Charles Olson

Charles Olson, at his most irritating, is like a computer overloaded with modern thought and ancient culture. He simply spews out citations, translations, and beliefs. That unruly habit helps breed the charge that his wordscapes are jagged and impenetrable. Such contortions are matters of surface only. totality of the work suggests a deep coherence though the later poems look different. If the earlier poems tend to be columns of lines the later ones are blocks of lines, fragments thrown on the page. If the early poet is a man of vision, the later one is a visionary. Yet the writing, prose and poetry, has a radical continuity. I offer a preliminary image of that work: a gyroscope. Picture three rings, on three planes, set within each other: the poet, in theory and practice; the historian; and the cosmographer. last devises a mythology, a set of figures, and a cosmography, a map of the heavens and the earth which they inhabit. wheel within which the rings are set is the poet's ego; the structure of the self. rings interlock. For example, the poet hammers out the intuitions of the historian and of the cosmographer. Such a figure even figures in Olson's poem, The Binnacle, written around 1957

Art · History · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• "Mr. Sauer" and the Writers

  Open Access•James J Parsons•Geographical Review•1996

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