By Charles Alexander
"Charles Olson: Language as a Physical Fact" was a conference and broadside display based around Charles Olson's Maximus poems on October 10-11, 2008, at the Poetry Center. Here’s what four of the conference participants said when asked the question: Why Olson? Why Now? What follows after is a reflection by Charles Alexander on Olson's impact on broadsides.
Cole Swensen. Charles Olson's work seems particularly apposite now because it was at the root of the contemporary notion of line as based in the body's natural music, which, in turn, was to posit that the body has a natural music—as expressed by breath, pulse, and other rhythms—and that poetry is uniquely capable of revealing it. This concept, radical when Olson first proposed it, has become so accepted as to be taken for granted, to the point that many young writers don't even know where it came from. When a central principle becomes that ingrained, it's more than time to bring it out for critical and creative examination.
Barbara Henning. Why Olson now? Because as we go over country and world borders, little fruit markets are disappearing as big conglomerates spread. Money and power de-localizing our lives. There is a big effort to look the same and talk the same. Because our days and words can be over technologically processed, abstracted, digitally zoning out. Why Olson now? To see, hear and celebrate the particular, the memory of the particular and the familiar and the interaction of the historical and mythical voices in our present lived lives. And to connect to our bodies and our breath and our particularities. A geography of consciousness. That's why today Olson is important to me.
Steve McCaffery. Despite occultation of Olson's reputation a return to his ideas and writing is more urgent than ever. Olson is the poet who introduced scale and ontology into poetics, radically revising natural history into the human universe. He was also the exemplary poet of the Cybernetic Age. With the earth on the brink of ecological disaster and language enmashed in the age of information, Olson appears as a prophet and perhaps a destroying angel.
Anne Waldman. In this frantic dominating election season Democrat Jared Polis, a civically minded, gay activist who quotes Allen Ginsberg at his rallies, just won the congressional primary in Colorado. For months we’ve had the sign “Polis” stuck in lawns all over Boulder. Imagine the delight of this Olsonian—borrowed and expanded—syncretic “zone”-word, this “logos” and “topos” permeating the landscape. At every street juncture, I’ve thought why still Olson, why now? The polis needs continual attention, obviously. And the culture needs its poets who obviate political master agon-narrative of the “demon box”. Paltry mainstream TV coverage, I noted, of the very informative symposium I attended yesterday at Denver Press Club on voting fraud, so little of what is going outside—outside the official convention on the streets of Denver, the “Funk the War” march etc. CSPAN broadcast from the Mercury Café where Code Pink holds headquarters. But it’s exciting, inside or out the halls of ambition, what a poet may do, point to & I am thinking again, epistolary virtual modalities. I think of Olson’s desperate civic letters re: the devastation of Gloucester, and what is lost to that polis. And yet the people I know who continue to work there, strive there in gloucestermegalopolis, I think of the polis in our virtual space, what Barack Obama has spurred through the Internet. Are we all our own “democracies” now? Hyperconnectivity begets mimeses begets hyperempowerment? Is this a good thing? So along those lines….. the interactive view of the history of life on earth….and all of us “hot for the world they lived in”, “another kind of nation” & send out a report...
Broadside: the fire from a cannon on the side of a ship, or frequently the simultaneous fire from all of the cannon on one side of an 18th century man of war, at close range. These cannons weren’t all that effective unless at short range, from which they could pierce the well-built hull of a wooden ship. This term then applied to printed pieces, printed on one side of a sheet of paper, most often in large type, posted publicly for political purpose. Sometimes rebellious purposes, or anti-rebellious purposes—think of the Gunpowder Plot or the Popish Plot of 17th Century England. There were also broadside ballads, in the 16th & 17th century, songs circulated and sung in public. Broadsides then, meant to have large impact, yet getting some of that impact through bold and artful design, intended for public purpose.
An artful field on which to dance with word and image, color and form. A sheet that may be printed, marked, folded, sprayed, embossed, debossed, sewn, cut through, collaged, possibly even kissed, like Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Pere Lachaise.
Broadsides today are often where printers, designers, and publishers play. An artful field on which to dance with word and image, color and form. A sheet that may be printed, marked, folded, sprayed, embossed, debossed, sewn, cut through, collaged, possibly even kissed, like Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Pere Lachaise. Play for the sheer fun of it, or conscious attempt to work out design issues. Short pieces of text, so quite often poems, though I have printed very short stories, quotations, single lines of text, and broadsides that have no text at all. Some broadside producers have designed text into shape, image, altar. I have sewn two differently printed sheets of paper together with red thread, standing for the blood of the body or the anger in our minds. I have printed COURAGE on a small sheet of paper to send to friends around the globe, at times when that trait seemed sorely needed.
The first time I ever set something in metal type, put it in a press, fed paper through that press, the resulting image was a broadside. Four short poems I had written, in black, another color for the inspired title “Four Poems,” a line at the bottom of explanation and of thanks to my teacher and mentor in printing and in thinking about relationship of type to paper to image to space. As I pulled page from press cylinder, I was hooked. Words on paper, poems in space, letters and forms in the field, were from then on a part of my life. I painted that page with an abstract brush stroke, hung it in a room, eventually framed it. It stands as beginning.
Now, September 2008, broadside to me means Charles Olson broadsides, the field of The Maximus Poems, letters cut in time and space, the poet the one who has taught me more than any other about the field of the poem, taken as history, archaeology, time, space, page and possibility. He writes of migration, and I migrate letters into their place on the field, in and on the broadside. Not so much cannon blast, as invitation. Come into this space. Enter the wor(l)d.