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Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg: A Portrait of a Friendship
This book focuses on the human and artistic dimensions of the contacts between Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg, two of the most interesting figures of modern American letters.
128 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1982
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November 16, 2014
I'm not the least disappointed in my looking over the few books I was looking at a year ago.
Lettered modernism has favored, since its birth beneath Jamesian auspices, the painterly title; or, to say it another way, the interpenetration that characterizes the culture's finest artefacts. Pound's Cantos is a suite of songs to be sung; Joyce's Portrait is an exemplar of fractal Stilleben; and the searching quotation of landscapes such as the Nature morte of Picasso does not suggest the function by which a short-story doubles its arm's reach by theft as much as it possesses that very function's corresponding virtue, meaning that it possesses the function. A bad painting aspires to be like a book, whereas a great painting is a book.
Ed Dahlberg's name is a dead one. Charles Olson's less so, partly because his presence at Black Mountain is owed, however obliquely, the unfortunate consequence of there having been Beats. Who has actually read the Maximus Poems? There are a number of extant video-recordings of Olson reading those verses. His "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]"--the first poem I ever memorized--is one, and he reads it well enough. One gets the sense that his stumbling over certain words is simply stumbling. A poet with that many poems to his name is bound to unremember certain of his lines, or at least to find them startlingly alien at a later date. I'm not sure it matters how a poet reads his poetry, or yet whether, or why.
I remember this Portrait more fondly than the single Dahlberg book I've read, the content of which draws a blank. That statement speaks more to my memory than to the quality of the book, though now I remember that it was uninteresting.
To me, Olson seems always to have been in the right, or toward it. He quit Washington, he quit politics after the bombs were dropped, having headed (!) the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information. He quit Pound when Pound hung still to a set of dogmas both thoroughly offensive and boring. And he quit Dahlberg when Dahlberg ripped off his Melville research (Olson was a late pioneer in the Melville Revival; he tracked down, if bad memory serves, some hundred-twenty volumes that had belonged to H.M.'s personal library--including the Shakespeares, limp scaffold of annotations intact, which made piece of such as Matthiessen's regal and gargantuan American Renaissance possible--in the process befriending the failed novelist and occasional poet's grandaughters and a great-grandson, the adolescent Paul Metcalf).
Dahlberg, of course, did more than that. Or is it less? He made sour faces when Olson began to write poetry (who'd've thought? Olson a poet?)--Olson having been, until then, principally a scholar, a one-time doctoral candidate in the new American Studies program at Harvard and star-student before that at Wesleyan.
Still, I wish greatly to read Because I Was Flesh . That, I understand, is the book to read, along with Can These Bones Live and The Sorrows Of Priapus . And perhaps Dahlberg was simply a sour man. Again, I understand that his prose is rich, as a Sir Thos. Brown's is. The book I did read, The Olive Of Minerva , I am now recalling, was wordy in the good sense of "wordy"--the kind of wordiness one finds in a Chas. Doughty, or yet a boy-drunk Guy Davenport. But so perhaps Dahlberg's province is not the novel, but the imagined and felt criticism, as witness W.C. Williams ( In the American Grain ) or, best of all, Charles Olson ( Call Me Ishmael ).
Lettered modernism has favored, since its birth beneath Jamesian auspices, the painterly title; or, to say it another way, the interpenetration that characterizes the culture's finest artefacts. Pound's Cantos is a suite of songs to be sung; Joyce's Portrait is an exemplar of fractal Stilleben; and the searching quotation of landscapes such as the Nature morte of Picasso does not suggest the function by which a short-story doubles its arm's reach by theft as much as it possesses that very function's corresponding virtue, meaning that it possesses the function. A bad painting aspires to be like a book, whereas a great painting is a book.
Ed Dahlberg's name is a dead one. Charles Olson's less so, partly because his presence at Black Mountain is owed, however obliquely, the unfortunate consequence of there having been Beats. Who has actually read the Maximus Poems? There are a number of extant video-recordings of Olson reading those verses. His "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]"--the first poem I ever memorized--is one, and he reads it well enough. One gets the sense that his stumbling over certain words is simply stumbling. A poet with that many poems to his name is bound to unremember certain of his lines, or at least to find them startlingly alien at a later date. I'm not sure it matters how a poet reads his poetry, or yet whether, or why.
I remember this Portrait more fondly than the single Dahlberg book I've read, the content of which draws a blank. That statement speaks more to my memory than to the quality of the book, though now I remember that it was uninteresting.
To me, Olson seems always to have been in the right, or toward it. He quit Washington, he quit politics after the bombs were dropped, having headed (!) the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information. He quit Pound when Pound hung still to a set of dogmas both thoroughly offensive and boring. And he quit Dahlberg when Dahlberg ripped off his Melville research (Olson was a late pioneer in the Melville Revival; he tracked down, if bad memory serves, some hundred-twenty volumes that had belonged to H.M.'s personal library--including the Shakespeares, limp scaffold of annotations intact, which made piece of such as Matthiessen's regal and gargantuan American Renaissance possible--in the process befriending the failed novelist and occasional poet's grandaughters and a great-grandson, the adolescent Paul Metcalf).
Dahlberg, of course, did more than that. Or is it less? He made sour faces when Olson began to write poetry (who'd've thought? Olson a poet?)--Olson having been, until then, principally a scholar, a one-time doctoral candidate in the new American Studies program at Harvard and star-student before that at Wesleyan.
Still, I wish greatly to read Because I Was Flesh . That, I understand, is the book to read, along with Can These Bones Live and The Sorrows Of Priapus . And perhaps Dahlberg was simply a sour man. Again, I understand that his prose is rich, as a Sir Thos. Brown's is. The book I did read, The Olive Of Minerva , I am now recalling, was wordy in the good sense of "wordy"--the kind of wordiness one finds in a Chas. Doughty, or yet a boy-drunk Guy Davenport. But so perhaps Dahlberg's province is not the novel, but the imagined and felt criticism, as witness W.C. Williams ( In the American Grain ) or, best of all, Charles Olson ( Call Me Ishmael ).
Displaying 1 of 1 review