Charles Olson Centenary Celebration

As for me, I'm a third of the way through the massive Maximus Poems and not likely to return to it anytime soon. The energy spent on it didn't always pan out for me. Anybody have other Olson I should know? I've read several volumes of the Creeley-Olson correspondence, which have been much more edifying than Olson's poetry, I'm sorry to say. But it is his centenary, and he should be centenarianized. I just don't cotton to his stuff much, myself.

Charles Olson was a complicated man who wrote complicated poetry.

The Worcester native was also a big man — 6 feet 8 inches — who still casts quite a shadow and presence in 2010, his centennial year. A “Charles Olson Centenary Celebration” being held in Worcester this week will draw a number of guest poets and scholars, and include performances, workshops, a symposium, and even the screening of a film about Olson’s life, “Polis Is This,” narrated by John Malkovich.

“It’s turning into quite a notable event,” said Mark Wagner, program chairman and a member of the Worcester County Poetry Association, one of the centenary sponsors. “It’s been a ton of work, but at the same time there’s a real tribe of ‘Olson-ites’ who are going to come together.”

Events this week are scheduled to include “Project Verse” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, a reading at Clark University led by students at Worcester-area colleges; a talk and poetry reading at WPI Thursday by nationally renowned poet Anne Waldman; and symposium discussions Friday and Saturday on an array of topics ranging from “Olson’s Politics/Poetics of Transnational Utopia” to “Charles Olson and The Blackstone Canal.” More.

The Worcester County Poetry Association sponsors the Olson Centenary, and you can find the relevant pages here. Many poets are reading and panelling here, and it's no doubt worth your time.

Comments

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared. His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years. James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t

Charlie Brice

Immortality You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts every third or fourth morning, cover those non-nut nuts with blueberries because they have gobs of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss every other night to inhibit heart infections, use mouthwash several times-a-day to ward-off armies of oral bacteria, walk the dog every night for a mile, eat an orange daily, take your Lipitor horse pill, your Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi- vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut your Metoprolol in half and take it for your arrythmias, and you do all this instead of church, instead of fingering rosary beads and telling yourself that somewhere near our galaxy’s big black hole Jesus and Mary are floating around without oxygen masks or spacesuits, and it’s in this way that you avoid the anvil of disease, the miasma of malaise, the numinosity of pneumonia—in this way you make sure never to die, you make sure to live forever and ever. Amen. Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry

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