Bram, Charles Olson and A.N. Whitehead

Charles Olson
and Alfred North Whitehead

An Essay on Poetry
Shahar Bram
Translated by Batya Stein
Lewisburg
Bucknell University Press
Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction: An Opening 11
1. The Battlefield 18
2. Whitehead vs. Descartes 24
3. Experience 30
4. Concrescence 42
5. Fluency 67
6. Story, History, Myth 91
7. Stance 111
8. Failure? 133
Epilogue 143
Notes 144
Bibliography 156
Index of Poetic Units 159
Index 161
Acknowledgments
I AM GRATEFUL TO DAN MIRON, THE SUPERVISOR OF MY DOCTORAL

dissertation, which was the basis of this book. His writings have stimulated
my thinking on poetry, and my encounters with him have always been
intellectually challenging. Thanks to Ayala Amir, good friend and colleague.
Our exchange of ideas has contributed to my thinking on literature. Warm
thanks to my translator, Batya Stein, whose professionalism matched her
personal generosity. I am grateful to Haifa University for their support during
the writing of this book.
The author is grateful to the following for the permission to quote from their
books:
University of Califorina Press: Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Edited by

Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1997.
University of California Press: Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Ed-

ited by George F. Butterick. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1984.
Harper Collins Publishers: Ferris, Timothy. Coming of Age in the Milky

Way. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
Prof. Ann Charters: Charters, Ann, ed. Olson/Melville: A Study

in Affinity. Berkeley: Oyez 1968.
University of Connecticut: Olson, Charles. Muthologos: The Collected

Lectures & Interviews. Edited by George F.
Butterick. 2 Vols. Bolinas, Calif.: Writing
35, 1978.
7
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 8
Simon & Schuster, Inc.: Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Real-
ity. Edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sher-
burne. 1929. Reprint, New York: Free
Press, 1978.
Harvard University Press: Von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The

Scholar’s Art. London: Harvard University
Press, 1978.
New Directions: Olson, Charles. Selected Writings. Edited by

Robert Creeley. New York: New Direc-
tions, 1966.
Introduction: An Opening
A Later Note on
Letter # 15
In English the poetics became meubles—furniture—
thereafter (after 1630
& Descartes was the value
until Whitehead, who cleared out the gunk

by getting the universe in (as against man alone
& that concept of history (not Herodotus’s,

which was a verb, to find out for yourself:
‘istorin, which makes any one’s acts a finding out for him or her
self, in other words restores the traum: that we act somewhere
at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides, or

the latest finest tape-recorder, or any form of record on the spot
—live television or what—is a lie
as against what we know went on, the dream: the dream being
self-action with Whitehead’s important corollary: that no event
is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal

event
The poetics of such a situation

are yet to be found out
January 15, 1962
“A LATER NOTE ON LETTER # 15” IS A POETIC MANIFESTO THAT PRE-

sents the essence of Olson’s worldview and points out major sources of influ-
ence, while also rendering his worldview and his poetics into concrete shape.
11
12 CHARLES OLSON AND ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
In retrospect, we can infer from his manifesto, from its wording and from
the continued search for the correct poetics, even after the first part of the
poem had already been published, that Olson approached poetry as a process
and an ongoing search continuously actualized in each poetic unit that is part
of one long poem. Beginning as an optional poetic genre, the long poem is
transformed into the poetics of poetry. “Long” thus means process, the search
and continuity of the poem, as opposed to the perception of the poem as an
object, with defined borders, closed, “short.” For Olson, poetry is not a poem:
the name of an object, a finished aesthetic product, the outcome of a process
in itself minor or negligible. Rather, the poem is poesis; the process of creation
and the poem are, at most, two names or two perspectives for contemplating
the same activity, the creativity of a human being in the world.
The poetics that Olson develops expresses a total Weltanschauung, which
was influenced by two major sources. The first and most crucial is the phi-
losophy and cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead, mainly as presented in
Process and Reality, Whitehead’s main philosophical work, but also in several
of his other writings.1 Whitehead’s conception functions as a net through
which modern science and its discoveries enter the work of Olson, who kept
close track of developments in this realm. The mythopoeia of an ancient,
“primitive” world, as manifest in various texts from different cultures, times,
and places, known to Olson from his readings, blends with ways of thinking
that he fashioned with the aid of Whitehead’s theories. At crucially decisive
points, Olson found a close affinity between these two approaches, seemingly
representing two opposite poles; in fact, Olson argues that Whitehead “only
refines and corrects the most ancient myth-cosmos.”2 In his long poem,
Olson preserves and applies the principles of a worldview growing from and
with these two sources. The long poem as process, as the act of an organism
and as an organism per se, as a real event in the world, as ritual and story, as
creation and construction, as multiplicity within unity—all these terms rely
on foundations anchored in Whitehead’s philosophy and in mythopoeic
patterns of thinking. Olson was also aware of the affinity between these two
conceptions of the world because, in his view, they both rely on assumptions
opposed to those characterizing canonic Western culture. In this sense,
Olson’s poetic act constitutes a critique of prevailing norms and a proposal for
an alternative ethos, which he actualized as a poetics. The poem is an act and a
call to act, the building of a new (re-newed) identity for the individual and the
community.
“A Later Note on Letter # 15” is a convenient opening place for presenting
the long poem woven by Olson. Olson wrote “A Later Note on Letter # 15”
in 1962. At the time, he was about halfway through the process of writing The
Maximus Poems, a project that had begun as a vague idea in the late 1940s.
INTRODUCTION 13
The first poetic unit, “Letter # 1,” was written in 1950, and the poem was
truncated by his death in 1970. Since the poem began as a real letter, Olson
referred to the different units of the poem in progress as “letters.” This
terminology, however, was not sustained as the writing progressed. My term,
“poetic units,” will replace the term “letter,” thus applying also to those units
he himself does not entitle letters. The term “poetic unit,” then, is not meant
to suggest fragmentation, but rather the opposite: the poem in progress is
built from a series of poetic units coalescing into one.
In its final version, the poem brings together three volumes that had been
published separately and in different circumstances. In his preface, Butterick
offers a detailed description of the poem’s history.3 The first volume was
published in 1960 under the name The Maximus Poems and appears now as
Part One in the final version of the whole poem. Although the first volume is
not formally divided into three parts, the name of the second book, which was
published in 1968 (Maximus Poems: IV, V, VI), can also attest to the inner
structure of the previous one. The third book was published in 1975 as The
Maximus Poems: Volume Three. Olson did not edit this volume, but still
managed to be involved in the editing of specific poetic units. The final
version of the poem, dated 1984, includes revisions in the organization of the
last volume, whose format was decided by the editor after Olson’s death.
Due to these circumstances, our reading of the last volume can, at best, be
partial and suggestive. As I will argue, however, Olson’s poetics, based on
openness at the micro level (in any of the “letters” for instance), is yet a
unifying poetics, narrative in aspiration, at the macro level. Thus, Olson’s
poetics enables us, to some extent, to maintain a cautious reading that follows
the characteristic movement of the poem. But the poem is still incomplete,
and not only because of its progressive character or of Olson’s habit of writing
“poetic units” and notes on scattered pieces of paper. Most probably, the
editor of the last volume also took into account Olson’s sense of failure, as
exposed both in his writings at this time and in private talks.4 I discuss this
sense of failure in regard to Olson’s poetics and to the sequence of the poetic
units in chapter 8.
My work is actually merely a reading, or an opening of this one poetic unit
(“A Later Note on Letter # 15”), which encapsulates the main elements of
Olson’s worldview. The Olsonian poetics involves an endless creative process
and develops into an increasingly comprehensive understanding of the
world—a process that invariably begins with the concrete and brings together
elements that interpenetrate and influence each other, a concrescence creating
a new momentary wholeness continuously expanding. This process is based
on the principle of transition between micro and macro, which allows the
integration of openness and determinism, suspension and fluency, spatial and
temporal patterns of thinking, multiplicity in unity. In the discussion that

follows, therefore, the concrete poetic unit will serve, on the one hand, as a
starting point for clarifying how different and “distant” elements are joined
together in one unit, and their mutual (spatial) influences. On the other
hand, I will also trace the blending of the whole poem at the macro level,
following its course through a temporal progress in which the poem moves
from a unity (of multiplicity) to a new unity (in which the previous unity is
already part of the multiplicity building the new one). Whitehead’s world-
view, and the type of mythopoeic thinking that influenced Olson’s poetics,
will be explained in the process.
Olson’s long poem is a poem of growth toward Maximus, and also the story
of Gloucester, where Olson had spent his childhood summers and to which
he returned in later life, after the idea of the poem was already taking form.
This is a continued and renewed shaping of identity: the identity of the
storyteller, the identity of his city, the identity of the whole world unfolding in
the story, and, ideally, the identity of the reader. Every place, according to
Olson, is an opening place, and can serve as a gate inward that can be used to
return outward, after further growth. The poetic unit “A Later Note on Letter
# 15” is an opening place for my building (anew, even if very partially) the
poem and the present book.
The book is divided into eight chapters. I do not discuss Olson’s place in
the American poetic tradition. Olson as “Pound’s most representative and
influential descendant”5 is not examined in this book, nor do I consider
whether “Olson synthesizes Pound’s and Williams’s methods for achieving a
measure of continuity in the Long Poem.”6 Even in the broader context of
poetic tradition, I do not dwell, for instance, on whether, “by virtue of what it
proposes, The Special View of History is Olson’s most Emersonian work”7 or
on whether “like Thoreau, Olson insists that the poet’s relation to facts
necessitates investigations that have normally been assigned to other ex-
plorers, such as the geographer, the anthropologist, the archeologist, and the
historian.”8 These and other similarly fascinating questions remain beyond
the scope of my work. Obviously, Olson shared his perception of the world as
an organism with other poets. Whitman’s name, for instance, may sometimes
come to mind, but I am pursuing Olson’s precise understanding of this term.
The book as a whole deals with the question of the long poem as Olson
perceived the underlying theoretical problems of this genre and with the ways
in which The Maximus Poems sought to contend with these problems. These
theoretical problems surface in the preliminary discussions in chapters 1 and
2, where I outline Olson’s worldview and examine its expression in his poetry.
As noted, the assumption underlying my discussion of The Maximus Poems is
that Olson’s Weltanschauung relies on two foundations: the philosophy and
INTRODUCTION 15
the cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead and the mythopoeic worldview of

antiquity, as Olson interpreted it. This point is worth stressing, since,
Olson’s enthusiasms encompass such oddments as Hopi language, Mayan statuary,

non-Euclidean geometry, Melville’s fiction, the austere structures in Whitehead’s
philosophy, the fragmentary remains of the Sumerian and Hittite civilizations,
Norse, Greek, and Egyptian mythology, numerology and the Tarot, the history of
human migration, naval and economic history, the etymology of common words,
pre-Socratic philosophy, the historical origins of the New England colonies, the
development of the fishing industry off the coast of Massachusetts, accounts of the
conquest of Mexico, the collapse of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. The list
could be extended.9
The assumption I wish to validate in this book sets up a hierarchy of these

various sources of influence and orders them in broad categories. I offer a
concrete and categorical answer to the question raised by Christensen—“Is
there an underlying unity at all?” (6). Regarding the search for a common
basic motivation underlying all of Olson’s areas of interest and activity, this
book will present the unity of The Maximus Poems through a careful analysis
of its actual construction, tracing the development of the one, whole but
perforce incomplete poem, out of its seemingly separate materials and units. I
thereby hope to shed light on the way Olson, by and through his poem,
attains his wish “to restore to human beings their own primal energies” (21).
In the opening discussion (chapters 1 and 2), I present the primary con-
cepts. The basic assumptions about the poetic act, as construed by Olson, will
be exposed by examining the struggle between the key figures populating the
poetic unit under discussion and by progressively broader references to his
long poem.
From chapter 3 onward, the theoretical and conceptual discussion becomes
increasingly focused, complex, detailed, and abstract. Chapters 3, 4, and 5
present the cosmological and metaphysical infrastructure guiding Olson’s
thinking, which takes shape as he deepens his knowledge of Whitehead’s
writings while closely following scientific discoveries during the first half of
the century. The theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and other physical
principles mold Olson’s world, filtered through Whitehead’s metaphysical-
cosmological interpretation. These chapters will clarify that Olson does not
adopt the scientific worldview and its concepts metaphorically. The differ-
ence between the various forms of discourse and the metaphysical skepticism
characteristic of the dominant cultural discourse of today are alien to Olson’s
beliefs and his poetry. Olson seeks to disclose the unity within the multi-
plicity, to bridge the divisiveness that, in his view, characterizes Western
thinking. Descartes and Whitehead, as philosophical rivals, serve as cultural
“watersheds,” and Olson musters their support in the poetic battle he wages
against the Western canon. Questions about the relationship between the one
and the many, and the difficulties posed by the concept of time (including all
its implications, particularly concerning the modern, “spatial,” scientific per-
ception) will be the focus of my concern in these chapters. It is through them
that I examine Olson’s poetry.
The theoretical discussion will unfold through the reading of various po-
etic units chosen from The Maximus Poems. The greater the empathy shown
in this reading, and the greater its success in presenting the fulfillment of
Olson’s demands and his critique, the easier the presentation of the inevitable
difficulties that follow from Olson’s worldview and from the ability to concre-
tize it. Due to the scope of the long poem, it is impossible to include the
whole text. The choice of specific poetic units will disclose the philosophy
and the methodology typical of the full text, providing “keys” for a com-
prehensive reading.
Chapter 6 deals with the second source that exerted a decisive influence on
Olson’s work: the mythopoeic thinking of the “ancient,” “primitive” world, as
Olson understood it. This chapter will portray a cultural worldview, which
Olson assembled from a variety of sources, representing to him a mode of
thought and action antithetical to the one he considered typical of the deca-
dent West. The sources I use are not necessarily Olson’s, but clearly demon-
strate his case. They are models, or paradigms imposed on scanty “facts,” to
make them retrospectively intelligible. My argument is poetic rather than
historical or philological. The mythopoeic framework I build is meant to
illustrate Olson’s method of consuming eclectic sources and turning them
into a unified whole. Hence, the generalizations and interpretations I use in
this chapter (“ancient” versus “modern”; “mythopoeic” versus “western”
thought) reflect Olson’s poetic needs when building his poetry.
I examine how Olson weaves his mythopoeic approach into a modern
scientific outlook, in his wish to preserve some of its basic aspects in our
attitude to the world and to the other as Thou. The poetic discussion of these
aspects focuses on such topics as story, history, myth, and logos. The extensive
theoretical discussion in the previous chapters, particularly concerning the
dimension of time, substantiates the discussion of these concepts. Olson’s
long poem, despite its reliance on the discoveries of modern science, is actu-
ally interested in preserving the “arrow of time” and its ritual and narrative
character. In chapters 6 and 7, I also stress that discussions of Olson’s texts are
actually revealed as arguments we tend to confine to the category of “the
reading process.” Since Olson claims that poetry exists only as a concrete
activity of the body (breathing and the link with orality will be discussed in
this context), and since poetry is a creative ritual that (re)tells and (re)creates a
INTRODUCTION 17
story and a world, the poet is revealed as a person whose activity depends on
the other, on the reader, for the full actualization of her/his work. Many
obstacles derive from the position in which Olson places the other—the later,
but also the early, reader of his letters: the people of Gloucester, his city, whose
story he wishes to (re)tell, and to whom he addresses his letters-poems. His
call goes unanswered. His Weltanschauung and his path are misunderstood
from the start, and his letters are subject to a “mistaken reading,” apparently
leaving Olson at the end of the way, namely, at the end of his poem, at the end
of his life, with a sense of failure. Olson’s “aesthetic” path (a word alien to the
cultural connotations acceptable in Olson’s world) is a priori moved by ethical
and philosophical considerations; the acute sense of failure in the concluding
section of the poem is a result of the continued separation “between faculties”
evident in the world around him, as opposed to his own project of healing the
breach: Olson’s endeavor, his poetic endeavor, is basically his life’s endeavor.
Olson, who does not distinguish “poetry” from “life,” ends his poem with his
death: no other end appears possible.
1
The Battlefield
THE MANIFESTO STYLE OF THE POETIC UNIT “A LATER NOTE ON LETTER

# 15” (henceforth “A Later Note”) is animated by the reader’s breaths. Olson’s
critique of Western thinking and Western poetry rises with the shaking of the
elements on the space of the page. The “poetics of furniture” at the beginning
of the unit is confronted with “the poetics of such a situation” at the end of it;
this “situation,” here and now, is an actual situation for Olson at the time of
the writing, and for the reader at the time of the reading, itself a creative act.
In both cases, it is the outcome of a process occurring within the unit itself,
mainly involving a collision between Descartes and Whitehead in the first
part, and between Herodotus and Thucidides in the second part. These two
struggles are actually one: the battle of Olson, who grows into Maximus,
against the divisive patterns of Western culture. The reader re-enacts this
confrontation, which accompanies The Maximus Poems throughout. The
struggle is part of the story told by the poem, and the reader, who (re)awakens
the struggle, is part of the story as well as the storyteller, the narrator. Re-
enacting the struggle latent in the elements spread over the space of the page
means to discover and activate the poetics of the poetic unit itself. The final
call (“the poetics . . . are yet to be found out”) is thus revealed as a call to act
addressed to every reader. Before us is the expression of a poetics acting
against divisiveness: readers, by eventually identifying with Olson, can thus
grow into the Maximus latent in them. The poetic unit is as much of an event
for the reader as it is for Olson. The concept of event (in the third line before
the end) is linked to the previous line but also stands by itself, as a separate
occurrence, and is projected forward in order to define “the poetics of the
situation” (which is here and now at every single moment). Indeed, the
sentence concluding the unit begins with a capital, as a syntactically autono-
mous sentence. Its beginning within the space of the page, however, within
the rhythmical-breathing framework defined by the lines of the unit, which is
the breathing of Olson/Maximus, denotes that this is a continuation rather
than merely a beginning. A continuation of the event and a definition of it,
“the poetics of such a situation” is also an event; the poetic unit is an event,
18
1: THE BATTLEFIELD 19
and the whole poem, as we will see, is an event. The event “belongs” to
Whitehead, who returns in order to conclude the unit opened by Descartes:
this is a movement forward through a return backward (Herodotus and
Thucidides). But the event also “belongs” to the “poetics of the situation,” to
the poem, to Olson/Maximus, and to the reader who embarks on its re-
discovery.
Olson does not perceive the movement and the collision between the
elements in the poem in metaphorical terms. Understanding Olson’s inten-
tion requires some acquaintance with Whitehead’s worldview and with the
concept of “field,” which guided Olson’s approach even before he knew
Whitehead. The field of the page is the battlefield between Descartes and
Whitehead, an actual field of energy activated by the reader: “First, some
simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called
COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all
form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective.”1
The poetic manifesto “Projective Verse,” which Olson wrote in 1950,2 is
already part of the battle against the “poetics of furniture,” which the poet
identifies as an old, Western, canonic poetics. Latent in Olson’s discussion of
the “poetics of the situation” in “A Later Note” are his previous steps in the
poetic struggle he was waging. The fact that “PV” is not part of The Maximus
Poems will later be revealed as irrelevant, not only because “PV” has become a
poetic landmark, but also because Olson’s perception of reality (and of poetry)
abolishes the fundamental division, the entrenched traditional dichotomy
between poetry and reality and between different genres of writing.
The highly significant role of “PV” and its influence on the American
poetic tradition is today unquestionable. Olson, however, began by challeng-
ing poetic conventions, as required by his critique of Western tradition in
general.3 The relevance of all materials to the activity that is poetry overrides
the arbitrary fact that “PV” was written before Olson had decided to embark
on The Maximus Poems project.4 Thus, the ending of “A Later Note” is
actually a return to “PV” for the sake of a forward projection, for the sake of
revelation, progress, expansion, a dynamic characteristic of the very thinking
about poetry in “PV.”
The key concept that shapes Olson’s picture of reality already in “PV” and
enables the energetic projection, is “the field.” The enormous importance of
this concept in scientific discourse eventually resonated in the cultural dis-
course in general. Olson was not the first to internalize scientific ways of
thinking, but his interest and his extensive reading of texts from the philoso-
phy of science single him out as the one who noted a particularly strong
closeness between the world of poetry and the world of science. This close-
ness, which Olson conveyed in his work, follows also from Olson’s sense of
reality as one, as a unity where the various manifestations are merely multiple
facets. He eventually formulated this sense into articulate statements, follow-
ing his acquaintance with Whitehead’s philosophical method, as we will see
below.
The concept of field, together with the world picture derived from it,
denotes a dismissal of the traditional perception of space. In this sense, it is
related to the efforts that Olson invested in clarifying the question of space in
his early book on Moby Dick and Melville.5 The concept of field had a
tremendous effect on our understanding and imagining of reality, as Einstein
himself explains:
A new concept appears in physics, the most important invention since Newton’s
time: the field. It needed great scientific imagination to realize that it is not the
charges nor the particles but the field in the space between the charges and the
particles which is essential for the description of physical phenomena. The field
concept proves most successful and leads to the formulation of Maxwell’s equations
describing the structure of the electromagnetic field and governing the electric as
well as the optical phenomena.6
The field, as defined by Ferris, is the “domain or environment in which the

real or potential action of a force can be described mathematically at each
point in space”; “force” is the “agency responsible for change in a system”;
“field theory, today explores processes ranging from the subatomic to the
intergalactic scale and portrays the entire material world as but a grand
illusion, spun on the loom of the force fields.”7 With Einstein’s help, the
concept of field led physics to a new thinking, far removed from the Newto-
nian world. Newton had described the world as empty space, in which
particles activate forces of attraction and rejection. A central characteristic of
these forces is acting at a distance, meaning across a gulf of empty space.
Newtonian atomism is quantitative: the properties of the material body are
based on the movement of the atoms composing the body, and Newton
formulated the laws of motion governing these bodies as axioms (Descartes
had perceived the particles as space, meaning he was an anti-atomist). The
concept of field developed with further discoveries in electricity and mag-
netism and, later, light, which was understood as electromagnetic waves. The
field was used to explain these various phenomena as resulting from the
activity of a physical entity endowed with energy and momentum, and gov-
erned by the laws of dynamics. The understanding of this physical entity is
closely associated to the concept of potentiality that, in turn, is linked to the
concept of the energy of the field.
The concept of field, which was incompatible with Newtonian mechanics,
demanded the invention of “aether” as the invisible medium suffusing all
space. But the concept of aether created new problems, namely, incom-
patibility between mechanics and electromagnetism concerning the relativity
of motion. Einstein dismissed the assumption about aether and made the
relativity of motion a general principle, which relies on an understanding of
the speed of light as fixed and unchangeable from the perspective of every
observer in the universe. Fields themselves were now perceived as the funda-
mental variables and replaced the forces acting-at-a-distance between bodies
in a space filled with aether. Once it became clear that light, magnetism, and
electricity are aspects of one single force, there was no longer a need for a
medium such as aether to transfer waves of light in space; changes in the field
spread in it like waves. “Einstein had replaced Newton’s space with a network
of light beams; theirs was the absolute grid, within which space itself became
supple.”8The measurement of space changes for different observers moving at
different velocities, as the measurement of time changes; distance is rela-
tive, as bodies in motion become longer and shorter. In fact, space and time
are joined together by two different physical sizes into a four-dimensional
space-time continuum, curved by matter, whose description requires a non-
Euclidean geometry.
As was hinted in the description of the concept of field, other physical
values, such as mass, energy, and momentum, also become aspects of one
physical entity. The preceding discussion stresses two points that are clearly
echoed in Olson and became a crucial foundation of his thinking after his
reading of Whitehead: (1) It is possible to relate to the whole universe as a
single physical system. This point is also linked to the question of the one and
the many, which is central to the understanding of Olson’s world. (2) The
universe, as Hubble had already discovered in 1929, is expanding, a view only
a short step away from the Big Bang theory. Expansion, or concrescence in
Whitehead’s scheme, is a cornerstone of Olson’s thinking about human beings
and the world. These concepts, following his reading and concern with
physics and with the philosophy of science came to replace what Olson, in
1950, had called projection in “PV”—Olson found a philosophic grounding
for what he had earlier intuited.
Olson internalizes the concept of field as a junction of acting forces. He
internalizes the dynamism of the space that is a “product” of these forces, both
concerning the textual space “on the page,” and concerning the poem as a
junction of forces “in reality.” Points 1 and 3 in “PV” demonstrate this clearly:
(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got
it . . . by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. . . .
(3) the process of the thing . . . : ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY
AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION . . . keep moving,
keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split
second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if
you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points . . . that every
element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the
sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as
we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that these
elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those
other objects create what we know as the world. (CP, 240, 243)
“Projective Verse” aims to blaze a trail for a poetics that would be suitable
to a view of the world as field, as dynamism. A poetics implementing this view
of the world implies that the “space of the poem” that is “frozen” in formal
traditional structures will now become an outcome of processes or forces of
which we tend to speak as happening and working within the poem. When
the definition of field is “transposed” to the realm of poetry, we have a domain
or environment where we can describe the actual or potential activity of a
force for any point in space, when force, as “the agency responsible for a
change in a system” is, in this case, language in all its aspects. Words are
energy rather than only meaning or sound. The poetic space is not only a
textual space, and the textual space itself, as an expression of forces, is not
atoms (syllables) that create entities (words) connected to one another across
the empty space (the page). The blank, “empty” page, is “full” of energy,
meaning that before us is a field whose textual phenomena (blank and writ-
ten) are an expression of the movement of energy, breath, in and out. Space
itself is the processes, the active forces, the potentiality actualized as energy:
Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin
of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a
poem. . . . For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the
figures of, the dance: “is” comes from the Aryan root, as, to breath. The English
“not” equals the Sanscrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to
perish. “Be” is from bhu, to grow. . . .
But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse. . . . The other child is
the LINE. . . . And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing
of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes. . . .
Let me put it baldly. The two halves are: the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the
SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE. (CP, 241– 42)
The poem, in all its space, is dynamic, flexible, variable. “The American
poem, Olson’s poem, is not trying to project something ideal, but rather to
reenact something radically earthly, radically local, and radically temporal—
i.e., a man’s encounter with the particulars of his experience, his environment,
and the history of his locale. This poetics is hardly an idealization.”9 Bové’s
explanation should be understood, in terms of Olson’s worldview, as claiming

that Olson fully accepts the implications of science and metaphysics as he
understands them. The poem, as a field, is full of energy and as such it is a
place of enactment and encounter. After reading Whitehead, this characteris-
tic of his will be intensified. An active battle is waged against the “poetics of
furniture” in the field of “A Later Note,” (re)enacted through the readers’
breathing and by actualizing the potential of elements contained in the field
of the poetic unit. This, in other words, is the process we have performed
here, by returning to “PV” and by enacting the poem and opening ourselves
to grow to be different, richer, “bigger” than before. This process emerges
through the encounter among Whitehead, Descartes, and Olson as compo-
nents present in the unit. Even at this early stage of our discussion, it is clear
that the poetics developed by Olson aspires to what Altieri refers to as a
“radical presence, the insistence that the moment immediately and intensely
experienced can restore one to harmony with the world and provide ethical
and psychological renewal.”10 “Projective Verse” itself is a latent manifesto
that is present in the poetic unit, and the declared aim at the ending of “A
Later Note” is the process we perform in this book as an opening place. Olson
had already declared in “PV” that his aim was to open the way. His long
poem, then, is always a poem of opening toward further progress. This is the
meaning of the kinetics that is the true dimension of the poem, its being a
process, an energy, a dance, the syllables always being “the figures of the
present dance” (TMP, 5, my emphasis). Every poetic unit is a field of tensions
stemming from the elements participating in it, a field reenacted by the
reader. Olson instructs us “to voice the poem” in order to resist the written
culture that kills this energy.
The reader of the poetic unit “A Later Note” is not alone. Olson enlists
Whitehead’s support in his war against the “poetics of furniture,” which is a
product of Descartes. In attacking Descartes, Olson has internalized, to some
extent, the position held by Whitehead, who had pointed to Descartes as a
watershed in the mistaken course taken by the West. Who is Olson resisting?
What is the “poetics of furniture” and what is the philosophy behind it? The
battle waged in the space of “A Later Note” continues the battle Whitehead
pursues in his writings, when he systematically attempts to build a worldview
antithetical to the Cartesian canon.
2
Whitehead vs. Descartes
WHITEHEAD REJECTS THE CONCEPT OF A SELF-EXISTENT AND INDEPEN-

dent substance (“the furniture”). This idea is a cornerstone of Western phi-
losophy and has its early roots in Aristotle, but its most distinctive representa-
tive is Descartes, the man of the new philosophy:
In the earlier, Fifty-first Section, Descartes states: “By substance we can conceive
nothing else than a thing which exists in such a way as to stand in need of nothing
beyond itself in order to its existence.” . . .
Thus we conclude that, for Descartes, minds and bodies exist in such a way as to
stand in need of nothing beyond themselves individually. . . .
It is difficult to praise too highly the genius exhibited by Descartes in the
complete sections of his Principles. . . . But the fundamental principles are so set
out as to presuppose independently existing substances with simple location in the
community of temporal durations, and in the case of bodies, with simple location
in the community of spatial extensions. Those principles lead straight to the theory
of a materialistic, mechanistic nature, surveyed by cogitating minds.1
A metaphysics built on the subject-predicate principle, as a dichotomous

system that freezes the subject and allows change only in the predicates, is
based on a mistake that begins with Aristotle and relies, inter alia, on the
syntax of a language that describes reality as substance and its accidents.
Nouns hint to independent entities supporting such qualities as permanence
and endurance, to which attributes are ascribed.2 Whitehead dwells exten-
sively on the concept of substance, reflecting his wish to devise a speculative
scheme that takes into account changes in our understanding of physical
reality. A mechanistic theory is no longer valid to describe the dynamic
universe revealed at the turn of the twentieth century as one interwoven
system that keeps expanding. Thus, Whitehead restores to the philosophical
agenda the problem of the relationship between the one and the many,
between unity and multiplicity, and constructs an alternative concept that no
longer bears the qualities of the Cartesian substance. This point will deeply
influence Olson’s perception of reality and will also be significant in his
24
2: WHITEHEAD VS. DESCARTES 25
concern with mythopoeic thinking, the ancient world, and myth. The long
poem that Olson develops relies on a nonmechanistic poetics, no longer based
on the Cartesian concept of substance. Hence, Olson perceives the space of
the poem as living and breathing. He develops a poetics of events and process
whereby the long poem is viewed as a continuously expanding poetic uni-
verse, enabling a poetics of multiplicity within unity. The epigraph of The
Maximus Poems says: “All my life I’ve heard one makes many.” As Butterick
explains, these words were:
Actually exclaimed by a cook at Black Mountain, Cornelia Williams, while work-

ing in the kitchen of the college, and overheard by the poet. . . . In his copy of
Whitehead’s Process and Reality, p. 28, next to the statement, “the term ‘many’
presupposes the term ‘one,’ and the term ‘one’ presupposes the term ‘many,’ ”
Olson adds in the margin: “exactly Cornelia Wms, Black Mt kitchen, 1953.”
While in an autobiographical statement written in November 1952, Olson had
stated: “that there is no such thing as duality either of the body and the soul or of
the world and I, that the fact in the human universe is the discharge of the many
(the multiple) by the one (yrself done right, whatever you are, in whatever job, is
the thing . . . ” (Additional Prose, p. 39). And in some early notes for the growth
and shape of the poems, he calls the epigraph, “the dominating paradox on which
Max complete ought to stand.”3
Whitehead points to Descartes’ incoherence: it is impossible to create a

coherent system that will include the categories of unity and multiplicity
together with the category of substance. For Descartes, the substance assumes
multiplicity, and multiplicity assumes the existence of a substance, but these
two concepts are incompatible with the concept of unity within one coherent
system.4 The concept of substance is incompatible with Whitehead’s require-
ments of the speculative system he is seeking to construct: “a coherent, logical,
necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our
experience can be interpreted.”5 Hence, the “poetics of furniture” precludes
unity in principle, making the long poem only multiplicity. The poetics to
which Olson aspires learns from Whitehead to renounce the concept of
substance. For Whitehead, contrary to Descartes, it is the act of experience
here and now that guarantees the certainty of existence: “I experience, there-
fore I am.” According to Whitehead, the ego revealed to Descartes in the
cogito is an abstraction: existence is in the act of experience itself, neither
before it nor after it, whereas the ego that links the act of experience to other
acts of experience goes beyond the argument found in the idea of the cogito.
Descartes reformulates the cogito in terms of a theory of substance (I
think/ I have the thinking attribute/every predicate has a subject—therefore,
I am substance): “When we perceive any attribute we therefore conclude that
some existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed is necessarily

present.”6 This is a self-evident idea that, as noted, is of Aristotelian origin,
and we are left again with multiplicity but without unity, since substance does
not require anything else in order to exist, it survives in complete isolation.7
The opening lines of “A Later Note,” therefore, activate a battlefield whose
space (remember that we are at the beginning of its disclosure) is a result of
length: the collision between Descartes and Whitehead in this unit relies on
their endeavor, their work, and their creativity. The story of the battle be-
tween them is a potentiality that is realized by the reader of the unit. The
progress and the development of the long poem, The Maximus Poems, builds
the story concretely, from one unit to another, including it in an increasingly
expanding story—the story of Gloucester, the story of the entire universe. All
of them, as is (and will be) made clear, are one story.
In other words: at the micro level of the isolated unit (here: “A Later Note”)
and as a potentiality activated by the reader, we are told a story that is not only
based on the reader’s “external” acquaintance (separations and divisions, such
as internal/external, are alien to Olson’s world) with Descartes and White-
head; the unit is also a momentary unity of the fluency of all units so far. In
this sense as well, the unit is built from the purposeful movement of the whole
poem between the units. This is the movement at the macro level, from unit
to unit.
The philosophical battle, which is a poetic battle, is a cultural narrative that
presents an ethos of action, since the “physical” Cartesian isolation bears clear
ethical implications. Progress at the macro level of the whole poem builds up
the broader story; this story is exposed by the reader of the unit along the
process of the long poem built from the aggregated units. Latent within the
poetic unit “A Later Note,” since it is a moment of unity resulting from the
flow of the poem so far, is the story of Boston, of Gloucester, of a Puritan
settlement erected in a new world with instruments of methodical thinking
pertinent to the old world: furniture or, in their name here, Cartesian mo-
nads. The battle between Descartes and Whitehead is, therefore, part of the
story told in the long poem about Gloucester, Olson’s city (“the polis,” a
concept I discuss below). The poetic unit “Stiffening, in the Master Founders’
Wills” is a good example of this:
Descartes, age 34, date Boston’s
settling. The pertinence
of yellow sweetings,
among other things which Pur-
itan contingent had
much savor for. As they also

(of which we’ve heard)
did savor some spiritual

matter—like throwing people
out. Or so fierce the sense
enthusiasm does not lead

to progression they took Quakers
(Mrs. Davis’s cookbook’s kind)
and sold them,
as slaves, or burned them
Boston Common. Proportion’s

not the easiest thing
to bring if character’s
(Cartesian monads)
desperate densenesses
be not washed out in natural
or bubble bath
. . . . .
(TMP, 132)
As Von Hallberg suggests,
the yellow sweetings are Blackstone apples, first grown by William Blackstone on
Beacon Hill before the settlement of Boston, and the word “pertinence” is a
thematic pun. These apples will not only be shown to be pertinent to the poem’s
theme, they will also be shown to be pertinences, in the sense of adjuncts to
property.8
The apple, fruit of Nature and fruit of knowledge, thus becomes a com-
modity, the fruit of the capitalistic market where individualism reigns, and
the fruit of the West’s legacy, Cartesian dualism. From here follow the corrup-
tion and the transformation of fellow human beings (the Quakers) into a
commodity, since they are matter but lack spirit (which is reserved only for
the Puritans). Descartes thus defaces the sense of proportion that had pre-
vailed at the beginning, at the origin, when human beings had been an
integral part of their natural environment. The Maximus Poems is thus the
unfolding poem (story) of Gloucester, the city of Maximus that Descartes,
according to Olson, curbs, and through which he deflects from “the right
path”:
was 1630 still sailors’

apprehension not Boston’s
leader’s: “A family”, he says,
“is a little
common wealth, and a common wealth
is a greate family” Stop

right there, said time, Descartes
’s holding up
another hand and your own people
in this wilderness
not savages but thought

has invaded
the proposition.
(TMP, 133–134)
The first 1630 original settlement, to be called Boston soon after, is the
beginning (the opening) that was missed—the battlefield, the new world that
is already controlled by Cartesian values, as Olson writes in “A Later Note.”
Descartes curbs the development that should have unfolded. It is not the
savages who prevented the growth that had been hoped for, but the mistake in
the cogito statement, which persisted until Whitehead’s arrival on the scene:
“I am, I exist” means “I exist as substance,” hence the return to a world that is
divided and lacks unity. “A Later Note,” as a unit dated later than the units
quoted above (and as many others that could obviously have been cited) also
encompasses this story, although it is “folded,” hidden: the movement in the
space of the unit, the “collision” between its elements at the micro level,
which are enacted by the reader. This movement is woven into the movement
at the macro level, in the story that Olson spins from unit to unit. Before us,
then, is a poetics of movement: on the one hand, an open battlefield at the
micro level, but, on the other hand, conditioned by the units that precede it
and directing the story at the macro level. Descartes is a soldier in various
wars, which are joined together by the storyteller, the poet, who directs the
wars, halts them, weaves them together:
Descartes soldier
in a time of religious
wars
a map of Dogtown: St cod via

Sophia, Fishermans / racks
Field, Fishermans / in a field
2 acres on which to dry like snow
fences or tables
at a lawn
party
(TMP, 226)
According to Olson, Descartes’s military service in several armies during

