Thursday, July 23, 1998

Insightful study of Charles Olson's 'Kingfishers' poem fitting as Gloucester celebrates its 375th anniversary

WHAT DOES NOT CHANGE: The Significance of Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers"

By Peter Anastas

If Charles Olson were alive today he'd be a happy man. Thanks to the University of California Press, all of the late Gloucester poet's books remain in print. Four separate volumes of Olson's collected prose and poetry, including his masterwork, "The Maximus Poems," are currently available from Berkeley in both cloth and paperback editions. In addition, Johns Hopkins University Press has reissued "Call Me Ishmael," Olson's study of the making of Melville's "Moby Dick," in an attractive paperback format with a new afterword by Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts Jr. And both California and Wesleyan University presses will soon publish volumes of Olson's selected correspondence.

The availability of these significant American texts points not only to Olson's continued importance as a poet. It also speaks to a renewed interest in Olson as a thinker, not only about verse but about a wide range of historical, philosophical and cultural matters.

Just as Olson's own works remain in circulation, so do two books that are essential to an understanding of Olson's poetic and cultural projects. One is "Charles Olson: A Biography," Ralph Maud's study of Olson's life and work through the books that Olson read, already reviewed in these pages. The other is Maud's new book, "What Does Not Change," a critical reading of "The Kingfishers," Olson's first major poem, long considered a milestone in postwar American literature.

Ralph Maud is the leading Olson scholar and editor of the "Minutes of the Charles Olson Society," published regularly from Vancouver, BC. He taught with Olson at Buffalo in the early 1960s, maintaining a friendship with the poet until Olson's death in 1970 from cancer of the liver. Since then, Maud, who is also known as an editor and bibliographer of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and an authority on British Colombian Native American traditions, has concentrated on documenting Olson's life and the sources of his work. He has collected a replica of Olson's library in anticipation of restoring Olson's home at 28 Fort Square, in Gloucester, as a research center for Olson studies.

It seems fitting, therefore, during the celebration of Gloucester's 375th anniversary, that Maud's examination of an essential Olson poem be made available. Not only does Maud help the reader to understand one of Olson's most enigmatic poems, his examination of the poem's sources and methods serves equally as a basis for the reading of all of Olson's subsequent work, especially "The Maximus Poems," in which the history of Gloucester becomes the history of America and, by extension, that of the world.

Maud's study serves yet another purpose. It focuses on five crucial years of the poet's life, between 1945, when in Washington, D.C., at the age of 35 he began to write his first poems, and 1950, when Olson's essay, "Projective Verse," was published, changing the face of American poetry. With Maud as guide, the reader experiences Olson's coming into his own as poet and thinker. Through his careful reading of "The Kingfishers," we come to understand, in Maud's words, the poem "as a thoughtful response to the problem of being a sensitive American."

After World War II and the revelations of the Holocaust, brought home to Olson by his friend, the Italian painter Corrado Cagli, who had accompanied Allied Units in the opening of Buchenwald, Olson, like many writers, asked himself what the future of literature was, if not that of humanity. "The Kingfishers" attempts to answer those questions affirmatively, according to Maud.

For Olson did not want to write another "Waste Land," T.S. Eliot's bleak poem about post World War I alienation. He wanted to write about the possibility of connectedness, of belonging, and he wanted to do that not in exile in England, as Eliot had done, but in America, in American terms. That Olson succeeded Maud makes clear. And he is not the first to suggest that a new American poetry began with Olson.

Peter Anastas is editor of "Maximus to Gloucester: The Letters and Poems of Charles Olson to the editor of the Gloucester Daily Times."

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