#charles olson

[majestativa]

Desire is resurrection. The soul is an onslaught.

CHARLES OLSON — A Sulfur Anthology [Ed. Clayton Eshleman], (2016)

[apocryphics]

[postcardaday]

Charles Olson by Gerard Malanga, 1969

[hyperions-fate]

Melville wanted a god. Space was the First, before time, earth, man. Melville sought it: “Polar eternities” behind “Saturn’s gray chaos.” Christ, a Holy Ghost, Jehovah never satisfied him. When he knew peaces it was with a god of Prime. His dream was Daniel’s: the Ancient of Days, garment white as snow, hair like the pure wool. Space was the paradise Melville was exile of.

Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (1947)

[lascitasdelashoras]

Charles Olson - Melville

[dialoogid]

Various Artists - Biting Off the Tongue of a Corpse (1975)

[foreign-lawns]

— Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, University of California Press, 1983, [III.229], pp. 635.

"The very last Maximus poem consists of only eight words that brutally summarize the attenuated range of his awareness in the final days of his illness..."

— Patrick Meaner, excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature: Revised Edition, 2023.

— George F. Butterick, "Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance," The Iowa Review, Vol. 11, Issue 4, 1980, pp. 3-27.

— Paul Stephens, "Human University: Charles Olson and the Embodiment of Information," Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Vol. 39, 2012, pp. 181-208.

"For instance, does 'my wife' refer solely to Betty Kaiser Olson, or does it conflate her with Olson's first common-law wife, Constance Wilcock Bunker, from whom Olson separated in 1955? There are numerous references to cars in Olson's poetry, including the 1958 non-Maximus poem 'Rufus Woodpecker. . .' in which 'three nurses / and a dog' 'at the Capitol' in Washington, DC, back their car into another car, thereby momentarily upsetting the intricately rhetorical confabulation of a Cold War strategy of peace via mutually assured destruction—from his years in politics working for the Roosevelt administration, Olson knew more than most poets about political doublespeak. And of course 'car' immediately brings to mind the car in which Betty Kaiser Olson died. The 'color' may refer to Olson's complexion, an idea seconded by Olson scholar Charles Boer; if so, is the loss of red in Olson's cheeks as his health fails him a conflated reference to his earlier commitment to Roosevelt, the New Deal, and aspects of Popular Front politics and aesthetics? Or maybe his cheeks aren't red but pink, because there's a queered Olson to be read in the ways he discursively conjures certain relationships between men... Perhaps Olson asserts his color in the final poem of Maximus to displace and lose it. In the original manuscript page for this poem, housed in the Olson archive at the University of Connecticut, there's a space between 'my' and 'color' equal to the empty spaces between each of the poem's constituent units."

— Alan Gilbert, "Charles Olson and Empire, or Charles Olson Flips the Wartime Script," Chicago Review, Vol. 60/61, No. 4/1, 2017, pp. 92-119.

[proustian-dream]

R.B. Kitaj, Charles Olson, 1966-70.

Screenprint on paper.