Gloucester to many of the cultural sources we associate with the eastern Mediterranean and south Asia. The larger-than-life figure of Maximus is both Maximus of Tyre and Olson himself. This is one of my favorite things, and i have to touch base with it from time to time.

[vanesa · Rating 1 out of 5]

sorry world, i simply cannot worship at the Olson altar- he's taken up all the space i could have used to admire him himself. these poems are insular, self-obsessed, driven with a hyper-masculine fear of subtlety, nuance, or stillness. the imagery is leaden, and stuffed with a gross amount of literery references. so hopelessly academic that i wish Olson would have just written an essay instead.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chose this volume to read (Jargon 24) -- I'm reading the whole thing, and will read Butterick's edition of the Complete Maximus Poems but must know how the geography was surveyed, how the property lines abutted; in brief, nothing to read but to be in Olson's cut. That topological study, "the scholar's art," as Olson's first scholar, Von Hallberg, had it, is what I come back to again and again in Olson. "In this day's sun," he has it in "The Twist," "in this veracity | the waters the several of them the roads" -- that give "these densenesses" of character that Olson sees in his Glouchester townspersons. "It rained | the day we arrived | And I have rowed the harbor since, | out the window of Johnny's Candy Kitchen, | through that glass and rain through which I looked | the first time I saw | the sea." That look, then, was generative, of the interest in persons, and situations, and materiel out of Melville, as well as founders, the mothers who cry for their castaways. Maximus and his common-law wife cross a street in the cut: ""I don't believe | I know your name.' Given. | how do you do,| how do you do. And then: | 'Pardon me, but | what church | do you belong to, | may I ask?' . . . I sd, you may, sir. | He sd, what, sir. | I sd, none, | sir."

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was surprised I didn't enjoy this more. Plenty appealed--the spiraling of time, history into a geographically situated self; the alternative and subjective cartographies;

...Harbor
better than
Champlain's--Champlain
a European with a home, American
no place
to go in landlessness alone
resides, the Earth a skid
for the American the
Skater all over the
surface of (the
skin

But something about the overall syntax of the 600 pages seemed haphazard, even on the relative scale of similar mega-life projects; it was too difficult for me to pick up some threads after they had disappeared so long. But maybe I'm expecting too much. Will probably return here once I'm in Buffalo and they can set me straight.

[Jim Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just started a thorough re-reading after 30 years. This is one of the few books I can identify that had a deep effect on me about what a poetic line was, the power of where a line was broken, how it was read. Although likely invisible in my work now, without Maximus I would not be the same poet I am. I recommend every reader check the few but precious youtube videos of Charles Olson reading several of these poems.

[Quietly Reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous modernist poems

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Maximus poems will do as they do and I will read them all again in in in. But I have to read Heroditus and know nothing about Tyre and also the deep history of Virginia and Boston and the kinds of salt to keep fish and what exactly a shoal feels like and if Adam Smith really was what, a poet, if he was cured of his skin's burns and "meubles" and Thucidides and furthermore Orontes, which C.O. calls a "congested poem." You see all of this plus stuff is to be mine upon reading and reading my C.O.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olson was just experimental enough in this ambitious volume and I like that his tone stays fairly lowbrow and relatable throughout. The random touches are great, like repeatedly using an open parenthesis with no close, or spelling "said" "sd". The only drawback is that the content can get quite boring: Massachusetts and fishing boats are not the most intriguing topics for me. But overall the collection sways between mythology, history, and personal events in a pretty compelling mish-mash. Very American, but in a universal way, not blind patriotism.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

big, rapturous and sedate by turns, image-thoughts cycled through the four seasons, maritime america, gloucester, mass. immortalized, formal innovation and structure always employed to specific effect, in response to a deeply-felt need. for those addicted to the collision of the monumental and the mundane in the narrative arts. and/or as a primer or a companion to MOBY DICK.

[Beth in SF · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mundane poems with historical tilts that suddenly jab you with a revelatory one liner. Quite unique and certainly not everyone's taste. I kept thinking that I was reading something special that held secrets for which I didn't have the key, but sometimes got the chance to peek through the keyhole.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my poetry grandfathers.

[Molly Brodak · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting...kind of self-absorbed at times. But lots to learn from.