1617–28 is a kind of preface to the war that he still wages in the new world,
even as he is absent. The war is fought over the semblance of the new world;
this war, that shapes Gloucester, the city of Olson/Maximus, of which Dog-
town is part, is still going on, enacted by Olson himself.
Fishermen’s Field was the site of the Dorchester Company in Cape Ann in
1623, which became part of Gloucester in the course of time, and is located
about a hundred yards from Olson’s own front yard.9 On 10 September,
1953, Olson wrote to Frederick Merk, an American historian at Harvard
University:
Again I have the distinct pleasure to write to you. This time, it is to ask you if you
can advise me about the state of knowledge about what is, in fact, the very grounds
I was raised on: Fishermen’s Field, Cape Ann. I am engaged in a work which pivots
from that field, and wish to saturate myself on all the history of it which is known
. . . have put it thus specifically, not to point any of the pieces at you, but to suggest
the sort of saturation that my own front yard—literally, that field was where I grew,
our house being on “Stage Fort Avenue,” Gloucester!—bred in me.10
The battles are the fishing battles and the battle for a livelihood,11 the battle
to survive in the new world that is a battle against Mother England, which
had tried to control the settlers’ economic and religious life. Sophia, the
Gnostic “Mother,” a figure of wisdom, is an ironic hint to these battles and to
herself as “the Spirit of God,” a symbol of the religious wars in Europe and in
the New World as well as between them.
All are latent in the battle of words, and inseparably linked to the battle
between Descartes and Whitehead. The field of the page is a potentiality for
various fields and wars; wars are waged on the field of the page between the
armies of words deployed on its sides. In fact, we are partners to Olson’s battle,
which is the enactment of the story, the actualization of the contact with
reality: “I take it that contest is what puts drama (what they call story, plot)
into the thing, the writer’s contesting with reality, to see it, to SEE.”12
The poetic unit “A Later Note” is already a wide-scale story, which ex-
panded further and further along the poem until reaching this unit, and will
continue expanding beyond it. This is a momentary unity, whose story imme-
diately continues its onward flow. The storyteller is the one to shape the story,
in which he also takes part. To understand the full depth of this process we
must return to Whitehead,
who cleared out the gunk

by getting the universe in (as against man alone
3
Experience
IN LINE WITH THE CHANGES IN THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE AND TIME, AND
wishing to suggest an overall speculative explanation of nature as a unity
(multiplicity within unity), Whitehead constructs a process philosophy, a
philosophy of organism based on the concepts of becoming and actual entity.
I quote below at length, because these two passages outline Whitehead’s basic
worldview:
“Actual entities”—also termed “actual occasions”—are the final real things of
which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find
anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so
is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are
gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which
actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual
entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and inter-
dependent.1
Newton in his description of space and time has confused what is “real” poten-
tiality with what is actual fact. He has thereby been led to diverge from the
judgment of “the vulgar” who “conceive those quantities under no other notions
but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.” The philosophy of organism
starts by agreeing with “the vulgar” except that the term “sensible object” is
replaced by “actual entity”; so as to free our notions from participation in an
epistemological theory as to sense-perception. . . . I will also use the term “actual
occasion” in the place of the term “actual entity.” Thus the actual world is built up
of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in
any sense of “existence,” are derived by abstraction from actual occasions. I shall
use the term “event” in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, inter-
related in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum. An actual occasion
is the limiting type of an event with only one member. (73)
The “actual entity” is Whitehead’s alternative to the Cartesian (and Aristo-

telian) concept of substance. In the clash between Whitehead and Descartes,
Whitehead turns the Cartesian method on its head: whereas for Whitehead
the act of experience is constitutive of the “subject,” for Descartes it is the
30
3: EXPERIENCE 31
subject that acts and experiences. Whereas Whitehead speaks of a world of

events, a process of becoming of “actual entities,” Descartes describes a world
of self-identical objects in time. Reality is for Whitehead a weave of mutually
related and dependent events, “penetrating” each other, or “prehending” and
“prehended”;2 all the “things,” “substances,” “essences” that we take to exist
are derived through abstraction from those “actual occasions,” or “actual
entities.” Olson relies on Whitehead to persuade us that what we term a poem
is merely an abstraction of the experience and the event, which are poetry.
The text, according to Olson, must once again become an actual and real
event in the world when the reader says it, breathes it, activates it. This
struggle of “events” against “substances” (a struggle that is an event) will come
to pass with the help of the readers, all readers, at every here and now of the
reading act. In the space of “A Later Note,” the word “event,” three lines
before the end, is counterposed to the “meubles” and “furniture” of the
opening line; its status as a line on its own highlights its intensity as a key
word. The reader, as an experiencing “subject,” will reactivate and impel the
unit, which is an event; he will also revive the word “meubles,” which for
Descartes was indeed “un meuble” and described a reality of “furniture.” The
unit will be concretized as an energy field, and will thus be experienced: the
reader sings the “data” of the unit (as an activity), and recreates it.
Olson’s basic assumptions, we learn, are assumptions about the “reading
process.” In The Maximus Poems, in his essays, and in oral expositions, Olson
becomes a teacher: a didactic tone characterizes the opening letters in the first
volume of The Maximus Poems. In these letters, Olson explains to Ferrini how
to sing right, how to live right. This attitude is incompatible, as we will see
below, with Olson’s stance against authority and hierarchy.3 Olson is entirely
dependent on the reader for the actualization of his concepts of poetry, and
the tension between his objection to doctrines (represented by Descartes) and
the transformation of his own poetics into a doctrine is evident, mainly in the
first volume. The units of The Maximus Poems are, after all, letters to the
people of his town; over the years of writing those letters, however, Olson
realizes that life patterns in the community are different from his own, and
that the people neither heed his call nor adopt his ways. Hence the disap-
pointment permeating the third volume of The Maximus Poems. The imme-
diacy of the letters, of the poetic units, and the reliance on the reader, the
“addressee,” the listener, becomes a pivotal issue for the future of his poetic
endeavor: will it remain relevant in the future, as an option for realization
latent in the poetics of Olson himself? If the reader is trained in “passive
reading” or in “photographing” the text, how will the poetic unit be re-
activated? If readers are not versed in Whitehead’s worldview or in Olson’s
poetic manifestos, will they still be capable of responding “appropriately”?
Does Olson’s endeavor thereby come to nothing? And why should the towns-
people, or the readers, accept Olson’s worldview and agree to see it as prefer-
able to their own, as implied in his letters to them?
Any attempt to answer these questions requires an understanding of the as-
sumptions underlying Olson’s thought, and his need to resort to Whitehead’s
theory in order to establish them. An “actual entity,” as Whitehead argues,
enjoys a primary ontic status, and all other modes of existence depend on it.
The “final facts” of reality, without exception, are “actual entities,” which are
“drops of experience.” Reality is immediate, in the sense of experience here
and now: an “actual entity” is an experiencing “subject,” in the sense that its
becoming is merely an act of experience. As a primary category of existence, it
is indivisible; in fact, it is realized all at once.4 Olson is thus strengthened in his
view that: (1) Existence is realized in full, undivided fashion; the vari-
ous dichotomies (body/soul, I/other, nature/culture, individual/collective,
subject/object, and so forth) that are characteristic of Western culture, are
abstractions mistakenly perceived as “final facts.” (2) Existence is realized as
experience, since the “final facts” are “drops of experience”; poetry, then, has
no meaning except as an activity, a creation, an experience.
Olson finds that Whitehead provides him with a systematic formulation of
his own point of departure as a poet: although life takes many forms, it is in
fact multiplicity in unity. Classic Western culture, as a written culture, a
“culture of logos,” split up experience and established a rigid hierarchy that
conceals the body, the experience that is always integral and indivisible in
actual reality, although it can be, and indeed was, analyzed (as in Whitehead’s
method). Olson’s critique of the classic cultural and poetic legacy of the West
targets the misconception of experience as unity, and the preference of the
“spiritual” over the “physical.” Already in “Projective Verse,” Olson had
conceived the poem and the word as a physical act, attesting to one entity, to
poetry as an event: breathing in and out, experiencing the world. Descartes’s
concept of substance had entangled him in the well-known “body and mind”
problem that is paradigmatic of the split thinking failing to perceive unity. An
“actual entity” is the outcome of Whitehead’s conclusion that “spiritual”
elements cannot possibly be separated from “physical” elements, because the
concreteness of the experience precedes these abstractions. This approach is
consistent with Olson’s perception and, in order to emphasize it, he even
resorts to Whitehead’s concepts in his poem.5
He also alludes to this in his essays and oral expositions: “that beautiful
concept of Whitehead’s, the eternal event that strikes across all object and
occasion.”6 These are merely random examples: Olson is highly influenced by
Whitehead’s thinking, which is so compatible with his own. As a teacher, he
guides us to relate to the poetic unit as an “actual entity,” an “occasion” to be
“taken” (as when saying “take a deep breath,” when to breathe equals to sing),
3: EXPERIENCE 33
to be realized. His poetic materials serve him in the same direction: to show
that experience is not necessarily linked to consciousness, and the body is the
immediate “environment” for our growth, the body, as can be seen in “Max-
imus Letter # whatever,” is our home:
Once a man was traveling through the woods, and

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
in the path in the forest, he
met another man who was carrying his house on his
head. He was frightened at first
. . . . . . . . . . .
he said I
never could carry it as you do. Yes, sd the man who
belonged somewhere else, just try it, and he found he
could, it was as light as a basket.
So he went off carrying his house until night

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and put it down. Inside was a wide bed covered
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the morning, it
was even better. Hanging from the beams were deer-
meat, hams, duck, baskets of berries and maple sugar,
and as he reached out for them the rug itself melted
and it was white snow, and his arms turned into wings
and he flew up to the food and it was birch-boughs on
which it hung, and he was a partridge and it was spring.
(TMP, 201)
The story about the man with his “house on his head,” which recurs several
times in the course of the poem, is beautifully illuminated in the following
passage by Whitehead:
And yet, the unity “body and mind” is the obvious complex which constitutes the
one human being. Our bodily experience is the basis of existence. . . . And yet our
feeling of bodily-unity is a primary experience. It is an experience so habitual and
so completely a matter of course that we rarely mention it. No one ever says, Here
am I, and I brought my body with me. In what does this intimacy of relationship
consist? The body is the basis of our emotional and purposive experience. It
determines the way in which we react to the clear sensa. It determines the fact that
we enjoy sensa.7
Poets, then (and, in this sense, myth is poetry) should indeed remind us of
what is not self-evident, at least not in the split poetry that, according to
Olson, is written in the West. The story of the man with his “house on his
head”, taken from Algonquin Legends of New England,8 is the story of aliena-
tion from the body, which in Western culture is “heavy” and “earthy,” op-
posed to “spirituality.” Yet spirituality, as is clearly evident from the end of the
story, is part of the body and within it: the growth of wings, its transformation
into a bird, spring—all are part of the human being’s “projection” from
within; “projective verse” denotes a physical projection from within the body,
which results in human growth.
Olson had been concerned with the “theme” of the body from a very early
stage.9 The body as a “first fact” remains, for Olson, the foundation of
“spiritual growth.” He who is at one with his body can grow from within
himself, expand from within himself, “fly.” The “earthy,” the “physical,”
became derogatory concepts in Western culture, while in actual fact they
represent an option of growth “upward,” to the “spiritual.”10 The human
who does “return to the body” is the one who touches the spirit, becomes
“spiritual.” Olson’s use of these prose passages (or documents, notes, journals,
and so forth) indeed attests to the removal of the traditional borders between
“prose” and “poetry” (or any other form of genre classification), since these
are arbitrary dichotomic divisions of something that is one. As is slowly
becoming clear, Olson views the “long poem” as a form that precedes all these
genre divisions: the long poem is indeed life in its entirety (“body and mind”).
The organization of the unit attests to that very unity of perspectives that is
the whole, unsplit individual:
he who walks with his house on
his head is heaven he
who walks with his house
on his head is heaven he who walks
with his house on his head
(TMP, 311)
Olson seeks to emphasize that the (renewed) encounter with the body is
always an encounter with the other and with space. In other words: all
dichotomies is but an extension of that false division between substance (that
is the subject) and the “other.” Descartes had perceived substance as that
which requires nothing else for its survival. He set clear borders to “the
substance,” thereby fixing its isolation from the surroundings. The poem tells
us that the encounter with the body (the “other” of the “I” in Western
tradition) is also the meeting with “other” humans from “other” places. This,
then, is the otherness of “origins” after which Olson searches obsessively in
order to renew their relevance. As Bové describes it: “Olson’s sense of origins
means an attempt to regain an awareness of man’s temporal and geographical
nature in a world where poetry should be written out of the complex, deep
3: EXPERIENCE 35
historical relationship between a man and the objects within his world, his
environment, his ‘field.’ ”11
To be at one with the body means returning to one’s origins, to be at one
with earth, with nature, with the rest of its creatures. The experience of the
body is the experience of the “other,” and that other is primarily nature, or
space. Nature works within and on human beings, since they are bodies, to
the same extent that human beings work on nature as “body.” Thus, “to
return to the body” means “to return to space,” to take part in that field of
energy surrounding you and including you, to be part of the earth, of creation
as a whole:
to enter into their bodies

which also
had grown out of
Earth
(TMP, 317)
According to Butterick, this passage in the poem actually refers to the

ancient Egyptian myth of creation.12 This should be clarified: the poetic unit
from which this passage is taken, although based on sources dealing with
myth, does not itself reveal this and could be understood entirely differently:
the mythical materials are relevant here and now, as part of Olson’s experi-
ence, of the reality of his own life. The above saying, then, even if actually
taken from a discussion on myth, is now related to the present and to the
space from which the poet was born:
Mother Dogtown
of whom the Goddess
was the front
Father Sea
who comes to the skirt
of the City
(TMP, 317)
The city is Gloucester, the town of Olson/Maximus, of which Dogtown is

part. The mythical “Mother Earth” and the mythical “Father Sea” (Okeanos),
assume a concrete visage; the mythical lives within the poet’s breeding
ground. The goddess also has two faces, not only as an Egyptian goddess but
also as the goddess of the city of Gloucester, the poet’s muse, the goddess of
the Portuguese fishermen community in Gloucester, Our Lady of Good
Voyage, who accompanies the poet from the beginning of the entire poem.
Similarly, “the front” relates to the geography of Gloucester-Dogtown, which

was the subject of the preceding poetic unit (THE FRONTLET), where the
landscape is described and the city goddess is mentioned. For Olson, return-
ing to the body means returning to the concrete space of experience, Glouces-
ter. The human body is part of the body of the city, which is itself part of the
earth, its fruit:
The earth with a city in her hair

entangled of trees
(TMP, 289)
The city is part of the Earth, which itself is a body: borders become blurred
and the mythical name Earth resumes its concrete bodily presence. The city is
the fruit of the Earth and a part of it, as human beings are the fruit of the
body, part of space. Olson explains the meaning of the concept home, to be at
home, while building this home at the same time. The myth itself illustrates
this issue: in the passage about the gods (TMP, 317), Olson refers to Fran-
kfort’s study of Egyptian myth, which describes the birth of the gods from
Ptah, the god of the city of Memphis who is the creator of all.13 Ptah is
perceived at times as a “spirit,” or as “reason,” and at times as a “body,”
“earth,” and so forth. Hence, when the gods “enter into their bodies” (TMP,
317), they are actually returning to the body, since they are creatures of Ptah to
begin with, like their bodies. This paradox is intentional. The mythopoeic
attitude, as Olson understands it, does not think of the world in terms of the
fragmentation, of the principle (or law) of bivalence that already permeates
the language we use. The two passages below illustrate how Olson (in the
second paragraph), following Whitehead (in the first paragraph), found close
propinquity between the mythopoeic thinking of antiquity and the discov-
eries of modern science, concerning the unity of experience and the blurring
of the separation between human beings and the world. Both are linked to the
balance required for a full description of reality:
The proper balance between atomism and continuity is of importance to physical

science. For example, the doctrine, here explained, conciliates Newton’s corpuscu-
lar theory of light with the wave theory. For both a corpuscle, and an advancing
element of a wave front, are merely a permanent form propagated from atomic
creature to atomic creature. A corpuscle is in fact an “enduring object.” The notion
of an “enduring object” is, however, capable of more or less completeness of
realization. Thus in different stages of its career, a wave of light may be more or less
corpuscular.14
It is rather quantum physics than relativity which will supply a proper evidence
here, as against naturalism, of what Melville was grabbing on to when he declared
3: EXPERIENCE 37
it was visible truth he was after. For example, that light is not only a wave but a
corpuscle. Or that the electron is not only a corpuscle but a wave. Melville couldn’t
abuse object as symbol does by depreciating it in favor of subject. Or let image lose
its relational force by transferring its occurrence as allegory does. (SW, 50)
Relativity, blurred borders, the status of “object” and “subject”—Olson

adopts them all and adapts himself (is influenced, “ingressed,” “apprehends”)
to the most ancient and the most modern: this adoption is per se an aspect of
the union of opposites, the multiplicity in unity, which guide the poem and
the poet. The quantum revolution (wave-particle duality and Heisenberg’s
indeterminacy principle) made a decisive contribution to the view, so cate-
gorically formulated in Olson’s writings, that the human being is not separate
from nature and cannot observe nature “from outside,” “objectively.” The
world is affected by the way we look at it: if we conduct an experiment that
measures the properties of light particles, we will obtain a “particled” answer,
but if the measurement is “wavy,” the answers will also be “wavy.” “By
revealing that the observer plays a role in the observed” Ferris notes, “quan-
tum physics did for physics what Darwin had done in the life sciences: it tore
down walls, reuniting mind with the wider universe.”15
These quotations point to the basic unity between the human creature and
the world, and to the human creature as part of the world, “ingressing” it and
being ingressed by it. They also suggest how Olson perceives his own relation-
ship to the world, how he “builds” the world, how he shapes himself as
Maximus and Gloucester as his city. His growth is always an outcome of
presence, of being one with the body, with space: the body is itself part of
space, the human’s “original,” immediate home. The human being springs
from space, and this is always concrete: the myth is always concretized in a
specific territory. The story of “he who walks with his house on his head” is
itself an illustration of “the local,” a story belonging to the (American) space
out of which Maximus grows—the figure and the poem. The movement, the
growth, “the flight”—these are always the result of presence, of being at one
with the body, with space, out of “maximal physicality,” as the “maximal
physicality” Olson finds in Melville, for whom space is no longer an ab-
straction. Melville therefore denotes for Olson the frontier of canonic West-
ern literature: “in each case the feeling or necessity of the inert, or the passivity
as a position of rest, is joined to the most instant and powerful actions
Melville can invent: the whale itself ’s swiftness, Ahab’s inordinate will, and
the harpooner’s ability to strike to kill from calm only” (SW, 52).
This growth from space, from the body, is formulated by Olson in what is
actually a kind of “definition” of his poetry: “how to dance/sitting down”; the
dance, the poetry, are concretized and emerge with and from the space and
the body. The page of the book (and it is the first page, of the first “letter” that
opens the poem: “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”) is also a seething space
that engenders the dance and the song:
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance
(TMP, 5)
The lance is a metonymy of the fisherman but also of the poet (his pen),
and the figures are the syllables (the unit repeats Olson’s words in “Projective
Verse”): the poem itself, according to Olson, has a “physical” presence, and
the poet himself is a dancer, who activates his body and thereby transcends
himself, expands, and grows.16 The balance between the various aspects of
unity, which means relativity, is already intimated here (in the unit that opens
The Maximus Poems): here the lance arises from the dynamic, from the
movement, as growth results from a momentary stability of unity out of
dynamism. The same principle is also at work at the level of the unit, which
grows into momentary unity from the dance of the syllables. As a lance, it is
also hinted here that the dance, the unit, has a purpose and a direction, which
is the direction of Olson’s growth into Maximus and of Gloucester into a
polis. The mistaken attitude to the body in Western culture is the mistaken
attitude to space and is responsible for a poetry and a culture that are alien-
ated, mechanical, arrogant, and craving control. Olson had already clarified
in “Projective Verse” his attitude toward the West’s alienation from space (or
nature, in line with the nature-culture dichotomy, another binarian division
characteristic of Western culture and its poetic tradition); he points to an-
other ethical “stance,” which he terms objectism: “that peculiar presumption
by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature
of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of
nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an
object” (CP, 247).
Olson’s aim, then, is not projection in the psychological sense, implying
that one’s ego is imposed on space, but a growth from within space and with
space. But the question remains open: does not every writing entail some
form of coercion (of the other, of space)? And is this not especially true of one
who writes as a teacher and mentor? Indeed, Olson identifies in the course of
the poem with such figures as Buddha or Confucius; however, and particu-
larly at the beginning, his approach seems authoritarian and coercive.17
3: EXPERIENCE 39
Olson’s choice of such figures as Confucius or Buddha, mentors whose

attempts to awaken humans from their slumber rely on activating growing
inner forces and not on authoritative forcing, is clear. Yet, while the question
concerning the source of the teacher’s power is apparently answered, we still
face the question of whether this “indirect way,” once it becomes tradition,
does not become “logocentric” and coercive to the same extent. A tension is
evident in The Maximus Poems (and in Olson’s oeuvre in general) between the
will to create a process, a dynamic tradition that, as Bové indicates, is “forever
changing in response to the temporal being of those humans who examine it
closely with no inherited preconceptions and values” (232–33), and the
authority that is particularly evident in the first part of the poem. This tension
also prevails between the violence implicit in the opening (which cannot be
exclusively attributed to the Western tradition that is being attacked), and the
transformation of Whitehead, who had produced a systematic and specula-
tive method, into a spiritual guide enjoying superior status. This tension is
indeed found throughout the book and, to a large extent, is actually inherent
in any experience resembling Olson’s.
According to Olson, who relies on modern scientific theories and on
Whitehead, humans are themselves events in space. Breathing, as Olson
stresses, is “man’s special qualification as animal” (SW, 24), with which the
poet must “work”; it is the potentiality to assume his projective size as part of
creation. The attack against “traditional” poetics is an attack against the
arbitrary worldview of violating the body, which is (the violation of ) nature,
which is the violation of poetic space: human beings read space from a higher
vantage point, they define it within a set of Euclidean coordinates, but do not
“participate” in it (a term used by Whitehead). Olson embraces the view of
modern physics concerning the place of human beings in the world (or rather
the renewed place because, as noted, Olson views ancient thinking as close to
modern science): “man,” says Olson, “was suddenly possessed or repossessed
of a character of being, a thing among things, which I shall call his physicality.
It made a reentry of or to the universe.”18 Here is the same conception that
Olson had recognized in Melville, formulating it as “to dance while sitting.”
The changed stage is what now allows the dancer to grow. The space is no
longer Euclidean, flat; it is, as Ferris reminds us, curved: “The force of
gravitation disappears, and is replaced by the geometry of space itself.”19
The “disappearance” of the force of gravitation “enables” individuals to
grow, to extend, to expand beyond themselves with the flexible space of which
they are part. The “result” of the general theory of relativity—a finite but
borderless universe, an expanding universe—is what turns Olson into Max-
imus: multidimensional, growing, expanding, influencing the world and in-
fluenced by it. In non-Euclidean geometry, the individual does not tower
beyond space, observing it from outside or from above, projecting himself on

it, and space itself is no longer absolute; the world is multiplicity within unity,
meaning that human beings are merely part of that multiplicity, and at the
same time participants in building its unity. The absence of a categorical
hierarchical distinction between body and soul, between various bodies
(being and being, being and nature), entails ethical implications opposed to
the “Cartesian” values that had dictated the world of Boston’s inhabitants,
who had lived where Olson himself was living. Olson phrases this situation in
“Letter 6” as follows:
There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of
(TMP, 33)
Not to subordinate body to soul, not to subordinate the other to yourself,

not to subordinate nature to culture, not to think in abstractions (many does
not equal mass) but to experience: this is, for Olson, the “reentry of or to the
universe,” that Whitehead, as we read in the poetic unit “A Later Note,”
shows as the way.
For Olson, then, “returning to the body,” means returning home, which
means “re-entering the world,” re-entering the cosmos. It means creating a
place for yourself: space becomes a place when it gives human beings a sense
of home; the body is our most primary home and only from it, and with it, do
humans rebuild their place in the world, in the universe; Olson understands
this to imply that he must return to Gloucester, the place of his childhood, to
build it and, through it, the world, the entire cosmos. “To return home”
means to emphasize the experience that preceded generalizations, to stress
particularism, to collapse dichotomical distinctions in order to leave them for
(and return to) general unity: “It is not the Greeks I blame. What it comes to
is ourselves, that we do not find ways to hew to experience as it is, in our
definition and expression of it, in other words, find ways to stay in the human
universe, and not be led to partition reality at any point, in any way” (CP,
157). Only in this way, and precisely in this way, will a “Human Universe”
(the title of Olson’s essay) be built. The role of the poet is no longer to describe
but to lead the way, “by way of his skin” (CP, 162), toward this worldview, and
this is an attitude to art as action, as activating.
The worldview behind the “Human Universe,” which was written in 1965,
has already fully internalized not only the approach of modern science but
also the metaphysical foundation built by Whitehead, who relies on modern
science. As Olson writes in “A Later Note,” Whitehead is the one responsible
for the metaphysical and cultural cleanup and for renewing contact: “by
3: EXPERIENCE 41
getting the universe in (as against man alone.” It is Olson that leaves paren-
thesis open “as against man alone,” and it is Whitehead, who formulates clear
metaphysical assumptions for him, who gets in. Whitehead’s assumptions
realize the concepts Olson anticipated in “Project Verse”:20 how do you grow
from the body, from space, enabling the place and the entire universe to grow
with you; how is experience translated into the activism of growth, inhaling
and exhaling—the very projection that Olson had sought from the start. The
concept of growth makes the poetics of the long poem a poetics of poetry in
general. That is because growth, as Olson learns from Whitehead, is actually
one kind of fluency—a concept I will examine in detail in the following. Both
concepts of fluency together—one working at the micro level (the level of the
isolated unit in the poem), and one at the macro level (the level of the one
long poem)—describe the entire world (including the poetic one), and in-
clude its various aspects and levels. Aspects of space and time are linked to
both concepts of fluency, as is the balance that Whitehead and Olson together
try to establish between the extremes characteristic of Western thinking pat-
terns throughout history.
4
Concrescence
WHITEHEAD DRAWS A DISTINCTION BETWEEN TWO CONCEPTS TO EX-

plain two meanings of fluency:
One kind is the concrescence which, in Locke’s language, is “the real internal
constitution of a particular existent.” The other kind is the transition from particu-
lar existent to particular existent. This transition, again in Locke’s language, is the
“perpetually perishing” which is one aspect of the notion of time; and in another
aspect the transition is the origination of the present in conformity with the
“power” of the past.1
The fluency discussed in this chapter is that of fusion or, in Whitehead’s

terms, concrescence: the becoming of an “actual entity,” the inner growth of
unity out of all its particles. The second kind, dealing with the transition from
“actual entity” to “actual entity” characterizes process and is discussed in
chapter 5. How does Olson, who is influenced by Whitehead, wish us to
understand this becoming, the growth of the poetic unit, the growth of the
experience, the concrescence of elements into a specific poetic unit?
Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]
I come back to the geography of it,

the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city,

to the right, it fell to the sea
42
4: CONCRESCENCE 43
I was so young my first memory

is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
a druggist they’d told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then
This, is no bare incoming

of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms

of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping

of the battle
It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions
of me, the generation of those facts

which are my words, it is coming
from all that I no longer am, yet am,

the slow westward motion of
more than I am
There is no strict personal order
for my inheritance.
No Greek will be able

to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.
I have this sense,

that I am one
with my skin
Plus this—plus this:

that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compell
backwards I compell Gloucester
to yield, to
change
Polis
is this
(TMP, 184 –85)
The poetic unit “Letter 27” is built as a body contained within a body. The
description of the landscape, which opens the unit, generates the body of
Maximus at the center of the unit, and also closes it: Maximus rises, stands,
within his space, and the unit shows how this space is his home, his place. The
geographical space is also the space of memory. Family is the basic unit giving
rise to the polis, meaning that the family is also a “body” within a broader
“body,” and so forth. Family memories are linked to the physical, geograph-
ical space of the city: as a human being, you are the fruit of space, of a concrete
place, as well as the offspring of your parents, the outcome of concrete events
in space coming forth at the unit’s outset. The human being, as Olson
paraphrases Whitehead (beginning at l. 20 and up to the section that closes
the unit, where he returns to the “geography of the place”), is neither a
product of abstractions nor an abstract form; human beings are the outcome
of events, of the place, of people and concrete experiences. In Whitehead’s
formulation: “It was the defect of the Greek analysis of generation that it
conceived it in terms of the bare incoming of novel abstract form”;2 “In
addition to the notions of the welter of events and of the forms which they
illustrate, we require a third term, personal unity” (240); “So intimately
obvious is this bodily inheritance that common speech does not discriminate
the human body from the human person. Soul and body are fused to-
gether. . . . But the human body is indubitably a complex of occasions which
are part of spatial nature” (243).
4: CONCRESCENCE 45
Olson’s “use” of Whitehead and of his sources in general, paraphrasing and

deleting the quotation marks, is part of the experience of the “other”; Olson is
not a derivative poet in a simplistic, plagiarist sense. Quite the contrary, “the
derivative stance” is for him the primary way in:
Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you

yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It
doesn’t matter whether its Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa.
But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it.
And then U
KNOW everything else very fast; one saturation job (it might
take 14 years). And you’re in forever.3
As Karlins maintains, for Olson “the idea of source becomes primary

content as well as method. His involvement in source is passionate, as he builds
his poem around his scholarly detective work.”4 This is the case particularly
concerning Whitehead, and this point obviously also applies to the reader’s
experience of Olson. The way to create an immediate experience of the other is
to create spatial openness without breaking the continuity of the experience
through various borders, such as parentheses or quotation marks.
The human body, then, is part of space, and the experience of space is the
experience of the “other.” It is Olson’s experience of Whitehead. Whitehead
claims that language itself hints to this immediate link between elements that
are seemingly split. Whitehead’s concern in the discussions to which Olson
directs us is to show that “there is thus a general continuity between human
experience and physical occasions . . . the human body presents itself as
negating the notion of strict personal order for human inheritance (as though
the personal order is limited by the fact of the linear seriality while the space-
time continuum is of the many dimensional seriality).”5 Olson grows into
Maximus, he is an experiencing, expanding body, the offspring of the space to
which his body belongs, as Whitehead’s phrasing again illuminates:
Where does my body end and the external world begin? For example, my pen is
external; my hand is part of my body; and my finger nails are part of my body. Also
the breath as it passes in and out of my lungs from my mouth and throat fluctuates
in its bodily relationship. Undoubtedly the body is very vaguely distinguishable
from external nature. It is in fact merely one among other natural objects.6
In his essay “Human Universe,” Olson formulates this as follows: “The

skin itself, the meeting edge of man and external reality, is where all that
matters does happen, that man and external reality are so involved with one
another that, for man’s purposes, they had better be taken as one” (SW, 60).
In Whitehead’s language, Olson, while experiencing, that is, while creating

and writing, is an “event,” an “actual entity.” He is a “nexus” of multiple
“actual entities” mutually linked and dependent, that is part of nature. The
writing of “Letter 27” is Olson’s experience, namely, the concrescence of the
unit. Several factors unite in Olson’s act of writing it: things Olson knows
from Whitehead’s philosophy, the concepts of polis and geometry; his memo-
ries, his wishes, and his physical sensations, which are influenced by the
situation in the “outside” world. In other words, all the physical, biological,
and other processes that apply to nature as a whole and to Olson unite within
it. All these elements are potentialities whose realization and concrescence is
Olson’s experience as represented by the unit. “Letter 27” becomes “actual”
and “concrete” only through “its writing,” through Olson’s experience in the
status of “subject.” Yet all its elements had already existed to some extent,
meaning that the unit had existed as a possibility, as a potentiality for actualiz-
ation that is realized in the experience. An “actual entity,” “a drop of experi-
ence,” is a “realization,” a “concrescence” of many “potentialities.”7 The
actual unit, then, is a unity of multiplicity: Olson’s experience in the here and
now of the unit is realized as one; it is indivisible, and the analysis of it is an
abstraction of what exists as a unity, as a whole.
Beyond his own personal belief in Whitehead’s metaphysical worldview,
Olson also requires the reader to believe in it. His problem is that writing
splits the experience; hence, reading, too, includes a continuity in time that
hinders acceptance of the unity of experience. Oral poetry, which Olson
considers an ideal, does not solve the problem of abstraction since it also lasts
in time.8 The experience, then, even when whole and simultaneous, is
doomed to abstraction as soon as we try to verbalize it. Building “Letter 27” in
a circular fashion, of a body within a body, is meant to strengthen the spatial
pattern so that it will delay the temporality of the inevitable abstraction. This
point should be understood as an organizing principle for the work as a
whole: each isolated unit, each “letter,” emphasizes patterns of organization
directed toward spatial patterns of prehension and reasoning; the transition
between the units, as we will see, is what stresses temporal patterns of think-
ing. The opening line in “Letter 27” must be examined together with the line
that closes the unit: the geography, which is also the geography of the space of
the page, is that of the polis. The polis is the name of the body of all the
citizens and is necessarily linked to a concrete physical space. The “is this”
that ends the poetic unit is also the “it” that opens it. This is how Olson tries
to create a situation wherein the experience, even if necessarily dependent on
time because it is transmitted through language, depends on the simultaneous
presence of all its elements beyond the inevitable linearity.
We are involved, then, in a process whose basic concepts are potentiality
and actuality: as the above analysis is a breakup of actuality, a deconstruction of
4: CONCRESCENCE 47
a deconstruction that has already been performed through language, the present
study as a whole is an analysis of Olson’s experience, which brought forth the
unit “A Later Note.” In the analysis of the unit, I deconstruct it down to “those
potentials” realized by Olson, which generated the unit when fused together.
Obviously, I thereby re-create the unit but as an “actual entity” different from
Olson’s, since the wishes, sensations, knowledge, physical situation, and other
elements that for me, as a “subject” in the analysis are present as components,
were not potentials for Olson, or were not the same potentials they had been for
Olson. Olson internalizes Whitehead’s emphasis on the relativity of the con-
cepts “potentially” and “actually”: “Letter 27,” after its initial realization from
“pure potentiality” into “actual fact,” becomes once more a potential for
realization, for any realization. In Whitehead’s terms, it could now be called a
“real potentiality”: this is a potentiality that has already been realized in the
past and is now again subject to new realizations. Olson learns from White-
head9 that a distinction is required between real potentiality and actual fact.
The emphasis is on the transition from the actual entity, the actual fact, to the
status of a renewed potentiality that is the real potentiality. An actual entity,
then, unlike the Cartesian (and Aristotelian) substance, neither persists nor
“perishes”; it goes on existing and influencing the world in another mode of
existence. Olson accepts the view that a “real potentiality” is itself a “stubborn
fact,” once more an element in every experience in the world. “Letter 27” will
be realized anew not only by the reader but by Olson himself, in his own
experience in “Letter 28,” where it is again an element, a different kind of
potentiality, one of the elements in the fusion that engenders “Letter 28.”
The potentiality to be an element in the real “concrescence” of many
entities into one actuality applies to all elements in the universe. As Olson
learns from Whitehead, this is a metaphysical characteristic generally valid for
all entities, actual and nonactual; this is the principle of relativity—“it be-
longs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’ ” (22).
The solution to the problem of the abstraction necessarily created through the
use of language, and particularly in a written culture based on texts, lies in the
reader’s ability to turn the unit once again into actuality, shifting his/her status
from “subject” to the actual experience, thereby becoming an “actual sub-
ject.” This solution raises problems related to the culture of reading and to the
character of the reading process: do readers indeed read as “required”? How
does the reader’s status as a “subject” evolve at the time of the reading and
reactivating the unit if s/he is unaware of Whitehead’s metaphysics or does
not believe in its permanence? The principle of relativity enables Whitehead
to create a balance between becoming and perishing. Adopting that principle
is one step in making the long poem the form synonymous with poetry as
such; the isolated poetic unit, “a poem,” does not “end” but continues to
influence the becoming of the next poetic unit.
For Olson, relativity is the principle that also validates the status of the
“subject” vis-à-vis the “object.” In “Letter 27,” Olson attempts to show that
all divisions are actually but extension of one (false) dichotomy, and that unity
means unity with every single “other” anywhere—the body, space, the neigh-
bor, and so forth. This attempt unfolds through Olson’s own experience “in”
Whitehead and through his experience of his body in Gloucester, the concrete
space of his existence. It is this experience that turns him into a “subject” in
that particular here and now. The components, or the various “beings,” are
potentials for Olson’s becoming a “subject” since, in this unit, he is a “subject”
constituted through his experience, and every element in his experience is
qualified to him, as an element of it. Whitehead is a particle of Olson’s
experience in “Letter 27” through the prehension of the “subject” Whitehead
as an “object,” as Olson is an element in my own experience when reading
Letter 27. The concepts themselves are relative, since the world is merely a
process of becoming events, and the question relates to the perspective for
approaching this process, the perspective for describing the world. Having a
vantage point attests to one’s being a “subject”; the perspective is what defines
the status of “subject” and “object,” of the prehensor and the prehensible
element, the perceiver and the perceived. Olson accepts Whitehead’s ap-
proach, which makes experience a mark of reality. The alternative is to return
to a Cartesian dualism that includes, besides substances or thinking “I’s” such
as ourselves, expanding substances without subjectivity, leading once again to
the well-known problem of body and soul. Experience is the multiplicity of
objects prehended by a “subject” and, as such, constitute the subject’s autono-
mous identity. This is the distinctively ethical approach that Olson calls
objectism, which stresses the equality between all creatures, all of whom are
simultaneously “subjects” and “objects” (SW, 24). “Letter 1” constitutes the
bird as “subject,” prehending from its higher perspective the city and its
inhabitants as “objects.” Its building of the nest, “feather to feather added,”
stresses the particular that is at hand and that we ourselves find and carry,
“the string/you carry in your nervous beak.” The protecting nest is here,
nearby:
the thing you’re after

may lie around the bend
of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird!
And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight

