Charles Olson. Selected Poems. Robert Creeley, ed.
Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of
California Press, 1993. xx + 225 pp. No price listed.

     Whether you are familiar with Olson's work or not,
this is a superb Selected Poems, laudable in every way,
from the Kitaj drawing of Olson on the dust-jacket and
the sheer excellence of the book design (generous space
in an elegant book that sits easily in the hand)
through Creeley's extraordinarily good introduction to
the poems themselves. Some readers might, I suppose, be
a shade disappointed at the absence of well-
anthologised classroom pieces like "I Mencius," in
which Olson pays his complex homage to Pound, or the
visionary "Lordly and Isolate Satyrs," but this is a
generous selection indeed, sixty-six poems (some of
them lengthy) in 215 pages of text. What has come to be
the "essential" Olson is well represented, by poems
like "The Kingfishers," "To Gerhart," or "Maximus from
Dogtown, I," but there are, too, some surprises --
lesser or even little-known short poems like "The Lamp"
or (from Maximus) "When do poppies bloom," each of
which should be a celebrated example of speech
transformed into music; all seven pages of the
astonishing "Stevens Song" from the third volume of
Maximus.
     
     Like Blake, Olson has suffered from his role as
(an often irascible) public moralist. Readers mistook
the overt political and personal outrage for the
writing, and surrounded his figure with the sort of
hoopla they thought befitted a guru and a saviour.
Olson himself no doubt contributed to this, though it
is clear that, like other writers in this and the last
century, he could not with even the greatest
determination wholly escape his audience and its
demands. As a result, the conventional and indeed text-
book picture of Olson has been oddly lop-sided, drawn
as it has been from Projective Verse (1959), The
Distances (1960), and the first volume of The Maximus
Poems (1960).
     
     Creeley's selection redresses the balance by
drawing upon the whole of Olson's career, with twelve
(of a possible 21) poems from The Distances (and 14
from elsewhere), and only seven from the 1960 volume of
The Maximus Poems (and 34 more from later volumes).
Olson's Collected Poems (1987) and the final gathering
of uncollected poems, A Nation of Nothing but Poetry
(1989), together add up to some 470 works, some of them
long; the complete Maximus adds another 360 or so --
close to 1500 pages altogether. Somehow, in the compass
of these comparatively few pages, Creeley has managed
not only to redress the balance, but so manage things
that anyone who did not know what Olson was up to would
certainly find out from this book. It is an exemplary
piece of editing, giving us the full range of Olson's
career from "Move Over" (c. 1947) to "the Blow is
Creation" (c. 1970).
     
     The voice of "I have been an ability -- a machine"
sounds a familiar Olson note, with its denunciative
lament for "this  / desperate / ugly / cruel / land
this Nation" (p. 196), "this foul country where / human
lives are so much trash" (p. 198), but it is a lament
for the poet himself, for possibility which has turned
its back on itself; the poem is a complex act of love
in which, as the very fine "Stevens Song" puts it (pp.
182-3), there are
               in normal bedstead
               fashion, no excessive
               facts here, no special or
               sought meaning
Less familiar, perhaps, but equally characteristic, is
the extraordinarily tender "West Gloucester" (p. 176)
which recounts Olson's rescue of a star-nosed mole he
found spinning in the middle of the highway until he
          took an oar out of the back seat of the
          station wagon
          and removed it
          like a pea on a knife to
          the side of the road
to release it off the marshes of Walker's Creek. And
the creek falls to Ipswich Bay falls to the Atlantic
Ocean, the poem tells us, circling back to that space,
"writ large," so essential to his vision. Olson is a
narrative poet of great lyric feeling, one of the best
of this century. He draws his power from a discipline
of ear and eye which tells us what he sees -- the
details and forms of life at the shores of topography
and consciousness, of landscape and time, space and
forgotten history that press around venal rapacity and
greed and press upon our waking and our dreaming
worlds, insisting the pluralities within which we must
live.

     The Selected Poems of Charles Olson is very much a
book for our time, and its publication very much a
political act. Not for its denunciations of political
chicanery and corporate cupidity, of intellectual
blindness and willful ignorance, but for its
affirmations and retrievals in the face of such hydra-
headed monsters, and for the sheer range of its
accomplishment, the mutiplicity of Olson's voice, the
detailed and felt pressures of its syntax, cutting
through the sludge. A note in the front of the book
tells us that this is one of one hundred titles
published between 1990 and 1995 to celebrate the
centennial of the University of California Press.
Physically, it is a beautifully designed book whose
demonstration of the printer's and book maker's arts
perfectly reflects the editor's great care for Olson's
text. One can only hope that there will soon be a
cheaper paperbound edition, for it is indeed essential
reading.

Peter Quartermain

[Originally published in the Durham University Journal
special Basil Bunting issue (March 1995).]