[Gary Norris · Rating 5 out of 5]

o macho poet of gloucester

i will follow you anywhere

you big meanie

[Bonnie · Rating 1 out of 5]

i hate you, charles olson.

HATE YOU.

[Noah Leben · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

Ostensibly Olson's masterpiece, although I am more inclined to grant that designation to The Distances, so much more distilled is Olson's poetic project within those pages (to my eye and ear). Although those earlier poems do not have the preoccupation with place that distinguishes Olson's later work (nor the typographical innovations), I am not readily willing to concede that this preoccupation is as necessary to the poetic project as Olson and Williams declare it to be, as I personally found the most affecting poems within the Maximus series either those where Olson turned inwards or those where Olson used a specific symbol (a poppy, say, or the star-nosed mole) as the locus around which his meditations could be ordered. To me, The Maximus Poems succumb to the same central flaw which marrs Pound's Cantos: when the focus shifts to the historical, the poetic register is diminished, the recounting becomes more matter-of-fact, and the insights and inferences, the ecstatic language, the sense of transfiguration is lost in the plain rhythm of the telling. Despite Olson's professed dissatisfaction with it, I think Paterson ultimately handles the historical dimension the best, choosing to render the historical passages in a plain-stated prose so that they—both from a linguistic perspective as well as from the concern of format (which is as essential and as at the root of a poetic project as any other element)—contrast the verse.

None of this is to say that The Maximus Poems are a failure: they contain some of Olson's best verse, such as the often-excerpted "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You," "Maximus, to himself" and "Cole's Island," as well as lesser-known passages, such as the ones I alluded to earlier regarding the poppy and the star-nosed mole (to be found on page 550 and page 395, respectively). But I do think "flawed masterpiece" is an apt descriptor: these poems are quite uneven, many having a semi-improvised quality as though they were dicated or typed and the words left as they first fell, with the awkward circumlocutions intact, the broken phrases (all qualities of Olson's verse I admire, admittedly). However, the mix of registers, the grand sweep of the ideas and references, the flashes of insight and clarity, and the great churn and eddy of Olson's thought as it takes in Gloucester (both its history and the history of the world preceding it), man's central myths, and finally the myth of himself as a man and the project of his own day-to-day making, makes for a thrilling reading experience, even if each poem does not necessarily live up to the last.

There is a profound and beautifully human struggle in Olson's grasping and reaching, and even if the object of his striving always eludes him (as it must elude as all), when he does lay his fingers on it, when he does make of himself a conduit—even if just for a single line—the results are exhilarating. We stride the islands and the shore with Olson as our guide: we stand on the precipice of a vaster being, knowing all the while that there is no total knowing (even for him, in all he contains, his brilliance and the sweep of his scholarship, his unearthing). But as we stumble in tandem we find much revealed, amongst the tides, strewn about the rocks, carried by the wind, upon the horizon, inherent in the blood...

[Peter Prokopiev · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can imagine Olson, in gloom on Watch House Point, looking at his polis. I can see the intent from which the poems spring forth and in this I feel a sense of kinship with O. What started me on the poems was the line: “To build out of sound the walls of the city”. Only trouble is, it turns out to be a city one gets lost in quite often. And I get the feeling Olson was lost too. Even if he would have disliked it, the comparison with Pound is inevitable and the Maximus pomes simply don’t hold up. Where Olson rambles on a whole page, Pound would condense to the utmost and get with it. And that’s why he is the superior poet. There is in the Maximus this general feeling of haphazardness, of pell mell, as if you’re reading a draft. And
the conversational, prosy tone does not help. Maybe it is a question of sensibility: Olson is a brash sailor, Pound - a sabre-wielding cavalier. And yet! Olson CAN be a superb poet. It is such a great delight when after a couple of pages of dross you get a line like polis is/eyes. Such sharp lines seem to be a specialty of his and when they do appear, the Maximus becomes exhilarating. People recognise it immediately as these poems, say the one that begins I come back to the geography of it or the one about learning the simplest things last, seem to be the most popular ones.

I marked my favourite lines in the reading notes.