(of the bird
o kylix, o
Antony of Padua
sweep low, o bless
4: CONCRESCENCE 49
the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones

on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart,
And the flake-racks

of my city!
(TMP, 5)
Out of the look, the blessing, the bird’s nest, grows the (phallic) energy, the
projection that will carry one forward.10 From high above, the goddess, the
patron of the city, launches the poet’s voyage; the voyage itself is the building
of his polis, of his poem, of himself into Maximus. Looks intersect, perspec-
tives alter, and identities merge into one another: the perspective from above
becomes the perspective of Olson/Maximus, since the city is his city. Hence
the subject’s identification with his object, which Olson also finds in my-
thopoeic thinking: the exchange of looks attests that the city itself is an event
arising from space through the look of the bird, the look of the poet and the
look of the goddess, who is the poet’s muse. The poet is also part of the city, as
the roofs are part of the bird’s look; the process is always internal, the growth
is internal, and every “outside” is merely a matter of perspective rather than a
true frontier. Olson seeks to break the hierarchical stance of the Western
perspective, which rises above nature or above the “other.” Human beings,
according to Olson, are part of the universe, part of the event that is the
universe; thus, they themselves become a potentiality for actualization
through nature, just as nature is a potentiality for actualization through them.
This ontic relativity shatters the primacy of the “I,” since the human is
prehended by the bird as an “object,” just as the bird is prehended by the
human as an “object”; hierarchy becomes relativity according to the perspec-
tive, or the “prehension,” as Whitehead describes it:
An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning
which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode is analysable into the
total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which the
special activity is concerned. This thing is a datum, that is to say, is describable
without reference to its entertainment in that occasion. An object is anything
performing this function of datum provoking some special activity of the occasion
in question. Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in
respect to its special activity concerning an object; and anything is an object in
respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject. Such a mode of
activity is termed a “prehension.”11
Olson’s concepts were already revealed in “Projective Verse” as striving in

this direction: the concepts of “object” and “subject” are reformulated and
attest to the relativity and dependence between all parts of the whole. Yet
Olson could not prevent the growth of his own “subjectivity,” his own con-
stitutive activity in his poetry, even when calling upon the other citizens to act
and constitute themselves. Many questions arise: Olson tries to present in the
poem the vantage points of the “other,” but this “other” then becomes an
“object” through its own growth—how can he realize and clarify in his own
writing that he is an “object” for another “subject”? Even when the look is the
bird’s, or the city’s, or some other person’s, since the text brings documents or
stories by others and about others, someone might claim that the perspective
is ultimately subjugated, or qualified,12 to the “subject” who is Olson/
Maximus. To formulate this in more general terms: Are we again facing the
dichotomies of writing/speaking, poetry/reality, and so forth? Does Olson’s
claim that reality is a realization of potentialities turn us into someone who, in
Olson’s terms, realizes the unit? And does our knowledge of Whitehead
change the reading mode of the poem in a deep, metaphysical sense? In-
stances such as the bird’s look expose another problematic facet: the “other” is
not always nature, and a critical view might argue that Whitehead’s cosmol-
ogy becomes a social instrument for Olson, at least in a considerable section
of the first and even of the third volume of The Maximus Poems. In the second
volume, Olson made an attempt to change perspective, which explains his
turn to the mythical and his concern with “Mother Earth,” “Okeanos,” and
other cosmic forces. But does his anthropomorphization of nature turn nature
into a “subject” relating to humans as “objects”? To what extent is it possible
to say that nature “perceives” us as we “perceive” it? Can this assumption be
more than a mere aphorism? Can it be concretized in a text that is a human
abstraction from nature? Olson, who wishes to change social reality, to shape a
community with different values, faces an additional problem: his argument
about lack of hierarchies clashes with the view he had endorsed previously,
stating that Whitehead’s metaphysics and the ethic implied by it are, accord-
ing to his own understanding, the correct approach.
The bird’s eye “mapping” the city, then, perfectly matches Olson’s eye,
which “maps” the city, the space, and thus generates Maximus: it “prehends”
and constructs the “actual entity” that is Maximus in the same act of percep-
tion and “prehension” of experience itself. Reality, as Olson wishes to empha-
size, is always particular, immediate, singular, perceived in order to change
with you and, of course, relative: “there are eyes in all heads” for which you
are also a “datum of prehension,” a “real object” in the creation of another
“subject”:
There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of
(TMP, 33)
4: CONCRESCENCE 51
Olson resorts to the eye as an instance of the relativity of “prehension,” of

perception, that constitutes the “subject.” The eye and the look are present
throughout The Maximus Poems and are joined by the ear, another metonymy
of human experience in the space that makes them grow. Obviously, writing
about the look, or about listening, is like writing about breathing—an at-
tempt to describe, through language, the experiential reality that is not a
product, a written, inanimate object. The organization of the words on the
page is Olson’s way of activating the eye, the ear, and the lungs. You have to
“voice” the words while your eyes move in the field of the page and to hear its
rhythm; otherwise, the use of the look and the ear once again attest to the
limitations of a description of space itself. Yet, even when we do so, the
problem of how to present nature as a perceiving, prehending entity remains
unsolved, and reemerges when Olson focuses on the human dimension in the
perception of the “object,” which is his way of building an ethos. If the poem
cannot attest to nature as a perceiving entity, it can at least activate people to
perceive nature once again, and themselves as part of it. It was the lack
of the “right” eye and ear, representing the absence of all the “right”
senses, and hence of the “right” conceptions, that led to the decline of their
city:
colored pictures
of all things to eat: dirty
postcards
And words, words, words
all over everything
No eyes or ears left
to do their own doings (all
invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses
including the mind, that worker on what is

And that other sense
made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched,
that consolation (greased
lulled
even the street-cars
song
(TMP, 17)
In “The Songs of Maximus” (which is “Letter 4”) and other poetic units in
the beginning of TMP, Olson deals with the present plight of his community,
and his observation of it is part of his attempt to expose the faults and
mistakes of the tradition that had engendered it. Olson attacks the values of
capitalism that, in his view, emphasize the conscious, linguistic dimension,

while perception is not a process necessarily accompanied by consciousness
(hence Whitehead’s decision to change the concept of perception to “prehen-
sion”).13 The misuse of language, says Olson, perhaps through other words or
through a different use, creates words that cover up everything to the point
that the perceiving, prehending body disappears under them, and the eye and
the ear are no longer able to do their work. A reality of words is a “Cartesian
reality,” in which language and consciousness take over the rest of the senses,
as the people of the West conquered space by force and overwhelmed the
people of the “new” continent. Olson assigns the mind the status of a worker
and makes poetry a craft like any other, such as shipbuilding, contrary to the
Cartesian “words, words, words” that represent the reasoning mind. He does
this, however, within the medium of language. The Maximus Poems move
along this tension of the will to be released from the conscious, the textual, the
hierarchical, but resorts to these instruments and takes a hierarchical look at
other modes of existence and other views, particularly in the first volume.
This tension, however inherent in writing as such, is being idealized in
Olson’s poem until the last volume, where the disappointed poet start enclos-
ing within himself.
“The Songs of Maximus” illustrates this well. On the one hand, this is
projective verse: the unit starts in midstream—every place is an opening. The
organization breaks up the conventional structures of syntax and of the
sentence to emphasize a movement that is based on the physical, on breath-
ing; the enjambments highlight the dimension of a language that is all-
inclusive (“all”), or fixes dichotomies, whether outside or within parentheses
that remain open on purpose. In general, there is an attempt to abuse the rules
of logocentric language, which preclude a genuine human world inseparable
from the world of nature and from the cosmos and function only in a world of
discourse. Yet Olson’s concept-packed language preserves the tension, partic-
ularly in the eighth line, which stresses the conceptualization of reality and
conceals the physical dimension of the word, and in the grammatical and
syntactic violations that lead to overintellectualization and remove the con-
crete. Even if we were to understand the linguistic choices in the eighth line as
a deliberate irony, we could not avoid this conflict. Once again, then, the
conclusion is that Olson, maybe more than any other poet of his times (but
times, of course, are changing), requires the cooperation, or re-activation, of
the reader.
The central problem affecting The Maximus Poems and Olson’s poetic and
philosophical ideas becomes progressively clear: Maximus seems to grow into
an era whose means are no longer adequate to his thinking. Because Olson is
compelled to resort to the tools of the time, his efforts to impart his own
4: CONCRESCENCE 53
worldview to the other fall victim to methods of thought and communication

that dull its effect.14 This might explain how Olson, who had highly influ-
enced other poets and had many disciples, remained to some extent a “margi-
nal poet.” The reading of Olson becomes clearer after we study his assump-
tions, which Olson had tried to impart in his lectures and by extensive writing
“about” the work itself. Yet, once the concrete presence of Olson/Maximus in
the world ceases, he exists only as a potentiality for realization, as an “object”
and no longer as a “subject.” Is it true to say that it was not as an “object,” in
the Olsonian sense, that he was assimilated into a written culture? That partly,
at least, he remained in it as a textual object scrutinized through reading
assumptions very different from his own? Yet, for any given reader, his text is a
potentiality for actualization.
In the poem, Olson tries to contend with the fixation coerced by the
dominant culture and poetics. He tries to lead the potentiality represented
through the poetic unit to enact and reconstitute the reader in it: “is this,” in
the last line of “Letter 27,” is not intended only for the “polis” in the previous
line but to the “subject,” who is Olson at the very moment all these elements
attain realization together. Alternatively, one might say that this “subject” is
the polis because, in its “essence,” the polis is the very joining of elements into
one community, one body. “Change,” in the third line from the end, attests
to the ceaseless flow of the “is this”: the becoming, the experience, is always
here and now for the reader. The fact that “polis” is within the breathing-
rhythmical frame of the lines, strengthens the seemingly contradictory bond
between change from the upper side of the “polis,” and the here and now
from its lower side. In other words, Olson tries to demonstrate to the reader
that the polis, the “subject,” the world, change and attain realization in every
new here and now, including that of the reader’s reading. Words are facts, says
Olson, they are real. Words grow me into Maximus, who goes on changing
and at the time of the next experience is already different—“I no longer am,
yet am”—and they will do the same to you, the reader, at the time of your
reading, which is the act of your experience. “Letter 27” deals at many
levels—the unit, the poet, the reader, the city, and the cosmos—with the
question of engendering. As we will see below, the reader even recreates
Olson/Maximus, since the reader’s experience of the unit is an experience of
the experience (Olson’s), it is an event with an event as its “object,” namely, a
reactivation of the first event, of the ritual that, as Olson grasps, is at the
foundation of the mythopoeic world view.
“Letter 27” stresses the process through which Olson/Maximus grows so as
to emphasize the identity between the reader and Olson, namely, the identity
of the “subject” with his/her “object.” The reader, like Olson, is the child of
concrete parents but also a child of civilization’s movement westward—from
the Fertile Crescent, from Tyre, to America. Maximus, the philosopher from
Tyre, is transfigured into Maximus from Gloucester and, according to Olson,
should also be transfigured into the reader, the child of a place that singles
him out, whatever that might be.
“One wants phenomenology in place,” Olson writes, “in order that event may
rearise” (Prose, 51). The freshness of space must be allowed to assert itself so it can
reveal its own form. Perception in the Maximus is an interchange between outward
space and the inward self which takes place at the surfaces of the body, before it is
confronted with the abstract systems which form in the centers of consciousness.15
Birth from the body, as Byrd emphasizes, is birth from space, which marks
out a place for the individual, a home. Even before becoming acquainted with
Whitehead, Olson, as an American (see “Letter 27”), had sensed himself as “a
complex of occasions/ themselves a geometry/ of spatial nature”: “I take
SPACE to be the central fact to man in America, from Folsom cave to now. I
spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy” (CMI,
11). And elsewhere: “It started, for me, from a sensing of something I found
myself obeying for some time before, in Call me Ishmael. It got itself put
down as space, a factor of experience I took as of such depth, width, and
intensity.”16
As a result of the movement westward, Olson sensed the American space as
the possibility of a new opening confronting a culture that had renounced its
living space and repressed its experience in space. He sees Americans as “the
last first men,” and assumes they will still be granted the possibility of growth
in a space that is not yet entirely spoiled, despite the “Cartesian” mistakes that
the people of Boston and the rest of the original settlers made when they came
to the continent. The end of “Letter 27” clarifies that the power of individuals
lies not only in their own growth since, invariably, it is also the growth of the
space of which they are part. Gloucester now relies on Olson, who, by
growing into Maximus, will also lead to its own growth. The emphasis is
twofold: one must grow from space, but space must be concretized, a place is
required. Olson views himself as a means for Gloucester to discover its own
shape, and thereby also shaping him to be Maximus. Growth, then, is dis-
covering, it is the prehensive look, the concrete observation that engenders
the whole from its details. This process is revealed (to the growing reader) as
early as “Letter 2”:
. . . . . tell you? ha! who

can tell another how
to manage the swimming?
he was right: people

4: CONCRESCENCE 55
don’t change. They only stand more

revealed. I
likewise
the light, there, at the corner (because of the big elm

and the reflecting houses) winter or summer stays
as it was when they lived there, in the house the street cuts off
as though it were a fault,
the side’s so sheer
they hid, or tried to hide, the fact the cargo their ships brought back
was black (the Library, too, possibly so founded). The point is
the light does go one way toward the post office,

and quite another way down to Main Street. Nor is that all:
coming from the sea, up Middle, it is more white, very white

as it passes the grey of the Unitarian church. But at Pleasant Street,
it is abruptly
black
(hidden
city
(TMP, 9)
The revelation of the city is the revelation of Maximus, as is stressed by the

relationship between the parts of the unit. In this letter, Olson begins the
process of “mapping” the city, a process that continues throughout The
Maximus Poems, as Olson grows out of the center of the city to its borders in
Dogtown. Olson, growing into Maximus, is the center enabling the dis-
covery of the “hidden” city that is exposed to the rays of his light. Olson omits
the closing parenthesis, so that “hidden” is indeed concealed in the shadow of
parentheses, but “city,” in the next line, is already revealed and opens up to
the space of the page; the light of Maximus reveals the city’s history, an
unpleasant and ethically troublesome history, including chapters such as slave
trading, with its proceeds serving to build the library. The light stops precisely
at Pleasant Street in order to reveal today’s unpleasant face as well, a conse-
quence of having strayed away then from the correct path:
New England, now

that pejorocracy is here, how
. . . . . . . . .
how shall you strike,

o swordsman, the blue-red back
when, last night, your aim
was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick
And not the cribbage game?
(TMP, 7)
The mast that Olson seeks to raise in “Letter 1,” the bird’s wings, the bird’s
perspective, the sailing and the flight—all face the corruption of the present,
which “slows” its growth. Olson is forced to create a hierarchy in order to
build a new, “nonhierarchical” ethos. And why, and according to what “objec-
tive” criterion besides Olson’s view, is the flight of the lance preferable to “mu-
sick”? And why is the poetry of Ferrini, to whom “Letter 1” was sent as a real
letter, before becoming the first unit of the poem, considered no good ? Why
is there no room for Ferrini’s poetry in a “nonhierarchical” reality? To build a
new world, we must apparently destroy whatever preceded it or, at least,
replace it with a hierarchy that will advance a new purpose. To penetrate so as
to reveal the “true” city, to build it anew, is to stick a lance: the opening lines
of The Maximus Poems attest to the didactic, guiding facet of Olson/Maximus:
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
the present dance
(TMP, 5)
In the name of the way, or so it would appear, the lance is sharpened, and
the dance is celebrated on islands of blood. Is not Olson, who obeys his
creatures, imposing his way and setting up clear hierarchies? At the beginning,
Olson’s approach is definitely critical and hierarchical, and only toward the
middle of the volume does he seem to allow his zealous pen to cool down.
This is how things appear for as long as he goes on digging (“the archeology of
the morning”) inward, into the city, into himself, so that he might grow
upward, outward:
in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the back

in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form
that which you make, what holds, which is
the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what
the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect,
the mast, the mast, the tender
mast!
(TMP, 8)
4: CONCRESCENCE 57
Olson’s wings, and those of the other city’s inhabitants, are fettered by the
chains of a three-hundred-year-old American settlement that has ignored
space. Olson declares he must do the “clearing out” that he ascribes to
Whitehead in “A Later Note.” In order to become the foundation of the city,
Olson adopts at the outset a sharp and critical wording. “Letter 1” is crowded
with forceful and even violent verbs: “o kill kill kill kill kill” (TMP 8). After
establishing his faith in his own power, Olson will acknowledge that his own
process of growth also enables the growth of the city: the personal is also
invariably collective. The light, in “Letter 2,” “does go one way toward the
post office,” since the post office is a metonymy of Olson’s father, the post-
man.17 The city being discovered revolves around the axis that is Olson/
Maximus, the center on which revelation relies and from which its rebuild-
ing becomes possible. Obviously, the dis-covery is also invariably a self-
discovery, as Olson puts it in “Maximus, at Tyre and at Boston” (which is
“Letter 21”):
that we are only

as we find out we are
(TMP, 99)
Olson is a child of the concrete space that is Gloucester and, in this sense,
not only is the unity multiplicity, but the one makes many: the place is a
multiplicity of the one, and Gloucester is an event created through one’s
“phenomenology of place.” Maximus is a junction of “external” and “inter-
nal” forces in the space and the body that is Olson, of “prehensions” whose
concrescence gives rise to him and to the city, as well as to the world and the
cosmos, as “subjects.” Olson/Maximus as a “subject” differs from other “sub-
jects” due to the specific form in which all the data are mutually qualified.
The process, however, is always “internal”: the “prehended” “object” is not
something external to the prehending “subject,” but a concrete element in its
becoming; the “subject” is identified with its object, and Maximus is identi-
fied with his place, his city. The “subject” and the “object” both continue
growing, realizing themselves in a maximalist process as the poem develops.
In the first volume, Olson walks the streets of the city bearing his words to his
fellow citizens, as in “Letter 5”:
I’ll put care where you are, on those streets I know as well as (or better:
I have the advantage
I was a letter carrier
(TMP, 26)
In the second volume, disappointed with his fellow citizens, Olson/

Maximus turns to the city surroundings, mainly to Dogtown, which is a
noninhabited area, a village abandoned since the eighteenth century. Here is

the “letter” of “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—II”:
the Sea - turn yr Back on

the Sea, go inland, to
Dogtown: the Harbor
the shore the City

are now
shitty, as the nation
(TMP, 179)
As the poem develops, Olson is increasingly disappointed with his com-

munity and moves away from the city. Nevertheless, he still considers himself
the center of its space and part of creation itself:
That’s
the combination the ocean
out one window rolling
100 yards from me, the City
out the door on the next quarter up a hill was a dune
300 years covered very little so that, a few years back
a street crew were and I picked up the white
sand
On my back the
Harbor and over it the long arm’d shield of Eastern
point. Wherever I turn or look in whatever direction,
and near me, on any quarter, all possible combinations of
Creation even now early year Mars blowing
crazy lights at night and as I write in the day light snow
covering the water and crossing the air between me and
the City. Love the world—and stay inside it.
Concentrate
one’s own form, holding

every automorphism18
(TMP, 582)
No partition separates Olson/Maximus from space—he is part of space,

grows with space and, in this sense, he is “mapping” himself: Maximus fuses
and identifies with space. Gloucester grows with Maximus and vice-versa.
“Prehension” means that one and the same event constitute the “prehending”
person and the “prehended” datum. As Altieri puts it: “Man exists in mul-
4: CONCRESCENCE 59
tiplicity; he gathers that multiplicity into the unity of an event; then he

must actively recognize that interpretation of world and self as only a single
moment in a universe he creates as it creates him.”19 We can no longer
think of space as an Euclidean surface mapped from above by fixing co-
ordinates. Space grows throughout The Maximus Poems,20 or, rather, the
scale of the map increases. The poet, as we have seen, leads the struggle
and his battlefield is not only the space of the poem but the space of the entire
cosmos:
. . . the poet’s act: stopping the battle, to get it down. . . .

. . . the old Irish doctorine: that the real boss of the kingdom is the poet. The only
person that can stop Enyalion.21
Enyalion, the Cretan god of war, is another name for Ares in The Iliad. He
represents both Mars and Hephaestus, with whom the poet wrestles. The
struggle conducted in “Letter 27,” is thus a war of Titans about the shape of
the world. From another perspective, this is a war against the dying of Myth
in order to make it newly relevant in the present; it is the creation of the story,
the drama. The design of the lines in “Letter 27”—the breaths—attests that
the battle in the space of the unit is also the battle that Olson, this time
perhaps as a poet who is himself Enyalion, wages against the Greeks, namely,
against the classic abstractions and dichotomies that stop growth (“Greeks is
the stopping”). In this sense, the struggle of Olson and Whitehead against the
“Greeks” “parallels” another battle taking place in the unit between Olson’s
father and the druggist who had “made a pass” at Olson’s mother. The battle
is the same battle: Olson is the child of his parents as he is the child of a
civilization moving westward, while Greece diverts it from its proper course.
Enyalion represents the principle of multiplicity—the battles—in unity, the
principle that every growth, every battle, is internal, since the “subject” is the
same as the “object” of the struggle. “Internal” growth means turning the
multiplicity of elements coming together into a whole that is more than the
sum of its parts, but without requiring something else, “external,” in order to
transcend and grow beyond its parts:
he turns back
into the battle
Enyalion
is the god of war the color

of the god of war is beauty
Enyalion
is in the service of the law of the proportions
of his own body Enyalion
but the city
is only the beginning of the earth the earth
is the world brown-red is the color of mud,
the earth
shines
(TMP, 406–7)
these things
which don’t carry their end any further than
their reality in
themselves
(TMP, 46)
Growth from within yourself, within your own borders—which are the
borders of reality because there is no split between you and reality, no de-
tachment—this is the law of proportions that Enyalion, the Cretan war god,
concretizes and represents here. He grows from his own body, from his own
proportions, which are the measurements of the city, of the earth, of the entire
world. Olson also hints here at the Greek concept of beauty, which for him
“symbolizes” harmony, not only in the sense of the right proportions between
parts so as to create a “pleasing” combination, but in the sense of that which is
measured through identical measurements.22 Human beings rely on them-
selves for their growth. Olson growing into Maximus does so through his own
power, without relying on any external source. The battle in which Olson/
Enyalion is involved is a poetic battle, and the arena, as Fredman describes it,
is the poem:
Enyalion struggles to pry open the lid on human possibility, using a “picture” as
weapon. The picture is both the imago mundi and the display of his own naked
body; because he is the fully embodied imago mundi, however, these two versions
of the picture are really the same. He proves his heroism and his virility by making
himself vulnerable, by stripping naked and facing the present moment with noth-
4: CONCRESCENCE 61
ing but his own, innate visionary capacity. Enyalion, the imago mundi, represents
the naked, heroic powers of recognition resident in each individual (“all men/are
the glories of Hera [the etymology of ‘Heracles’] by possibility”), a power that
projective verse summons forth.23
Color is part of the armor of the poet, the warrior; he is the one shaping
reality in his own measure:
Honor, or color, point
they called it, between the middle chief

and the heart, point
(TMP, 97)
According to Whitehead, if an entity becomes actual, it has significance.

“Significance” means that an “actual entity” functions by its own determina-
tion. Enyalion is a product of his internal growth: he realizes his measure-
ments. He realizes himself as part of the city and of space and, in this sense,
which applies to everyone because Olson argues all of us can be poets,
Enyalion also represents the law of possibility:
Enyalion
is possibility, all men
are the glories of Hera by possibility, Enyalion
goes to war differently
than his equites, different
than they do, he goes to war with a picture
far far out into Eternity Enyalion,
the law of possibility, Enyalion
the beautiful one, Enyalion
(TMP, 405)
As potential, as possibility, Enyalion, like Olson himself, goes on forever:

he never dies. Growth goes on forever; the battle, the poetic battle, goes on
forever. Striving toward beauty, toward building, toward the concrescence of
all parts into one proportionate whole, goes on forever. Enyalion is also “the
law of possibility” in the sense that his concrete visage changes in every single
one of his appearances or, in another formulation, he himself is the concres-
cence, and even an ongoing growth, from unit to unit, of other mythological
figures, as Butterick reveals Olson’s sources:
In this poem, however, a composite in which several mythological figures are
incorporated and transformed—even more so when earlier versions are con-
sidered. The next phrase, “he has lost his hand,” reveals Enyalion also to be
Tyr. . . . While what appears to be the first version of the present poem also
describes Enyalion as follows:
Enyalion is the god of war Enyalion

is the son of Odin Enyalion is the one caught in the trap
in bed with Beauty. Beauty is the wife of Tartaros . . .
Referred to is the story of Ares caught in bed with Aphrodite by her husband,
Hephaestus, who created a special net for the purpose. . . . However, in another
version of the present poem, Enyalion, or Ares, is also spoken of in terms of
Hephaestus . . . yet who also killed “the smith” (Hephaestus) himself. Further, Tyr
is not “the son of Odin,” as mentioned in the earliest version, Vidar is. So the
images are continuously confused, reversed, or interwoven, until the new figure—
who is also a Wanax and at times . . . has the traits of an ancient Irish hero—is
created, an archetypal composite but also a unique and novel hero.24
Before us is one who is many, many who are one, a thing and its opposite
contained together, the elimination of borders between one body and an-
other, the identity of the subject with its object. Enyalion, who is also Her-
cules, whose name means “the glory of Hera,” is Olson/Maximus as well as
his opponent. He is concrete in every unit but “brings with him” his various
faces, which had already been concrete and had already been realized in the
past. This “realization-in-the-past” influences the present realization, confers
on it the purposeful direction of the flow from one unit to another. This self-
functioning is the real internal constitution of the “subject,” the one that gives
the “subject” its identity. The way in which elements are linked to one
another is the “essence” of the thing itself. Hence the growth toward a self-
identity that does not rely on externals, as Whitehead phrases it: “An actual
entity is called the “subject’ of its own immediacy, and it combines self-
identity with self-diversity.”25 The content is constituted by the form; becom-
ing, as Whitehead states, constitutes being; prehension is what constitutes the
existing “subject.” The unit below is a “subject,” Maximus at a particular
moment in time, created from the field of words reactivated by the reader, and
deals with the becoming of the “subject” out of his/her “prehensions”:
I looked up and saw

its form
through everything
—it is sewn
in all parts, under
and over
(TMP, 343)
4: CONCRESCENCE 63
The units of the poem, says Olson, are reactivated and they too are an
event. They rise from the page that is their space, while the reader-creator
reveals their power and experiences them:
it was the reds of buds

sent me this spring,
lighting up the valleys
as now this fruits do,

and these pages have come in,
of a white so right
the print is brown
I, dazzled
as one is, until one discovers

there is no other issue than
the moment of
the pleasure of
this plum,
(TMP, 46)
The present tense projects the process or revelation, which is also the
process of flourishing and the process of concrescence, onto the reader. The
“come in” in this unit is the same as “getting the universe in,” “as against man
alone . . .” that Olson ascribes to Whitehead in “A Later Note”: Olson is
Maximus, who, at the present of the unit, concresces as a fruit growing from
and with his living space, and his words are his breaths coming from the body,
from space. The “entrance” of indented stanzas on the page is evidence of the
breathing context that inhales, “prehends,” experiences in space and body, in
order to go out, fuse, and concresce.
For Olson, Whitehead’s worldview was not merely a metaphor: his poetry,
the movement inward into his memories, toward Gloucester’s past, to the past
of the cosmos in general, to the mythical and the primeval is a projection
forward, a building of himself as Maximus, of his city as a polis and of the
entire universe. The poet, Olson believed, influences the world, actually
creates it, as he learned from Whitehead’s thought and modern science as well
as from mythopoeic thinking, which he understood as having a ritual of re-
creation at its foundation. The problematic entailed by this process has
already been noted and will be revealed as more acute when we examine the
second concept of fluency, linked to time and to the transition from one unit
to another. To sum up the present chapter, I have chosen a poetic unit where
Olson brings together his thoughts about growth from place. “Letter 7”
illustrates again the difficulties attending on the attempt to show the way to
the other. When Olson embarks on Maximus’s way, it is clear to him that the
poem is not a product; it is not a substance, a “furniture,” an aesthetic
product, but an unsplit experience, an event arising from the place and from
the body:
(lungs, Ferrini, lungs:

you need no other friends than us
you need not waste evenings, beers,
seeking too ready ears
The men of the matter of this city
(who was it did carve the Lady?)
are never
doctrinaires
(TMP, 38)
The Maximus Poems began with the letters that Olson wrote in 1950 to
Vincent Ferrini, who was then planning to edit a local periodical in Glouces-
ter.26 These letters include the first poetic unit and “Letter 7” cited above,
wherein Ferrini, the poet and editor, also emerges as a later—and earlier, from
the perspective of his appearance in the poem—ally of Descartes: a poet of
doctrines—“I think”—rather than a man singing—“I experience.” Fer-
rini, according to Olson/Maximus, does not activate his lungs, he does not
breathe, does not experience, does not create. As Olson explains in “Letter 5,”
Ferrini does not “use” the potentiality latent in the world in order to actualize
it, to grow with it:
You have had a broken trip, Mr Ferrini. And you should go hide in your cellar (as a
Portuguese skipper once had to, he’d so scared before a storm, and run for it,
leaving two of his men on the sea in a dory). (TMP, 24)
Ferrini, in Olson’s view, is escaping from reality, from experiencing reality.

He does not sing, in the sense of the action that is poetry, just as sailing is
action, in the sense of the “contest” with reality that builds the drama, the
story, hence the didactic tone explaining to Ferrini how to live and how to
write. The word “broken” points to the split that results from avoiding the
realization of experience in the world, and the cellar is the repressed area to
which the individual withdraws after the break, after cutting off contact with
reality. The escape from experience is the escape from yourself. Olson teaches
Ferrini and leads the individual to abstraction, to all-inclusive, and universal
patterns of thinking:
4: CONCRESCENCE 65
You get my drift: 4 Winds

. . . . . . . . .
your magazine might excuse itself

if it walked on those legs all live things walk on,
their own
. . .
nor is it life
with a capital F
the shocking play you publish

with God as the Master of
a Ship! In Gloucester-town
you publish it, where men
have cause to know where god is
when wooden ships,
with sail or power,
are out on men’s business
on waters which are tides, Ferrini,

are not gods
on waves (and waves

are not the same as deep water)
and themselves, and their vessel,

in the hands of winds: winds, Ferrini,
which are never 4, which have their grave dangers (as writing does)
just because weather
is very precise to
the quarter it comes from (as writing is,
if it is good as
(TMP, 28–29)
Rather than concreteness and experience, Ferrini represents a “Cartesian

poetry” that has split off from the experiencing body. The periodical he edits
(4 winds) is detached from reality, from experience, and from the place where
one experiences; his poetry is abstract, lacking the concrete form that results
from experiencing the body in a concrete space. It is a poetry of capitals, of big
letters removed from the concrete reality (see the “God” ascribed to Ferrini as
opposed to the “gods” of water). For Olson, poetry is measured in hues—the
preciseness, the variety, and the concreteness that characterize experience in
reality, even if the critique of the West, or of capitalism, is worded in general-

izations. This is a poetry that stands on its feet, as do all creatures: Olson
chooses to write “those legs all live things walk on,” since everything exists “at
the same level” in regard to the category of existence, all are “actual entities”
and events. We are all “objects” to the extent that we are all “subjects.” The
Cartesian man perceives himself in “big letters,” placing himself above the
surroundings, above space, above the “other.” He differentiates himself from
“things” and becomes, in his own perception, (a representative of ) God. This
haughtiness toward “things,” argues Olson, is what leads the Boston settlers
to murder Indians, to trade in slaves, and to oppress, even within their own
community those who are “different.” “Letter 5” is Olson’s attempt to meet
Ferrini, but Ferrini is not a child of this earth in a the true sense:
It’s no use.
There is no place we can meet.
You have left Gloucester.
You are not there, you are anywhere
where there are little magazines
will publish you
(TMP, 29)
Ferrini’s poetry is everywhere; it is an abstraction and is therefore nowhere.

As far as Olson is concerned, Ferrini left Gloucester in the deepest sense of
cutting ties with his living space, no longer part of a place. He is not the one
who grows with the place and makes it grow. Olson, in contrast, begins now,
in 1953, as he writes the letter, to re-build the place.
5
Fluency
ONE OF OLSON’S CRUCIAL ASSUMPTIONS WAS THAT EXPERIENCE IS INDI-

visible and is realized all at once. His systematic formulation of this assump-
tion was influenced by Whitehead’s definition of the “actual entity” as a
primary category. The definition and adoption of the category of experience
as indivisible account for the main problem involved in the reading of The
Maximus Poems. This problem represents a dilemma that characterizes the
reading of the long poem and is further intensified in the context of the
cultural approach dominant in Olson’s times. The poem itself contends with
this problem, developing and applying a poetics that illustrates the resolution
of its fundamental philosophical query.
Readers of Olson’s book ask themselves what turns all the units—all the
“letters”—that could be viewed as independent of one another, into one
(long) poem. This problem has a historical background, of which only those
aspects relevant to our specific discussion will be considered here. The long
poem is usually viewed as a form derived from the tradition of the epic, and
particularly the classic epos (Greek, Roman); hence some of the basic assump-
tions concerning the frame that unifies the work, which are linked to narra-
tive principles. Yet the epic itself also developed in various directions and
forms. Some of these developments rely on other types of basic assumptions
(for instance, the cataloguing principle). Nonnarrative principles emerge as
relevant and may even appear central in an era that casts doubts on such
“metanarratives” as the epos and its foundational myth. But the historical
discussion is only one facet of the philosophical dilemma typical of Olson’s
long poem since, as noted, the long poem is much more for Olson than an
additional poetic option—it is the pivot of poetry as such.
The basic philosophical problem characterizing The Maximus Poems is the
problem of unity and multiplicity. Olson, as mentioned, indicates that the
epigraph of the poem (“All my life I’ve heard one makes many”) is “the
dominating paradox on which Max complete ought to stand.” In this sense,
The Maximus Poems could be considered a long poem dealing with the
fundamental philosophical question underlying its own poetics. The problem
67
of multiplicity within unity has so far been discussed here at the micro level,
when dealing with the concrescence of the potentialities or “prehensions” that
constitute the poetic unit, the “subject” as a whole at the moment of experi-
ence. This concrescence is one of the two meanings of fluency. The special
problem of the long poem focuses on the second meaning of fluency which is
the continuity of becoming—how, if at all, is there fluency at the macro level,
in the transition between poetic units? How are they joined together in one
long poem? Does Olson’s long poem tell a story and preserve a narrative
character?
Olson seeks to concretize a poetics of the long poem that will integrate
thinking at two levels, which are the two kinds of fluency he finds in White-
head. Olson’s long poem works through the transition from the micro to the
macro levels: growth at every “here and now” of a poetic unit that is experi-
ence, and the fluency of one unit into the next, thus becoming a continuity
and culminating in one long poem, one story (the story of Maximus, the story
of Gloucester, and of the earth as a whole). The second concept of fluency, as
we saw, is linked to the concept of time:
The other kind is the transition from particular existent to particular existent. This
transition, again in Locke’s language, is the “perpetually perishing” which is one
aspect of the notion of time; and in another aspect, the transition is the origination
of the present in conformity with the “power” of the past.1
The creation of actual unity out of a multiplicity of data, the realization of

potentiality by turning into a fact—this is the “essence” of Maximus, who
concresces from the multiplicity of data “provided” by the world. Maximus
did not “really” exist in the world, but his potential had existed; Olson “takes
up” this option not only for the purpose of his own growth—he allows every
reader to grow as well: “you sing, you / who also / wants.”2 But as soon as
Maximus “first” emerges, as soon as the first poetic unit of The Maximus
Poems sets up a figure of Maximus (however weak, partial, and incipient)—
Maximus himself becomes an “object,” which is itself a “real potential” rather
than a pure potentiality. Olson learns from Whitehead that the systematic
meaning of the dynamism he had always sensed as characteristic of reality is
that the actual world is a process, and the process is the creation of experi-
ences, “actual entities.”
Every act of experience, then, every “actual entity,” requires a description
presenting it in its potentiality for objectification in the creation of future
experiences, of other “actual entities”—units flowing into one another to
create one long poem. For Whitehead, the concept of objectification denotes
the unique mode in which the potentiality of one “actual entity” is con-
cretized in another “actual entity,” the transition between “actual entities.”
5: FLUENCY 69
The “character” (the “personality”) Maximus was born and can penetrate
future acts of experience as a datum: at the end of the second poetic unit,
Maximus is the realization of a new pure possibility for whom “Maximus
1”—“Letter 1”—is a “datum,” a real element in other “data” (the materials
of “Letter 2”), whose synthesis is Maximus at this moment of experience, here
and now. And so on: no “actual entity” can possibly emerge in the world from
.
now on without taking into account the “object” Maximus in its process of
becoming (even if only as part of an excluding selection). Every Maximus,
every actualized Maximus, every actualized poetic unit faces now an objective
immortality. It ceases to exist as an “actual entity” in its initial mode of
existence, but continues to exist in other modes of existence and to affect the
world as an actual “object.” It loses its status as a subject, but acquires
“objective immortality.”
In a poetics relying on the concept of fluency developed by Whitehead,
Olson wages a twofold struggle in order to preserve the possibility of telling a
story, to be able to claim that a real link exists between the units, and a real
unity within the growing multiplicity of the (“poetic”) experiences. On the
one hand, he must contend with the difficulties that arise from renouncing
the concept of an object persisting through time, of a substance persisting
over changes; on the other hand, he must contend with the answers given by
modern physics to seventeenth-century physical theory, answers that left the
world (and the human being) fragmented, frozen, and “spatialized,” as a
result of the new perceptions of time. How can we say that Maximus is one,
that Gloucester is one, that the poem is one? How can we tell a story, join the
fragments, the units, in a scientific and poetic world (an obviously artificial
split for Olson) that no longer believes in the concept of entity and does not
accept the creative dimension of time? In an era increasingly skeptical about
purposeful validity or causal validity (two kinds of “metanarratives”), Olson
tries to link a poetic “drop of experience” here and now to the next poetic
“drop of experience” in order to tell a story that is more “open,” but still
marked by causal and purposeful determinacy. The poetics of multiplicity
within unity, as Olson learns from Whitehead, relies on equilibrium, on
balance, on mutual dependence and relativity rather than on the subordina-
tion of one concept to another. Whitehead’s philosophy attempts to build a
description of the world that will not rely solely on one side in the conceptual
confrontation between time and space, fluency and atomization, movement
and stability, freedom and determinacy (and so forth), which had charac-
terized Western culture. The intuition that “all things flow,” Whitehead tells
us, is one of humanity’s first generalizations, which he phrases as “the flux of
things.” Then, he qualifies this statement: “But there is a rival notion, anti-
thetical to the former. . . . This other notion dwells on permanences of
things.” Whitehead finds these two notions united in one integral experience
in two lines of a famous hymn:
Abide with me;

