The Distances

by Charles Olson

Poems by Charles Olson . 16mo pp. 96 Brossura (wrappers) Molto buono (Very Good)

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Charles Olson was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the Language School, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."

Olson's first book was Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick which was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University.[5] In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the breath of the poet and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic. The poem "The Kingfishers", first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), is an application of the manifesto.

His second collection, The Distances, was published in 1960. Olson served as rector of the Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1956. During this period, the college supported work by John Cage, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and many other members of the 1950s American avant garde. Olson is listed as an influence on artists including Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney.[6]

Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers", "In Cold Hell, in Thicket", and The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of", manifest a sincere, original, accessible, emotionally powerful voice. "Letter 27 [withheld]" from The Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns. Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley.

In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound's Cantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writing The Maximus Poems, a project that was to remain unfinished at the time of his death. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled. Dogtown, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside on a tree stump in Dogtown.) The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre, an itinerant Greek philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The final, unfinished volume imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones.

Reviews

[e · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only just bought this volume second-hand (for $5!) less than a week ago, &, tho I've read all these many times over for years now, have already deemed it deserving of permanent residence in my backpack (alongside the Selected Poems volumes of Duncan, Pound, & cummings). It's only a shame this is so terribly out of print because I feel like it's the better introduction to Olson's poetry than the more recent Selected (University of California edition). In any case, it makes for a wonderful (life-long) companion.

[Noah Leben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awake,

my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle

of being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires
be left upon the earth. Let even your mother

go. Let there be only paradise

The desperateness is, that the instant
which is also paradise (paradise
is happiness) dissolves

into the next instant, and power
flows to meet the next occurrence

Although I am not sure I am willing to declare any single poem in this volume as rival to the best of, say, Stevens or Yeats—although both The Kingfishers and As The Dead Prey Upon Us would be worthy contenders—what I am willing to declare is that this is perhaps the single finest collection in contemporary American poetry when one considers the consistency of the individual poems, the intellectual sweep on display, the forceful strength of its gnomic declarations, and the attentiveness to rhythm (the balance of various rhythms). Pound and Williams are of course directly cited as a reference but I hear Eliot (in The Kingfishers in particular, even if Olson disavowed his influence) and Oppen as well (although Olson was familiar with Oppen, he claims not to have read his work: convergent evolution?). What Olson is able to achieve in these poems is an incredible union of prose rhythm and verse rhythm (exalting both while never dwelling in the morass of either), in conjunction with that rare third vatic register that he perhaps inherited from Melville (although maybe it is best to not dwell too deeply on specific literary inheritances, lest one discount the singular man that is the poet at hand, the flourishings unique in him). Olson's poems at their finest have a sense of universal declaration and a truth-value which can only be found in the finest works of art. The ways in which Olson is able to distill his erudition and fragment his sources through the prism of his being is astounding; one could read this collection a lifetime through and still find hidden resonances.

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked up C.O.'s "The Distances" in a used bookshop in LA. After doing a bunch of research on Black Mountain I figured I owed him another chance. I'd read him in undergrad when I took part in a group independent study course where we read literary magazines from 1910-1996. (Course was so awesome; we read original source material that had been archived). I was tolerant but nonplussed by Olson back then, whereas I really jammed out to his cohorts Creeley, Duncan, Corman. So I pulled C.O. off the shelf in LA and was immediately drawn in by the first poem "The Kingfishers". It's time to give the big guy another chance. I think I could learn something from him about writing in this particular moment.

[Allyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

from paul

[David Garza · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of typical Charles Olson poems, which means this is a great collection. I might have given this 4.5 stars.

[j · Rating 5 out of 5]

always a pleasure to revisit