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Poets Beyond the Barricade
Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960
By DALE M. SMITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1749-2
Chapter One
"Dear Gloucester"
Poet Charles Olson has issued a last desperate appeal to the public ... —Editors, Gloucester Daily Times, August 8, 1967
While best known for his epic The Maximus Poems, a work that self-consciously engages a modernist tradition in the spirit of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and others, Charles Olson modified the practice of modernist pastiche and assembly to establish a voice that was plausibly competent as a vehicle of public consciousness. His complicated practice as a poet-orator—a man committed to poetic production, literary criticism, radical pedagogy, and civic engagement—provides insight to how poetic gestures in public contexts can motivate reflection on issues important for civic awareness and social environments. Through Olson's letters and poems in the 1960s written for the Gloucester Daily Times we see also how poetry can take on a new audience, moving from a literary context to one of municipal debate. If Olson's modernist literary practices restricted his access to a larger public audience, his writing for the town daily narrowed distances between personal vision and communal realization, and with the help of key public figures he was able to bring a historically grounded perspective to the Massachusetts community where he lived in the 1960s. By looking closely at his gestural shifts away from literary coterie to civic space, we can discover how civic possibilities are maintained through poetry in the controversial situations Olson addressed. While contingent public concerns provoked responses in him that narrowed the distance between private experience and more integrated social textures, his actions contributed to a lasting regional legacy. Through his relationship with concerned citizens, editors, and local publishers, Olson's community advocacy invited reflection and demanded action over the inevitable urban changes Gloucester faced in the 1960s.
While he negotiated the distance between literary vision and public argument in powerful and iconoclastic ways, the intervention of editors at the town daily in Gloucester ensured a public reception for his civic address. in particular, Paul Kenyon, the paper's editor, and Philip Weld, publisher, contributed greatly to the preparation of Olson's idiosyncratic literary style for a large public audience, and a portion of this chapter looks at that task while considering the results and municipal possibilities Olson enabled. in terms of extending knowledge of public culture and the rhetorical methods available to someone like Olson who, in many ways, addressed a community's sense of values, the situations described here suggest modal possibilities inspired by contingent local issues of ecological preservation, urban planning, and architectural development. While not all of Olson's advocacy projects were successfully realized, he left a record of public inquiry that complicates deliberative discourse based on actualities of existing civic discussion; he established, moreover, a record of committed gestures, performative acts, and strategic interruptions that move between literary claims of authority and public capacities for engagement. Like Walter Benjamin, Olson pursued a "contextualist program" and was "antiformalist" in his approach to a poetics grounded in a materiality of communication. The archive of these actions provides a public record for understanding how such strategies influenced a region of the American north east, and it preserves events of keen interest that enable the public queries pursued here.
But as a writer who is often associated with many aspects of Ezra Pound's version of modernism, it is possible to overly identify Olson's "code of gestures" with the strong, performative presentations in the Cantos, or to those vituperative radio broadcasts transmitted from World War II Italy. Both authors privilege conservative instincts of preservation, and both are critical of business interests (or of what Olson calls "merchandise men, / who get to be President,") that intervene on prior cultural traditions. Olson's critical perspective, however, is directed at formations of capital that had been imposed on geographies that, to him, once bestowed identity and purpose for communities, and he integrated these into historic public and personal legacies. But the tendency in both men to idealize the past creates what can be seen as a romanticized reaction to the industrial and postindustrial forms of modernity each responded to. This cultural stance is echoed, moreover, in the writing of Olson's student Edward Dorn, whose penetrating analysis of US society critiqued instead postwar commodity culture, focusing especially on what he called (echoing Pound), its "ruinous increase." This criticism of the proliferation of postwar consumption—a contrived system of growth leading to environmental devastation and disciplined socioeconomic relationships—correlates closely with Olson's own responses in the pages of the Gloucester Daily Times. While certainly a strong play is made by these writers to exert literary authority for their claims on behalf of idealistic, prewar visions of a socially integrated American polis, Olson's postwar criticism, unlike Pound's, focuses on the practical benefits of conservation, resource management, regional identity, and urban planning, not on idealistic notions of order, tradition, and anti-Semitism.