Fast falls the eventide.
Here the first line expresses the permanences, “abide,” “me,” and the “Being”
addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux.
Here at length we find formulated the complete problem of metaphysics. Those
philosophers who start with the first line have given us the metaphysics of “sub-
stance”; and those who start with the second line have developed the metaphysics
of “flux.” But, in truth, the two lines cannot be torn apart in this way.3
To mediate these ends, to achieve unity within multiplicity, means con-

tending with one of the first problems known to philosophy. The resolution
Whitehead suggests to the dispute between Parmenides and Heraclitus,
which Olson adopts and attempts to implement, is that stability derives from
fluency: “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming,”
namely, “extensiveness becomes, but ‘becoming’ is not itself extensive. The
actual occasions are the creatures which become, and they constitute a con-
tinuously extensive world. The ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism” (34 –
36). This solution is compatible with the findings of special relativity and
quantum theory since, as Frazer summarizes, these theories suggest “that
permanence is an emergent quality of the world, having arisen in the course of
evolution from the fundamental restlessness of the universe, and that perma-
nence and change are hierarchically related, in that rest and permanence may
be constructed from elements of motion and change, but not the other way
around.”4
Olson adopted this approach in his own voyage toward a long poem that
will indeed rely on “atomism” becoming continuity. His readings of modern
science guided his poetic steps:
It is . . . Riemannian observation, that the metrical structure of the world is so

intimately connected to the inertial structure that the metrical field (art is measure)
will of necessity become flexible . . . the moment the inertial field itself is flexible.
Which it is, Einstein established, by the phenomena of gravitation, and the
dependence of the field of inertia on matter . . . the structures of the real are
flexible, quanta do dissolve into vibrations, all does flow, and yet is there, to be
made permanent, if the means are equal. (CP, 125)
What makes Whitehead unique within his scientific environment, and

what also captivated Olson, is his preservation of the creative aspect of flu-
5: FLUENCY 71
ency, the temporal aspect. What Whitehead tried to do in metaphysics, Olson

embraced in his poetry. Olson proposes a balanced system that will not lean
toward the well-known tendency of Western philosophy to subdue fluency to
stability, with the former eventually disappearing altogether. On the one
hand, he takes into account scientific discoveries; on the other hand, he does
not completely spatialize time, as poetics increasingly tended to do at the
time, relying on scientific discoveries. Bergson’s formulation, “the human
intellect ‘spatializes’ the universe,”5 shows that “stability” is a concept that
accords with a spatial perception of reality; it compels an analysis of the world
in terms of static categories.6 Change and movement are, as cited, “the
ultimate facts” of reality according to the physical theories currently domi-
nant; in our mind, however, they are still linked to a spatial perception that
was developed at the expense of a developmental, creative perception of time.
Whitehead and Olson are not willing to tolerate a worldview that forsakes
concepts of creativity and development, which in our consciousness are
linked to time, and insist on claiming that these concepts also emerge from
modern physics and fit its principles. We return, therefore, to the battle
waged in the arena of the poetic unit “A Later Note”: “debunking” Descartes
means not only to debunk the whole physical thinking of his time, the
Newtonian physical world, but also to challenge the tendency of modern
physics to spatialize reality.
In the Newtonian world, “units” of time and space were perceived as actual
(even if Newton did not use the concept “actual”). Olson identifies with
Whitehead’s critique of the Newtonian worldview, whose concepts (a discon-
tinued moment of time, a point not expansible in space, and an indivisible
particle of substance) do not enable any description of movement; the com-
parison between a particle in situation A and in situation B, against a back-
ground of absolute space and time, leaves movement unexplained. Hence the
impossibility of “granting” reality the fluency and continuity required to
explain the “solidarity of the universe,”7 the unity emerging from multi-
plicity, as Kraus explains:
Simply located particles, be they “bits” of space or “bits” of time, remain eternally
outside each other, incapable of being joined into anything with a unity greater
than that of a mere assemblage. Only if the relations are internal—that is to say, if
t2 is somehow an outgrowth of t1, can motion be analyzed without the specter of a
frustrated Achilles haunting the theoretical background of the calculation.8
Modern physics contended with this problem through the discoveries of

quantum mechanics and relativity theory, which changed our understanding
of the flow of time. The idea of “absolute time” lost probability after the
discovery that the speed of light is the same to all observers, no matter how
they are moving. Time, as Hawking argues, “became a more personal con-
cept, relative to the observer who measured it,” so that anyone trying to unify
gravity with quantum mechanics had to introduce the idea of “imaginary”
time:
Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space. If one can go north,

one can turn around and head south; equally, if one can go forward in imaginary
time, one ought to be able to turn round and go backward. This means that there
can be no important difference between the forward and backward directions of
imaginary time.9
But, of course, our sense of time tells us a big difference prevails between
the forward and backward directions, and we wonder with the physicist,
“Where does this difference between the past and the future come from? Why
do we remember the past but not the future?” The laws of science, then, do
not distinguish between the forward and backward directions of time. But
there are at least three arrows of time that do distinguish the past from the
future, as Hawking sums up: “They are the thermodynamic arrow, the direc-
tion of time in which disorder increases; the psychological arrow, the direc-
tion of time in which we remember the past and not the future; and the
cosmological arrow, the direction of time in which the universe expands
rather than contracts” (152).
From the perspective of physical theory, the problem is how to reconcile
the symmetric laws of physics—which are universally valid and do not
distinguish between here and there, between left and right, between past and
future—with a number of processes that do not follow this symmetry and
show direction, an “arrow of time,” asymmetry. In another formulation (less
precise though more “popular”), the question is: Does time flow? Does the
concept of time convey “true” development? Or is time given as space, as a
dimension, past and future existing “in the same sense”? Is the universe a
collection of situations that exist to the same extent, the “now” merely a cross-
section of space-time; for some observers in the universe events taking place
“now” are in my past as well as in my future? Are “drops of experience,” poetic
units, mutually isolated and detached? If so, we must agree with Einstein that
science cannot grasp our sense that the “now” differs from the past and the
future, and that “psychological” time, with its emphasis on the now, lacks
objective meaning:
The psychological subjective feeling of time enables us to order our impressions, to

state that one event precedes another. But to connect every instant of time with a
number, by the use of a clock, to regard time as a one-dimensional continuum, is
already an invention.10
5: FLUENCY 73
Whitehead, as noted, thinks of fluency as “the origination of the present in

conformity with the ‘power’ of the past.” On the one hand, no longer a
causality of the kind that had characterized the world of objects; on the other
hand, one must avoid the implications of the “spatial,” non-“creative”
(Whitehead’s concept) perception of time endorsed by the physicist. If “time
does not move,” there is no becoming in the “creative” sense, the “self ” being
nothing but a collection of mutually detached, frozen “selves”; at every single
moment of our lives there is another “self,” inanimate and frozen, experienc-
ing whatever happens at that moment. Is it indeed true, asks Whitehead,
asks Olson, that consciousness does not “flow,” does not develop from
the past toward the future? Think of Olson as the “sceptic” in the dia-
logue that Davis composes to present these philosophical and psychological
problems:
Sceptic: You still haven’t explained to me why I feel the flow of time.
Physicist: I’m not a neurologist. It has probably got something to do with short-
term memory processes.
Sceptic: You’re claiming it’s all in the mind—an illusion?
Physicist: You would be unwise to appeal to your feelings to attribute physical
qualities to the external world. Haven’t you ever felt dizzy?
Sceptic: Of course.
Physicist: So, I maintain that the whirling of time is like the whirling of space—a
sort of temporal dizziness—which is given a false impression of reality by our
confused language, with its tense structure and meaningless phrases about the past,
present and future.11
The question of the long poem touches precisely on this issue: Is there
indeed a real link between the poetic units, which turns the long poem into a
unity? Is it possible to grow as one and build a story, or are the split, the
fragmentation, the detachment, and the lack of contact between the elements
of the illusion that is the subject or its story perhaps inevitable? Olson wished
for more than this illusory link: there is continuity; there is an inner link and a
possibility of renewal, of “creativity,” of growth. Thus was Maximus, the man
and the poem (two that are one), created; Whitehead’s method provided him
with the metaphysical foundation. We face here the same problematic pre-
sented at the micro level, concerning Olson’s understanding of the becoming
of the isolated poetic unit. But this problem becomes more acute when we
consider, at the macro level, the long poem as a whole: in order to read Olson
correctly, particularly in an era that is “antimetaphysical” and hence disdain-
ful of the notion of “correct” reading—do we need to know and accept his
worldview, which is systematically formulated in Whitehead’s method? Does
the poem rely on the “correctness” of a metaphysical method that is Olson’s
specific belief? Olson himself repeatedly directs his readers/listeners to his

teacher:
We arrange the measurements, now we have to get the nature. That’s where we are
today. I mean, science and poetry today is brilliant because it’s already now return-
ing to what, again, my great master and the companion of my poem, Mr. White-
head, called his cosmology: “The Philosophy of Organism.” (MUT, 186)
Understanding the growing Maximus, the growing poem, requires a

Weltanschauung that will allow this growth, a philosophy of organism.12 In
Whitehead, Olson found the metaphysical basis for his understanding of life
not merely as an experience but also as a possibility for development and
growth involving a clear ethical aspect: it is possible to change humanity and
the world, to replace a negative reality with a better future to be shaped by
each one of us. The act of growth, which is internal to life, ensures value and
direction to the lives of the individual and the collective. It must be empha-
sized again that when Olson uses concepts such as truth, fact, reality, and so
forth, these words are not part of a language game. Olson internalizes White-
head’s metaphysics and cosmology as compatible with his own view of reality,
in which words are concrete and actual in the world, and poetry is a real
activity. “I quote Whitehead,” says Olson, and brings his “Master’s” words:
“The dominance of the scalar physical quantity, inertia, in the Newtonian
physics obscured the recognition of the truth that all fundamental physical
quantities are vector and not scalar.” Commenting on this passage, Olson says:
“So one gets the restoration of Heraclitus’ flux translated as, All things are
vectors. Or put it, All that matters moves! And one is out into a space of facts
and forms as fresh as our own sense of our own existence.” Words, remarks
Olson in regard to Whitehead, “occur to him as substances—as entities, in
fact as actual entities.” His own words, as he explains, were “space, myth, fact,
object. And they were globs. Yet I believed in them enough to try to reduce
them to sense. I knew they were vector and in Ishmael treated them as such,
but they didn’t, for me, get rid of scalar inertia” (85).
Olson’s saying that he had not yet realized his aim in CMI attests to
Whitehead’s importance. Whitehead offers not only a specific metaphysical
world picture, but also a systematic methodological platform that Olson,
whose views are close to those of Whitehead in any event, had sought to
implement. The scientific world picture that Olson took pains to study
confirmed his initial outlook (in “Projective Verse,” for instance), and Olson
did not approach it as a metaphor: contrary to the attitude of currently
prevailing trends, Olson did not view “truth” as a contemptible term. Olson
relates to poetry as work, as life itself. To regard life as multiplicity within
unity is applicable to the common dichotomy of “poetry-reality.” For Olson,
5: FLUENCY 75
therefore, the long poem is not yet another poetic form but poetic work prior
to any classification. But the reader remains troubled: if Olson’s truth is not
the reader’s truth, if Olson’s truth is not even known to the reader, if science
will eventually dismiss Olson’s worldview (considering that, even in his own
time, several prominent trends found it unacceptable), if concepts such as
truth are no longer solid—how will the re-enactment process take place in the
course of reading the poem?
In the context of discussing fluency and the flow of time, it could be said
that Olson was, on the one hand, part of the poetic process of breaking
dichotomies. The binary compound text-world of American poetry had been
progressively eroded by Lowell, Berryman, and Ginsberg, to name but a few
of his close contemporaries. On the other hand, Olson advances a serious
claim whereby the creative process is synonymous with the “poem” and thus
writing poetry is actually writing a long poem, since any poem is always a
constituent of a longer poem. This claim is going far beyond a mere blurring
of boundaries. Olson transcended his time and place, venturing metaphysical
claims about reality and relying on assumptions considered unorthodox in
terms of the dominant cultural trends. Lowell or Berryman thus becomes the
hallmarks of a fragmentation in which the next (not necessarily chrono-
logically) poetic steps lead to a retreat into language and to increasing detach-
ment from “true reality,” despite or precisely because they were poets dealing,
as it were, directly with life. The crisis in their poetry, ostensibly personal, is
obviously a poetic and “metaphysical” crisis; poetry will now declare itself to
be concerned a priori with itself or, in other words, with language. Poets
whose starting point is cosmological will necessarily appear “weird” against
this background, and certainly in their attempt to write an epos. In another
formulation: to write in the epic tradition after Pound is, so to speak, an
inconceivable move, and even in Pound’s time it had been an altogether
different kind of epic.
Except that Olson did want to write an epos: indeed a different one, but
still one preserving the cosmological and metaphysical dimension. Already in
his poem “The Kingfishers,” which is addressed to Pound, he points to the
breakup of boundaries in Western tradition that had led Pound and his long
poem to a dead end. As he makes progress in the “project” of The Maximus
Poems, he understands his need for the second kind of fluency, which is the
macroscopic process explaining the continuity of the world, of the human
being, of the poem. This is the continuity of the organism, “the subject,” “in
the course of time,” “with the flow of time,” unlike the initial growth, the
microscopic process that describes the act of becoming here and now. Olson
wanted to go on telling stories or, in another formulation, to preserve the
arrow of time rather than accept its spatialization. The orthodox approach
accepts the asymmetry of time and views it as an open problem, but views the
passing of time as only an illusion, derived from this asymmetry. Philosophers
like Whitehead and Bergson13 are unusual in this regard, in their attempt to
save the flow of time from a physics that does not acknowledge it.14 Time and
space do indeed become with his growth into Maximus, with his breathing,
with his speech; his poetry, as energy, as an individual’s activity, makes him
grow. This is the very struggle within reality, with reality, creating reality by
contending with it, which obviously extracts a price:
Space and time the saliva

in the mouth
your own living hand amputated living on

in the mouth
of the dog
(TMP, 414)
The mouth is Olson’s, who, while singing, grows himself, the world, space
and time; the event that is the human being is embodied for Olson in his
breathing, which leads to his actual growth; poetry is singing, is breathing, is
actual growth. But the mouth is, at the same time, the mouth of the dog (the
wolf ) Fenris, with whom Maximus struggles, this time in the shape of Tyr
(which is also another facet of Enyalion, as noted). The Nordic god of war
loses his hand in the mouth of the wolf, but manages to imprison him. A river
named Von, or Expectation, flows from the wolf ’s saliva. Fenris, the dog, is
also a “reincarnation” of, for instance, Cerberus, the Greek guardian of the
infernal gates, whose drooling saliva when carried by Hercules resulted in the
growth of the aconite. This is an illustration of “objective immortality” (the
hand goes on living in the wolf ’s mouth), of creating by taking in and taking
out: the wounded, amputated hand is Olson’s writing hand, which keeps
growing back again and again, in Olson’s as well as in the reader’s mouth. The
renewal of the event, its repeated recreation, forms space and time with its
experience; growth is always internal.15
Olson’s reliance on “internal” growth, on experience as the starting point,
compels him to look at the other aspect of fluency as well, which we defined as
a “continuity of becoming,” following Whitehead. The thermodynamic arrow
(the lack of order in closed systems increases with time) and the cosmological
arrow, the prominent aspects of the asymmetry of time vis-à-vis space, con-
verge in Olson’s perception of the human being as an expanding universe
within an expanding universe, a story within the story being told. Time and
5: FLUENCY 77
space, “the organizing frameworks” of the narrative, grow with the character,
with the story, with the poem. The body, the organism, actually represents the
biological arrow, which is merely an outcome of the thermodynamic arrow. It
is the basis of the macroscopic asymmetry (which is conveyed in the second
law of thermodynamics), the basis for growth in the temporal sense of the
human being (as individual, as community, as civilization, and as species), of
the flower. Human beings must learn to acknowledge boundaries, their
boundaries, and the limitations of their bodies, thus actually enabling their
growth, their dance, their poetry, which will break through these boundaries:
Tyrian Businesses
1
The waist of a lion,
for a man to move properly
and for a woman,

who should move lazily,
the weight of breasts
This is the exercise for this morning
2
how to dance
sitting down . . .
II
a hollow muscular organ which, by contracting vigorously, keeps up the
(to have the heart
. . . . .
(When M is above G, all’s
well. When below, there’s
upset. When M and G are coincident,
it is not very interesting)
1
(peltate
is my nose-twist, my beloved, my
trophy
tropical American diffuse and climbing pungent
with lobed or dissected

And showy, e.g. so variously colored, a garden species, the . . .
3
The seedling
of morning: to move, the problems (after the night’s presences) the first hours of
He had noticed,
the cotton picks easiest
As my flower,
after rain, wears
such diadem
As a man is a necklace
strung of his own teeth (the caries
of ’em . . .
4
(the honey is the lion, the honey
in woman
5
“felicity
resulting from life of activity in accordance with”
Which is the question: in accordance with what?
Ukase: “the vertical

through the center of buoyancy of a
floating body
intersects
the vertical through the new
center made
. . . .
(TMP, 39– 42)
Our body, the source of our growth, also determines and dictates possible
directions for this growth. To grow from within yourself means to grow from
within your body; being part of space means that your body is part of it. The
dance comes out of your body, from its concreteness and its weight: the
combination is between total passivity, in the sense of awareness of the body’s
5: FLUENCY 79
presence, and activity, which can only emerge from this total passivity. In Part
I of “Tyrian Businesses” (which is “Letter 8”), Olson emphasizes the “weight”
of the body, which directs and prompts human movement. Part II opens with
a lexical definition of the heart, the center of the body, as Tyre, and Glouces-
ter, are a center for growth and expansion. “The waist of a lion” that teaches
“a man to move properly” and thus allows growth, relies on center and
balance. The biblical riddle “out of the strong came forth sweetness” dons a
“tangible” garb in Olson, stressing the physical (hence Samson) as a power
that shapes growth, as the basis of growth, latent in which is (the potentiality
of ) honey. The heart itself, as a metonymy of the body, attests to the integra-
tion between passivity and activity; the human being is the product of the
body, its diadem. The sailing mast (see again “Letter 1”) is raised from the
basis of the body rather than from reason; Olson cites Aristotle in order to
answer the question anew. Instead of Aristotle’s saying in Ethics—“felicity
resulting from a life of activity in accordance with reason”—Olson offers a
version that is slightly but significantly modified—“felicity resulting from a
life of activity in accordance with the metacenter.” The lexical definition of the
metacenter is quoted in answer to the question raised in the poetic unit cited
above, after it had already been identified with the heart (again, through a
quotation of part of its lexical definition) in the previous section of the poetic
unit. The metacenter, Byrd reminds us, is:
the critical point in the distribution of weight which determines the orientation of
a floating body. Of course, it is relevant to a ship, in which the metacenter must be
kept above the center of gravity or “there’s upset,” and, by implication, to the
dancer who drags herself across the ground, her metacenter and center of gravity
coinciding, and to western culture as a whole which has spread itself horizontally.16
The body is the home, is the ship. Both expressions recur throughout The
Maximus Poems, and since Gloucester is a fishing village and the history of
various ships features prominently in the poem, the body of the city is also
ships. The body, as Whitehead says, is a projection toward the future:
The macroscopic meaning is concerned with the givenness of the actual world,
considered as a stubborn fact which at once limits and provides opportunity for the
actual occasion. . . . Also in our experience, we essentially arise out of our bodies
which are the stubborn facts of the immediate relevant past. We are also carried on
by our immediate past of personal experience.17
The poetic unit “Tyrian Businesses” situates Tyre as a body that is the basis
for the growth of civilization and its move westward; Gloucester, which is
identified with Tyre, must be a place where growth begins anew, where a new
morning dawns, a new beginning. The word morning, which is omitted
throughout Part 3—“the first hours of ” [morning]; “the cotton picks easiest”
[in the morning]—emphasizes that the poem as a whole functions at the time
of its writing (and its reading) as an “exercise” and a “seedling” of morning (of
Olson/Maximus and of the reader/Maximus). Gloucester and Tyre are identi-
fied here not only with the (body of the) ship, and not only with the flower in
its manifestation as tansy (which “wears a diadem after rain”), but also with
the nasturtium, of which Olson cites part of the lexical definition (“peltate / is
. . . / a garden species”).
Von Hallberg explains in great detail the present appearance of the flower
as nasturtium:
First, nasturtium is derived from nasus, “nose + torquere, tortum, “to twist,” so
pungent is its odor. Its generic designation: Tropaeolum majus. Webster’s on Tro-
paeolum: “A genus of tropical American diffuse or climbing pungent herbs con-
stituting the family Tropaeolaceae (order Geraniales). They have lobed or dissected
peltate leaves and showy variously colored flowers. . . .” Tropaeolum derives from
Greek tropaion, the etymon not only of tropism but also of trophy—a monument
of the enemy’s being turned around. Trophy because “the climbing plant was
considered as representing ancient trophies, with its shield-shaped leaves and its
flowers suggesting gilded helmets spattered with blood and punctured with
lances.” That would be irresistible to one who began with the promise to “tell you/
what is a lance, who obeys the figures of/ the present dance” (M I, i). Nasturtium,
then, comes from bellicose beginnings: twisted noses and trophies. And nasturtium
leads in other directions: “cadmium yellow,” says Webster’s; Cadmus killed a dragon
(Tiamat), sowed the dragon’s teeth, reaped an army, founded a city (Thebes), and
introduced the Phoenician alphabet to Greece—Tyrian businesses.18
The flower is obviously identified with the growing Olson/Maximus him-

self, who, at this time (within the complete long poem, implying this is an
early poetic unit) is still indeed a tender shoot. The growth of the long poem
is actually the growth of the flower, of the body, “the subject,” the city, the
universe expanding in all its directions. Olson stresses the vertical axis of the
body (the various bodies, see part 5 of the unit above) in order to shatter any
conceptualization in the reader’s thought, which is naturally horizontal; but
the expansion, the growth, is multidimensional; it is itself the expansion of
space and time. These concepts are derived from the more general notion of
“the extensive continuum,” which is itself an abstraction: it does not exist as
an “ultimate fact.” This is a misunderstanding that had characterized the
history of European thought and Olson must contend with it when writing
(the more so because it is “not yet corrected” by modern science). The mistake
5: FLUENCY 81
is founded on the confusion between what is only potentiality and what is

actuality. Continuity concerns what is potential, whereas the actual is inevita-
bly atomic.19 A “traditional” storyteller views himself as the author (creator)
of a narrative, which he turns into a whole (of continuity). Olson, as narrator,
realizes himself in the course of narrating the poem, and knows that his text is
a potential continuity that will be realized in every single act of reading
(creation) by the reader. The poem is an organism growing through “creative
advance” that is not seriality, as Whitehead emphasizes: “There is a prevalent
misconception that ‘becoming’ involves the notion of a unique seriality for its
advance into novelty. This is the classic notion of ‘time’ which philosophy
took over from common sense. . . . In these lectures, the term ‘creative ad-
vance’ is not to be construed in the sense of a uniquely serial advance” (35).
Maximus (the character, the poem) grows according to the principle coined
by Whitehead: “The many become one, and are increased by one” (21).
Olson’s epigraph, as well as the target of Olson’s striving “in generic terms,”
are thus clarified as a struggle against the collapse of the epic tradition into
serial poetry. In Olson’s time, the long poem reincarnates as serial poetry,
marked by features derived from the renunciation of the “arrow of time,” of
continuity and fluency, of the development and the striving for coherence and
unity. The (serial) text turns into a space of clashing juxtapositions whose
momentary meanings are doomed to disappear.20
This issue is highly problematic. Despite the claim that one may “enter”
the “series” anywhere, and notwithstanding the will to view language as a
space, linguistic progress remains linear (and never “all at once”). The “series”
thus paradoxically preserves what is, philosophically, a misunderstanding of
the time dimension (against its will, since poetry, as a language, is linear,
meaning that it preserves the arrow of time, and even the book is organized in
a consecutive sequence): there is M1 in T1, followed by M2 in T2, along the
expanding linear continuum that is the language. The reader therefore resorts
(despite the “reading instructions”) to the illusion of the “old” concept of
time—time as a collection of moments along an axis, and so forth. The use of
the concept of series preserves the “old” concept of time: units succeed one
another, while the problem of the connecting link between them, of the
movement, of the actual continuity, remains unsolved. The Maximus Poems is
not a serial poem, neither in the generic sense (as a genre generally considered
characteristic of what is usually called “postmodern”) nor in the sense of a
time perception that is preserved in the concept of a series.
The Maximus Poems grows as an organism, when every becoming poetic
unit contains its predecessors at the moment of its becoming. For Olson, the
long poem is a “necessary genre.” The reader must realize the potential
continuity, as Olson does when growing into Maximus. In this sense, the
generic model that interests Olson is precisely the opposite of that intended
by someone choosing to write “serial poetry.” The reader is the one experienc-
ing, thus turning potentiality into actuality. The reader’s experience is the
teleological immediacy of the poem’s process. Only in this way can one
describe, by means of language, a reality that is actually a process. This
approach emphasizes reading as a concrete experience of existence, as grant-
ing a voice (in other words, breath) to the poem, which as a written text is an
abstraction about the world. Only in this way can the reader realize and feel21
the unity in the (vast and extensive) textual multiplicity that is the (poetic)
world. Olson contends here with the problem posed by language. Language
shatters unity in the microcosmic sense (turning the here and now, the
immediate, into something that exists in time—in language—and is analyz-
able—sequentially narrated), and in the macrocosmic sense (isolating events
from one another and assuming entities instead of process). Language as-
sumes beings (names) instead of becoming, thereby suppressing the nature of
reality as process, as becoming.22
Rather than serial advance, which breaks up concepts of time and world
and leaves them lacking real, “inner” continuity, the macroscopic process of
fluency is based on “creative advance” and on re-enactment. The flower
budding in “Tyrian Businesses” is recreated every time anew, bigger and fuller
because of previous seedlings and becomings. We have already read (i.e.,
activated) along the poem:
Maximus, at Tyre and at Boston

Honor, or color, point
they called it, between the middle chief

and the heart, point
And if the nasturtium

is my shield,
and my song
a cantus firmus
(TMP, 97)
“Tyrian Businesses,” which are Gloucester’s businesses, and the business of

Maximus who straddles the two cities on both sides of the ocean, on both
sides of the time and place emerging with him—these businesses bloom
anew, and grow and become clearer as we progress along the poetic units. The
5: FLUENCY 83
flower grows and develops: peltate (in the poetic unit “Tyrian Businesses,”
which is “Letter 8”) blooms and becomes Olson’s shield in the unit above
(which is “Letter 21”). This unit reminds us of the battlefield with which we
opened this book, where this unit was already mentioned. The field of flowers
is a battlefield; that is, a battle is growth. This growth unfolds by realizing the
potential latent in the nasturtium, the flower opened by the reader in the unit
that is “Letter 21,” which includes its previous realization in the unit that is
“Letter 8,” protects the heart that had already throbbed in “Letter 8”; the
heartbeats are added in a “creative advance”; the flower returns to bloom,
Maximus grows and, with him, the city and the reader who opens the shield
to his heart. But latent in the flower are also further blooms, for instance in
“Letter 9” (“the flowering plum”); in the unit that is “Letter 13” (“And for
flowers, always / it’s flowers, presented”); in “Letter 14” (“Or might it read /
‘compare / the ripe sun-flower?’ ”); in the unit that is “Letter 17” (“they throw
flowers”); in the poetic unit “The Twist” that is “Letter 18” (in various ways,
some of which I consider below); and in “Letter 20,” among other ways
through a further link to the shield (“as it was a shield”). All these mentions
appear before the unit that is “Letter 21,” where the nasturtium that was the
starting point for the present discussion emerges.
The reader of the poem, which follows a linear course, encounters the
flower again and again in its different facets, re-enacting in every one of these
meetings its latent potential from previous units that have now become an
“object” (in Whitehead’s sense) in the concretization of the new unit. The
experience reconstructs the elements that were an actual experience in the
previous units and thus, slowly, the flower grows. The meaning of objectifica-
tion, the participation of the “actual entity” that has already been realized as
an element in the process of creating the new “actual entity,” is in fact a re-
enactment of the first “actual entity” in the becoming of the second “actual
entity.” The first “actual entity” is a unity of perceptions, or of “prehensions”
in Whitehead’s terms, and so is the second. Hence, this is a “prehension” that
has a “prehension” as an object, meaning a re-enactment of the first “prehen-
sion” by the second “prehension.” A real, “inner” continuity is thus created:
an “actual entity” emerges as a real factor that influences the new becoming of
a new “actual entity.”
Whitehead bestows a new, more “open” content on the concept of caus-
ality: the macroscopic process is conditioned by the past, but is open to
changes suggested by the present with its new “prehensions.” The “subject”
re-enacts the world and grows with it.23 This process applies to Olson as well
as to the reader: through their experience, both re-create the (poetic) world as
they advance from unit to unit, from one “drop of experience” to another, to
make up a cantus firmus.24
In the process we performed here, we loosened Maximus’s shield, the

flower’s shield, exposing layer after layer. The process of reading, however,
also works the other way around: the reader rebuilds the flower layer after
layer, obviously another, new flower, even if conditioned by Olson’s concretiz-
ation. Olson’s shield is suited to his breathing, and covers his own heart;
readers build their own shields, their own bodies blooming to maximal real-
ization. In the reader’s inhaling and exhaling the poem anew, as its lines
become organized, Olson’s body enters the reader’s body through the reader’s
own breaths. This is the same interpenetration of events that sustains the
world as an actual process; and the process, as mentioned, proceeds con-
tinuously; the flower goes on growing, goes on being realized throughout the
poem:
Heart to be turned to Black

Stone the Black Chrysanthemum
is the Throne of Creation Ocean
is the Black Gold Flower

(TMP, 180)
Butterick tells us about Olson’s source of the Black Gold Flower:
This is the “golden flower” of Chinese and medieval alchemy [ . . . ] See esp. Jung,
Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 74 –75 and note: “The solar quality has survived in the
symbol of the ‘golden flower’ of Chinese alchemy . . .
The identification of Ocean with the Black Chrysanthemum here has been
prepared for in the line “Okeanos the one which all things are . . . [p. 172] and [p.
6] for the simply visual or descriptive aspect of this passage: “the water glowed,
//black, gold” . . . and also [p. 7] where the water of the harbor is described as “a
black-gold loin”—out of which spring the “seeds” which eventually “flower,” etc.
The combinations are endless.25
No wondrous alchemy is involved here. According to Olson, the flower is

indeed realized every time anew: the “alchemy” is real, potentials turn into
actuality. The black flower “of p. 180” re-enacts its previous, hesitating ap-
pearances at the beginning of the book, and grows to become a renewed,
encompassing, and broader unity. This is an excellent example of macro and
micro integrating, because the spatial array of the unit, whose elements melt
into one another to create the specific experience, is particularly prominent.
This re-enactment is a crucial point in Olson’s understanding of the world,
and we will meet it again in the context of his mythopoeic approach. Every
5: FLUENCY 85
reading of the poetic unit, every experience, is a ritual, a retelling of the tale, a
re-creation of the world. The world was created by breath—that of every
single one of us; everyone is a creator, a narrator, as well as a part of the story.
The potentials for realization available to the reader when experiencing the
unit are infinite, as Butterick points out: “the combinations are endless.”
Everything is related to everything in The Maximus Poems, and it is hard to
even embark in an attempt to describe this phenomenon (my choice of the
“flower” is arbitrary in this regard): “Okeanos the one which all things are,”
for instance, refers to Heraclitus, who himself is “reincarnated” in various
manifestations along the poem; the flower, then, includes these manifesta-
tions as well. Furthermore, one should add that experiencing readers also
bring with them, “from outside,” prehensions that unite with their own
experience; the flower blooms again and again, always new, always different,
and the advance is always “creative.” “Creativity,” according to Whitehead, is
“that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe dis-
junctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunc-
tively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.”
Since an actual occasion is “a novel entity diverse from any entity in the
‘many’ which it unifies,” “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of
the many. Whitehead’s “creative advance” is the application of this principle
of creativity to each novel situation that it originates. Thus he arrives at “the
ultimate metaphysical principle,” in which the advance from disjunction to
conjunction creates a novel entity different from the entities given in disjunc-
tion. “The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds,
and also it is one among disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity,
disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes.” As noted, the
many become one, and are increased by one.26
The Maximus Poems rests upon this principle. Olson’s fundamental as-
sumption, the assumption of his poetry, is that the poem is an organism and
the world itself is an organism. According to Olson, we have the ability to
create, which is the ability to narrate, which is the ability to bloom. Every one
of us is the chrysanthemum, or the black stone, which does not require
alchemy but self re-enactment. As Olson indicates, “that which exists through
itself is what’s called meaning.”27 This sentence was the epigraph that Olson
had suggested for a lecture he prepared in 1965 (“Causal Mythology”). But-
terick points out that it is taken from “the opening passage of the Chinese
sacred text translated by Richard Wilhelm as The Secret of the Golden Flower
(London, 1945).”28 But this is no secret for us, and the source of this
apparent secret—whether alchemy or Taoism—is irrelevant. Olson rejected
all the various forms of blurring mystical perception. The clarity of what
exists through itself, and the experience of it, is what bestows meaning. Olson
holds that the strength of any comparison, in the legacy of Western tradition,
is in its ability to remove us from “the thing itself ”:
We do not find ways to hew the experience as it is, in our definition and expression
of it, in other words, find ways to stay in the human universe, and not led to
partition reality at any point, in any way. . . . All that comparison ever does is set
up a series of reference points: to compare is to take one thing and try to under-
stand it by marking its similarities to or differences from another thing. Right here
is the trouble, that each thing is not so much like or different from another thing
(these likenesses and differences are apparent) but that such an analysis only
accomplishes a description, does not come to grips with what really matters: that a
thing, any thing, impinges on us by a more important fact, its self-existence,
without reference to any other thing, in short, the very character of it which calls
our attention to it, which wants us to know more about it, its particularity.29
The experience of the thing itself is what reveals its quality and its being
part of a larger unity. What is ostensibly a symbol (the black flower) is actually
an opening to the unity of the experience and the creation. Particularity is the
only way to penetrate reality, the unity of it. Comparison is based on the
assumption of dichotomies. But if the “many” are to become “one” particu-
larity is reentering creation in its unity. Olson’s poetics is always methodology
and ethos, since it is form that creates content (becoming creates being). The
black flower is “reincarnated” into a lotus, the birthplace of the gods, in the
next poetic unit (“Maximus, to himself, as of ‘Phonicians’ ”):30
. . . the padma
is what was there BEFORE
one was. Is there. Will be. Is what ALL
issues from: The GOLD
flower All the heavens,

a few miles up—and even with the sun out—
is BLACK
(TMP, 181)
The one who opens the leaves of the lotus, the padma, finds within it not
only the gods but also the (black) flower in its various manifestations. And
these, as the unit tells us, were there before, are there now, and will be there in
the future: the flower generates itself anew every time in all its facets, man-
ifestations, and realizations. Here too, then, the flower (the lotus) attests to
creation, which is internal, self-generated, from within. But this creation is
the creation of everything (“flower All the heavens”), the growing universe
5: FLUENCY 87
itself, the time and space themselves that expand in the very act of creation.
Hence the unity of opposites, which is also a principle in mythopoeic think-
ing according to Olson, enabling the sun in black heavens. Note again, for
instance, “Letter 14,” where the sun is already linked to a flower—“sun-
flower.” The sun itself is, of course, a god. Olson had read extensively on
ancient Egyptian myths and on Mesopotamian myths in general, and mate-
rials he borrowed from them are scattered throughout the poem. Heavens are
again linked to the ocean and to Heraclitus, for instance in the poetic unit
“MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—I” mentioned above: from the mating
of heaven and earth, Okeanos is born—according to Olson who quotes/
elaborates on Hesiod. “The world is a web of mutually linked and dependent
events,” as Whitehead tells us, and the poem is multiplicity within unity.
Thus will the flower continue to bloom from the poetic space in every
reading. The smell of the flower bears its increasing pungency from unit to
unit:
Nasturtium
is still my flower but I am a poet
who now more thinks than writes, my
nose-gay
(TMP, 632)
the Blow is Creation

& the Twist the Nasturtium
is any one of Ourselves
And the Place of it All?
Mother Earth Alone
(TMP, 634)
The appearances of the flower at the end of the long poem concretize the
entire way; latent in them is the complete story of the flower, which is the
story of Gloucester, which is Olson’s story. Ultimately, Olson preserves the
most basic feature of the long poem in its generic tradition: Olson builds a
world, he is a builder (or, to use another “image” central to The Maximus
Poems, he is a carpenter); the bricks are meant to be joined together for the
purpose of creating a structure. An architecture and a texture that relies on all
the bricks in order to create a “home,” which had not existed before and is
now an “object” in the world. But Olson goes even further in his thinking: the
building is a re-enactment of yourself, of the world, of the story. Olson knows
that “inside” and “outside” are one; he knows that every act of becoming in
the poetic unit re-enacts/rebuilds the act of previous experience, and only
thus are the world, the city, the poem, built. Olson tells a story, even if its
organization differs from traditional plot patterns and is more open, “hiding
behind,” as it were. The story of himself, the story of Gloucester (as a city and
a community) are tied to each other, and they are parts of one story. But this is
also the story of Olson’s striving and disappointment, as it seems, over his
inability to make the city grow with him. The poetic unit (TMP, 632)
illustrates the split that Olson had felt throughout the third volume of The
Maximus Poems (as we know it): the split between the poet and the flower in
the second line, and between writing and speaking in the last line, two
dichotomies that were shattered at the beginning of the struggle (“Letter 8” or
“Letter 21,” for instance) in order to realize the unity of a concrescent world.
As we see in another unit “Maximus of Gloucester” (on p. 473, which is
discussed elsewhere), Maximus withdraws, abstains, forsakes his crown, re-
nounces his power to shape the city and the world. The problematic we have
presented concerning the possibilities of communication between Olson,
who presents his beliefs, and the readers, who have their own, leaves its mark
on Olson/Maximus himself; he feels a failure, his fellow citizens do not listen
to him, do not cooperate with him.
In the process of his story-growth, as Olson understood it, the function of
the narrator is always emphasized (connecting, once again, with the tradition
of oral culture as the source of the epical). The narrator returns to the position
of strength he had lost as writing came to dominate speech, to his capacity to
shape and influence the world. Narration is the process of the story’s actual
production and not only the process of its being told. The story, then, is never
finished, always in a process of creation-narration, always in the present (for
the narrator; the “right” reader becomes a narrator too, although her story is
necessarily different). The human being narrates herself, her city, and creates
them (with)in her story. The story is open but conditioned. When “nose-
twist” becomes “nose-gay,” or splits (in TMP, 634) between “the Twist the
Nasturtium,” Olson is already renouncing his unifying, narrating, construct-
ing power. “The Twist,” found here in lowercase, is the name of a poetic unit
(which is “Letter 18”), and appears there in capitals. This transition is a
testimony to the disappointment, the withdrawal, the shrinking that Olson
experiences at the end of the road. The nose-twist (“Letter 8”) is a seedling
opening up in “Letter 18,” “The Twist.” In this unit, the turning inward
toward himself, the taking inward, is projected outward and gives rise to
Maximus in the first part of the book. Latent in the “nose-gay” at the end of
the book is the absence of this turning, implying withdrawal, taking in
without taking out, namely, a split. “The Twist” (“Letter 18”) is itself a
realization of another twist as well, which is actually the same, as can be seen
in “Letter 15”:
5: FLUENCY 89
He sd, “You go all around the subject.” And I sd, “I didn’t know it was a sub-
ject.” He sd, “You twist” and I sd, “I do.” He said other things. And I didn’t
say anything.
. . . .
I sd, “Rhapsodia . . .
(TMP, 72)
“The Twist” is a poetic principle; the principle of growth, the principle of

breathing (Olson divides the word subject when it is ascribed to him, and
leaves it unbroken when ascribed to his interlocutor, in order to emphasize
the principle of projection and the shattering of the concept of subject from
every point of view). It is indeed the same process of inhaling and exhaling
sustained by the organism, which is characteristic of poetry and of life. The
brief discussions above, which entail the opening up of realized potentiali-
ties and their rebuilding, does not even begin to qualify as a “representa-
tive sample.” Olson, as noted, sings a rhapsody, in the Greek sense: “songs
stitched together.”31 The stitching, however, is real, and the poem does not
remain a series of units detached from each other.32
The flower encapsulates a broader potentiality that was not even noted
here: for instance, the ship, whose name is “Flower,” whose story is linked to
the story of Gloucester, the fishing town, and to the economy of the early
settlement, as well as to heroic tales building up the community’s collective
memory, and so forth; the poem is an ongoing and accelerating chain of
images, as Fredman summarizes:
In The Maximus Poems, for example, the Black Chrysanthemum becomes a central
image, associated with the ocean (2, 172–176, 180), with Heraclitus (172) with
Whitehead (501–502), with the sun (181, 441), with heaven (386, 441– 443,
501–502, 568) and the World Tree with its roots in heaven (509), with the
underworld (600), with flowering trees (45– 48) and with a number of the specific
flowers praised throughout the book: tansy (13–16) nasturtium (40– 41, 86–90,
634), lotus (181, 441– 443), and rose (478– 481, 565).33
Every unit, like a flower whose opening never ends, contains within it its
previous realizations, which were melted together and combined into an
open, though conditioned, story. This story, as Whitehead says, is
a process proceeding from phase to phase, each phase being the real basis from
which its successor proceeds towards the completion of the thing in question. Each
actual entity bears in its constitution the “reasons” why its conditions are what they
are. These “reasons” are the other actual entities objectified for it.34
The preservation of the arrow of time enables Olson to tell a story. A

story,35 in the traditional perception, is basically a sequence of events in time
(and in space), necessarily linked together, leading to one another, and follow-
ing from one another: between them, we expect a causal link. Olson, with
Whitehead’s help, offers us an “open causality,” which enables him to go on
rebuilding an ancient poetic tradition.
6
Story, History, Myth
THE POETIC UNIT “A LATER NOTE ON LETTER # 15” IS A MANIFESTO

that concretizes Olson’s poetics. In the second part of the unit, a battle is
waged between two new opponents struggling over the shape of history and
its relationship to myth and to story:
that concept of history (not Herodotus’s,

which was a verb, to find out for yourself:
‘istorin, which makes any one’s acts a finding out for him or her
self, in other words restores the traum: that we act somewhere
at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides, or

the latest finest tape-recorder, or any form of record on the spot
—live television or what—is a lie

(TMP, 249)
Olson, as usual, returned to explain his intentions elsewhere. The follow-

ing passage spares the need for further explanations, which is why I have
chosen to quote at length:1
Obviously the word “history” is a word—unless you take it to root—which doesn’t

have any use at all. And the root is the original first use of it, in the first chapter if
not the first paragraph of Herodotus, in which he says “I’m using this as a verb
‘istorin, which means to find out for yourself; and this is why I’ve been all over the
goddamn Middle East and down into Egypt, been taught by the great Fathers of
Egypt the ancient learning, and have learned everything I possibly could about the
Persian War, and now I’m going to tell you about it.” So, what he starts off to tell
you about is history before the Trojan War. . . . In fact, in the moment of the
invention of the word, you get almost the moment of the invention of some
supposed division between Europe and Asia. It’s a very curious fact that you can
even peg the thing down to the word’s moment of first use and the division of the
so-called continent on one side and a continent that’s coming on the other. And
what Duncan did. . . . He divided it into . . . histology, or the study of cells, and
91
story. “Story” in the sense that the only thing that really counts, again, is what’s so
exciting. After all, Herodotus goes around and finds out everything he can find
out, and then he tells a story. . . . So, that idea of breaking that word so that we
don’t talk about a concept “history”—that’s why I offered the damn thing is to
break up that word immediately, break it back to either a verb of Herodotus,
which, as some of you know, I’ve put a whole lot of weight on in working on a
longer—a “long” poem, like they say. And I found that, when Robert took that
split and did introduce the idea, that the minuteness that you’re after is the
histology, and the result that you may come up with is story, OK? (MUT 1:3)
The battle, then, as we are told from the start, is always the same battle,
and only its appearance and its representations differ: the contest with the
split, with the breakdown of Western culture and its severance from ex-
perience, from self-discovery (including all the connotations of this concept),
from growth—are once again the “topics on the agenda,” viewed from a
different perspective and with the aid of other concepts. The reader re-
quires only a minor name substitution, replacing Herodotus with Maximus,
in order to understand the meaning of Olson “being all over” the ancient
Middle East, the Mediterranean basin, Tyre, Egypt, and, obviously, the early
settlement in the United States, including Boston, Gloucester, and all the
cultures, people, and places filling the pages of his book in the process of his
growth with The Maximus Poems. Olson, as a historian-poet, gathers the
voices and the stories, and revives a history taking shape anew through him; as
Karlins notes, “the use of ‘he sd’ has the effect of peopling the poem with a
democratic host of anonymous people. It suggests a multitude of voices
coming together, rather than Olson’s isolated voice.”2 This, then, is insertion
for the sake of extraction, a re-building of the split continent, a retelling of
what is now his story, which is the story of the place and the community
growing with him:
Peloria the dog’s upper lip kept curling

in his sleep as I was drawn to the leftward to
watch his long shark jaw and sick brown color
gums the teeth flashing even as he dreamed.
Maximus is a whelping mother, giving birth
with the crunch of his own pelvis.
He sent flowers on the waves from the mole
of Tyre. He went to Malta. From Malta
to Marseilles. From Marseilles to Iceland.
From Iceland to Promontorium Vinlandiae.
Flowers go out to the sea. On the left
of the Promontorium. On the left of the
Promontorium, Settlement Cove
6: STORY, HISTORY, MYTH 93
I am making a mappemunde. It is to include my being.

