Review of Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
(869 or 627 words)
My daughter’s taking A.P. English
at Auburn High. I told her to ask her teacher if he had ever read Charles
Olson. She did ask him and his response was “who’s that?” I had assumed (always
dangerous) that advanced placement students would be exposed to advanced
material. Wrong. A film screening this April (National Poetry Month) on many
PBS stations, including Seattle’s KCTS on April 24th at 12N,
celebrates the life of Olson, one of the biggest U.S. poets who ever lived. Polis in This: Charles Olson and the
Persistence of Place is the movie and it is part biography, part love
letter to
Six foot seven and over three
hundred pounds, Olson was a bureaucrat in the Roosevelt administration, but it
was the horrors of
John Stilgoe,
Professor of Landscape History, at Harvard University says in Polis is This, “The local environment is
the prism through which anyone’s understanding of the cosmos is filtered; to
look at the outer world from a vantage point in the local. For many people the
local landscape was very uninteresting and ordinary, but for him, it was the
threshold to the world.” Olson’s epic The
Maximus Poems tracks the history of
In addition to place, it was Olson’s method that is important. Salient lines from his essay Projective Verse, read in the film by actor John Malkovich, suggest that the poem is an energy transfer from the poet, from wherever he or she got it, though the poem to the reader. The method should be spontaneous and form is never more than an extension of content. As his friend Robert Creeley was quoted in the film as saying, Olson’s was, “a poetry that can inform itself by what it’s doing, rather than what it “should be” doing or “must” do or “has to” do or “has done”, is a much more active and engaging way of proceeding.”
And then to use the method and act;
in Olson’s case, write; fight the filling of wetlands and the destruction of
classic local buildings with letters to the editor, and teach others. As part
of
The movie is a primer. It doesn’t go too deep into Olson’s work or his life, including the warts and all, but that is not its purpose. It is for the A.P. English teachers whose idea of contemporary poetry is that verse written with in a manner beholden to the 19th century. The film is for Gloucester, a town that still does not know what it had in Olson, or about its own sense of place. Most of all this film is for the person who intuits that Olson’s process is revolutionary because it empowers and allows someone to act with their whole self in this world; a world that values division and a parts mentality. For someone who intuits that you can find out for yourself.
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Olson was, and his work remains, a
threat to the
This morning of the small snow
I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet
which makes of the sink time, the drop
of the water on water as sweet
as the Seth Thomas
in the old kitchen
my father stood in his drawers to wind (always
he forgot the 30th day, as I don’t want to remember
the rent
a house these days
so much somebody else’s,
especially
Congoleum’s
Or the plumbing,
that it doesn’t work, this I like, have even used paper clips
as well as a string to hold the ball up. And flush it
with my hand
But that the car doesn’t, that no moving thing moves
without that song I’d void my ear of, the musicracket
of all ownership…
In the land of plenty, have
nothing to do with it
take the way of
the lowest,
including
your legs, go
contrary, go
sing
Paul E. Nelson
908 I
253.735.MEAT
pen@splab.org