But the macho voice Olson creates associates strongly with Pound, whose own masculinist performances may have been derived, like other modernists, from fears of "the distance between aesthetic sterility and artistic authority" in a new era that broke radically with the past. As Michael Davidson explains, machismo in the writing of postwar male poets paid homage "to the old guys of modernism ... by reinstating an ideal of heroic masculinity and by returning to romanticism's cult of energy, orality, primitivism, and expressivism." For Davidson, the "compulsory character of homosocial literary communities" created "innovative poetic practices," too. He claims, moreover, that these "communities saw themselves in direct contrast to more public agendas of consolidation and consensus," and this certainly will be evident in the voices Olson constructs for his public writing. The thing to note for the purposes of this chapter is that Olson's construction of masculinity is complicated by cultural attitudes, literary homage, class identification, and other values that shaped the potentials in his poetic vocabulary. The very male voices that Olson and other new American poets create in the Cold War era are in many ways reactive to systemic social and economic changes in America at that time. But Olson also registers a different kind of voice—one that is vulnerable and less certain than the many performances that animate Pound's shifting social and creative masks.
Another difference was Olson's obvious political and ethnic commitments. As a new Deal Democrat working under the FDR administration during World War II, Olson supported Roosevelt's social policies and actively addressed first-generation ethnic groups regarding the Democratic Party's position on the war. Olson identified with many of the issues immigrants faced, while Pound's rigid screed against "a botched civilization" betrayed a serious rift between the poets: one engaged in the social and political particularities of US citizenship, the other from a great distance lamenting the decline of tradition and values. Consequently, Olson self-consciously stepped away from Pound's influence; thus, after World War II, when the elder poet had been incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, Olson wrote of him as a "traitor" who "stood with the lovers of ORDER." It is worth noting also that Olson, the new Deal Democrat, and Robert Duncan (whose work will be considered in chapter 2), share much in common with Dorn's critical observations of a heedlessly expanding American culture and economy. This is a very different sociocritical affinity for postwar interventions in poetry than the openly fascist, cultural-traditional establishment of literary objectives sustained by Pound and others of his generation.
I have lingered over Olson's relationship to modernism because he did little to modify his writing for a public medium, using instead modernist strategies of montage along with disruptive syntax and tonal registers that colored the process of his writing in deliberate ways. Because of these literary commitments, his public presentation allows a rare opportunity to observe the rhetorical effects of a marginal voice making arguments in a more culturally accessible venue. While Olson's letters and poems to the Gloucester Daily Times focus on local issues, particularly on topics of architectural and ecological preservation, civic history, and the maintenance of common spaces, the occasions of his letters and poems provide insights to how rhetorical poetics influences public space. Primarily, I will explore how scale shifts contribute to the transforming contexts of modernist public discourse, as well as show how poetic gestures in Olson's writing for a public audience could alter contingent plans with new possibilities of municipal action.
Guilt and Urban Change in Gloucester
Olson's letters to the Gloucester Daily Times provide a unique opportunity to witness a poet's attempt to shift scales in readership from a small literary community to a larger civic audience. Olson's letters should be looked at as an effort to bring arguments in poetry to a genre that typically allows some degree of epideictic discourse within the more deliberative and forensic modes of a daily paper. in its pages, editor Paul Kenyon and publisher Philip Weld encouraged Olson to express his views to a public audience invested in issues that were also significant to the poet, even offering, in 1963, to give the poet a regular column. They provided print space for Olson's claims, frequently inserted photographs to illustrate some of the primary concerns in his letters, and on occasion, Kenyon provided editorial commentary to help interpret Olson for his local audience. in many ways we may think of this process as a collaboration between the poet and his editor, and as such the role of mediation plays a significant part in the scale shifts that occur for Olson's work. Moreover, Kenyon did not alter Olson's letters directly, most of which are written with the same poetic form and diction as The Maximus Poems. Taking the poet's concerns into account, Kenyon went so far as to even reproduce Olson's peculiar typography through facsimile reproductions. Some of Olson's letters, however, were framed with editorial comments to help readers understand the arguments better, and photographs of buildings important to Olson's arguments often accompanied his editorials, thus providing a link between the common experience of the city with the uncommon rhetorical gestures of the modernist poet. More about this editorial relationship will be described a little later, but for now let us begin with an exemplary editorial by Olson.