It is called here, at this point and point of time
Peloria.
(TMP, 257)
Here again is Maximus, giving birth to himself with space and time in the
dog’s mouth, with the flowers he sends, with the poem that keeps growing.
This poetic unit, as Butterick indicates,3 like other poetic units in The Max-
imus Poems (177, 264, and others), presents Maximus as a voyager in some of
his “guises,” faces, and “transfigurations”: Pytheas, Odysseus, Hercules,
Manes; these figures are related to his own manifestation as Enyalion, as a
poet, as recurrently struggling with the dog, with reality, in order to reactivate
himself, to go on expanding, growing with his poetry. The issue, obviously, is
that the third person is identified here with the character of Maximus: he is
the one rising from all the characters that were and are realized within him.
These are his voyages; this is a mappemunde that Maximus builds, that
emerges from him—he is the one who gives birth to the world and he is the
one contained in it. The historical materials are again relevant, exist in their
present concretization, in their presence here and now, in their configura-
tion into an “actual entity,” an actual experience. History exists as a poten-
tial for realization, and is realized anew at every moment. The map of the
world, and Maximus himself, expand and change, and the “name”—the
identity—of the map is therefore fixed only for this moment of experience.
History is part of the present, “serves” the present in its growth, grows
anew with the creation of every here and now. Olson’s voyages in time
(and in space) are always in the present, the movement backward is in-
variably a movement forward (the movement toward the past is the move-
ment toward the future), and from it grows Maximus, from it grows his
city. The second volume of The Maximus Poems, showing on the cover a
map of the Earth (and Okeanos) before the separation began, opens with
“Letter 41”:
With a leap (she said it was an arabesque

I made, off the porch, the night of the
St Valentine Day’s storm, into the snow.
Nor did she fail of course to make the point
what a sight I was the size I am all over the storm
trying to be graceful Or was it? She hadn’t seen me
in 19 years
Like, right off the Orontes? The Jews

are unique because they settled astride
the East African rift. Nobody else will grant

like he said the volcano anyone of us does
sit upon, in quite such a tangible fashion.
Thus surprise, when Yellowstone kicks up
a fuss
Where it says excessively rough moraine,

I count such shapes this evening in the universe
I run back home out of the new moon
makes fun of me in each puddle on the road.
The war of Africa against Eurasia
has just begun again. Gondwana
(TMP, 171)
The battlefield of the poetic unit is alive; the battle is waged anew here and
now, and is ongoing: it is the poem. The opening, the movement forward (the
opening of the volume) is a movement backward, toward the past. In other
words: the present concretizes the past, reactivates it, as an immediacy of a
teleological process in which reality becomes actuality. The storm mentioned
in the poem marks the beginning of Olson’s path as a poet:
Wrote my first poems . . .

the St Valentine Day’s
Storm spring
1940
(TMP, 299)
From a more “general,” historic-geographic perspective, Olson identifies

in “The Twist” (TMP, 88) the “personal” storm of St. Valentine with the
primeval chaos (Pytheus’s sludge) described by Pytheus—a Greek explorer
(fourth century B.C.) from Massalia, which is the Marseilles mentioned
above. He was the first Greek to visit and describe the Atlantic coast of Europe
and report on the island of Thule, which marked the Greeks’ last frontier, the
place where the earth is found in its primeval chaos.4 The leap into the snow,
then, is also the leap into the chaotic, mythical beginning, into the arabesque,
in order to discover (and to dis-cover means to grow) the beginning, as
Pytheus and Herodotus had; and through your eyes, your hands, your re-
experience, create a new opening of which you are part and that you have
shaped: at the opening of the Orentes, which flows into the Mediterranean
north of Tyre, is Mount Casius, the arena of the battle between Zeus and
Typhon (the child of Earth and Tartarus). Typhon is yet another manifesta-
tion of Maximus himself (who wages his battle at the last frontier of classic
Greek thought):
after the storm was over

out of his cave at Mt Casius
came the blue monster . . .
into the stream, to go

for Malta, to pass by
Rhodes and Crete
to arrive at Ireland
anyway to get into the Atlantic
to make up a boil . . .
to shake off his cave-life

and open an opening
big enough for himself
(TMP, 264)
to travel Typhon
from the old holdings
(TMP, 265)
Every poetic unit is Olson’s attempt to “open an opening,” a new-old open-

ing, for himself and for the collective, to be released from the fetters of Platonic
thinking, to leave the shadows of the cave (the parable of the cave is overturned
here) and to touch reality itself, present here and now. In other words, the
“personal” is for Olson inseparably linked to the “collective.” We are now
within a frame of critical thinking that challenges the divisions and splits born
from Western history, but the issue of the “collective” surfaces anew: is this
body, composed of individuals, mindful of the one who assumes the guiding
role? And if it is not, in what sense is the growth of Maximus, his war, the war
of the collective? Maximus strives to be not only Typhon, he is the Diorite,5 he
is the “sea serpent” of Gloucester (TMP, 202; 291; 426), he is Enyalion and
much more; Maximus sees himself, as his name indicates, as Peloria:
Thunder and lightning, wind and rain, storm and tempest might fitly be classed as
peloria, portents. . . . The word peloria covers, I [Butterick] think, both Earth-
powers and Sky-powers, both Giants and Titans; but it is not a little interesting to
find that quite early the word differentiated itself into two forms . . . what is earth-
born, and . . . heavenly signs.6
As Butterick explains, Earth, Heaven, and Okeanos—all grow with Max-

imus, who creates himself and creates all. Although the movement forward is
also a movement backward, it obviously generates a new movement forward:
the past, the historical, is translated into the forces that bring forth Maximus.
Thus the battle dance in the space of “Letter 41”: the second stanza recedes,
with his breathing, to the start of the page, and the third stanza once again
goes forward, to the breathing frame of the first stanza; every step inward aims
to return outward. History as “dead material,” as conception and ideas, holds
no interest for Olson. The past is only alive in the present, and only meaning-
ful as an element in the growth of the place and the man who is a native of this
place, who tells and builds the story of the place, now, in the present, toward
the future. This is the meaning of “objective immortality” in Whitehead’s
terms: the past is never dead, it always participates concretely in the present.
Typhon/Maximus dismisses his “historical” existence (in the traditional
sense), releases himself from the shackles of the “cave of history” in order to
go out, to open a new opening; this is the option of a beginning from within
himself, from his life, for himself, to tell himself anew: every movement
backward in time means a movement forward toward the possibility of a new
coherence. This is the will to cohere, the force that directs the synthesis of the
data—among them the “historical”—toward the future through the experi-
ence in the present. In Whitehead’s phrasing, “the future is merely real,
without being actual; whereas the past is a nexus of actualities. The actualities
are constituted by their real genetic phases. The present is the immediacy of
teleological process whereby reality becomes actual.” Thus, the future has
what Whitehead calls “objective reality in the present, but no formal actuality.”
This “will to cohere” applies to each actual entity, since although it is com-
plete in regard to its microscopic process, it is yet incomplete by reason of its
“objective inclusion” of the macroscopic process.7 History, then, is built anew
with the macroscopic process, which makes its actual entities, meaning the
historical data, teleological. It is as a poet-historian, therefore, that Maximus
identifies with the primeval forces, which are constructive forces: “the sub-
ject,” the world, work according to a creative impulse toward “satisfaction”
(to use Whitehead’s term)—a realization that is the “contentment of the
creative urge” (219). The “subject,” then, advances not only out of the “active
cause” in its past, but also according to the “purposeful cause” directing it
toward its future; he reshapes history. The storm at the beginning of Olson’s
poetic course is the poetic storm he must generate in his course as a poet: it is a
purpose and not only a point of departure, the “cause” (of writing his first
poem). This is the cause of the spring storm: its purpose is to “clean up”
toward growth:
Wrote my first poems

and an essay on myth
at Kent Circle
at Kunt Circle
there was a Dance Hall there

like literally ye Olde
West on the spot whar he
looked out and saw the sun gleaming
on the snow after
the St Valentine Day’s
Storm spring
1940
exactly
300
years
writing
at the stile
before
the town
age
29
(TMP, 299)
Like Whitehead in “A Later Note,” Olson struggles in this unit with three
hundred years of deviance (from Olson’s perspective, the emphasis is on
poetic deviance), namely, the years of Descartes’s unquestioned domination.
Five years younger than Descartes, Olson embarks on a life endeavor aimed at
(re)building the settlement that Descartes had diverted from its desired course
(“Descartes, age 34, date Boston’s/ settling” (TMP, 132); Olson was born in
December 1910, and the storm marking his first poem occurs in the spring of
1940). This storm is already part of Maximus as Peloria: even the forces of
nature direct him and are directed to that purpose. The struggle represented
by these forces is analogous to the struggle represented by people like Stevens
the carpenter in the human environment; this is part of the movement
seeking to smash the cultural canon, which is the breakup of the Western
hierarchy: in the ritual of the poem, Maximus “summons” and brings into life
ancient forces (again the flower of the alchemy) against the rationality of the
West. Illustrating the possibility of “upward” growth, he breaks the orderly
Cartesian line (in both content and form; see the unit above) so that he might
“climb” on it, begin a new beginning.
“Letter 41” demonstrates how history, in the Olsonian sense, brings all
paths together: the spatial movement from East to West, which is the history
of human wanderings over the globe; the movement along the time axis from
past to present (although this, as noted, is reversed); and the movement from
the bottom up (volcanoes, the Great Valley Rift, Okeanos—also present as a
monster—with its subterranean currents, linked in one sense to the wander-
ings of nations and not only of continents, and in another to the transition
from the unconscious to the conscious—Olson hints at Jung in the poetic
unit above):8 the present is a synthesis of historic data in the sense that they
actualize and touch the individual as such. History is a story whose narration
is always the present; to be a storyteller is to participate in the story.
In “Letter 23” (TMP, 103), Olson proclaims “the historical principle” and
simultaneously implements it. The poetic unit deals with the beginnings of
Gloucester.9 The letter opens by presenting “the historical facts”10 and pro-
ceeds to clarify the question of what is a historical fact, what is its status, and
what is history:
What we have here—and literally in my own front yard, as I sd to Merk,

asking him what delving, into “fishermans ffield” recent historians
not telling him it was a poem I was interested in, aware I’d scare him
off, muthologos has lost such ground since Pindar
The odish man sd: “Poesy

steals away men’s judgement
by her muthoi (taking this crack
at Homer’s sweet-versing)
“and a blind heart

is most men’s portions.” Plato
allowed this divisive

thought to stand, agreeing
that muthos
is false. Logos
isn’t—was facts. Thus
Thucydides
I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking

for oneself for the evidence of
what is said: Altham says
Winslow
was at Cape Ann in April,
1624
(TMP, 104 –5)
We thereby return to the field, which yields the historical facts stored
within it. For Olson/Maximus, the facts, history, are in the yard. But not only
in the conventional sense, meaning that they coincidentally fit the biography
of Olson (who grew up across fishermans ffield), and characterize the tradi-
tional historian: facts that document events from the past and thus Merk, who
may be scared by Olson’s lack of historiographic responsibility. History is a
potentiality for realization and, as such, is a “stubborn fact.” The question of
what is history and what it means to be a historian is related to an understand-
ing of the concepts of myth, and of logos, and to the interpretations that have
shaped our views regarding the distinction between “history” and “myth” and
how these two are—or not—related to “story.”
Olson points to Pindar’s distinction11 between two concepts that, prior to
their split, were synonymous in their use, and now denote truth and falseness.
Pindar identifies the concept of muthoi with Homer, asserting it can distort
human judgment to distinguish truth from falseness through its poetic power,
thereby fixating the concept of muthos as a false story. According to Thomson,
this use of the concept creates the meaning known to us, of myth as a fictional
story (while logos assumed the philosophical meaning that we ascribe to it of
truth, rationality, the word, God, and so forth). But at first, Olson remarks,
logos and muthos had meant the same, as can be seen in Homer: “Muthos with
him means ‘what is said’ in speech or story exactly like Logos in its primary
sense” (SVH, 20). Olson ends the unit in TMP, 502, with the word “Dixit”
(which means “he said”). The concepts of truth and falseness that have
entered the discussion are an aspect of the struggle, originating in oral culture,
between the authority of the poet as a hegemony that refines the story
through its (rhythmical, organizing) tools, and the clinging to a “historical
fact” that bestows legitimacy on the story. In other words, this is the struggle
between Herodotus and Thucydides: does the story become valid by virtue of
its inner coherence and synthesis, for which the poet is responsible? Is the
poet the one who shapes the historical in the story of the present of which he
is part (and, in that sense, “subjective”)? Or, rather, is the historian seeking
“objective” truth without, as it were, affecting the description of the events
presenting a “historical story”? Is his story based on a correlation suggested by
a purportedly detached outsider, construing abstractions that fit the “objec-
tive” molds of universal place and time. The historian of the logos tells us that
“History is the Memory of Time,” as Olson names the poetic unit that quotes
the early seventeenth-century settler John Smith (TMP, 116) in order to
correct him: “my memory is/ the history of time” (TMP, 256). As Thomson
says, the Greek word mousike means not only music but also “the state of self-
organization and intensity of attention which the bard must attain”:12 “As the
people of the earth are now, Gloucester / is heterogeneous, and so can know
polis / not as localism, not that mu-sick (the trick”) (TMP, 10). No more mu-
sick, says Olson, “a sick story from a sick mouth,”13 says Von Hallberg, but
rather mousike, a story relying on the narrator’s rhythm, which is the meaning
of history as Olson understands it:
(the LIE of history is that man can find or take any relevance out of the infinite
times of other man except as he pegs the whole thing on his time: and I don’t mean
times, that sociological lie, I mean your TEMPI—mine, in short, all that TIME
IS, is RHYTHEM (and there is no way of knowing any rhythym OTHER THAN
YOUR OWN than BY your own.14
“ ‘Discussions of rhythm,” Altieri explains, “must be taken out of formalist

contexts and related most explicitly to the acts of the body.”15 We return,
therefore, to “Projective Verse”: this is the breathing of the organism. The
qualitative, categorical difference between myth and history (as logos), is
dismissed. The place is the story of the place, emerging from the place itself.
As Von Hallberg notes, Olson “prefers muthos to the more usual translitera-
tion mythos, meaning word or story, because the former suggests a connection
with the Old English muth, meaning simply mouth.”16 Muthology thus
attests to a perception of the logos as something originating in the mouth,
namely, in the body, that, as we saw, is part of nature, of the man who has a
voice and can thus tell the story of the place, which is the story of a native son.
Olson seeks to obliterate the difference between “mythos” and “logos,”
which he believes fixated the course of Western thinking. Instead, he wishes
to build an unsplit world, free of the dichotomies created by this separation.
He wants the historical to draw its validity from the voice of the narrator
telling the (“historical”) story in the present, from it, and with it. The ancient
world, the early cultures of preclassic Greece, the ancient polis, and other
“contra-Western” cultures, represent for Olson another possibility of life in
the world. Olson argues that Whitehead’s cosmology, in the way it realizes
modern science, emerges as suited to another worldview, mythopoeic, an-
cient. To facilitate understanding of Olson’s conception of “the ancient

world,” a generalization he bases on several sources and “breathes in” as he
struggles against what he considers a prevailing culture of decline, I outline
his cultural perspective below. Note, however, that this worldview is a para-
digm imposed on historical “facts” in an attempt to illustrate the poetic
unifying imagination of Olson, the poet-historian. For Olson, the world of
“the ancients,” the world of the “primitives,” preceded the dichotomies and
ignored the binarian opposites of nature/culture, individual/collective as is
portrayed by Frankfort:
The ancients, like the modern savages, saw man always as part of society,
and society as imbedded in nature and dependent upon cosmic forces. For them
nature and man did not stand in opposition and did not, therefore, have to be
apprehended by different modes of cognition . . . natural phenomena were reg-
ularly conceived in term of human experience and . . . human experience was
conceived in terms of cosmic events. . . . for modern, scientific man the phenome-
nal world is primarily an “It”; for ancient—and also for primitive—man it is a
“Thou.”17
Whitehead’s metaphysics, although parallel in many ways to the most

advanced scientific thinking, often intersects in Olson’s view with these an-
cient patterns of thought (or observation; the concept of “thought” must be
placed within this old-new context). Western humanism, as against the “Hu-
man Universe” Olson writes about, and the individualism resulting from this
humanism, has isolated human beings from the surrounding world, including
the “social” one. Capitalist culture, which Olson calls pejorocracy, epitomizes
not only detachment from “nature” in his view, but also the individual’s
alienation from his human environment. It is also measured in economic
terms, when individuals are solely concerned with themselves and scorn their
fellows. Olson seeks to replace these values, seeking to return to another, new-
old “Human Universe” (as he entitles his essay). The above quotation from
Frankfort brilliantly conveys why Olson emphasizes the concept of the polis,
and how he views it as a proper political framework. It explains the deep link
between “scientific discourse” and “mythopoeic discourse,” which are linked
together in The Maximus Poems, itself a distinctive instance of multiple per-
spectives without renouncing unity, “the solidarity of the universe.” In Frank-
fort’s image of the ancient and primitive world, it is precisely because man is
part of the universe that he is always given to its immediate contexts, and thus
to multiple facets and perspectives. According to Frankfort, “the mythopoetic
mind, tending toward the concrete, expressed the irrational, not in our man-
ner, but by admitting the validity of several avenues of approach at one and
the same time.” Moreover, mythopoeic thought had fully recognized “the
unity of each phenomenon which it conceives under so many different guises;

the many-sideness of its images serves to do justice to the complexity of the
phenomena” (29).
Olson held that, as among the ancients, experience as the basis of a world-
view and the absence of a categorical-qualitative difference between various
ontic levels, lead to Whitehead’s “ecological” worldview. This is the infra-
structure giving rise to a story, creating the very possibility of telling a story.
Your being “part of,” “influenced by,” “in contact with”—these thinking pat-
terns are the basis of a “narrative worldview.” Thus, Olson finds the meaning
of the concrete experience in the world, both in Whitehead and among “the
ancients,” in the I-thou contact, a contact between mutually influencing
“actual entities” taking part in one another and in the wider universe. A
contextual, harmonious, systemic perception, leads to a narrative explanation
and description. Isolation means a lack of ties and contexts and does not allow
narrativity. The breakup of the long poem is, therefore, a product of the
growing social and existential alienation human beings sense. As a result, they
do not experience the world, are not part of it, nor do they affect it. “World” is
used here as synonymous with “Thou,” meaning any “other”: nature, society
or neighbor, since detachment from nature, as noted, is a detachment from the
other in general. Instead, they find themselves in a regressive reflection that
increasingly separates them from the world; they think the thought of the
world but, being prisoners of language, have no access to it.
In other words, a story is built of events, which are the experience of the
entire human being in the world and in a Thou, not the dichotomies of body-
soul (or mind), conscious-unconscious, and so forth that leave the corporeal,
the irrational, and other similar aspects inferior because they are beyond
(written) language. According to Olson, human beings in the ancient world
do not act according to subject-object distinctions, hence the closeness of this
worldview to Whitehead’s philosophy. The world is a Thou, as any other
being is a world. In order to go back to tell a story, in order to build a long
poem (as an epic move), an event must be set up as the basis. In this paradigm
of life in antiquity, myth is grasped as the story of the world rather than as a
fiction. Since “the whole man confronts a living ‘Thou’ in nature,” and since
“the whole man—emotional and imaginative as well as intellectual—gives
expression to the experience,” the account of the individual’s events and their
explanation can be conceived as action and assume the form of a story: “In
other words, the ancients told myths instead of presenting an analysis or
conclusions” (15).
Olson seeks precisely the type of wholeness that Frankfort ascribes to the
organism (which is man, which is the world in which he lives). The body here
is the basis of the story, the intellect is merely a part of the body, part of the
ways in which the body perceives (namely, prehends) reality. Olson, wishing to
tell the “story of Gloucester,” emphasizes that the heart, the breath (or, the eye,
the ear, and other examples already cited), namely, the living organism, is what
shapes his story and the story of his place. According to this basic perception of
reality, the time dimension originates in the growing organism (the beatings of
the heart, the various recurring cycles of the organism, and so forth), and in the
parallel sense of process known to us from the surrounding world; it is Olson’s
view, that human beings in the ancient world did not derive the abstraction of
the concept of time from the experience of time for them; time is an expression
of the willed order of creation: it weaves the events into a story.
This ancient worldview matches the direction that Olson’s quests and his
feeling had taken from the start. Olson had learned from his experience that
the movement backward—toward the mythical—is a movement forward,
with Whitehead, beyond the traditional perception of the present. His obser-
vation of the ancient world reveals to Olson the aim to which Melville, who
“closes” the canon of Western culture, is striving in his efforts. What Olson
wrote in CMI, for instance, on the harpoon hurled at the whale, about full
activity out of the physicality of presence, fits this perception of the ancients
as laid out by Frankfort: “the knowledge which ‘I’ has of ‘Thou’ hovers
between the active judgment and the passive ‘undergoing of an impression’;
between the intellectual and the emotional, the articulate and the inarticu-
late.” “Letter 2,” about the discovery, the exposure of the city, acknowledges
the city as a “Thou,” as a live presence whose potentialities can be articulated,
because “Thou” is “a presence known only in so far as it reveals itself . . .
experienced emotionally in a dynamic reciprocal relationship” (13).
Olson holds that myth, in the meaning preceding the split created by
Western philosophy severing it from its relevant and concrete context, plays a
central role in the ancient world. It is not legend, fiction, or some other
similar concept derived from its essence as a counterconcept to the logos. It is
neither an allegory nor a symbol: people in the ancient world do not think in
terms of signifier-signified; rather, for them “there is a coalescence of the
symbol and what it signifies” (21). Olson finds this concreteness among the
Mayan people,18 and strives for it in his own writing. In this regard, The
Maximus Poems are themselves myth, exploring and revealing a metaphysical
truth about the world, a work that preserves and ensures the discovery of the
“Thou” around us and with us. The telling of the myth becomes the ritual of
exposing the “Thou” and achieving real contact with it. The ritual is not
simply a symbolic act but an event in the universe, the recreation of the
universe, the creation of a new beginning by returning to the initial one;
hence the emphasis in the story of Maximus and Gloucester on “THE BE-
GINNINGS” (TMP, 235), on the “morning exercise,” which is the actual
work of the poet, the poem itself. Eliade illustrates this conception of myth
when arguing that it is “always an account of a ‘creation’; it relates how
something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of that which really
happened, which manifested itself completely.”19 For Olson, myth really
happens in his poem. Myth reminds humans of the story of their creation, of
their beginning, but it is also the story of the present since it allows them to
begin anew. According to Olson, the ancients saw themselves as part and
product of mythical events, hence their home is the entire universe:
Physically, I am home. Polish it
The Earth—and sea level. Now

Heaven: be the Moon reflecting,
from the Earth the Light
(of the Sun). Be Charles the
Product
(of the Process) as Gloucester is the Necco
(TMP, 456)
The capital letters suggest that the forces of Nature are actual, present
entities affecting human beings. This approach contrasts with that of modern
humanity, whose members see themselves as a product of history; the differ-
ence Olson sees between modern and ancient men and women is precisely the
difference between their perception of beginnings. People in the modern
world regard themselves, in Eliade’s phrasing, as “the result of the course of
Universal History,” and thus do “not feel obliged to know the whole of it.”
But in this image of the ancients, “archaic societies are not only obliged to
remember mythical history but also to re-enact a large part of it periodically”
(13). Thus, the historian-poet that is Olson/Maximus has the possibility of
returning and beginning anew, to be always at the beginning. Although the
past has indeed ended and is now an object, in Whitehead’s terms it is a fact in
the present and, in this sense, it can be reactivated, it is a presence. White-
head’s metaphysics is, according to Olson, a response to a world of beginnings
expressed by the ancient perception of myth, although accommodated to
modern times: every experience is a ritual that recreates the universe and
reactivates the process of creation from the beginning. The concern with
myths of creation recurs often in Olson (particularly in the second volume,
and note again the mappemunde prior to the split on the cover); the “return”
to cosmogonic myths is a beginning, an opening that shapes his way as a poet
since “the cosmogony is the exemplary model for every creative situation”
(32). Olson’s “application” of the cosmogonic myth to all areas of life obvi-
ously attests, again, to his understanding of the unity of multiplicity, namely,
to the perception of myth as the story of a harmonious, organistic, and what
could be called ecological worldview.20 Olson’s worldview coincides here with
Eliade’s picture of man in “primitive” societies, who “feels the basic unity of
all kinds of ‘deeds,’ works,’ or ‘forms,’ whether they are biological, psychologi-
cal, or historical” (31).
The myth enables re-creation by returning to the source, to the start, to
“the first beginning,” which is the cosmogonic beginning. For Olson, then,
the cosmogonic story is the source of all these stories, or, in other words, the
“local” myths are always a continuation or a return of/to the first story.
Hence, the poet, the storyteller, while (re) narrating the myth “lives” its time,
the mythical enters the present, the myth is made present through its narra-
tion, and, in this sense, the poem is a ritual. For instance, Okeanos and Earth
are active forces when Olson/Maximus stands at the harbor and when he
narrates their story (as well as when the reader reactivates the unit):
Maximus, at the Harbor

Okeanos rages, tears rocks back in his path.
Encircling Okeanos tears upon the earth to get love loose
(TMP, 240)
The time of the myth is not a simple “return” but rather a “revival” of the
primeval forces (Okeanos, the Earth) in a present whose “countenance”
differs from the reality of the past. The arrow of time, then, absorbs within it
the initial time of the creation as a creative force at every single moment in the
future of the universe (and the countenance of this future is constantly
changing). The poetic unit goes on to say:
that women fall into the clefts

of women, that men tear at their legs
and rape until love sifts
through all things and nothing is except love as stud
upon the earth
love to sit in the ring

of Okeanos love to lie in the spit
of a woman a man to sit in her legs
(her hemispheres
loomed above me,
I went to work
like the horns of a snail
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the thought of its thought is the rage
of Ocean : apophainesthai
(TMP, 240)
In the unit, the movement from the “general” to the “personal,” from the
many to the one, illustrates the presence of the mythical as a force now acting
on the individual, on the speaker; Olson/Maximus activates the mythical
through his search for a new beginning. The beginning, the birth, of love,
from the body, from the earth, the growth of the one out of the many, in their
various expressions, is summed up in the Greek word apophainesthai, mean-
ing “that which shows forth.” From the fall into the “clefts of women” (which
hints at the union with the mythical Great Mother), the unit ends with a
projection (in the Olsonian meaning) of the mythical onto the future, which
will bring forth the wanted son: “The great Ocean is angry. It wants the
Perfect Child.” This ending attests to the tension between the individual and
the collective, between the narrator and the audience whose story the narrator
seeks to tell but feels that he has failed to turn his listeners into actual
participants, as it were.
For Olson, every new story is activated by the first story (while it re-
activates the first story), but its concretization is always changing. The return
to the first moment, to the cosmogonic myth, is actually the source of the
power to change, namely, the power of re-creation, to move forward with the
arrow of time: participation in the origin is what ensures control over this
power in the present; you cannot begin something unless you know its source,
how it first came into existence. This kind of knowledge is not external and
abstract but, to use Eliade’s language, “knowledge that one ‘experiences’ ritu-
ally, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or by performing the ritual
for which it is the justification.”21
At the conclusion of the poetic unit above (TMP, 240), Olson appears to be
asking himself what happens when the audience refuses to cooperate, or fails
to listen and therefore fails to know the source, when it does not experience in
order to know itself and its place so that it might change and grow. Olson tries
to “wake up” the citizens of the ailing city: he performs a ritual (for instance,
casting flowers upon the water) and sings the myth, their own stories, to the
townspeople.22 In the last volume of the TMP, however, Olson’s sense of
failure, signs of which are already evident midway, resonates clearly.
The split between myth and logos, then, represents for Olson the chain of
splits that began to characterize the Greek worldview in a process whose
beginning was marked by the pre-Socratic philosophers. As soon as the Greek
worldview began to grant autonomy to thought (to the intellect) and to draw
away from the concrete and the experience in favor of abstraction and con-
sistency; as soon as it began to separate ontic and epistemic levels (revealed
versus concealed, apparent versus concrete); as soon as the concept of “sub-
ject” and “object” separated from each other; as soon as the religious character
lost its holiness to secular representations—as soon as these processes became
dominant, the multiplicity within unity broke down into homogeneity as

unity, or heterogeneity as split.
The key figures representing this process have already appeared in our early
discussion of the poem. The discussion of questions from the “literary dis-
course,” then, is but another facet of the discussion of questions from the
“scientific-physical discourse,” meaning that we are approaching one whole
from several perspectives. Heraclitus and Parmenides represent the turning
point of Western civilization, the split that Olson himself marks between
“ancient” and “primitive” cultures on the one hand, and “Western” culture
on the other. Here is Frankfort’s image of the movement toward our “logo-
centric” civilization: “With Heraclitus of Ephesus philosophy found its locus
standi. ‘Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are
steered through all things.’ Here, for the first time, attention is centered, not
on the thing known, but on the knowing of it.” Heraclitus asserted “that
this wisdom surpassed even the loftiest conception of Greek mythopoeic
thought.”23 He calls this wisdom Logos, a term whose dominance we need not
discuss here.
Yet, it is in Parmenides’ strictly idealistic position that the autonomy of
thought is vindicated, “and every concrescence of myth is stripped off.” Thus,
as Frankfort sums up, “throughout early Greek philosophy reason is acknowl-
edged as the highest arbiter, even though the Logos is not mentioned before
Heraclitus and Parmenides” (262).
This is the type of description that Olson had in mind when he wrote:
“Greeks, is the stopping/of the battle” (TMP, 184), and this is why he returns
to the epic with the aid of the mythic, considering how to build and represent
a new-old world as described above. His identification with Homer stems
from Homer’s power, not only as the guardian of a cultural heritage but as its
creator in the present, namely, as bestowing identity. For Olson, the epic
poem is actually the embodiment of mythopoeic thought; it is perceived as a
complete system that is not merely one more genre among others but prior to
any classification and, as noted regarding the myth, as “the exemplary model
for all significant human activities.”24 For Havelock too, whose Preface to
Plato Olson read carefully, “all of culture is collected in the epic and transmit-
ted by a language system which, in musical and rhythmic form, places at
everyone’s disposal knowledge and awareness without which the community
would be deprived of its beliefs and of a large part of its social and technical
competency.”25
Olson moves along the junction of experience and creativity, as opposed to
preservation and fixation, between the oral and the textual, and this tension
characterizes his work. Homer represents for him an oral culture, and the
Homeric epos is, in Havelock’s wording, a kind of “tribal encyclopedia.”26 In
Detienne’s terms this is “the encyclopedia of community knowledge,” which

deals not only with central events, such as war, or patterns of power, but also
details the rituals, the cultic practices, the legal procedures, the family norms,
and the craft of shipbuilding.27 Nevertheless, Homer lives in the present, and
his story reshapes the cultural heritage. It is Olson’s poetic need that directs
him to make the Greeks the border. Until about the fourth century B.C.,
Greek political life had not relied on a written culture; the textualization of
life was directly related to the rise of philosophy and abstract thought. Olson
stresses this step, which involves drawing away from everyday experience and
immediate concreteness. Yet, as Detienne portrays this period, the beginning
of the expansion of written culture in Greece is not yet related to reading but
to listening: “And the book gradually became a commodity, is written within
an ample system of culture which continues to be transmitted by mouth and
by ear—even under the windows of Plato” (33).
Hence, it was the need to pinpoint the beginning of the “split” that pushed
Olson to generalize and single out “the Greeks” as a turning point:
We have lived in a generalizing time, at least since 450 B.C. And it has had its
effects on the best of men, on the best of things. Logos, or discourse, for example,
has, in that time, so worked its abstractions into our concept and use of language
that language’s other function, speech, seems so in need of restoration that several
of us go back to hieroglyphs or to ideograms to right the balance. (The distinction
here is between language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought
about the instant.) (SW, 54)
This tension also seems to characterize the work of Olson, who moves
within a textual culture but tries to preserve principles characterizing the oral:
“by mouth and by ear” are the poetic principles already listed in “Projective
Verse.” Olson tries to be a Homeric poet in a textual world, which made us, as
he argues, “unaware how two means of discourse the Greeks appear to have
invented hugely intermit our participation in our experience, and so prevent
discovery” (SW, 54). With his poetics of realization (by the readers) Olson
tries to preserve the speech dimension of oral culture, the concreteness of
speech, which leaves the task of memory (of the historical legacy) open to
variations and given to changes because it is in a continuous present. Olson
tries to preserve a way of contact between the individual and the community,
between the “I” and the “Thou” (which is the entire world). This is his war
against “logic and classification,” the two means of discourse that the Greeks
appear to have invented, which prevent discovery and experience, that is,
prevent actuality. The actuality of the world, in Whitehead’s terms, is the
actuality of speech, which transforms into “object” when put into writing; it is
a realized potential that will only become actual at a time of a renewed
experience, namely, when it is again spoken, subject to variations limited by

its other components at the moment of the new present. This tension might
be detected on Olson’s formal side as well: the techniques of memory, as well
as the musicality and the rhythm characteristic of the oral poet, are missing in
The Maximus Poems. The element of repetition in Olson’s poetry takes into
account the textual framework and the transformation of speech into an
“object” in the world through its writing. The entire poem hinges on this
tension of speech versus writing, potential versus realization, experience
versus fixation. Writing fixates reality, whereas the oral culture relies on a
dynamic memory linked to experience. His poem wishes to tell a story whose
fixation in a text is not meant to make it static and passive, but will be retold
in a poem whose speaker (and any reader becomes its speaker) will shape it so
that it will be relevant to the place and time. This should have happenned first
to all the townspeople, but they appear not to be listening. The poem relies on
“ear and mouth” and, as such, is a ritual, making alive what is spoken in it,
but how will a ritual take place when “the tribe,” his townspeople, no longer
participate? Oral culture does not fixate the norms, the model, and the words,
repeating them without changing them; repetition actually preserves the
possibility of change, the concreteness of existence and of identity, the
creativity. The shared body—which is the community—serves as “preventive
censure,”28 re-creating the norms at every specific moment; they are the
characters that affect the spirit and the contents of the story, if they wish.
Olson learns that the community of Gloucester is oblivious to his letters and
does not take its story into its hands.
Let us return to the beginning in order to sum up the differences between
the model of the historian adopted by Olson, that of Herodotus, and the one
he criticizes, that of Thucydides. As Detienne explains, Thucydides suspends
the concept of time from the story he tells:
Besides what he has seen, Herodotus gives an important place to what he has
heard. “As for me, throughout my account (logos) I propose to put in writing
(graphein) just as I heard it (akoe) what different people say.” The traveler is always
on the road between the oral and the written. Thucydides, on the contrary, is
purposefully engaged in writing, conceptual writing which makes it possible to
“see clearly.” . . . Thucydides demands a reader who will avoid time and its sur-
prises; a reader in the mirror of the finished book, permanent and immutable.”
(58)
For Thucydides, the aim of history is to suspend the stories, to renounce

the pleasures of the “mythical,” to attain release from communication pat-
terns that distort and mislead conceptual analysis and thought. Herodotus
offers movement, dynamism, discovery, and “subjectivity” that is responsibil-
ity: to tell what is relevant to the story you are telling, to the memory you are
building, from your own way, in the place you are telling, through your seeing
eyes, through your feeling body, through the identity you are building. The
historian-poet Olson wants to be the one who chooses and selects his data,
without being obsessed by a duty to record everything.29 He “mentions” what
is worth mentioning. “To mention,” Detienne reminds us, in Greek is “ ‘to
remember’ (mnesthenai) or ‘to give a name to’ (epimnathai). That is to say,
simply to speak of it” (57).
The distinction between Herodotus and Thucydides, between myth and
logos, between history and story, is one of Olson’s landmarks in the deviation
of Western culture, which led to its decline. Thucydides is an ally of Descartes
in the ongoing battle waged by Olson, who enlists Whitehead and Herodotus
in the battlefield of his unit “A Later Note” and of the long poem as a whole.
Thucydides, like Descartes, marks the watershed that the poet-warrior must
return to cross, since he represents a rationalist historian that no longer has
anything in common with “tellers of tales who are logographers and in the
same category as poets.” Olson shares Detienne’s view that “the Peloponne-
sian War puts an end to the desultory and scattered history of myth, the will-
o’-the-wisp that amuses Herodotus.” (61)
If to be a poet is to be a historian, then it is to be like Herodotus, a teller of
tales, a reteller of myths, and generally, to practice a craft to be taken seriously.
Work and creativity are pleasurable, but also, in their deep meaning, they are
political and ethical terms. The poet warrior is taking a stand vis-à-vis reality.
7
Stance
I knew no more then than what I did, than to put down space and fact and
hope, by the act of sympathetic magic that words are apt to seem when
one first uses them, that I would invoke for others those sensations of life I
was small witness to, part doer of. But the act of writing the book added a
third noun, equally abstract: stance. For after it was done, and other work
in verse followed, I discovered that the fact of this space located a man
differently in respect to any act, so much so and with such vexation that
only in verse did I acquire any assurance that the stance was not in some
way idiosyncratic and only sign of the limits of my own talent, only
wretched evidence of the lack of my own engagement at the heart of life.
But the mark of life is that what we do obey is who and what we are.
And we have no other recourse than to see what we do as evidence of what
we are, and use it, for good or worse, (1), to make more use of what we
obeyed in the first place, and, thereby, (2), continue the pursuit of who we
are (which pursuit seems to me now only a permanent one, if the only
excusable one of men so inclined).
—Olson/Melville
OLSON SEES HIS POETICS AS HIS ACTUAL WELTANSCHAUUNG; HIS POETRY IS

his deeds, his life and, as such, it is also a stance, an ethos of action: “THE
MORAL IS FORM, & nothing else[,] and the MORAL ACT is the honest-
‘sincere’ motion in the direction of FORM” (LO, 82). Olson seeks to bridge
the rift between “the aesthetic,” “the ethical,” and “the cognitive.”1 Every
experience in the world is also a political experience, in the broad and original
sense of this concept. TMP opens with a critique of a social and cultural
reality and with a defiant challenge: Maximus points to the corruption pre-
sently engulfing his city and calls for action:
I, Maximus of Gloucester, to you
. . . . . . . . . .
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
when even our bird, my roofs,

cannot be heard
111
when even you, when sound itself is neoned in?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
love is not easy
but how shall you know,
New England, now
that pejorocracy is here, how
. . . . . . . . . .
weave
your birds and fingers
new, your roof-tops,
clean shit upon racks
...
with others like you, such
...
o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)
(TMP, 6–8)
Maximus is the character that rises and grows from Olson against this
background, this ugly present, as a personal and general need to direct a re-
building process and adopt a stance toward action. We are what we do, and
our actions invariably take place within a given space, in a place that grants us
identity through our deeds. Gloucester—the city, the community, the nest—
is now exposed to an alienated world that Olson characterizes as a pejoroc-
racy; a word first used by the poet in his poem “The Kingfishers” and
meaning, “Literally, ‘worse-rule’ (Latin pejor, and -ocracy, as in democracy,
from the Greek krateia), a worsening form of government. Borrowed from
Pound, Canto LXXXIX of The Pisan Cantos.”2
Olson condemns a cultural reality lacking in genuine contact—either of
the people with one another or between them and their city or between them
and the space in which they live. Contact is blocked by an abstract language,
unrelated to actual reality, which leaves individuals in their isolation.3 The
attitude to language reflects the attitude to the human being:
Let those who use words cheap, who use us cheap

take themselves out of the way
Let them not talk of what is good for the city
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let them cease putting out words in the public print