[Sean Tatol · Rating 5 out of 5]

As everyone, including Olson, says, the obvious comparison is Pound's Cantos. The key difference is that Olson uses the technique of the quotidian as profound, and Pound uses the technique of the profound as profound. Olson's method is certainly more reasonable, less quixotic, and therefore more consistent. The Cantos reach some of the highest points of the sublime that I've ever encountered in poetry, but getting to them requires a slog through hundreds of pages of regurgitations of history books and rants about usury, which aren't without interest in themselves but end up an extreme test of patience. Here the writing moves along at an even keel, due to book's subject being a personal history of small town Massachusetts and not an attempt at a synthesis of European and Chinese history into a realization of Truth itself. If Pound was trying to climb Everest with nothing but the force of his hubris, Olson is taking a leisurely stroll through Gloucester. The Cantos are a heroic and insufferable failure, The Maximus Poems are much more modest, but also much more amiable. Having said that, I just read the 1960 edition which is only 160 pages. I imagine the full edition contains a lot more bloat and brilliance, which would make it harder to differentiate the two.

[Binovin Lal]

I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You by Charles Olson Poem Summary

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

essential text. olson is the prophet, this is his bible.

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

insane

[james green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massive, massively flawed, influential, everything you need is in there, it's a classic

[Axolotl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do admire Charles Olson's poetry---for its highs and lows.
I do find "his" idea of 'istorin compelling (one of those elegantly simple yet difficult things)
but a little dubious with regard to his own poetry
in that
it's as though he is saying "find out for
yourself and you'll see that I've been right about everything
all along". On the other hand,
in his poem beginning
"at the boundary of
the mighty world", he does say (while
personifying a geological formation,
no less) "I should like to take the time to be dull"
which mitigates, I think, some
of the other side criticisms:
at times, in the Maximus Poems, he certainly does
take the time to be dull and with these
no urge to 'istorin is elicited--but this is exceptional.

The Maximus Poems are patchy/scrubby \
in spots
but it is no exaggeration to say:
there are many glittering diamonds which become
(increasingly) harder & carefully defined (no room for carelessness)
with contact and time
within the mind--possibly more
so when, in contact with the "scrub-like"
local history of Gloucester poems here and there
--after all, as Creeley said "form is never more than an extension of content": Olson is able to conjure in these poems
his phantom/psychic "polis", giving us in the process the keys to our--respective and collective--kingdoms, archipelagos of words into matter(s),
all while sitting on a stump in Dogtown (dancing sitting down)
quite a trick to pull off.
And he makes it.

[stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

alternately lovely and tedious, as any huge collection is bound to be: but under this a counter-history of the u.s., and obsessive reprocessing of gloucester and it's ghost-double of dogtown, and a complicated map of the fort and the cut and the islands in gloucester harbor and many stories of boys on fishing boats in storms at night far away. most excellent for the head if you find yourself being on cape ann and want to be convinced that it is multiple but haven't quite been able to find confirmation of that. the lovely parts are lovely indeed.

[James Debruicker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rare "liked it" rather than "really liked it" from me. I usually don't bother reviewing books unless I really liked them. Anyway. I love the language of this, I love the form, Olson is undoubtedly an amazing poet. The content just leaves me cold. Maybe because I didn't grow up in Gloucester, MA? But, like... there's this part where he goes off on a rant on the editor of the local newspaper for *some* slight and I just found myself going "Really, Charles Olson? This is how you're choosing to spend this poem?"

[Jim Leckband]

I don't often not give a book a rating - but I don't think I'm qualified to give a rating because I think my reading experience was orthogonal to what the author intended. I think he wanted a reader who has a reading ship full of barnacles slowing down the eyes. My ship sailed too smoothly and quick, which I'm sure left a lot of the poetry out. Good thing I only had the 1960 edition and not the complete edition - I think my reading ship would have never have left shore. As it is, I don't regret the voyage, but don't want to take it again or further.

[barry]

As I mention in my review of the Olson biography I'm reading, this book stands to become a monumental obsession for me. It could change my life. I may finally consume it, drop out of my current life, move to a lonely Cape Ann on Cape Ann and watch the waves pound against Bass Rocks until they wear away the shore of my sanity. But, alas, I can't find my way into this tome. Not yet. I will, though. Mark my words. I will, dammit, I will...

[Ann Klefstad · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the fading edge of the possibility of the epic poem. Only a great loneliness for the specificity of another distinct human being can keep one tethered to these pages for a continuous reading of the book. And that seems to happen less often nowadays. But this extraordinary project is worth the time and effort if, by chance, you happen to have them available.