In his third letter to the paper from December 3, 1965, we get a sense of the clash of modernist montage within the editorial packaging for the Gloucester Daily Times. The occasion for Olson's letter is the destruction of the Davis-McMillan house, a town house at 69 Middle Street next to the YMCA in downtown Gloucester. Solomon H. Davis had built it in 1840. Because of its ornamental Greek columns, the house was known locally as "Solomon's Temple." They wanted to replace the house with a new swimming pool. Olson's response mixes outrage at the citizens of Gloucester for allowing the demolition of the house while providing a historical context for reading the value of local architecture. Written in the oratorical style of the early books of The Maximus Poems, Olson assumes a Maximus-like persona whose ethos is built on archival knowledge of town history. The first portion of the poem begins:
A Scream to the Editor:
Moan the loss, another
house
is gone
Bemoan the present
which assumes
its taste, bemoan the easiness
of smashing anything
Moan Solomon Davis'
house, gone
for the YMCA, to build another
of its cheap benevolent places
bankers raise money for,
and who loan money for new houses: each destruction doubles
our loss and doubles bankers' gain when four columns[....]
Here, with performed indignation, Olson "moans the loss" of a physical piece of the city's heritage. While he is sensitive to the details of Gloucester's architectural history, he is skeptical of the institutions of finance that support the replacement of historic structures with urban conveniences. He refers to the YMCA as a "cheap benevolent place," throwing into question any positive social effects the organization may offer the city. Olson is skeptical of the system of finance that seeks to replace historic property with structures the polis does not need, at least from Olson's informed historical perspective. in other words, a YMCA exists in Gloucester because bankers have persuaded the city to make room for it at the expense of historic structures. This interrogation of capital as a force of destruction motivates much of Olson's work and supports many of his angry addresses to the polis. He argues for the value of historic memory and the relations of that memory through civic space. For Olson, the city's expansion in the 1960s made room for new sites without a thorough reflective process on the value of historic structures and their revived possibilities in the present. To his perspective, the total environment provided a sense of individual value, and when the architecture changed, so too the people.
As the poetic epistle continues, Olson moves from the historic circumstance of the destruction of "Solomon's Temple" to address the people directly, writing:
Bemoan a people who spend
beyond themselves, to flourish
and to further themselves
as well made the Solomon Davis house itself
was such George Washington
could well have been inaugurated
from its second floor
and now it is destroyed because 70 years ago
Gloucester already could build the y, and Patillo's
equally ugly brick front and building[....]
Here Olson examines temporal scale in a civic context. The YMCA, built seventy years prior, and "Patillo's," a dry goods warehouse, constructed in 1895, "dwarfed the Davis- McMillan house." Olson's argument "bemoans" the loss of Gloucester's original mercantile existence to the corporate interests of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here he returns to a theme prevalent throughout The Maximus Poems, wherein he argues to preserve an ideal of Gloucester as a village of fishermen and merchants, and he regrets the town's decisions to allow newer corporate expansions to transform his beloved polis.
The poem/editorial continues with considerable historic details that are relevant to his argument about the destruction of the Davis- McMillan house. once he has provided the historical civic relation of the house to the history of Gloucester, Olson shifts tone from that of the concerned citizen interested in Gloucester's architectural history to a voice of outrage at the social catastrophe of the kind of historical erasure he perceives. He writes:
oh city of mediocrity and cheap ambition destroying
its own shoulders its own back greedy present persons
stood upon, stop this renewing without reviewing
loss loss loss no gains oh not moan stop stop stop this
total loss of surface and of mass,
putting bank parking places with flowers, spaces dead so dead
in even the sun one does not even know one passes by them
now the capitals of Solomon Davis' house
now the second floor behind the black grill work
now the windows which reach too,
now the question who if anyone was living in it
now the vigor of the narrow and fine clapboards on the back
now that flatness right up against the street,
one is in despair, they talk and put flowers up
on poles high enough so no one can water them,
and nobody
objects
when houses which have held and given light
a century, in some cases two centuries,
and their flowers
aren't even there in one month[....]
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poets Beyond the Barricade by DALE M. SMITH Copyright © 2012 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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