(TMP, 13)
7: STANCE 113
This is the recurring critique of Western capitalism and its values, using the
language of advertising as its metonymy: an abstract, passive language that
represents an isolated, passive life, taking away individual identity, and with it
the freedom and the will to act and engage in a life of action. “The big
machinery of the word, press, radio, movies is horrible,”4 says Olson, who
watches the aging Pound confined at St. Elizabeths due to his treason and his
fascist broadcasts, and is appalled: “Cut off, he is cut off from life. That a poet
should choose hate!” (44). The nest, the city, were shaped by a love that is love
of the world, of the other, of the community, and of oneself as part of all these,
while also being characterized as possessing an independent identity. Olson’s
basic stance, which guides Maximus’s behavior, is one of love. Love is form,
creativity, giving, birth, to create and pad the nest, to build while singing: the
feather in the bird’s beak building the nest is the poet’s pen, the web of the text
that, as noted above, is a “rhapsody.” What is at first glance hidden should
perhaps be emphasized—love and the search for love is the power that drives
Olson to begin with. The flight from the “lyrical,” egocentric self is replaced
by love of the other and with the other (of the world). Love is an expression of
contact and a search for contact. Olson seeks contact with the reality hiding
behind the abstract language, back to the language of the body, which is the
language of the world.5 The language of advertising represents the sickness of
a sick government, whose patterns attest to the decay of its ethical-political
life. Tired of a politics he well knew, of the conflict between power groups,
Olson wishes human beings to return to political activity in the old sense of
this term. He regards the aim of politics and political institutions, as Murray
characterizes Greek’s politics: “to discover or to aid in the creation of a general
will to action, and to express that general will in an ordered ritual.”6 But this
“concept of the eunomia (good order)” that dominated the early history of the
polis (21) should be understood as multiplicity within unity and not as unity
in the sense of sameness. Olson believes that politics should be concerned
with the whole, with the community, but this community is made of diver-
sity. The purpose of politics is to enable this multiplicity and diversity by
weaving them together into “good order,” that is the harmony of the polis as
unity. His own experience in politics taught him that political fragmentation
leads to stasis, making growth impossible. If Gloucester is to become a grow-
ing polis, unity is imperative.
Since a political life is the expression of human beings acting within their
social body, the concepts of creativity, ritual, and unity are now manifest in
the collective realm as polis. Olson’s sociopolitical critique is merely another
facet of the unity and multiplicity issue (or a different perspective on it), and
of the attempt to shake free from divisive Western culture. The polis is Olson’s
sociopolitical “answer” to present woes, attained through the search for a
human social framework that will fit the needs of the human creature, who is
naturally also a homo politicus; the building of such a framework may provide
the chance for a new beginning.
The “dream of creating a city” mentioned by Olson (MUT, 102) im-
plies building a society that is a polis, thereby avoiding the trap that had
tripped Winthrop and most settlers through their religious vision, which
began to collapse almost from the outset and led Gloucester to its present
plight.7 In the life of the polis, there is no distinction between words and
deeds. Word is deed, as Von Hallberg reminds us: “The written language is
associated, in Olson’s mind, with European class society, whereas the spoken
language belongs to the people. His discussion of breath is meant to give to
poetic language all the actuality and power of the working people.”8 Lan-
guage is a real force in the world—The Maximus Poems that does not accept
the aesthetic/ethical (or cognitive) separation of powers. Life is one, and
multiplicity is merely an expression of unity. Creativity is an ethical-political
act, with direct implications for reality; writing poetry means adopting a
stance in the world; it is a deed, an act toward the world, toward yourself,
which includes “taking” responsibility. The work of the good poet, says
Olson, is
of an order that causes him to demand back what he gives: utmost care & openness
in discussion of. On top of that, he has, like any of us to whom the thing is already
our life stretching down to our death, a sense of the responsibility of the act of
writing by anyone anywhere: that sense of the public domain that only the most
serious men ever have, and to which they give, and sacrifice anything. (LO, 87)9
For Olson, art is the metaphysics of life itself, which re-enacts the kinetic of
the world and of human beings:
There is only one thing you can do about kinetic, re-enact it. Which is why the
man said, he who possesses rhythm possesses the universe. And why art is the only
twin life has—its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact.
And if man is once more to possess intent in his life, and to take up the responsibil-
ity implicit in his life, he has to comprehend his own process as intact, from
outside, by way of his skin, in, and by his own powers of conversion, out again.
(CP, 162)
Art is the activity of the organism that is the human being. The kinetics of
art is the concrescence of perceptions, of prehensions, the experience that
constitutes the “subject.” It is the objectification of this “subject” as an
“object” in the emergence of a “new” subject—the “re-enactment” of an
experience (or a “prehension”) during the new experience. In Whitehead’s
formula: “the subjective form of a physical feeling is re-enaction of the subjec-
7: STANCE 115
tive form of the feeling felt. Thus the cause passes on its feeling to be
reproduced by the new subject as its own, and yet as inseparable from the
cause.”10
This process is the one underlying such basic mythopoeical concepts as
ritual or re-creation. Olson is actually seeking to return to the work of art its
ancestral meaning aided by modern scientific patterns. Not only is the work
of art “creative” and “innovative,” but it is also a deliberate act of building an
actual world, and always bearing political, active, social significance—the
work of art should recognize, and give place, to a Thou. Olson wishes to
cancel the distinction between craft and art, as is clear from his identification
of Stevens the carpenter with the first Maximus.11 The polis is composed of
people who enact themselves, and thereby enact the body of the entire com-
munity, as can be seen in “Letter 7”:
(Marsden Hartley’s
eyes—as Stein’s
eyes
Or that carpenter’s,
who left Plymouth Plantation,
and came to Gloucester,
to build boats
and who owned the land of “the Cut”,

until Gloucester, too, got too proper
and he left, fended for himself
. . . . . . . . . .
This carpenter
must have been the first to see the tansy
take root, the fishing stages then at Cressy’s,
and the boats beaching
at Half Moon
. . . . .
That carpenter is much on my mind:
I think he was the first Maximus
Anyhow, he was the first to make things,

not just live off nature
And he displays,
in the record, some of those traits
goes with that difference, traits present circumstances
keep my eye on
for example, necessities the practice of the self,

that matter, that wood
. . . . . . .
(if I let any of that time in,
it is Verrocchio’s cracked wood
of Lorenzo, with a head like a Minnesota back
or any worked schooner
. . . . . . . .
(As hands are put to the eyes’ commands
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
(such gloves
as fish-handlers—as Olsen, say,
or gardeners wear—or Ferrini ought to,
handling trash:
a man’s hands,
as his eyes,
can get sores)
. . . . .
What Hartley did was done according to his lights
(lungs, Ferrini, lungs:

. . . . . . .
The men of the matter of this city
(who was it did carve the Lady?)
are never
doctrinaires
. . . .
as Hartley’s hands
did stand, they were so much (each finger) their own lives’ acts
as Jake’s did,
from baiting hooks for sixty years,
(TMP, 34 –38)
The polis is the place where craft is art, an inseparable part of the citizen’s
life. Polis is/eyes: Stevens the carpenter, like Hartley the painter, like Jake the
fisherman, like Verrocchio (which means “true eye”), the Florentine sculptor
and painter, and also like Olson’s father and several others who experience
reality, have the eyes that see reality as is and lead to the right actions (the right
hands), to a life of action, a life of work. Olson makes “work” a keystone of his
worldview; Ferrini, as mentioned, lacks these features, and Olson is therefore
critical of him and his actions. The sharp criticism and the strong language of
Olson make the reader of “Letter 7” (as well as other letters) wonder if
7: STANCE 117
experiencing reality according to Olson excludes specific aspects, like the

aspects Ferrini here represents. If so, it seems that adopting a stance compels a
hierarchy since beside every stance there will always be others. This of course
makes Olson’s claim for a “multiplicity within unity” questionable. It raises a
question Olson does not answer, about “the inevitability of hierarchies”: how
can such worldviews that exclude each other be at the same time a multiplicity
within unity—which is the “truth of reality” according to only one of them?
Is it that Olson’s stance does not accept Ferrini’s universalism altogether? Or
does he see it as a “prehension” in the re-creation of the polis, meaning as a
part of the internal constitution of the becoming unity? In his search for the
general Ferrini divides, and most certainly loses, the particulars. Olson thinks
Ferrini approaches his craft too lightly, rather than as real work meant to
create a better humanism. Thus, for instance,12 contrary to Ferrini, Olson
and his father commit themselves, as laborers (Olson calls himself and his
father “workers”), to build the “human universe” at whose basis is the polis.
In Olson’s conception of the polis, creative life and political life were not
separate. All domains of spiritual creativity were connected and together
directed the polis’s will. A similar, though not identical, view is illustrated in
works like Havelock’s Preface to Plato as well as in others,13 which portray a
unity that Olson intimates. The religion of the polis is actually all-inclusive
and thus is more than the personal concern of individuals. The plastic arts
seeks to beautify the city, and the polis’s great artists make their ideas and
talents part of their city’s hour of glory while at the same time invent its glory
and myth. The polis needed the spiritual forces latent in its citizens, and it
released them, activated them, encouraged them, and directed them to itself
when becoming the focal point in the life of the spirit in all its manifestations.
At the same time, it is the individual experiences of the citizens woven
together that portrayed the characteristic of the polis and directed its way. The
pinnacle in the development of the polis is, according to Olson, also the
pinnacle in the spiritual life of Greece.
Ferrini, the editor,14 needs a “worker’s” hands and eyes in order to establish
a journal that will not be swept away in the general decay that has spread
through the nation. Olson holds that being a poet is work, just as being a
carpenter is work. Stevens is the first Maximus because he neither violates nor
exploits the space “on which” he resides, but rather creates from it and with it.
Stevens activates his body and the body of the world as the poet activates the
body, in order to build the world within its inner rhythm: he takes from the
world and gives back to it. The “practice of the self ” is work with the material,
with the body, within the space, as part of it. Such is the work of the carpenter,
the poet, the fisherman, the dancer, or the sculptor who sculpted “our Lady of
Good Hope,” the patron goddess of the Portuguese community of fishermen
and the poet’s muse, of his voyage—his sailing—his poetry. According to

Olson, he who does not dance the place as a presence, dance while “sitting
down,” he whose actions are not an “extension” of his body, of his breathing
(Ferrini’s lungs), cannot attain “maximality”: the ability to grow, to encom-
pass, to be unity and multiplicity. These are the expressions of “love becoming
form” at the hands of the carpenter, the fisherman, the painter or the poet:
Eyes,
& polis,
fishermen,
& poets
or in every human head I’ve known is
busy
both:
the attention, and
the care
(TMP, 32)
The rhythm of the body is the rhythm of love, of care. If Olson’s poem
begins with the force of the lance, in the same breath it is also driven by love, by
attention, and by care. Stevens the carpenter, whom Olson “joins” through
space, through the places they both share (for instance, Cressy and Half Moon,
above), is the first Maximus. He identifies the decay spreading through the
settlement, the estrangement from those characteristics that could lead to the
growth of the people and the place, and leaves it. This is Ferrini’s weakness
precisely: he lacks the measure of care, since this measure grows from the place.
How, asks Olson, will you find closeness and care, if you do not know your
environment, if you have not established any contact with your surroundings?
Ferrini, as noted in chapter 5, is not a native of the place, although he lives
there. Ferrini’s poetry is “everywhere,” it is an abstraction, without any links to
the concrete space, it is not an act of growth. Ferrini and Stevens stand, once
again, as enemies on two sides of the battlefield.15 Olson strengthens the link
between himself (as Olson and as Maximus) and Stevens, through the tansy
that characterizes his childhood and the city in general16 and whose roots
Stevens has seen. The tansy is again a specific transfiguration of the flower, and
poetry is a flower since it grows from/with the place, and its “smell” is the smell
of the place; the tansy flowers, the flowers of poetry, were destroyed by people
like Ferrini who strive, according to Olson, for a static homogeneous
universality:
Tansy was brought on the bottom of bags in cargoes to Stage Head originally out
of Dorchester’s entry. . . . It is strong (like goldenrod) and smells almost offensive
7: STANCE 119
with a pineapple odor. It doesn’t grow anymore at the same place but that is due
to more efficient mowers, and the desire (like blacktop) to have anything smooth
and of one sort or character. We therefore celebrate TANSY MORE THAN
BEFORE.17
Olson finds eunomia (good order) in the polis,18 the possibility of creating
a general will to action, which sustains it as a world within a world; Maximus
builds this eunomia throughout his poem. This is his craft, this is his purpose:
to build the city. The polis must be as a “society,” in a sense similar to this
term in Whitehead: a nexus of actual entities in an order that characterizes
their mutual relationships, with itself as its cause. Obviously, each “society” of
this type is not really isolated, but rather perceived against a broader back-
ground of actual entities, of “societies” upon which it depends and to which it
is related:19 Olson actualizes Whitehead’s metaphysics as sociopolitical prin-
ciples by turning, if we formulate this in terms of a critique, metaphysics into
ethics (although ethics is patently latent within metaphysics). Olson is ap-
prehensive about developments that resulted in the collapse of the polis,20
such as stagnation, the split between word and act, homogeneity, and other
such “evils” that already characterize the nation:
As the people of the earth are now, Gloucester
is heterogeneous, and so can know polis
not as localism, not that mu-sick (the trick
of corporations, newspapers, slick magazines, movie houses
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The word does intimidate. The pay-check does.
But to use either, as cheap men
o tansy city, root city

let them not make you
as the nation is
(TMP, 14 –15)
In terms of a later terminology, originating in political science and in the

study of nationalism, Olson’s suspicions appear more intelligible. So does his
stance on the question of the relationship between national and “local” ele-
ments in shaping the identity of the individual, when considered through a
definition of nationalism coined by Benedict Anderson: “an imagined politi-
cal community, and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”21
Rather than a world where nationalism is imagined and so actually detached
from the daily life of the individual, Olson puts all efforts on creating a
limited community in order to make the collective aspect of life as tangible as
possible, an actual part of human’s identity.
The emphasis that Anderson introduces into the definition of nationality,

the imagination on which it is based is, in my view, an excellent illustration of
the reality that became the object of Olson’s critique, and which he mainly
feared. According to Anderson, the members of a nation do not know each
other, do not meet, and do not even hear about one another; rather, in the
modern world, where nationalism is the main characteristic of the individual’s
identity, imagination is what creates the partnership, the communion. The
validity of one’s identity as part of the collective (and nationality is the
strongest collective identity for the individual) does not grow at all from the
real world, from the human space located in a specific physical space. In the
identity of the individual as belonging to a collective there is none of the
concreteness and the experience of the surroundings; rather, individual iden-
tity is based on a radical abstraction: “You are thus suddenly without a place.
And you are thus anonymous, you are without a face, a name, clothes, set
down in the midst of the city, a no-face.”22
Olson launches an attack on the alienated society. Anderson’s model sug-
gests that the act of the “national” imagination is abstractive and vague, since
as homo politicus man sees himself as part of something he does not actually
know. Moreover, man hardly takes active part in the collective aspect of life
and involvement, according to Olson, is essential for real understanding (as
we so in his attack on the universalism of Ferrini). In Anderson’s model there
is no necessary contact between the individuals composing the community.
Anderson draws a model of a triangle with an open base—individual A
connects to individual B through point C, which is “nationality,” to be drawn
somewhere above them because, although nationality is imagined, it is no less
hierarchical. From point C, of course, numerous rays radiate toward all the
individuals who belong—belong to rather than participate in the nation;
before us, then, is again the eternal sun (the king, the idea, the logos),
conferring value and validity on individual identity based on a correlation
between the internal and the external, between the inferior and the superior,
between the temporary and the everlasting, and so forth. The model is vertical
and perpetuates the gap and the lack of contact, which cannot be bridged in a
vertical model of this type; the detachment between individuals—the open
base of the triangle. The open base represents the act of abstractive imagina-
tion that needs to fill the gap between the participants at points A and B.
Needless to remind that any lack of concreteness between I and Thou hints to
man alienation from nature (another kind of Thou), meaning that to be a
homo politicus is to be child of the place. Thus Ferrini standing nowhere,
which is everywhere. His poetry has no roots in his existential space, in his
body, his home, his society, and his city. When Olson looks at the nation, he
understands it is losing its roots and fears that, despite his efforts, Gloucester,
7: STANCE 121
his city, is already engaged in a similar process. An imagined national identity

creates homogeneity and alienation, weakens the power of action and the
power of change, since isolated individuals are detached and lack contact and
establish their individuality on external values. In such a reality, abstract
models that use words cheaply neutralize the individual’s power when he
stands before them alone. Identity models such as this one perpetuate the
erroneous worldview concerning space and even time and go on fixating the
dichotomical borders that, according to Olson, have ruled Western culture
concerning individual identity. Thus, it is again made clear how very far
removed The Maximus Poems are from serial poetry. Serial poetry is a genre
that is the product of a new understanding of space and time, sustaining a
retreat to language on the grounds that one cannot be in contact with reality
itself. Human beings, then, are again left as the possessors of a static, fixed,
and abstract identity that is not dependent on their (physical and human)
environment and their experience; powerless vis-à-vis abstract systems that
dictate their lifestyle—and, despite all these, still the possessors of an arrogant
ego towering over their physical and human surroundings. “Despite” because,
in fact, aloofness and detachment of this type place human beings in a weak
position.23
According to Olson, instead of repeating this vertical model of meaning we
should replace it by a horizontal model: individual A touches individual B
directly,24 and both participate in the physical environment as natives of a
specific place. Implicit in this perception is that the place also touches the
human being directly. This point was illustrated in the discussion of the
concept of field and the possibility of remote action: according to Olson, the
concept of field can release us from the “national aether” once assumed in
order to “penetrate,” to “prehend” our neighbors B and be “prehended” by
them. Identity grows when you are an actual part, when you are in actual
contact with the space wherein you live and with the other “subjects” living in
this space: identity grows from the place and with it. It is not static, and you
have the power to shape it and shape the collective of which you are part.
Identity is a story and part of a story. Olson sought this story: “What is the
story of man, the FACTs, where did he come from, when did he invent a city,
what did a plateau have to do with it, or a river valley?” (HU, 17). It is Olson’s
wish to disarm his city’s life from the dichotomies of individual—collective
and private—public and recreate the polis. Olson thinks that the polis is the
political concretization of the metaphysics of the organism, since the polis is
actually organized as multiplicity within unity. In the history of the polis, as
recounted by Aristotle at the beginning of his Politics, the structure of each
unit is modeled on the structure of the prior one, with the family in the
household serving as the prototype of an organic-like unit.25 Murray’s image
of the ancient city as an expanding organism exemplifies Olson’s powerful

poetics:
In the most influential of modern works on the ancient city, Fustel de Coulanges
posits as actual history a process not far removed from that described by Aristotle.
Families formed into phratries, phratries into tribes, and tribes into a polis, and at all
stages, for Fustel, the groups were united by the bond of common cult practices.26
Olson shares this image of the polis as an organism that concretizes the
principle of the micro and the macro, and Whitehead’s concept of “society.”
The polis is related to the physical space and to the concrete contact between
individuals; the polis was, in Victor Ehrenberg’s definition, “community, self-
absorbed, closely united in its narrow space and permeated by a strong
political and spiritual intensity that led to a kind of special culture of every
Polis.”27 Olson retains two elements that Aristotle and Ehrenberg consider
conrnerstones of the polis: a citizen body and a territory. The polis is a
community of place with common concerns. In Griffeth’s terms, “the charac-
teristics of community of place and community of people were so inextricably
fused that it may be without profit to debate the priority of one or the other
factor.”28
As abstract space turns into place, Maximus turns out to be a native son.
Life (experience) is concretized into a given space that imposes limitations
and shapes life within it, so that one “place” is different from another “place.”
This is the social system of a “world” sustaining multiplicity and unity within
a “world” that also sustains multiplicity and unity, beside other such “worlds”
with which it comes into contact. The polis is a sociopolitical system where
the preservation of multiplicity enables unity; in Griffeth’s wording, “the
citizen body (the Demos) was united by its divisions” (267).
Thus, Olson idealizes the polis as a substitute for a life based on nationality
in its imaginative version, since the polis is both a city and a state. The polis
supplies the needs of the human being, “by nature, a political animal” accord-
ing to Aristotle’s definition in his Politics.29 Rather than an imagined com-
munity, Olson’s ideal is a community that is experienced and immediate. He
borrows the concept of the polis because one of the basic features of the
ancient polis was its small size. The area of the Athenian polis, for instance,
which was unusually large for a Greek city-state, did not exceed 2,500 square
kilometers; the large commercial state of Corinth extended over an area of
880 square kilometers. The island of Crete had no less than fifty city-states,
each averaging 150 square kilometers. Population figures suited the physical
size: Corinth, numbering 20,000 citizens, and Athens, numbering 43,000,
appeared to the Greeks as gigantic. Greek political theory was based on these
facts: in Plato’s ideal state, there would be 5,040 citizens. The prevalent view
7: STANCE 123
in Greece was that a good city-state has a population of 10,000. In any event,
it was not desirable, according to these views, for the area of a state to be so
large as to make it impossible for a citizen at any time of the year to take an
active part in its political life. Citizens should know one another lest personal
selection to state positions and effective participation in state affairs become
impossible. Of course, this ideal phrasing—to know one another—is trans-
lated more than once to: be familiar with one’s political, educational, cultural,
and geographical surroundings, with one’s family and genealogy and so forth:
criteria for judgment if a citizen does not know a candidate “personally.” This
“lesser extent” of knowing is yet completely different (in aspiration as well as
in its actual form) from embracing imaginary model. For the citizens of the
ideal polis their “state” is no abstract concept but a daily reality, acquired
through feeling and experience. Olson’s use of the concept refers to the polis
as a “microcosm,” an entire world on its own, based on its small size. The
citizens of the polis only need to climb the Acropolis, the fort of their
homeland, in order to envision the entire state. They know it perfectly, and all
its paths are clear. Every clod of earth is close and familiar.30 This is the true
meaning of Olson’s “mapping” the city, the native son’s wanderings in his
known and beloved polis built within him through its “prehension” (through
the eye, the ear, the foot: through his body). Maximus climbs and looks down
from the tower:
having descried the nation
to write a Republic
in gloom on Watch-House Point
(TMP, 377)
Watch-house
Point: to descry
anew: attendeo
& broadcast
the world (over the
marshes to the outer limits
. . . . . . . . .
one house-
one father one mother one city
(TMP, 394)
Maximus sees a space that becomes place, that becomes home; and home,
as we learned, is also a “note” for the body; in other words, the human body is
the body of the world is the body of the polis (the polis, as we know, is
founded on the demos, “the body of citizens”), a city that is part of the space,
grows with it, takes part in it:
The earth with a city in her hair

entangled of trees
(TMP, 289)
The increasing violation of space that characterizes urban modern culture

is unsuited to the “ecological” view that Olson infers from Whitehead’s
organistic philosophical method and from the mythopoeic worldview. In
Olson’s view, as the dichotomies that had fixated categorical qualitative differ-
ences disappear, human beings will find themselves as a real part of the
surrounding nature, influencing it and influenced by it, without any promise
or any transcending or transcendent moral justification of ascent over the
“world.” The city itself is perceived as a living breathing organism, and thus
“entangled” in the space, part of the body of the earth.
Now we understand the power (the enormous power, one might say) of
Maximus—the poet, the narrator, the citizen—as the builder and unifier of
the city. As noted in the book’s epigraph, he is the “one makes many.”
Maximus is the one “containing” the multiplicity, turning the multiplicity
into one place, one body, one story; but also the one “creating” the multi-
plicity, the builder, the narrator, and the observer, who makes concepts con-
crete. Just as he is part of the space and shaped by it, so is the polis itself
planted in the space and influenced by it; natural conditions are what shape
daily life for the citizen of the polis. Natural borders determined the city’s
limits (the rivers, the mountains, the coastline, the sea). They set up a defens-
ible unity, based on its natural features to begin with, as “Letter 6” tells us:
And the few—that goes, even inside the major

economics. It is not true that the many,
even in fishing, say, in Gloucester,
are the gauge
(where Ferrini, as so many,
go wrong
so few
have the polis
in their eye
The brilliant Portuguese owners,
they do. They pour the money back
into engines, into their ships,
whole families do, put it back
in. They are but extensions of their own careers
as mastheadsmen—as Burkes
(TMP, 32)
The organism that is Gloucester adapts itself to its own living space.
Economy and work rely on the same organic movement from the outside
7: STANCE 125
inward, and then outward again, according to the character of the body,
which is the space. Economic activity also emerges from the existence within
space. The early settlers worked with space, not against it. In “Letter #10,”
Olson/Maximus examines the first settlement in Cape Ann to indicate that
the beginning, the movement forward, was based on fishing, which suits the
character of the place, rather than stemming from Puritanical aspirations
(which did not act with the space and from it). Olson juxtaposes Roger
Conant, the governor of the Dorchester Company settlement in Cape Ann,
to the “later” Conant (James). Once again, he sets them up as opponents in a
battle, which is the story he is telling, in order to point to the factors that led
to the decay of the city and to reawaken its growth. Growth is hard because
of the straying away from reliance on the local; the fins, the fishing, are
gone:
on John White / on cod, ling, and poor-john
on founding: was it puritanism,

or was it fish?
And how, now, to found, with the sacred & the profane—both of them—
wore out
The beak’s
there. And the pectoral.
The fins,
for forwarding.
But to do it anew, now that even fishing . . .
It was fishing was first. Only after (Naumkeag) was it the other thing, and Conant
would have nothing to do with it, went over to Beverly, to Bass River, to keep clear
(as a later Conant I know has done the opposite, has not
kept clear)
. . . .
As you did not go,
Gloucester: you tipped, you were our
scales
(as I have been witness,

in my time,
to all slide
national, international,
even learning slide
by the acts of another Conant than he who left his Tudor house, left fishing,
and lost everything to Endecott, lost the colony
to the first of,
the shrinkers
. . . .
Now
. .
Harvard
owns too much
and so its President

after destroying its localism (“meatballs”,
they called the city fellers, the public school
graduates) Conant destroyed Harvard
by asking Oregon
to send its brightest
Roger Conant did not destroy, was, in fact, himself destroyed, as was the city, 1626
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
my Conant
only removed to “Beggarly”,
as the smug of Salem—the victors!—
called that place still is, for me
(when I go down 1A or take the train
the opening out
of my countree
(TMP, 49–51)
Olson seems to be mixing incompatible elements: what might be the link

between “another” Conant, who was president of Harvard in 1933–53, and
Conant the governor of Cape Ann in 1623–26? We are already used to the
time “gap,” because we know the approach of the historian who is Maximus.
The comparison between two people whose professions and areas of interest
are very different seems puzzling—how could they stand as two (normatively
contradictory) “landmarks” of the same issue? This temporal “skip” is, as
noted, an instance of the vitality of historical materials for the historian
Olson/Maximus: the relevance to the story he is telling is what determines the
place of facts and their links. This is the way the unity and will of the polis is
affected and determined by its citizens. When joined together, the “objects”
(in Whitehead’s sense) taking part in the poetic unit create a new synthesis,
7: STANCE 127
presently existent and, as is readily visible, oriented toward the future, which
Maximus wishes to build in better, and more ethical ways. “Historians-poets”
are able to put together a topical story from “historical materials” relevant to
them and to the place of whose growth they are part.
Olson, a “historian-poet,” does not discern “temporal gaps,” nor does he,
as “poet-citizen-man of the polis,” discern separate “fields of activity” or
accept divisions between the various “domains of life.” The “categorical
status” of the two different Conants is identical regarding their activity as men
of the city, the polis: Maximus shows us how the later Conant, the educator,
failed to rely on the local in order to grow and bring about the city’s growth;
he destroyed Harvard because he tried to bring his “materials” from the
(human) space that is outside the polis. The early Conant is one of Maximus’
“twin-figures,” relying on the physical space of the polis in order to grow from
within it. Olson emphasizes Conant’s unwillingness to compromise his prin-
ciples, when he left and lost the settlement to Endecott, who marks the onset
of the restriction process that led to decay. Throughout the entire poem,
Olson recurrently signposts the deviations from the correct path when he
deals with Gloucester and when he deals with Western culture in general.
Endecott marks the beginning of the decay that Maximus knows from the
present of his life; for him however, (the first) Conant is a real presence here
and now,31 and he meets him when he travels from Boston to Gloucester
along the road passing through Beverly, the place to which Conant had
moved. The A1 is an “an alternate route between Boston and Gloucester,
passing through Beverly. Before the construction of route 128, the main
highway into Gloucester from Boston,”32 a point that is again an instance of
Olson’s method: the real details hint at the thought hiding behind them.
Indicating the name of this road actually hints at the move that interests
Olson/Maximus, which he then performs: the search for an alternative identi-
fying the point of deviation from the right road. In this way, then, the path is
reopened for Maximus at the end of the poem, an opening to his city is now
available. There are no full stops at the end of the poetic units, in order to
suggest the continuous movement forward, the one movement. The archaic
spelling (“countree”) hints at a move backward, which is an opening, a move
forward, growth—as the tree that is hidden and revealed anew.
In “Letter 16,” Olson also points to the crumbling of the polis that was the
city, and to the beginning of the separation between the private and the
public. Maximus’s words at the beginning of the letter are typical of both the
merchant and the poet:
“not to crowd you. But what do we have

but our wares?
As Olson says elsewhere: “No artist is ever an aesthetician . . . he is—and

this is where he is at one with everyone—a man offering his goods.”33 Later
in “Letter 16,” Olson/Maximus again points to the place where deviation
started and the collapse of the polis began, classes and hierarchies emerged,
and a separation was created between the private and public realms. The place
where the movement toward restriction rather than growth began, and the
trunk started to corrode. As Agyasta (the Indian saint endowed with superhu-
man powers) swallowed the ocean (indeed wishing to help), and thus caused
the drying of the land and of every living creature, so Bowditch, who became
an insurance agent after retiring from sea life, led to the city’s economic
development away from the desirable course. Instead of the polis that had
been the city, the nation develops:
Bowditch (later) ran Harvard,

. . . . . . . . . .
He represents, then, that movement of NE monies
away from primary production & trade
to the several cankers of profit-making
which have, like Agyasta, made America great.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
who was the first “trustee” of others’ monies

who treated them as separate from his own accounts.
In other words, he marks that most neglected of all
economic law: how the coming into existence of benevolence
(the 19th century, left and right)
is the worst, leads to the worst, breeds
. . . . . . . . . . . .
what we have a word for
. . . . . . . .
pejorocracy (what you have, my town, what all towns
now have
. . .
(TMP, 76–77)
The polis, then, must rely on its given space for its economic growth, and
the mistakes made in the past, which led to the city’s decay, serve Maximus in
his attempt to rebuild the city as a polis, this time from the space and with it.
The space gives rise to the cultural uniqueness, to the myths and stories of the
place. Gods and mythical figures, monsters and heroic deeds, are always
related to local aspects of the territory and its characteristics. Those who grew
and set the community on the right path economically, by relying on its
7: STANCE 129
features, are also heroes. “The religion of the polis” is not based on saints
performing miracles but rather the opposite—on the many daily activities
that are all facets of the one body. As Murray describes the Greek polis, so
Olson wishes his own city to be: “Religion is present in all the different levels
of social life, and all collective practices have a religious dimension.”34
Olson, as a native, tells-shapes the “stories of the place,” the “religion of the
polis.” This story-ritual is the inner determination that gives (self ) identity
and difference (from another place, another polis). The first volume of The
Maximus Poems in particular is the ritual of the polis that is Gloucester, which
is performed through the (narrative) ritual of the “local heroes” as, for in-
stance, the fishermen stories that Olson/Maximus sings in “Letter 2,” and
particularly the rescue story of Carl Olsen, the captain of the “Raymonde.”
This “local hero” recurs along The Maximus Poems;35 as is evident in the
poetic unit entitled “The Death of Carl Olsen” (TMP, 474), Olson/Maximus
“raises” this character to the rank of a “naval hero” and sets up a memorial to
him in his living space:
. . . . . . . . . .
This was Carl Olsen
captain of the Raymonde,
and in the time of our lives the instance
of the men who were called
captains, of the vessels which made up
the Gloucester fishing fleet.
The plural subject that Maximus uses points to the shared ritual of the
townspeople, but the speaker sings alone, and it is not even clear that there are
any listeners. Olson/Maximus seeks to bring the townspeople to participate in
its shaping by means of well-known local ritual stories of this type, stories
“making the rounds” in the common space. The hero of another story-ritual
is James Merry, a former sailor who fought the bull in Dogtown.36 The unit
called MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—I (TMP, 172–76), is wholly
devoted to this local hero (who also returns elsewhere along the book), and
takes place in the space where the hero had acted: Maximus tells the story of
the place that is Dogtown. Byrd analyzes this poetic unit37 in terms of the
archetypal forces of the earth in their representation as the “Great Mother,”
and of “deep-swirling Okeanos,” which are also archetypes of gender:
The feminine archetype which presides over Merry’s struggle “to manifest his soul”
is a relatively late form of the Great Mother. . . . Obviously the bullfight is an
appropriate celebration of the Lady of the Beast, because she is the symbol of man’s
emerging domination over the natural world. In his failure, Merry, as a projection
of Maximus himself, participates in an anti-ritual which makes it possible for the

Great Mother in her more primitive forms to re-emerge.38
Byrd argues that this is an anti-ritual, since the “hero,” Merry, actually
represents the vain “ego” (“to show off his / Handsome Sailor ism”) who
attempts to subdue Nature; the result of his acts was that the space itself, the
place, and the bull as his extension, kills Merry:
the ice holds

Dogtown, scattered
boulders little bull
who killed
Merry
(TMP, 173)
Merry’s death, (“as he died / in pieces / In 400 pieces”) illustrates the break-
up of the “ego” that enables the communion with space:
Then only
after the grubs
had done him
did the earth
let her robe
uncover and her part
take him in
(TMP, 176)
Instead of the “anti-ritual” terminology that Byrd uses to describe the story
of Merry and the bull, we could say that this is a ritual chiefly concerned with
a pattern of alienation in space, a ritual that concretizes the conflict between
the place and the stranger who negates it. It is as such that its importance
becomes evident: Olson cannot successfully activate the ritual since there is
no one to share it with. The ritual is taking place not for himself but for the
city, the polis, the community. From the start, Olson aims to build the city,
which is why the disappointment, at the end of the day, is so great. This, then,
is a ritual that concretizes the death of the “self,” of the negative hero, at the
hands of the superior powers of space. The polis must participate in this
ritual, thereby acquiring its self-identity through the union of the individual
with the collective and of the collective with space, in a necessary process of
contending with a “self ” seeking “violent” expression toward the surround-
ings, an expression finding its way in the ritual itself. The return of the “self,”
toward the end of The Maximus Poems, will concretize the failure of the shared
ritual, manifest in the individual’s withdrawal into himself.
7: STANCE 131
The examples of “stories of heroes” and “ritual stories” that I chose here are
arbitrary.39 The poem is filled to the brim with such stories, from a myriad of
sources: Indian legends, stories of fishermen, records of the early settlers,
letters, and so forth. Their common denominator is the place that engendered
them or that accepts them and takes them into its (territorial-geographical)
bosom. “Its heroic cults in particular gave the religious system of each polis
much of its individuality, its sense of identity and difference, which were
connected with the mythical past and sanctified the connection of the citizens
with that past to which they related through those cults.”40 As Murray
successfully conveys, the ritual of the story engenders the polis with its local
“religion.”
In the early Maximus Poems, Olson appeals to the goddess of the city,
protector of the community who, of course, is also the muse of the local poet
telling-building the place. This attests that, despite the openness of the begin-
ning, the poem, and the poet, have a “purposeful end” that drives and directs
their growth:
(o my lady of good voyage

in whose arm, whose left arm rests
no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner!
A delicate mast, as bow-sprit for
forwarding
(TMP, 6)
“The poem is a voyage, and I want a good voyage,” says Olson.41 The
purpose is to build a polis, and the active cause is the laws of the polis
themselves, which establish it and the citizens living within it. “The polis was
the institutional authority that structured the universe and the divine world
in a religious system, articulated a pantheon with certain particular configura-
tions of divine personalities, and established a system of cults, particular
rituals and sanctuaries, and a sacred calendar.”42 As in Murray’s description of
the Greek polis, Olson emphasizes that to be a citizen of the polis means to
take an active part in its life. The activity of the organism is based on the
experience of every one of its citizens. Hence, every activity, or experience, is
always a “political” act, because the activity preserves individuals as part of the
world, affecting their environment and affected by it, “opening” or “closing”
possibilities of action. Individuals are an “actual potentiality,” responsible for
their own growth and for that of the world to which they belong. The
activities and the rituals create the unity of the body of citizens, and empha-
size the subject’s active power and responsibility, even in activities ostensibly
quotidian and “unimportant”; every act is invariably participation and “a will
to cohere” (in Olson’s terms). Participation is actually a shared experience.

