Introduction

INTRODUCTION Charles Olson, who was born in 1910, did not publish his first poems until 1946, several years after what would prove to be the middle of his life. Indeed, from all the known evidence, he did not even begin writing poems until twenty-nine years old. Before then his overriding ambition had been to be a Melville scholar, a man of letters, a "writer. " Even in college he published only newspaper editorials, book reviews, and a single play. What prompted him to try his hand at poetry? Most likely, as with many poets, it was a gradual awakening, an evolution, rather than an incident along the road to Damascus or a Caedmonic dream. One can be sure it was not encouragement from his early mentor, Edward Dahlberg, who had such an antipathy to modern poetry. Nor was it a directive from Ezra Pound, whom Olson began visiting in 1946, for he had already written many of the poems in the early pages of this edition. We may never know for certain. All he ever said was that it was overhearing the talk of Gloucester fishermen as a boy, on summer evenings, that made him a poet. It never even occurred to me to ask. He just seemed so completely and classically a poet, filling out the role as he did any space or company with his physical and imaginative presence. There was—and is—hardly room for thought of him otherwise. There is, therefore, no section ofjuvenilia in this collection, although some of the earliest poems in their apparent simplicity are those of a beginner. But this is no problem: he was always, like his Melville, a "beginner—and interested in begin- nings." It was not until 1949, with the writing of "The Kingfishers," and 1950, with the publication of his manifesto "Projective Verse," that he was set irrevocably on his course. There might be said to be three periods of Olson's poetic development, even though this collection is not divided so neatly: the initial years through 1948, or until he began his association with Black Mountain College and including the annunciative "La Préface," his first "postmodern" poem; the middle period, beginning with "The Kingfishers" and corresponding roughly to his stay at Black Mountain, during which time the Maximus poems were launched; and the period from around 1957, when he returned to Gloucester from Black Mountain, until the end of his life (although the final years, beyond 1964, were given over almost exclusively to Maximus). Nor is this a collection, like some poets' Collected Poems, of previously published volumes intact and in order of publication. Olson did not necessarily conceive of his work that way and, more important, three-quarters of the roughly four hundred poems presented here were never published in his lifetime. Upon his death, he left xix not only the final third of his Maximus epic unpublished but also a sizable body of other writings, including an unusually large number of unpublished poems, many equal in quality to those published during his lifetime. It was his understanding that they would eventually be published, although as with The Maximus Poems he left few specific guidelines. And since the earlier most comprehensive volume of his separate poems, Archaeologist of Morning, had been allowed to go out of print by its publisher, this occasion, part of the larger design of making his complete writings available, was viewed as the opportunity to bring all his non-Maximus poems worthy of pre- servation into one large collection. If Olson had a reputation as a major shaper of twentieth-century poetry before this work was available, how much greater his promi- nence will be when the full extent of his accomplishment is made known. For it is as a poet, not as teacher or theorist or influence alone, that he must be judged and by which his reputation lives or wanes. Even the imposing Maximus Poems, which have been made available in a separate volume by the University of California Press (1983), do not demonstrate the full scope of his powers. Unlike the poems of that epic series, the poems presented here are not localized in Gloucester (though a few have Gloucester as subject or setting) and are not successively forwarded by the voice of Maximus. Rather, they are more self-contained impulses. There are smaller series within them, such as O'Ryan or 'West', but most are isolate bursts or swarms, some intensely lyric, others broader and more encompassing. Whether widely or narrowly occasional, their occasions are all their own. All bear the stamp of Olson's unmistakable authority. Some are charms, others are blasts, ferocities. If he had worked in more traditional forms, there might be more traditional names for them. In fact, he was forging the tradition of what Pound had called the "new" and Williams the "American"—yet he himself had the persistent sense he was working in thematic areas as far back as Homer and Hesiod, the Hittites and Sumerians, the earliest Indo-European road-warriors, Pleistocene forebears, the aboriginal earthlings, Terrans, Gaeans themselves—areas of human occupation inexhaustible to any age. The poems collected here are from the full course of Olson's career and include all those non-Maximus poems the poet himself published during his lifetime. Readers will find such familiar and influential classics as "The Kingfishers," that successor to "The Wasteland"; the probing, hammering, and above all triumphal "In Cold Hell, in Thicket"; and the deeply personal yet archetypal "As the Dead Prey Upon Us." The many unpublished poems left behind at the time of his death are mostly from among his extensive papers at the University of Connecticut Library, but also from holdings in other institutions and in private hands, wherever these have been dis- XX coverable. They embody the widest (and sometimes wildest) range of human inter- ests, from the cosmic to the comic to the economic. They extend from one-word poems (anticipating by a number of years, perhaps, Aram Saroyan's famous "eyeye") to the magnificently rolling antiphon beginning "The chain of memory is resurrec- tion . ," or "Conqueror," whose lines are so long they can only be doubled-up at the margin. The voice in each is impassioned or hushed, urgent or generous, raised to exhortation, ringing off the ionosphere, or lowered to an earthy jest. None of the poems are without risk. As in editing the final volume of The Maximus Poems, I have gone through Olson's papers repeatedly, including his notebooks, correspondence, and the books in his library (where poems on folded sheets have been found, as well as some written on flyleaves and in margins).1 A determined effort was made to gather together all known manuscripts in the preparation of this edition. Editors in whose publications poems appeared were contacted where possible, as were the significant correspon- dents throughout Olson's career. Public repositories throughout the United States and Canada were approached for previously unknown manuscripts, variant texts, texts for collation, and in order to secure dates for undated manuscripts. I received helpful responses from all the institutions known to have Olson materials. Over the past fifteen years, I have generally kept my eyes open. There may be occasional strays left to be found, of course, although I am confident there are no sizable hidden caches, no lost masterpieces. A few poems undoubtedly remain buried among the poet's water-damaged materials in Connecticut,2 including perhaps two from mid-1951 en- titled "Composed of Distinct Parts or Discontinuous Elements" (unless that is an early title for "A Discrete Gloss") and "Not So Much Movement as Its Lack"— both mentioned in July 1951 letters to Robert Creeley but which do not otherwise survive. The present collection contains almost four times the total number of rion-Maxi- mus poems published during Olson's lifetime and collected in Archaeologist of Morning (1970). In those terms alone, Archaeologist of Morning, out of print since 1977, is plainly not the full extent of the poet's accomplishment or his poetic canon. Al- though useful at the time, it was not an authorized edition in the usual sense, for Olson had no active role in its making, aside from urging that it be done (or at least that some such large collection of his poems be made). It is doubtful he gave any 1. See the introductions to my A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) and Editing the Maximus Poems (Storrs: University of Connecticut Library, 1983). 2. Described briefly in my introduction to Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspon- dence (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1983), V, vii; see also my "Modern Literary Manuscripts and Archives: A Field Report," Credences, n.s., 1:1 (1981), p. 84. XXI personal supervision to the volume: it was still being assembled while he was dying and was published posthumously. It was, in fact, no more than an opportune collection. He did not approve the selection of texts, made no decisions as to textual vari- ants or whether any of the assembled pieces might be better considered prose or ad- ditional Maximus poems, and did not provide any instructions on the order of the selections, although all these questions had been raised with him. Publisher Barry Hall of Cape Goliard Press had proposed in November 1969 to bring the assembled manuscript to Gloucester some time after Christmas that year, but by then it was too late. Olson died in New York on iojanuary 1970.3 Moreover, the text itself of Archaeologist of Morning is not very reliable.

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