When people have shared experiences they start to feel as one body.
Maximus’s “words” to the townspeople, the letters he wrote “inspired” by
the muse, are also in the category of an activity no different from any other
activity of the townspeople that enables and directs their shared experience.
The uniqueness of this activity is that its object is its constitutive role itself; it
establishes the city while speaking about establishing it. But as an activity that
is experience, an act of the will to cohere, it is also part of building the civic
institutions—the give and take of each citizen from and to the body of the
polis, which ensure the continued growth of the organism. The growth of the
polis is the growth of every one of its citizens, an expression of their actual
participation, accompanied by acquaintance and creating a shared experience
that grants the city the power to act as one body. The polis thus becomes a
kind of “conscious social unity,” conducting its affairs with a sense of freedom
and responsibility. Olson’s poem is a call for action, an attempt to “awaken”
the townspeople to go back and rebuild the polis, infusing freedom and
responsibility into their lives and thus informing them with renewed value.
Citizens of the polis shape their lives at will, since the validity of the laws of
the polis is within themselves and within the local traditions and practices
that sustain the polis; to sing is to build is to legislate laws and practices.
Social, communal practices create a ritual system, wherein participation and
repetition create (and re-create) the coherence and the unity of the entire
body. When these practices are directly related to territorial features, the
presence of the past is felt more intensely in the here and now: the body that is
the polis carries with it a collective memory anchored to the specific space,
and the rituals performed within this space (“where it really took place”)
revitalize and preserve the memory by sharing it time and again, by experienc-
ing the event. The story, the myth, are always in the present, and all the
citizens of the town take part in it, narrate it, create it; the polis as a social
form is based on the actualization of the past for the sake of self-growth. The
shared practices confer the power to act. This power is not concentrated in an
elite group, but characterizes the polis as a unity, as “the universe of soli-
darity”; unity rests on contact and on communication between individuals,
who build the unity of the body. Toward the end of his endeavor, however,
Olson felt that he had failed in his main purpose, that he had remained
alone—the polis is not established. Do The Maximus Poems also remain as
multiplicity without unity?
8
Failure?
MAXIMUS WANTS TO BE THE SHAMAN, THE RITUAL WORKER, THE GUIDE

who is also part of the community experiencing the ritual. Documents from
Gloucester’s history, liberally included in The Maximus Poems, are adapted as
ritual material. This material is intended to lead the citizens, through Max-
imus’s attempts, to a shared experience that revives a collective memory,
expressing the shared will to act harbored by the citizens of the polis. The
diaries of Winthrop and Smith, the documents detailing the goods found in
the belly of the ship (TMP, 122), the stories of fishermen and boats: all are
activated, made present, re-told, in the ritual Maximus wishes to enact in his
letters (and Olson in his poetry). The townspeople (and the readers) should
experience the weaving of the story and will make it grow. During the ritual,
the person strips in order to don the past anew as present. To be the first
means to be naked again, to re-experience the world without partitions,
with a naked eye, and without the “self ” that is the fruit of the Western
legacy:1
Gloucester can view

those men
who saw her
first
He left him naked,

the man said, and
nakedness
is what one means
that all start up

to the eye and soul
as though it had never
happened before
(TMP, 111)
133
Butterick points out that this poetic unit (“Maximus, to Gloucester”) is

partly based on a dream Olson actually had, and cites an earlier version
describing this dream:2
I must make it known, now that I have had the great dream
have waked from the shock of myself confronted with
myself. I standing, before my own eyes, naked, and charging
myself with what? There I was, and I was he, and it was me,
just as I am, the exact body. And we stared at each other.
I do not know that we asked anything, I, of him,
or he, of me. Yet we did look at each other, we were
sibs. And the I who was naked had a single look.
The I who dreamt was as I have been, a host,

with people, things around me, was surprised,
looked out from the edge of a crowding of the real. And separate
only as a scratch is red, and conspicuous, on skin.
Was a looking figure, not liking to be looked at,
as, it was clear, this new one did not mind. This
was the charge he wore upon him like his nakedness,
it was this that made the other—me—awake.
Olson struggles here with the “Western self,” through what Karlins calls
“distancing himself ”: “The final version is not only pared down, but the angle
of perception is entirely different. Olson postulates a ‘man’ to tell the dream
and Olson himself becomes ‘he’ and his dream double becomes ‘him.’ ”3
Thus, a distance is created and the involvement of the poet’s “I” is lessened.
Olson, in other words (his own words) is looking for an image of man made
out of the material known to him:
It is not I,
even if the life appeared
biographical. The only interesting thing
is if one can be
an image
of man, “The nobleness, and the arete.”
(TMP, 473)
This “distancing from himself ” entails a self-stripping, one form of letting

the “other” come into yourself. Olson strips off his identity, as Maximus does
in the poem, since nakedness emphasizes the rediscovery of the body and its
existence within a larger body and as part of it; in other words, participating in
a ritual, adopting a stance, require exposure, dis-covery, and self-examination.
8: FAILURE? 135
The ritual requires identification and penetration of the “other,” namely,

renouncing the “self,” the solidity of a protected self-identity (which Olson
considers illusory). The “transfiguration” in the other, a temporal, spatial,
human, or generally natural otherness, is undoubtedly the threatening aspect
of the ritual, of a worldview that eliminates borders. The beginning of
Gloucester “then” remains not only promising but also threatening:
But just there lies the thing, that “fisherman’s Field”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
stays the first place Englishmen
first felt the light and winds, the turning, from that view,
of what is now the City—the gulls the same but otherwise the sounds
were different for those fourteen men, probably the ocean
ate deeper in the shore, crashed further up at Cressy’s
(TMP, 110)
The City (capitalized) restrains the fears, the primary forces that had once
been more exposed: in order to tell the “story” (which makes up most of the
first part of the above unit) one must reawaken these forces, stand naked
before them again, allow them now to enter the home, into the picture-
postcard reality that covers up the fears:
But that as I sit

in a rented house
on Fort Point,
the Cape Ann Fisheries
out one window,

Stage Head looking me
out of the other
in my right eye
. . . . .
twenty-two eyes
and the snow flew
where gulls now paper
the skies
where fishing continues

and my heart lies
(TMP, 111–12)
The primeval forces awaken and become a living, invasive presence. In

order to grow again one must fight again, renounce the illusion of solidity and
borders, open up to the space and its forces, to the past and its forces. True
continuity means re-experiencing the hardships of the beginning, renouncing
your identity in order to grow it anew—stripping and donning the “attire of
the other” during the ritual. “The turning” (TMP, 10) mentioned regarding
the space of the city is “The Twist” (which is “Letter 18,” TMP, 86), both in
the sense of a “transfiguration” of identities and a blurring of borders. This is
the Annisquam river that appears in the poetic unit “The Twist,” itself indi-
cating the movement (inward and outward) that becomes a presence imbued
with power. On the one hand, there is a threat; on the other, however, there is
an intimation of sowing and growth (in the flowers he plants, actually for
Pound, which again link the act of doing in the world to the doing in the
poem itself ):
As I had it in my first poem,
the Annisquam
fills itself, at its tides
. . . . . . . . . . . .
my neap,
my spring-tide, my
waters
(TMP, 86)
Do indeed exposure, discovery, threat, and fears ultimately prevent the

participation of the townspeople/readers in the ritual initiated by Maximus/
Olson? Does the fact “that the reader must work hard—harder than he is
accustomed to work—to make sense of a string of words that on first reading
may sound like gibberish”4 prevent communication and contact in the first
place, leaving the individual in his solitude and the story fragmented? Does
Olson succeed, in his activity as a poet, in unifying at least his own poem?
These questions hint at the familiar basic tensions between “Art” and “Life,” a
split—at least as a recurrent theme in the history of ideas—that Olson
himself struggles to heal. This is the conflict of a man writing letters, which he
turns into poems for all readers, and of a poet addressing his poems, as letters,
to his community. Added to this tension is the fact, known to us from “real
life,” that the poem was left unfinished with the poet’s death—though one
understands that Olson’s (long) poem could never be finished—and an editor
assembeled the last volume. But if we consider the poem’s call for action and
the mission that Olson/Maximus assumed, a sense of failure and seclusion is
already visible in the second volume (Olson/Maximus retreats to Dogtown, a
deserted place), and certainly in most of the “letters” in the last volume. The
“dependence” on “immediate readers,” as well as the failure to be expected
from their silence, become a certainty to Olson/Maximus as he proceeds
8: FAILURE? 137
along his journey. If the storyteller lacks an active audience; if the letters
actually have no addressees, then Olson, a postman’s son, himself a postman,
carries Maximus’s letters to nowhere. Maximus is the guide; more than one
“transfiguration” of his figure in the poem strengthens this attitude toward
him. He holds the secret of the nasturtium, the “secret of the Black Chry-
santhemum,”5 which is “the secret of the Black Gold Flower”—the flower of
Chinese alchemy—serving Master Lu Tzu and also Olson, who is Maximus
the teacher.6 The flower’s appearance as the lotus, “The Cosmic Flower”
(TMP, 73), leads Olson to the gate of another teacher, Buddha, who returned
in order to light the path for others (for instance, TMP, 473). When Olson/
Maximus calls out to bring the ships into the port for sailing, to cross the
borders, he is joining his role as an actual guide with his role as a poet-teacher,
who also provides tools for the sailing:
And now let all the ships come in

pity and love the Return the Flower
the Gift and the Alligator catches
—and the mind go forth to the end of the world
(TMP, 290)
As Olson explains, “The Return, The Flower, The Gift, and The Alligator, are
ketches owned by a Gloucesterman who built them.” Ketch, continues
Olson, “is an old name for sloop, a fishing sloop—but they spell it in the
record ‘catches,’ and you know catches is ‘song’ ” (MUT, 158). Olson hints
here at the poet’s quality as a carpenter, providing his audience with a means
of transportation to their shared destination. Stevens the carpenter, the ship-
builder, is presented in TMP as the first Maximus. The poem is a boat and
Olson/Maximus steers it: the poetic units coalesce into a long and continuous
voyage to an old-new world. Beginning with “The Twist,”7 Olson/Maximus
brings together the voices, one after another (one makes many), weaves-builds
the poem, the ship. But without a crew, without the townspeople and the
readers as his fellow workers, he cannot function as a teacher or as a poet.
Without them his ship has no purpose.
The method of Olson/Maximus is that of self-discovery and, as a teacher,
he cannot offer his own to others but relies on those stirring to action with
him, in his wake. For Olson, education means “educere, to lead out,” and
methodology for him means to “go back to root, to methodos.” Olson explains
this root as “ ‘The way’ (road, path tao)” or “with a way” (LO, 106). The result
is that “methodo”-“logy” is “(1) to have a path (2) and that such a path is only
accomplishable by the habitual practice of orderliness and regularity in ac-
tion” (LO, 107).
Olson holds that we must grow out of our own selves, without coercion,
out of our own experience, without a path being laid out in advance and
without presuppositions directing the way. The teacher is also the sailor, one
of the crew, a citizen of the town who is on the way (his “location” is “outside
and inside”). But if no one is with him on the way, he has no function as
teacher in his role to wake the others to their ways, which will eventually
become the way of the polis.
Maximus casts flowers upon the water from the mole;8 this is an annual
ritual in memory of the Gloucester fishermen lost at sea, and Olson seems to
have been present at the ceremony performed on the day he wrote this unit.
Between the two poetic units describing the same ritual, there are two promi-
nent differences: (1) On page 157 the townspeople are described as casting
flowers upon the water, while Maximus is a commenting observer. But on
page 257 Maximus is the subject of the poem and he himself casts flowers
upon the water; the ritual here is mentioned as part of his voyages in one of
his various guises. (2) The second difference is the location: whereas Maximus
sends the flowers in Tyre, the ritual itself, as it is performed on page 157, is the
annual ceremony taking place in Gloucester.
Throughout The Maximus Poems, Tyre is Gloucester’s “twin city,” Max-
imus’s other home. The poem indeed opens with Maximus “off-shore, by
islands hidden” (which, as it emerges, are hidden to the poet himself ); this is
an instance of the discovery latent in the process, which is exposed with the
growth of the character, since in Tyre he stands “beyond time”:
The “hero” of my poem (Maximus of Gloucester) is in truth Maximus of Tyre.

And thus, whether I liked it or not, at a very early point, in fact in the very first
letter addressed to Gloucester, the position off-shore of Maximus is indeed an
enormous expropriation of the other side of the Atlantic, the other side all the way
back to man’s first leaving the massive land continent of “Asia” for Cyprus, the 1st
“island” in that aspect of Westward movement (Tyre of course is still more “true”
being that island only made into a peninsula when Alexander, to reduce her, for the
first time in history—as late as 333 B.C.—built the mole.9
Tyre (when choosing Tyre, Olson also relied upon the geographic-physical
similarities with Gloucester) is the quintessential polis, and also represents
nonsurrender to Western culture. It is a temporal and spatial beginning,
preceding the philosophical-cultural deviation; the starting point for the
native expansion westward. Accordingly, Gloucester is the place of the “last
first people”:10
I regard Gloucester as the final movement of the earth people, the great migratory
thing . . . migration ended in Gloucester . . . the motion of man upon the earth
8: FAILURE? 139
. . . northwest-tending line, and Gloucester was the last shore in that sense. The
fact that the continent and the series of such developments as have followed, have
occupied three hundred and some-odd years, doesn’t take away that primacy or
originatory nature that I’m speaking of. I think it’s a very important fact. And I of
course use it as a bridge to Venice and back from Venice to Tyre, because of the
departure from the old static land mass of man which was the ice, cave, Pleistocene
man and early agricultural man, until he got moving, until he got to towns. So the
last polis or city is Gloucester.11
Metaphysics brings along an ethic or, rather, it is the other way around.
Olson/Maximus takes it upon himself to begin anew. Olson’s view is so
comprehensive that beginning anew means introducing a sweeping change
into Western cultural values but, as always, the comprehensive and inclusive
can only be accomplished through concrete elements and at a specific place.
In other words, the relationship, the stance vis-à-vis the world and your
responsibility for it, are measured in your care for the concrete here and
now, in your stance vis-à-vis the concrete place, in your being the child
of a concrete place. The relationship between Tyre and Gloucester, between
Maximus from Tyre—not only Jung’s Homo Maximus, which is an arche-
typal figure of large dimensions, but also the Greek philosopher of the sec-
ond century B.C.—and Maximus from Gloucester, is the basis not only for
understanding Olson’s ethical stance but also for “measuring” the realiza-
tion of the project that Olson/Maximus has taken upon himself. The char-
acter of Maximus is the measure (of that “Human Universe”): he is the one
who builds the city, the world, himself. If we measure Olson as Maximus—
as it seems Olson himself did at least partially—we face such questions that
blur the distinction between the poet and his persona. Can the poet be judged
according to his success in transforming a center that once again grants
his city its unity, its coherence, its purpose, its place in the surrounding
universe (so that it should become a navel for him as well, for his own
growth)? But if not how come the poet himself expresses disappointment
from his fellow-citizens’ failure to follow his way, as a teacher? Is it not Olson
that feels disappointed when Maximus is left alone to cast flowers upon the
water? Can we seriously say that it is only Maximus’s failure, or that only
as Maximus he feels a failure? But does Olson really think he can create a
shared experience for the townspeople and build a power base for its activ-
ity? Does Olson differentiate between the townspeople as audience and the
readers of poetry as audience? And if it seems sometimes that Olson does
not draw the line between Maximus (as a persona) and himself should we
do it? At what price? Does the swap between observation posts, between-
places, between the ritual that Olson/Maximus—observes? shares?—in
Gloucester, and the ritual in which Maximus participates—in whose com-
pany? alone?—in Tyre denote the gap between Maximus and the people of
his town Gloucester, or the gap between Maximus and Olson, or, yet, the gap
between phases of the same identity? If we take what emerges from the
description of the ceremony in Gloucester (TMP, 157) as the failure of the
townspeople to understand the meaning of the ritual,12 we will not be sur-
prised to find Olson/Maximus retreating into his solitude, feeling as a man
from Tyre.
As noted, a sense of closure characterizes the poem toward the end. The
figure of Maximus from Tyre, the attempt to replace the canonical power
center, to offer an alternative to the Western Greek-Hellenistic world—all
appear as a utopic call for action from this point of view. We remain, there-
fore, with the well-known question of art’s ability to affect reality and be part
of reality without impairing its own autonomy and maintaining an indepen-
dent perspective. Olson’s work seems to be another example, indeed a distinc-
tive one, of an oeuvre contending with these questions, which could them-
selves be rephrased as the problem of multiplicity within unity. Poetry (for
Olson) is an act of many, even if it opens and is opened from the one, and
Olson’s long poem is the quintessential expression of this. The importance of
the poem is not in the poetizing, in the confession or the pleasure. It is not art
for art’s sake, but art for life’s sake. The relationship between Tyre and
Gloucester, between Maximus of Tyre and Maximus of Gloucester, is thus a
measure of the “unity” or the “division” that the poem ultimately presents.
Olson “calls,” “summons,” makes real the Maximus of Tyre as a “realized
potential,” who can direct the process whereby he himself wishes to be the
center of the new polis of Gloucester:
He represents to me some sort of a figure that centers much more than the second
century A.D.—in fact, as far as I feel it, like, he’s the navel of the world. In saying
that I’m not being poetic or loose. We come from a whole line of life that makes
Delphi that center . . . and this I think is the kind of a thing that ought to be at
least disturbed. . . . He is a transfer for me to that vision of a difference that Tyre is,
or proposition that Tyre is, as against, say, Delphi.13
To build Gloucester is actually Tyrian Businesses, it is the archeology of the

morning, the morning exercise, the dance sitting down.14 At the start, Max-
imus’ double posting is meant to give him the “will to cohere” for dismissing
hierarchies, and the shield to turn his poetry into cantus firmus.15 By contrast,
in the later sections of the poem, Olson/Maximus increasingly feels that the
city does not concresce under his control into the longed-for polis. The shift
between Tyre and Gloucester emerges as a split. Olson/Maximus remains
with a sense of isolation and failure, which threatens to shatter Olson/
Maximus himself into his elements:16
8: FAILURE? 141
Maximus of Gloucester
Only my written word
I’ve sacrificed every thing, including sex and woman

—or lost them—to this attempt to acquire complete
concentration. (The con-
ventual.) “robe and bread”
not worry or have to worry about
either
Half Moon beach (“the arms of her”)

my balls rich as Buddha’s
sitting in her like the Padma
—and Gloucester, foreshortened
in front of me. It is not I,
even if the life appeared
biographical. The only interesting thing
is if one can be
an image
of man, “The nobleness, and the arete.”
(Later: myself (like my father, in the picture) a shadow

on the rock.
(TMP, 473)
The split of “every” and “thing” (in the second line above); the split that is
intimated between writing and speech; his deliberate mention of Half Moon
beach (a small, well-protected crescent-shaped beach);17 the “Padma,” the
lotus, the gods’ dwelling and birthplace, now closes in on him like the sea; a
process of shrinking and withdrawal is now taking place, rather than this
place becoming the starting point for the growth of everything.18 Gloucester
itself loses its concreteness and becomes an external diagram; Maximus cuts
off from the world, becomes a mere shadow lying on the rock, a picture like
that of his father. Reality again becomes Platonic (the question of unity and
multiplicity; how “the brave” is “the good” is “the beautiful,” one that is
many; and Olson asks, is this possible?), art goes back to being mimetic, the
soul departs the body, the individual departs from society, the monk needs
only “robe and bread,” and shuts himself in his cell, as is well emphasized in
other “evidence” Butterick brings:
The word [conventual] appears underlined in the poet’s copy of Brooks Adams’
Law of Civilization and Decay. . . . Olson wrote . . . around that same time: “I
really do prefer the soul to society; and think that the conventual is now solely the
imagination which applies.”19
Olson/Maximus, then, feels that the city, the polis, is not being built. The
flower becomes the flower “of the poet,” growing with him and from him. It
is not, however, the flower of the city, and a dissociation emerges or, should
one say, remains between the individual and the collective, a dissociation
between body and soul, between writing and speech:
Nasturtium
is still my flower but I am a poet
who now more thinks than writes, my
nose-gay
(TMP, 632)
This poetic unit, which was already noted, illustrates the tension well: the
breaths on the page, “the instrument” attesting to the one source of the
multiplicity, the organism that is the whole standing behind the apparent
splits—all attest now to concrete separations and splits in the world upon
which the subject cannot prevail because of the blindness of his fellows who,
in his view, prefer the isolation of the “Cartesian monad” (TMP, 132). The
smell is now reserved for the individual, the plant is cut, and the bouquet is
not cast with the other bouquets upon the water: the placement in a separate
line, two pages before the end of The Maximus Poems (about two months
before his death and several days before he was transferred to the hospital,
implying this is one of the last texts he ever wrote) attest that the unit is itself a
bouquet to his poem, that the poem itself is a bouquet to his life, but not to
the polis. The renunciation, the withdrawal, and the closure sensed here, turn
into a clear declaration in the last unit of The Maximus Poems, which is made
up of only one line;20 the “self ” returns to rule the poet’s life:
my wife my car my color and myself.
As Butterick points out,21 the unit is apparently a catalogue of losses, or at

least of worries that troubled the poet during his last days. The shield, now
removed, leaves the poet’s heart, the flower, exposed to the reader.22 Did
Olson indeed expect that the city, the community, the polis, would act as a
shield for him? The conclusion is apparently gloomy, even if known ad
nauseam: a change in the boundaries of the collective requires the involve-
ment of the collective, genuine cooperation. The word that Olson/Maximus
(or perhaps Olson alone?) chose to conclude his vast endeavor, the closing
word of The Maximus Poems, is probably unequaled as a way of denoting the
triumph of the individualism of late capitalism as representing the entire
canonic legacy of the West.
Epilogue
EVERY PLACE, ACCORDING TO OLSON, IS AN OPENING PLACE. THIS EPI-

logue, of course, is but a beginning. If the comprehensive and inclusive can
only be accomplished through concrete elements and at a specific place, then
this book, written in Jerusalem, together with other books about The Max-
imus Poems and other readers of the poem, join the community built by
Olson/Maximus, which is continuously growing. An actual entity never dies;
it becomes a “real potentiality” and is itself a “stubborn fact” to be realized
again.
Thus, this book, and others like it, is an indirect answer, though not a
solution, to the questions raised in the last chapter. When reading Olson (is
not that common language itself evidence of an Olsonian/Whiteheadian
process?) the lives of the readers are enriched. They grow. Of course, this is
true of other writers. It seems to me, that in the culture of individualism
fostered by late capitalism, the polis is made of readers.
143
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984), 249. Subsequent quotations from this work are cited in
the text, abbreviated as TMP.
1. Alfred North Whitehead, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1919); idem, Science and the Modern World (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1925); idem, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan,
1933); idem, Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938); idem, Dialogues of A. N.
Whitehead as Recorded by Lucien Price (New York: New American Library, 1956).
2. Charles Olson, The Special View of History, ed. Ann Charters (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970),
49. Subsequent quotations from this work are cited in the text, abbreviated as SVH.
3. George F. Butterick, A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).
4. See the last chapters in the biography of Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a
Poet’s Life (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1991), especially the account of Olson’s
decline after the death of Betty, his second, common-law wife. George Butterick, the editor of
The Maximus Poems, was Olson’s student and became his friend, bibliographer, and editor.
5. Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic
Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 84.
6. Robert Von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (London: Harvard University
Press, 1978), 63.
7. Sherman Paul, Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain, and Recent American Poetry (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 102.
8. Stephen Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30.
9. Paul Christensen, Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1979), 5–6.
CHAPTER 1. THE BATTLEFIELD

1. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 239. Subsequent quotations from this
work are cited in the text, abbreviated as CP.
2. “Projective Verse” (henceforth “PV”) in Charles Olson, Selected Writings, ed. Robert
Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966). Subsequent quotations from this work are cited in
the text, abbreviated as SW.
144
NOTES 145
3. Paul Bové, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1980), 217–34, extensively and persuasively describes the generally
hostile attitude of the critics (mostly of New-Criticism) toward Olson. As Bové shows, even
after the influence of “PV” had begun to filter down, critics still failed to contend with his
poems, nor did they really grasp that the essay (or the “theoretical” writing in general) and the
poetry are inseparably linked and part of one continuum. In the discussion he devotes to
Olson, Bové explains the need for this “essayistic” or “theoretical” writing in the struggle
against the static canon and its representatives, the critics, for the purpose of opening it up.
4. Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry, 3– 4, offers another formulation that, in
some senses, spans Bové’s and my own position concerning the elimination of dichotomies and
the perception of the whole as one activity: “Lacking a grounded tradition to draw upon, Olson
uses his essays, lectures, interviews, book reviews, and letters to present an alternative ground-
ing method I call ‘containment,’ which makes his poetry both possible and effective.” Fred-
man’s terminology bridges the perspective of the attitude to tradition and the perspective of
immanent unity in Olson’s activity as a whole. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, contrary to
Bové, who presents Olson as a “destructive poet” vis-à-vis the tradition, Fredman’s formulation
actually points to Olson’s link to the Emersonian tradition and particularly to Thoreau, with
whom he shares the “grounding” method that Fredman calls containment. Nevertheless, both
Fredman and Bové do agree with the view that has since become the prevalent consensus
regarding Olson’s writing, namely, that it accepts no dichotomies.
5. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1947). Subsequent quotations from this work are cited in the text, abbreviated as CMI.
6. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1947), 258–59.
7. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: William Morrow, 1988),
186, 398.
8. Ibid., 192.
9. Bové, Destructive Poetics, 229.
10. Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the
1960s (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 78.
CHAPTER 2. WHITEHEAD VS. DESCARTES

1. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 179–80. See also Alfred North Whitehead,
Process and Reality, eds. David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press,
1978), 29–30, 137.
2. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 180–90.
3. Butterick, A Guide, 4.
4. In the case of Spinoza, for instance, as Whitehead shows, the attempt to save the
concept of unity by assuming that one entity possesses an infinite number of attributes, leads to
the loss of multiplicity.
5. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 6–7. See also the preface and chapter 1.
6. René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1955), 240.
7. Ibid., 73–77.
8. Von Hallberg, The Scholar’s Art, 101.
9. See another poetic unit which also precedes “A Later Note,” Letter 23.
11. This is another topic that was also previously considered in CMI, Olson’s book on Moby
Dick, and obviously characterizes Gloucester as a port city and as the early settlement in the
new world.
12. Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove
Press, 1967), 123. Subsequent quotations from this work are cited in the text, abbreviated as
HU.
CHAPTER 3. EXPERIENCE
1. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18.
2. On these concepts, see below.
3. This attitude characterized Olson’s behavior in the classroom as well. See, for instance,
Clark, The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, 209–10. Although, as Clark suggests, this attitude may be
rooted in his childhood anxieties concerning social performance, the tension between the poet
in his life and in his figure as Maximus remains. The reader should bear this in mind when
considering “the failure” of the last volume.
4. Ibid., 22.
5. For instance, Olson writes in “A Later Note”:
self-action with Whitehead’s important corollary: that no event
is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal

event
or in “Letter 27”:
An American
is a complex of occasions
6. Charles Olson, Muthologos: The Collected Lectures & Interviews, ed. George F. Butterick,
2 vols. (Bolinas, Calif.: Writing 35, 1978), 58. Subsequent quotations from this work are cited
in the text, abbreviated as MUT.
7. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 156.
9. Thus, for instance, he regrets his failure to speak to Ezra Pound (when he visited him at
St. Elizabeths) about his most important project at the time (March 1946):
That’s the book on the Human Body. A record in the perfectest language I can manage of the HEART,
BRAIN, LIVER, KIDNEY, the organs, to body them forth, to give a full sense of the instrument of the
organism, approached on the simplest of premises: viz., the BODY is the first and simplest and most
unthought of fact of a human life.
10. As we will see, human beings grow multidimensionally; the use of the vectorial axis is
meant for emphasis, in an attempt to follow the reader’s patterns of thinking.
11. Bové, Destructive Poetics, 228.
13. “On p. 28 of Frankfort’s study, occurs the following section (much of it underlined in
the poet’s copy) dealing with the origins of the major gods in Ptah: ‘And the final phrase of the
section closes the circle: while it has started by stating that the gods came forth from Ptah,
NOTES 147
objectified conceptions of his mind, it ends by making those gods “enter into their bodies”
(statues) of all kinds of material—stone, metal, or wood—which had grown out of the earth,
that is, out of Ptah’ ” (Butterick, A Guide, 436).
15. Ferris, Coming of Age, 289. Ferris’s description of the process whereby we change our
perspective on the world is formulated in rather poetic terms:
Traditionally, scientists were free to think of themselves as passive observers, sealed off by a pane of
laboratory glass or a telescope’s lens from the outer world they examined. But on the microscopic level,
every act of observation is disruptive—countless photons of starlight die upon the eye, protons smash
into accelerator targets—and the manner in which we choose to make the observation (to “collapse the
wave function,” as the physicists say) influences the results of the interaction. Subatomic particles
sometimes resemble particles, sometimes waves, depending upon how we examine them. They are not
“really” one or the other—and, in any event, the two images are mathematically equivalent. Rather,
they are participants in an act of observation, the nature of which influences the qualities they present to
us. Quantum physics obliges us to take seriously what had previously been a more purely philosophical
consideration: That we do not see things in themselves, but only aspects of things.”
16. The poet did have a physical presence, clearly emerging in his letters to his lover and
muse, Frances M. Boldereff. The early draft of the first letter was “composed in two inter-
mingled languages: one public and literary, one private and coded for translation only by his
directive Muse. The poem went on to address a ‘lady of good voyage’ who represented, on the
one hand, the statue of the Virgin cradling a schooner on the Church of Our Lady of Good
Voyage in Gloucester, and on the other, Frances, whose recent invitation to voyage, in the letter
intercepted by Connie [the poet’s wife], had made such a powerful impact. It was boldly sexual,
thrust forward on images of phallic masts, beaks and lances directed with propulsive energy
toward receptive female nests” (Clark, The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, 167).
Clark’s biography reminds us that the tension between the dichotomies that Olson seeks to
dismantle is not easily removed, as is evident in Clark’s title for his biography, The Allegory of a
Poet’s Life. For another biographical reference of the poet’s writings see Ralph Maud and Sharon
Thesan, eds., Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1999). Yet, note Creeley’s remark:
Olson would be dismayed when persons wanted to identify Maximus as being an egocentric projection
of his own values of himself. And he’d say “No! No! No! It’s simply a possibility of material. I mean it’s
‘me’ because I’m here this thing is here so it’s my agency for the recognition of what else is here. I’m the
material of my poem. I’m not the center of it in some egocentric demand.”
William V. Spanos, “Talking with Robert Creeley,” Boundary 2, 6.3–7.1 (spring-fall 1978): 42.
17. According to Bové, Destructive Poetics, 232–33: “Olson’s destructive poetics militates
against the reestablishment of some fixed order.” Bové states this conclusion when discussing
the building of an alternative canon and tradition, a new center, which various critics claim that
Olson offers as a substitute for Western tradition. See, for instance, Joseph N. Riddel, The
Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 186. Bové argues that “Olson’s position is extreme: his
ontology, his ‘epistemology,’ not only destroys the onto-theological ‘tradition,’ but it destroys
the very means by which any ‘canon’ can become static and passed on verbally as percept. . . .
The very word ‘tradition’ is deconstructed by his poems and shown to be a mystified center of
the logocentric ‘tradition.’ ”
18. Ibid., 46– 48.
19. Ferris, Coming of Age, 200.
20. On this question, see the following passage (Von Hallberg, The Scholar’s Art, 124 –25):
Olson’s readings of Whitehead came at a decisive time, during those years in the mid-fifties when Black
Mountain was faltering to its dispersive close. . . . Although Olson actually shared many of White-
head’s most fundamental principles long before he read the cosmologist, this does not lessen White-
head’s importance for Olson. Through Pound, especially through Pound’s renderings of Fenollosa and
Confucius, Olson may have come to the notions of reality as process, the dynamism of objects, and the
ethical imperative of action, but until he read Whitehead, Olson seems not to have felt the coherence of
these and other ideas in a system that could legitimately be called a metaphysics . . . which is to say that
Whitehead offered Olson clarifications, definitions, and above all else, a way of systematically organiz-
ing a set of metaphysical principles.
CHAPTER 4. CONCRESCENCE
2. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 242.
3. Charles Olson, Additional Prose (Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1974), 11. Subse-
quent quotations from this work are cited in the text, abbreviated as AP.
4. Mark Karlins, “The Primacy of Source: The Derivative Poetics of Charles Olson’s The
Maximus Poems (vol.1),” Sagetrieb 4, 1 (spring 1985): 34.
5. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 242– 43.
6. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 155.
8. The concept of time itself undergoes changes, which lead to further problems I discuss
in the chapter about the second type of fluency.
9. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18, 73.
10. I stress the relationship between the masculine and the feminine here because, generally,
as is pointed out by Judith Halden-Sullivan, The Topology of Being: The Poetics of Charles Olson
(New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 34: “Put frankly, Olson is a ‘macho’ poet. He uses feminine
referents only in stereotypic contexts: When poeticizing about the powers of nature, love and
sex.” As Halden-Sullivan herself remarks, however: “Never does he explicitly exclude women
from participating in the ontology he envisions.” I suggest that we refrain from overstating the
significance of this limitation, because “his ideas may survive his sexism, which are typical yet
to his times.” See also the biographical data in Clark, The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, and Maud and
Thesan, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff.
12. The choice of term is evidence of the reader’s empathetic or critical attitude.
14. I discuss this “failure” of communication in chapter 7 below, when trying to examine
the causes for the mounting feeling, in the third volume of The Maximus Poems, that Maximus
withdraws further and further into himself after his letters to the townspeople go unheeded and
remain unanswered.
15. Don Byrd, Charles Olson’s Maximus (Urbana: Universiy of Illinois Press, 1980), 45.
16. Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity, ed. Ann Charters. (Berkeley: Oyez, 1968), 83.
Subsequent quotations from this work are cited in the text, abbreviated as O/M.
17. As well as for himself, who had also worked at the post office. Olson dedicated his book,
The Post Office (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1975), to his father.
18. On Olson’s source for the term automorphism: “Cf. Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics
and Natural Science, p. 72: ‘We now consider the special case when our domain of objects is
NOTES 149
mapped not upon another domain but upon itself, and thus arrive at the notion of automor-
phism: an automorphism is a one-to-one mapping p-p’ of the point-field into itself which leaves
the basic relations undisturbed” (Butterick, A Guide, 210).
19. Altieri, “Olson’s Poetics and the Tradition,” Boundary 2, 2.1–2 (fall 1973–winter
1974): 182.
20. On the cover of the second volume, Olson chose to present a map of the globe before
the continents had split off. Mapping the space of the earth is closely linked to the historical
move that Olson makes along The Maximus Poems.
22. Ibid., 547.
23. Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry, 91.
26. Olson was then living in Washington. In 1957 he returned to Gloucester, the site of his
childhood summers.
CHAPTER 5. FLUENCY

2. TMP, 20, and note the use of the present tense.
4. Julian T. Frazer, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Redmond, Wash.: Tempus Books of
Microsoft Press, 1987), 256.
5. Cited by Whitehead, Process and Reality, 209.
6. As is true, for instance, of Descartes, Plato, and Aristotle. See ibid.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process
and Reality (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 16.
9. Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
(London: Bantam Press, 1988), 143– 44.
10. Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, 311.
11. William P. Davis, God and the New Physics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984),
129, 131–32. See also Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum: The Compound “I”
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 12–13.
12. On the crucial importance of PR see also Butterick, A Guide, who was put in charge of
the poet’s archive and was also his friend. Any study of Olson’s work relies on his prodigious
endeavor, and particularly on the detailed guide he wrote on The Maximus Poems, where he
points out a source for every term and concept throughout the work: “The copy of Process and
Reality he acquired in February 1957 is one of the most marked and annotated volumes in his
library” (Butterick, A Guide, 358). Olson also knew the rest of Whitehead’s works. For
instance, he had read Adventures of Ideas in 1954. It is also worth noting that Olson, while a
student at Harvard, had met Whitehead at a special evening in honor of the philosopher, who
was then in his seventies (see O/M, 84).
13. On Bergson and Whitehead, and on the former’s attitude to modern physics, see Milic
Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Reevaluation (Dordrecht, Holland:
D. Reidel, 1971).
14. Because if time itself develops, a higher supratime is required for this development to
occur, and so on ad infinitum, hence Whitehead’s tendency to see becoming as a primary
concept that takes precedence over others.
15. John Taggart, Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1994), 161–62, suggests a most interesting explanation of Olson’s
attitude to Melville. He views Melville as “Olson’s center and source that, once saturated, once
‘in himself,’ gave him the key to ‘everything else very fast.’ ” Olson however, deliberately
misread or misreported his reading of Melville, “with his insistence on Melville’s value as an
author of physical detail and factuality.” Olson “turns Melville’s physical space into a physical
entity.” The animus for this, according to Taggart, “is a proprietary desire to keep his central
source to himself. . . . To gain power, you must defeat an opponent stronger than yourself, you
must partake of that power (eat from the body, magnum corpus) and you must keep something
of the once stronger opponent as a souvenir of the power you now possess yourself.”
I choose to deal with this issue now rather than when I noted how Olson views Melville as a
writer of “physical entity” (p. 37), or when I considered Olson’s quality as a “derivative poet”
(p. 45), because at this point, after we have already covered some distance, we can draw further
conclusions from Taggart’s statement (and thus return to the places noted above). The picture
described in TMP, 414, as well as in other poetic units, allows us to view Taggart’s analysis as a
possible principle guiding Olson’s attitude to texts in general; the wars of Enyalion, Tyr,
Hercules, and others, could actually appear as the war of Olson/Maximus who, as Taggart
describes him, is a cannibal of texts:
This has to remind us of Ishmael who, as his author’s book’s etymology and extracts prologue make
clear, is a cannibal of texts. This sort of cannibalism allows what “experience” never could, the creation
of fictional space. It is the fictional narrator cannibal, not Queequeg, who survives. . . . The imperative
first sentence he took for his title has a doubly reflexive reference to the earlier cannibal and to himself,
Olson, the later one.
Taggart’s analysis thus strengthens the tension I had noted (and will also note below
regarding Olson’s ritual dimension that is indeed our concern here): the lot of a poet attempt-
ing to be a teacher without pulling rank; seeking to rebel and break a tradition and a canon
without turning himself into their replacement; trying to rebuild a world without resorting to
the violence (even if only textual) of the world in which he is rooted and is actually seeking to
destroy.
16. Byrd, Charles Olson’s Maximus, 85. See also Butterick, A Guide, 58–64.
17. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 128–29.
18. Von Hallberg, The Scholar’s Art, 155. Von Hallberg also adds other puns derived from
Olson’s choices. See pp. 150–58, which he devotes to general aspects of “Tyrian Businesses.”
19. See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 61.
20. Joseph M. Conte, Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991), characterizes two forms of the postmodern, serial and procedural. The
emphasis is that, contrary to the misleading appearances, Olson’s poetry is not serial. Certain
descriptions of Olson’s way of working seem to fit procedural poetry, in Conte’s terms. Thus,
for instance, Christensen, Call Him Ishmael, writes: “My premise that there is such unity is
‘conjectural’ in the sense that Olson used the term; its etymology reaches back to Latin
conjicere, ‘to throw together,’ or toss, as Marcel Duchamp tossed the rods in his studio, allowing
them to fall randomly and make a design, from which he fashioned ‘The Mechanical Bride,’ a
work of the most deliberate precision.” As is clear from my writing here, I do not accept this
view, which leaves randomness (clear to the postmodern artist) as the central element of Olson’s
poetics, and no further comment seems necessary.
NOTES 151
21. Whitehead’s choice of the term feeling is understandable, since “positive prehension” is
“the definite inclusion of the item into positive contribution to the subject’s own real internal
constitution” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 23, 41).
22. Whitehead, then, reminds the reader that a gap prevails between language and reality,
which can only be bridged through a leap of imagination. Beyond this, however, he adopts a
writing technique that takes into account these difficulties, making this leap of imagination
easier for the reader: by coining this new philosophical conceptualization, and after opening
and presenting the conceptual scheme of the categories he had created, Whitehead recurrently
explains the systematic conceptual approach throughout the book, at various levels and in
various formulations, by pointing to, analyzing, and contending with the relevant philosophi-
cal sources of these terms.
Whitehead thereby attains two aims that share the same purpose. First, he contends with the
problem of the “baggage” that is a priori inherent in language for anyone who uses it: the
cultural, philosophical, and other associations fixated and internalized in the linguistic system
(see, for instance, Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 200). The problem posed by the “baggage”
borne by language is particularly important for Whitehead, since his approach challenges the
traditional pattern of Western canonic thinking, certainly from Descartes onward, but in many
ways even from Aristotle. Although this reflects a reversal in the scientific worldview, it is
specific to Whitehead because he assumes his stand as a philosopher rather than as a scientist,
in an attempt to rebuild a comprehensive speculative method to explain the world—despite,
and precisely because of, this scientific reversal. Removing old patterns because of new ones
therefore implies a release, as far as possible, from a loaded language: the old philosophical
problems require reformulation; the philosophical language requires us to invent new concepts,
enabling liberation from the old cosmology and the thinking patterns it enforces. Whitehead’s
new terms reflect the new analysis of an old problem, and the new terminology attests to the
direction of the new solution now suggested.
Reaching Whitehead’s first aim by building a new conceptual system entails confusion for
the reader. The organization of the text (Process and Reality) helps to contend with this
inevitable difficulty. In a sense, Whitehead imposes a process quality on his philosophical work
in order to attain his second aim: the internalization of the new conceptual world, the creation
of a closed linguistic microcosm to describe the world, where concepts are elucidated and
become meaningful within this microcosm. The conceptual system emerges along the work, in
the course of the reading process, from within and out of the world it describes; in order to
clarify his concepts, Whitehead recurrently explains the categorical scheme he had originally
presented, in different ways and with the help of various examples, by coining synonymous
terms for every concept, and obviously by relating to philosophical tradition and its concepts.
The method itself is an inner network of concepts closely linked to each other and assuming
each other, in order to create a coherent system. Obviously, then, concerning The Maximus
Poems as well, and by analogy to Whitehead’s contents and cosmology, a world containing its
own explanation is presented that, in the course of the reading, reaches (textual) lucidity and
unity.
23. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 236–38.
24. The reader familiar with Pound’s poetry will recognize here the critique already pointed
out. Olson emphasizes that we will now obtain a cantus firmus, meaning unity, but as it occurs
in time: “I couldn’t write a canto if I sat down and deliberately tried. My interest is not in
cantos. It’s in another condition of song, which is connected to mode and has therefore to do
with absolute actuality. It’s so completely temporal” (The Paris Review, 1970: 198).
25. Butterick, A Guide, 257–58.

27. MUT, 1:64.
29. CP, 157–58.
30. Olson was influenced by various Eastern methods and by Eastern philosophers. Given
the scope of this work, and striving for coherence, I have refrained from opening up this
conceptual world. Let us indicate, in general terms, that the way in which Olson uses these
sources is compatible with his general approach and with the correspondence he also finds
between modern science and ancient thought. On the links between Budhism, Zen, and even
Hinduism, and modern science see, for instance, Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Berkeley:
Shambhala, 1975).
31. See Butterick, A Guide, 202; TMP, 135–36.
32. “A ‘seamless’ poetry gives the illusion of perfection through formal means, covering over
the process of recognition. Olson’s method, on the other hand, calls attention to its acts of
recognition, letting the seams show in an effort to represent more fully how recognition works”
(Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry, 83). This is precisely where Olson’s strength
lies: his concern is to expose the process that builds unity while actually building this very
unity.
33. Ibid., 66.
35. Histoire, according to the distinctions of Gerard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil,
1972), 71–76.
CHAPTER 6. STORY, HISTORY, AND MYTH

1. Dated 1963; the poetic unit was written in 1962.
2. Karlins, “The Primacy of Source,” 37.
4. See ibid. 94.
5. TMP, 186; 226; 404; the stone monster in the Indian myth, who also struggles with the
god.
8. See Butterick, A Guide, 238.
9. As do previous units, beginning with “Letter 10” and following.
10. Taken from Rose-Troup’s book about John White.
11. Citing Thomson, Art of the Logos; see Butterick, A Guide, 145.
12. Byrd, Charles Olson’s Maximus, 36.
14. Charles Olson, Letters for Origin, 1950–1956, ed. Albert Glover (New York: Cape
Goliard Press and Grossman Publishers, 1970), 83. Subsequent quotations from this work are
cited in the text, abbreviated as LO.
15. Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 98.
17. Henri Frankfort, Mrs. Henri Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before
Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951), 12.
18. See his letters to Creeley.
NOTES 153
19. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torch-
books, 1963), 6.
20. As will emerge below, this is the story of the polis, which is the sociopolitical expression
of the multiplicity in unity.
21. Eliade, Myth and Reality, 18–19, and see also 33.
22. See his letters, entitled “Maximus, to Gloucester.”
23. Frankfort, Before Philosophy, 255–56.
24. Eliade, Myth and Reality, 6.
25. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1963), 165. See also Marcel Detienne, The Creation of Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 27.
26. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 165.
27. Detienne, The Creation of Mythology, 27.
28. Ibid., 39.
29. This confrontation should be taken in its context. It is clear to me that “history” is
always more revelatory of the historian than the events considered, and the historian always has
to select and shape his material.
CHAPTER 7. STANCE
1. “I cannot be responsible for the way the Dept. of Justice tries the citizen Ezra Pound.
But I say I nor any other writer can allow Ezra Pound the writer to go untried. For he stands
forth in all his violence to be judged. It is here the fact that he is a poet, and a good one, has
bearing” (Charles Olson, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths, ed.
Catherine Seelye [New York: Paragon House, 1991], 16. Subsequent quotations from this
work are cited in the text, abbreviated as COEP).
The tension that Olson felt with Pound, which is not resolved as we sense when we end the
reading of COEP, stems from this nonseparation of powers, a separation that would have made
it easier to cope with Pound’s “separate sides.” Olson, who was born in 1910, belongs to the
generarion of postwar poets deeply affected by the terrors of the war (Auschwitz, Hiroshima).
He was also involved in political activity. After resigning from the Office of War Information,
he joined the Democratic National Committee as director of the Foreign Nationalities Divi-
sion. But “in January 1945, deciding ‘to write like forever!,’ he declined two offers of govern-
ment positions (O/M, 9). In April, he returned to Washington from a vacation in Virginia and
learned of Roosevelt’s death: ‘I started Ishmael that afternoon, the afternoon I kissed off my
political future.’ ” (Von Hallberg, The Scholar’s Art, 5). See ibid., ch. 1, 5– 43 on Olson’s
development as a political poet; on the political-economic-cultural background of his times; on
aspects of leadership, treason, law, and democracy that affected and shaped, for instance, the
characters of the “protagonists” of The Maximus Poems (Stevens the carpenter; Conant, who
averts corruption and sordidness); on Mao’s influence; on his shaping as an educational figure
in the political context and, as noted, on the context that generated his idea that “subject
matter is primary” and “lyric poetry that is more engaged by its own language than by its
ostensible subject . . . derives from aestheticism, a blight on modern poetry” (p. 22).
3. Obviously the opposite of the language that Olson tries to revive throughout the entire
poem, a language directly and concretely related to human breathing and to the world of which
he is part, and potentially capable of returning the power of the “object” to the world of which
it is the “picture.” See again Olson’s remarks on the language of hieroglyphics concerning the
culture of the Maya in, for instance, SW, 58.
4. COEP, 83.
5. I noted above the tension affecting a critique of language through language.
6. Oswyn Murray and Simon Price, eds. The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 21.
7. See, for instance, TMP, 113, 133.
9. From this passage, dealing with Robert Creeley, we must infer again concerning the
Pound case, which was noted above.
11. The movement backward in time, to the beginning of the settlement before decay set in,
is a movement toward a previous stage, before mistaken and conceptual divisiveness.
12. TMP, 37.
13. See Murray, The Greek City; Victor Ehrenberg, The Greek State (London: Basil Black-
well, 1960); Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas, eds. The City-State in Five Cultures (Santa
Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1981); Alexander Fuks, The Athenian Commonwealth: Politics,
Society, Culture (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1975).
14. As noted, Ferrini resides in Gloucester and intends to publish a journal there. The letter
Olson sent him, “Letter 1” in The Maximus Poems, set the entire process of the poem in
motion.
15. Binarity, then, is inescapable: Olson’s divisions into pairs of rivals, as is well emphasized
in “A Later Note,” show that this pattern of thought is relevant to various needs, even in a
world with pluralistic aspirations.
16. See “Letter 3.”
17. Butterick, A Guide, 22–23, citing Olson’s description of the herb in a note to editor
Donald Allen, c. 22 July 1963.
18. See Murray, The Greek City, 21.
20. As described in Murray, The Greek City, 21.
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6. This became the prevalently accepted definition to
many prominent scholars in various areas of discourse, not only political science.
22. HU, 141. Pound’s case, which is so relevant, deserves to be mentioned again here. See,
for instance, Olson’s critique of Pound for his arrogant attitude toward the guard at St.
Elizabeths: “But it was the fascist too, as a snob, classing the guard” (COEP, 50). The growth of
the idea of the polis, in all its denotations, is unquestionably tied to the case of Pound, who was
one of Olson’s poetic ancestors, and to Olson’s visits to him in the mid-forties.
23. This is true concerning a nationality that senses itself superior to others, or a person who
feels superior to others—both are the result of a sense of superiority concerning the environ-
ment itself. Traditional Western humanism, as we know, is extremely violent.
24. See the “I-thou” relationships we discussed in chapter six, concerning the Weltanschau-
ung of antiquity and of myth.
25. Aristotle, Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (New York: Penguin Books, 1978).
26. Murray, The Greek City, 267–68.
27. Ehrenberg, The Greek State, 194.
28. Griffeth, The City State, 31.
29. Aristotle, Politics, 28.
30. See Fuks, The Athenian Commonwealth, 2–3.
31. In Whitehead’s terms, he is an “actual potentiality.”
NOTES 155
33. Ibid., 108.
34. Murray, The Greek City, 200.
35. TMP, see pp. 23, 31, 37, 43.
36. See Butterick, A Guide, 239– 42, for Olson’s sources on this story.
37. Don Byrd, Charles Olson’s Maximus, 114 –17.
38. Byrd returns to the sources Olson had used for his concepts, in this case the book by Eric
Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1974).
39. See the previous chapter on myths or stories with a mythical aspect.
CHAPTER 8. FAILURE?
1. Olson was influenced by various Asian doctrines and by Asian thinkers. Due to the
scope of this work and to considerations of coherence, I have refrained from delving into this
conceptual realm. Let me just point out that Olson’s use of these sources is generally compatible
with his Weltanschauung, as well as with the correspondence he finds between modern science
and ancient thought. On the links between Buddhism, Zen, and even Hinduism on the one
hand, and modern science on the other see, for instance, Capra, The Tao of Physics.
2. Butterick, A Guide, 155–56.
3. Karlins, “The Primacy of Source,” 43.
5. Like the title of Olson’s essay. See TMP, 180.
6. For Olson’s sources, see Butterick, A Guide, 413, 512.
7. As he himself indicates; see MUT, 1:159.
8. TMP, 257. This unit was discussed above. This ritual is at the center of TMP, 157–59.
9. Butterick (citing Olson), A Guide, 9.
10. “We are the last ‘first’ people” (CMI, 14).
12. See, for instance, Byrd, Charles Olson’s Maximus, 109.
14. TMP, 39; parts of this unit were discussed above.
15. “Maximus, at Tyre and at Boston,” as the title of the poetic unit in TMP, 97.
16. See TMP, 476, 482, 483, 488, as instances of this sense of failure.
17. My emphasis.
18. See TMP, 172, 181.
20. TMP, 635; Olson explicitly designated this unit as the concluding one, although he did
not edit the last volume.
22. See the discussion on color as related to the shield of the body, the heart, and the shield
of the flower, concerning “Letter 20,” “Letter 21,” and more.
References
WORKS BY CHARLES OLSON

AP Additional Prose. Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1974.
CMI Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947.
COEP Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. Edited by Catherine
Seelye. New York: Paragon House, 1991.
CP Collected Prose. Edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
HU Human Universe and Other Essays. Edited by Donald Allen. New York: Grove Press,
1967.
LO Letters for Origin, 1950–1956. Edited by Albert Glover. New York: Cape Goliard
Press and Grossman Publishers, 1970.
MUT Muthologos: The Collected Lectures & Interviews. Edited by George F. Butterick. 2 vols.
Bolinas, Calif.: Writing 35, 1978.
O/M Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity. Edited by Ann Charters. Berkeley: Oyez, 1968.
SVH The Special View of History. Edited by Ann Charters. Berkeley: Oyez, 1970.
SW Selected Writings. Edited by Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966.
TMP The Maximus Poems. Edited by George F. Butterick. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984.
SECONDARY WORKS
Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979.
——— “Olson’s Poetics and the Tradition.” Boundary 2, 2.1–2 (fall 1973–winter 1974): 173–
88.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-
ism. Revised and Extended Edition. London: Verso, 1991.
Aristotle. Politics. Translated with an Introduction by T. A. Sinclair. 1962. Reprint, New York:
Penguin Books, 1978.
Beach, Christopher. ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradi-
tion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.
156
REFERENCES 157
Bové, Paul. Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980.
Butterick, George F. A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978.
Byrd, Don. Charles Olson’s Maximus. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Capek, Milic. Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Reevaluation. Dordrecht,
Holland: D. Reidel, 1971.
Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975.
Christensen, Paul. Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.
Clark, Tom. Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
Conte, Joseph M. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1991.
Davis, William P. God and the New Physics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
Descartes, Rene. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Vol. 1. New York: Dover Publications,
1955.
Detienne, Marcel. The Creation of Mythology. Translated by Margaret Cook. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1986.
Draper, R. P., ed. The Epic: Developments in Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1990.
Ehrenberg, Victor. The Greek State. London: Basil Blackwell, 1960.
Einstein, Albert, and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1947.
Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper Torch-
books, 1963.
Ferris, Timothy. Coming of Age in the Milky Way. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
Frankfort, Henri, Mrs. Henri Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen. Before
Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951.
Frazer, Julian T. Time: The Familiar Stranger. Redmond, Wash.: Tempus Books of Microsoft
Press, 1987.
Fredman, Stephen. The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian
Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Fuks, Alexander. The Athenian Commonwealth: Politics, Society, Culture (in Hebrew). Jerusa-
lem: Bialik Institute, 1975.
Genette, Gerard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972.
Griffeth, Robert, and Carol G. Thomas, eds. The City-State in Five Cultures. Santa Barbara,
Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1981.
Halden-Sullivan, Judith. The Topology of Being: The Poetics of Charles Olson. New York: Peter
Lang, 1991.
Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1963.
Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. London:
Bantam Press, 1988.
Karlins, M. “The Primacy of Source: The Derivative Poetics of Charles Olson’s The Maximus
Poems (vol. 1).” Sagetrieb, 4, 1 (spring 1985): 33–60.
Kraus, Elizabeth M. The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and
Reality. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.
Lockwood, Michael. Mind, Brain and the Quantum: The Compound “I.” Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 1995.
Maud, Ralph, and Sharon Thesan, eds. Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Corre-
spondence. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999.
Murray, Oswyn, and Simon Price, eds. The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991.
Neumann, Eric. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Paul, Sherman. Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent American Poetry. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978.
Preminger, Alex, ed. Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1965.
Riddel, Joseph N. The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos
Williams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.
Spanos, William V., “Talking with Robert Creeley,” Boundary 2, 6.3–7.1 (spring–fall 1978):
12–74.
Taggart, John. Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Tuscaloosa: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 1994.
Von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art. London: Harvard University Press,
1978.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Edited by David R. Griffin and Donald W.
Sherburne. 1929. Reprint, New York: Free Press, 1978.
———. Dialogues of A. N. Whitehead as Recorded by Lucien Price. New York: New American
Library, 1956.
———. Modes of Thought. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
———. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan, 1933.
———. Science and the Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1925
———. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. New York: Cambridge
Index of Poetic Units
The following is a list of the poetic units, or “letters,” examined in this book. The titles appear
in accordance with The Maximus Poems’ index of poems, where first lines serve as titles to poetic
units otherwise untitled.
after the storm was over, (TMP, 264): 95 Letter 7, (TMP, 34): 64, 115, 116, 117
Letter 9, (TMP, 45): 60, 63, 83
BEGINNINGS (facts), THE, (TMP, 235): Letter 10, (TMP, 49): 126
103 Letter 16, (TMP, 76): 127–28
Blow is Creation, the, (TMP, 634): 87 Letter 20: not a pastoral letter, (TMP, 93):
61, 83
Death of Carl Olsen, The, (TMP, 474): Letter 23, (TMP, 103): 98–99
129 Letter # 41 [broken off ], (TMP, 171): 93–
Descartes soldier, (TMP, 226): 28 94, 96, 98
earth with a city in her hair, The, (TMP, Maximus, at the Harbor, (TMP, 240): 105–
289): 36, 124 6
Maximus, at Tyre and Boston, (TMP, 97):
FRONTLET, THE, (TMP, 315): 36 57, 61, 82, 83, 88
MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN-I,
having described the nation, (TMP, 377): (TMP, 172): 87, 129, 130
123 MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN-II,
he who walks with his house . . ., (TMP, (TMP, 179): 58, 84
311): 34 Maximus, to Gloucester [I don’t mean, just
History is the Memory of Time, (TMP, 116): like that . . .], (TMP, 110): 133, 135
100 Maximus, to Gloucester: Letter 2, (TMP, 9):
54 –55, 57, 100, 103, 129, 136
I looked up and saw, (TMP, 343): 62 Maximus, to Gloucester: Letter 14 (TMP,
I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You, (TMP, 5): 63): 83, 87
12, 23, 38, 48– 49, 55–56, 79, 111–12, Maximus, to Gloucester: Letter 15 (TMP,
131 71): 89, 13
Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld],
Later Note on Letter # 15, A, (TMP, 249): (TMP, 184): 42– 44, 46, 48, 53, 54, 59,
11–15, 18–19, 23, 26, 28, 29, 40, 47, 107
57, 63, 71, 91, 97, 110 Maximus, to Gloucester, Sunday, July 19,
Letter 3, (TMP, 13): 112, 119 (TMP, 157): 138, 140
Letter 5, (TMP, 21): 57, 64 –65, 66 Maximus, to himself, as of “Phoenicians,”
Letter 6, (TMP, 30): 40, 50, 124 (TMP, 181): 86
159
160 INDEX OF POETIC UNITS
Maximus Letter # whatever, (TMP, 201): 33 Song and Dance of, The, (TMP, 58): 83
Maximus of Gloucester, (TMP, 473): 88, Songs of Maximus, The, (TMP, 17): 51
134, 137, 141 Space and Time the saliva, (TMP, 414):
my memory is, (TMP, 256): 100 76
my wife my car . . ., (TMP, 635): 142 Stiffening, in the Master Founders’ Wills,
(TMP, 132): 26–27, 97, 142
Nasturtium / is still my flower . . ., (TMP,
632): 87, 88, 142 That’s / the combination . . ., (TMP, 582):
58
On First Looking out through Juan de la to enter into their bodies, (TMP, 317): 35,
Cosa’s Eyes, (TMP, 81): 83 36
to travel Typhon, (TMP, 265): 95
Peloria . . ., (TMP, 257): 92–93, 138 Twist, The, (TMP, 86): 83, 88, 89, 94, 136,
Physically, I am home. Polish it, (TMP, 137
456): 104 Tyrian Businesses, (TMP, 39): 77–80, 82, 88
rages / strain / Dog of Tartarus, (TMP, Watch-house / Point . . ., (TMP, 394): 123
405): 60, 61 Wrote my first poems, (TMP, 299): 94, 97
Index
Achilles, 71 Cadmus, 80
Activity: of inner sources, 39, 79; and phys- Call me Ishmael, 54, 74, 103
ical entity, 20, 49; poetry as, 16, 18, 26, Cape Ann, 29, 99, 125, 126, 135
31, 40, 51, 53, 64, 74, 93, 106, 113, Cerberus, 76
114, 117, 131, 132 Christensen, Paul, 15, 150 n. 20
Actualization, 12, 46, 94; by the reader, 17, Clark, Tom, 144 n. 4, 146 n. 3, 147 n. 16,
29, 31, 46– 47, 82, 84; in “A Later Note 148 n. 10
on Letter # 15,” 18, 23, 47 Conant, James, 125–27
Agyasta, 128 Conant, Roger, 125–27
Algonquin Legends of New England, 34 Concrescence, 13, 21, 42–66, 68; and En-
Altieri, Charles, 23, 58, 100 yalion, 61; and experience, 45– 47, 57,
Anderson, Benedict, 119, 120 63; in “letter # 27”, 46; and writing, 50,
Aphrodite, 62 114
Ares, 59, 62 Confucius, 38
Aristotle, 24, 26, 30, 47, 79, 121, 122 Conte, Joseph M., 150 n. 20
Atomism, 20, 36, 69, 70, 81 Continuity: and atomism, 36, 70, 81; and
becoming, 70, 73, 76, 81, 83; of the
Beach, Christopher, 144 n. 5 event, 18; of the experience, 12, 45, 75,
Bergson, Henri, 71, 76 136
Berryman, John, 75 Creativity, 12, 16, 70, 73, 75, 81, 85, 110,
Body: and experience, 32, 33, 52, 54, 64 – 113, 114, 117
65, 77, 78, 79, 102–3, 117, 125, 134;
and family, 45; and home, 33–34, 36, Darwin, Charles, 37
37, 40, 44, 79, 123, 135; and inheri- Davis, William, 73
tance, 44, 45; and the “other,” 34 –35, Descartes, Rene, 15, 18, 23, 71, 110; as
95, 113; and poetry, 16 anti-atomist, 20; and Boston’s settling,
Boston, 26, 27, 28, 40, 92, 127 26–28, 40, 54, 66, 97; his concept of
Bove, Paul, 22, 34, 39, 145 n. 3, 147 n. 17 substance, 24, 25, 30, 32, 47, 48, 64,
Breathing: in “Later Note on Letter # 15, 142; as Whitehead’s rival, 18–19, 23,
A,” 18, 23; in “Letter 9,” 63; in “Letter 24 –29, 71
41,” 96; and nature, 45; and poetry, 16, Detienne, Marcel, 108, 109, 110
18, 22, 25, 32, 39, 76, 84, 89, 100; in Diorite, 95
“Songs of Maximus, The,” 52–53 Dogtown, 28, 29, 35, 36, 55, 57, 129, 136
Buddha, 38 Duncan, Robert, 91
Butterick, George F., 25, 35, 61, 84, 85,
93, 95, 96 Ehrenberg, Victor, 122
Byrd, Don, 54, 79, 129, 130 Einstein, Albert, 20, 21, 70, 72, 145 n. 6
161
162 INDEX
Eliade, Mircea, 103, 104, 106 65, 66, 79, 80, 82, 87, 88, 89, 92, 95,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 14, 145 n. 4 98, 100, 103, 109, 112, 114, 115, 120,
Entity: actual, 30–31, 32, 42, 46– 47, 50, 124, 127, 129, 133, 135, 138, 140
61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 74, 83, 85, 89, 93, Greek influence, 40, 43, 44, 59, 60, 67, 76,
96, 102, 118, 143; nouns and, 24; per- 80, 89, 100, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112,
ceiving, 51; physical, 20–21 113, 117, 122, 123, 125, 128, 131, 140
Enyalion, 76, 93, 95; and multiplicity, 59; Griffeth, Robert, 122
and the law of possibility, 61; and the Growth: and body, 33–34, 37, 38, 41, 45,
law of proportions, 60, 61 77, 79; and the “other,” 50, 53, 74, 76,
Ethos: of action, 12, 26, 111, 112, 113, 80; and space, 37–38, 39, 41, 49, 54,
116, 119, 127, 132, 135–36; and experi- 55, 80, 97, 125; and unity, 38, 42, 59,
ence, 51, 86; and hierarchies, 50, 56; and 60, 73, 118, 131
history, 55; of objectism, 38, 48
Event: and body, 44, 64; the city as, 49; and Halden-Sullivan, Judith, 148 n. 10
creating, 46; the poetic unit as, 18, 63; Hartley, the painter, 116
the world as, 12, 30–31, 48, 49, 87, 102 Havelock, Eric A., 107, 117
Experience, 30– 41; and becoming, 30–31, Hawking, Stephen, 72
53, 69, 83; bodily, 33, 34 –35, 51, 52, Hephaestus, 59, 62
79, 109; and existence, 25, 30–31, 40, Hera, 61, 62
41, 47, 65–66, 86, 106, 111, 120, 123; Heraclitus, 70, 74, 85, 87, 89, 107
and the “other,” 34 –35, 45, 46, 48, 53, Hercules, 62, 76, 93
85, 102, 131–32, 133–35, 139; in rela- Herodotus, 18, 19, 91, 92, 94, 99, 109, 110
tion to the subject, 30–31, 46, 82, 114, Hesiod, 87
120 History, 16, 55, 91–110; and facts, 91, 96,
98–99, 101, 111, 121; and the present,
Failure, 133–142; Olson’s sense of, 13, 17, 93, 96, 98, 100; and story, 98–100,
31, 52, 88, 106, 136, 139 109–10
Fenris, 76 Homer, 98, 99, 107, 108
Ferrini, Vincent, 31, 56, 64, 65, 66, 116, “Human Universe,” 40, 45, 101
118, 120, 124, 154 n. 14
Ferris, Timothy, 20, 37, 39, 147 n. 15 Jake, the fisherman, 116
Field: composition by, 19, 83; of energy, Jung, Carl Gustav, 84, 98, 139
19, 22, 35; Fishermen’s, 28–29, 98–99,
135; and the perception of space, 20, 34, Karlins, M., 45, 92, 134
121; theory of, 20–22 “The Kingfishers,” 75, 112
Flower, 77–78, 80, 82–87, 88, 89, 93, Kraus, Elizabeth, 71
118, 119, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142
Fluency, 13, 26, 41, 68–90; and becoming, Lady of Good, 35, 49, 117, 131
42, 68, 69; and creativity, 71, 73, 82; Locke, John, 42, 68
and permanence, 70–71 Logos, 16, 32, 98, 99, 100, 103, 106, 107,
Frankfort, Henri, 36, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 120
146 n. 13 Long poem: and the arrow of time, 16, 73,
Frazer, Julian, 70 75, 81, 90; and the concept of substance,
Fredman, Stephen, 60, 89, 144 n. 8, 145 n. 25; and epic tradition, 67, 75, 81, 87,
4, 152 n. 32 102, 107, 108; as life itself, 34, 67, 136;
as a poem of growth, 14, 23, 25, 41, 80;
Ginsberg, Allen, 75 its scope, 12, 16; as what precedes genre
Gloucester, 14, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 36, divisions, 34, 41, 47, 75
37, 38, 40, 44, 48, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, Lowell, Robert, 75
INDEX 163
Macro level, 13–14, 26, 28, 41, 68, 73, 75, Orality, 16, 46, 88, 108, 109
77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 96, 122 Orentes, 94
Manes, 93 Organism: philosophy of, 30, 74, 121, 124;
Mars, 59 the poem as, 12, 81, 85, 89, 122; reality
Massalia (Marseilles), 94 as, 14, 85, 89, 102–3, 122, 132, 142
Maud, Ralph, 147 n. 16
Maximus: as a guide or a teacher, 31, 32, Parmenides, 70, 107
38–39, 137–38, 139; the poet as, 18, Paul, Sherman, 144 n. 7
29, 35, 37, 38, 39, 49, 50, 58, 61–62, Pindar, 98, 99
69, 73, 80, 93, 112, 134, 139; the reader Place: living in, 64 –66, 96, 100, 112, 118,
as, 18, 53, 62, 69, 80; Stevens as, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 139; an opening
118, 137; from Tyre, 54, 138, 139, 140 place, 11–13, 23, 27–28, 52, 94, 95,
Maxwell, James Clerk, 20 96, 138–39, 143; phenomenology in,
Melville, Herman, 15, 20, 36, 37, 39, 103, 54, 57
150 n. 15 Plato, 98, 108, 122, 141
Memphis, 36 Polis, 26, 38, 44, 46, 49, 53, 100, 101,
Merk, Frederick, 29, 98 114, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124, 127, 128,
Merry, James, 129–30 131; and body, 46, 95, 109, 113, 115,
Micro level, 13–14, 26, 28, 41, 68, 75, 82, 117, 122, 123, 131, 132; Gloucester as,
84, 122 63, 113, 119, 131, 138–39, 140, 141
Modern science, 19–21, 70–71, 72, 73, 80; Potentiality, 20, 26, 29, 39; in nature, 49;
as influence, 12, 15, 19–20, 23, 39, 40, and poetry, 46– 47, 68, 81, 82, 89; real,
70, 71, 74; and mythopoeic approach 30, 47, 68, 131, 143
16, 36, 39, 100–101, 104, 115 Pound, Ezra, 14, 75, 112, 113, 136, 146 n.
Multiplicity. See Unity 9, 151 n. 24, 153 n. 1
Murray, Oswyn, 113, 121, 128, 131 Process: of becoming, 49, 69; Olson’s po-
Myth, 12, 15, 16, 33, 74, 87, 91–110; and etics as, 12, 13, 21–22, 23, 39, 46, 68,
creation, 35–36, 104, 106; and place, 88, 114; and perception, 52; of reading,
37, 129; understanding of, 99–100, 16–17, 18, 31, 47, 50, 75, 82, 84
103– 4, 132 Projection, 49, 88, 89; and the body, 34, 41,
Mythopoeic thinking: as influence, 12, 14, 79; in “Later Note on Letter # 15, A,” 18–
15, 100, 107; Olson’s understanding of, 19; in “Letter 9,” 63; and modern physics,
16, 25, 36, 49, 53, 63, 84 –85, 87, 101, 21, 40; in “Songs of Maximus, The,” 52
104 “Projective Verse,” 19, 21, 22, 23, 32, 34,
38, 41, 49, 74, 100, 108
Narrativity, 13, 16, 67–68, 77, 81, 85, 88, Ptah, 36
98, 102 Pytheas, 93, 94
Nationalism, 119–20, 122
New England, 15, 55, 112 Realization: and enduring object, 36; and
Newton, Issac, 20–21, 30, 36, 71, 74 identity, 62; and poetry, 31, 46– 47, 50,
53, 68, 83, 86, 88, 96, 108
Odin, 62 Ritual, 12, 16, 85, 104, 106, 130, 133,
Odysseus, 93 134 –35, 136, 138, 139; poetry as, 16,
Okeanos, 35, 50, 84, 85, 87, 93, 96, 98, 63, 103, 108, 109, 113, 129, 132
105, 129
Olsen, Carl, 129 Samson, 79
Olson, Karl Joseph (father), 116, 117 Seriality, 45, 81, 82, 121
One and many, 16, 21, 24, 25, 34, 57, 62, Space: and body, 34 –36, 37, 39, 40, 44 –
68–69, 81, 85, 124, 137 45, 54, 117, 130; in physics, 20–21,
164 INDEX
Space (continued) Trojan War, 91

39– 40, 70, 71, 73; in poetry, 18, 21, 22, Typhon, 94, 95, 96
28, 46, 55, 76, 81, 87, 111 Tyr, 62, 76
Spanos, William V., 147 n. 16 Tyre, 54, 79, 80, 92, 94, 138, 139
Spatial patterns, 13–14, 16, 46, 69, 71, 75,
81 Unity: of body and mind/soul, 32–34, 36,
Spinoza, Baruch, 145 n. 4 40, 44, 48, 102, 142; and Descartes’ the-
Stability, 69, 70, 71 ory of substance, 25, 28, 71; of eclectic
Stance, 31, 38, 45, 49, 111–33; and hier- sources 15, 16, 82; of the Maximus
archy, 117, 119–20; and love, 113, 118; Poems, 15, 73, 82, 136, 140, 141; and
and responsibility, 114, 131, 139 Multiplicity, 12, 14, 20, 24, 25–26, 32,
Stevens, the carpenter, 97, 115, 118, 137 37, 40, 46, 48, 57, 59, 67, 69, 82, 85,
Story, 12, 16, 91–110; of Gloucester, 14, 87, 107, 113, 117, 122, 124, 132, 140;
17, 26–28, 37, 87, 88, 92, 103, 130–31; and the “other,” 48; reality as, 20, 37,
and myth, 99–100, 102, 104, 106, 130– 45, 71, 82, 114, 141; various aspects of,
31; and poetry, 17, 64, 68, 69, 75, 76, 38, 48, 92, 104, 107
85, 88, 90, 98, 121, 129; as a poten-
tiality, 26, 87–88, 89; and struggle, 18, Verrocchio, the sculpter, 116
29, 59, 69, 91–92, 99, 135, 136 Vidar, 62
Substance: according to Descartes, 24 –26, Von Hallberg, Robert, 27, 80, 100, 114,
34; according to Whitehead, 24 –26, 30– 144 n. 6, 148 n. 20
31, 74
Western culture, 12, 34, 134; and its
Taggart, John, 150 n. 15 canon, 16, 37, 69, 97, 103, 140, 142;
Taoism, 85 Olson’s critique of, 16, 18, 19, 32, 38,
Tartarus, 94 49, 52, 79, 85, 92, 100, 101, 107, 113,
Temporal patterns, 14, 16, 46, 71, 76 121, 127, 138
Thoreau, Henry David, 14, 145 n. 4 White, John, 125
Thucidides, 18, 19, 91, 98, 99, 109, 110 Whitman, Walt, 14
Thule, 94 Wilhelm, Richard, 85
Time: in ancient world, 103; and history, 99– Winthrop, John, 114, 133
100; in physics, 21, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 81 Work, 74, 103, 110, 114, 115, 116, 117
Transition: and actual entity, 42, 47; be-
tween units and levels, 46, 63, 68, 69, 88 Zeus, 94

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Charles Olson

and Alfred North Whitehead

Translated by Batya Stein

I AM GRATEFUL TO DAN MIRON, THE SUPERVISOR OF MY DOCTORAL

University of Califorina Press: Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Edited by

University of California Press: Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Ed-

Harper Collins Publishers: Ferris, Timothy. Coming of Age in the Milky

Prof. Ann Charters: Charters, Ann, ed. Olson/Melville: A Study

University of Connecticut: Olson, Charles. Muthologos: The Collected

Harvard University Press: Von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The

New Directions: Olson, Charles. Selected Writings. Edited by

& Descartes was the value

until Whitehead, who cleared out the gunk

& that concept of history (not Herodotus’s,

at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides, or

—live television or what—is a lie

is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal

The poetics of such a situation

“A LATER NOTE ON LETTER # 15” IS A POETIC MANIFESTO THAT PRE-

temporal patterns of thinking, multiplicity in unity. In the discussion that

the cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead and the mythopoeic worldview of

Olson’s enthusiasms encompass such oddments as Hopi language, Mayan statuary,

The assumption I wish to validate in this book sets up a hierarchy of these

THE MANIFESTO STYLE OF THE POETIC UNIT “A LATER NOTE ON LETTER

The field, as defined by Ferris, is the “domain or environment in which the

explanation should be understood, in terms of Olson’s worldview, as claiming

WHITEHEAD REJECTS THE CONCEPT OF A SELF-EXISTENT AND INDEPEN-

A metaphysics built on the subject-predicate principle, as a dichotomous

Actually exclaimed by a cook at Black Mountain, Cornelia Williams, while work-

Whitehead points to Descartes’ incoherence: it is impossible to create a

some existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed is necessarily

much savor for. As they also

did savor some spiritual

enthusiasm does not lead

Boston Common. Proportion’s

As Von Hallberg suggests,

was 1630 still sailors’

is a greate family” Stop

not savages but thought

a map of Dogtown: St cod via

According to Olson, Descartes’s military service in several armies during

who cleared out the gunk

The “actual entity” is Whitehead’s alternative to the Cartesian (and Aristo-

subject that acts and experiences. Whereas Whitehead speaks of a world of

Once a man was traveling through the woods, and

So he went off carrying his house until night

to enter into their bodies

According to Butterick, this passage in the poem actually refers to the

The city is Gloucester, the town of Olson/Maximus, of which Dogtown is

Similarly, “the front” relates to the geography of Gloucester-Dogtown, which

The earth with a city in her hair

The proper balance between atomism and continuity is of importance to physical

Relativity, blurred borders, the status of “object” and “subject”—Olson

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

Olson’s choice of such figures as Confucius or Buddha, mentors whose

beyond space, observing it from outside or from above, projecting himself on

Not to subordinate body to soul, not to subordinate the other to yourself,

WHITEHEAD DRAWS A DISTINCTION BETWEEN TWO CONCEPTS TO EX-

The fluency discussed in this chapter is that of fusion or, in Whitehead’s