The Collected Poems of Charles Olson

Excluding the Maximus Poems

Charles Olson, George F. Butterick

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520212312
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520920415
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson (1910-1970) has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry is marked by an almost limitless range of interest and extraordinary depth of feeling. Olson's themes are among the largest conceivable: empowering love, political responsibility, historical discovery and cultural reckoning, the wisdom of dreams and the transformation of consciousness—all carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and coolly demanding. Until recently, Olson's reputation as a major figure in American literature has rested primarily on his theoretical writings and his epic work, the Maximus Poems. With The Collected Poems an even more impressive Olson emerges. This volume brings together all of Olson's work and extends the poetic accomplishment that influenced a generation. Charles Olson was praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors. He was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." His indispensable essays, "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe, " and his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael, remain as fresh today as when they were written.
A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson (1910-1970) has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry is marked by an almost limitless range of interest and extraordinary depth of feeling. Olson's themes are among the larges

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Purgatory Blind
• You, Hart Crane
• Birth’s Obituary
• Atalanta
• White Horse
• Fire is
• Fable for Slumber
• Hymn to the Word
• Tomorrow
• The House
• By Cure of—Sulfa
• Law
• A Lion upon the Floor
• Sing, Mister, Sing
• The K
• Pacific Lament
• She
• She, Thus
• The Night
• A Translation
• Her Dream, Half Remembered
• Ballad for Americans
• Key West
• New England March
• Lower Field—Enniscorthy
• Said Adam i
• Burial Ground
• Enniscorthy Suite
• The Town
• Afternoon
• 2 Propositions and 3 Proof
• A Lustrum for You, E.P.
• The Winter After
• Marry the Marrow
• There Was a Youth Whose Name Was Thomas Granger
• Trinacria
• La Préface
• The Dragon-Fly
• Epigraph to Call Me Ishmael
• Lalage!
• The Return
• Bagatto
• “Double, double, root and branch…”
• The Fool
• A Constance, This Day
• The Moebius Strip
• X to the Nth
• The Green Man
• Canto One Hundred and One
• Your Eyes
• R2
• In the Hills South of Capernaum, Port
• A Spring Song for Cagli
• Willie Francis and the Electric Chair
• Move Over
• A Fish Is the Flower of Water
• Landscape, Without Color
• Only the Red Fox, Only the Crow
• All You Can Do
• “Put him this way…”
• Conqueror
• Conqueror
• February 10, One Year Too Late
• “Elements of clothes …”
• Igor Stravinsky
• Troilus
• Siena
• Sans Name
• Li Po
• Tanto e Amara
• Name-Day Night
• La Chute
• La Chute II
• La Chute III
• Dura
• The Kingfishers
• Epigon
• The Laughing Ones
• The Praises
• The Babe
• “all things stand out against the sky…”
• “hear my prayer my father…”
• “under every green tree…”
• The Advantage
• These Days
• A Po-sy, A Po-sy
• “here i am, naked…”
• “It’s SPRing AgAIN”
• Asymptotes
• The Morning News
• A Gloss
• Of Lady, of Beauty, of Stream
• At Yorktown
• The She-Bear
• The She-Bear (II)
• TO THE SHE-BEAR
• Diaries of Death
• “friday, Good Friday…”
• Cinos
• Bigmans
• Bigmans II
• In Cold Hell, in Thicket
• For Sappho, Back
• “Help Me, Venus, You Who Led Me On”
• Other Than
• Quatrain
• Day Song
• Day Song, the Day After
• The Dry Ode
• ABCs
• ABCs (2)
• ABCs (3—for Rimbaud)
• The Story of an Olson, and Bad Thing
• Adamo Me …
• La Torre
• The Cause, the Cause
• Of Mathilde
• The Gate Is Prouti
• There Are Sounds …
• Issue, Mood
• Signs
• The Moon Is the Number 18
• Abstract #I, Yucatan
• This
• He, Who, in His Abandoned Infancy, Spoke of Jesus, Caesar, Those Who Beg, and Hell
• Knowing All Ways, Including the Transposition of Continents
• Concerning Exaggeration, or How, Properly, to Heap Up
• To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things of Which He Has Written Us in His “Brief an Greeley und Olson”
• The Fathers
• Applause
• Issues from the Hand of God
• A Round & A Canon
• Letter for Melville 1951
• “pitcher, how…”
• The Ring of
• For Cy Twombly Faced with His First Chicago & N.Y. Shows
• An Ode on Nativity
• “At midnight, after hours of love…”
• The Clouds
• For a Lady of Whom I Speak
• To the Algae
• The Civil War
• The Connection
• The Friend
• War on the Mind in a Time of Love
• A Discrete Gloss
• Kin
• The Thing Was Moving
• “He / in the dark stall..
• Black Mt. College Has a Few Words for a Visitor
• Merce of Egypt
• A Toss, for John Cage
• The Leader
• “The winds / which blew my daughter…”
• From the Inca
• Dramatis Personae
• The Collected Poems Of
• Common Place
• “Its got to this…”
• “my poor dumb body…”
• “my poor dumb body…”
• Well
• The Mast
• For a Man Gone to Stuttgart Who Left an Automobile Behind Him
• “The sea / is an archeology…”
• Proensa
• Jas Jargon
• Maya Against Itzas
• The Boat
• The Soul
• Da Boyg
• Love
• The Motion
• The Pavement
• A Story
• Peograms
• The Real
• I Believe in You …
• Red Mallows
• The Death of Europe
• Going from Battle to Battle
• Small Birds, to Agree with the Leaves, Come in the Fall
• I, Mencius, Pupil of the Master …
• O’Ryan
• O’Ryan 11—15
• True Numbers
• New Poem
• Anecdotes of the Late War
• The Bride
• The Picture
• “He treads on edges of being …”
• Sut Lovingood
• King’s Mountain
• The Post Virginal
• “As I went in and out I heard pieces…”
• De Los Cantares
• Evil
• The Seven Songs
• A Newly Discovered ‘Homeric’ Hymn
• The Whole World
• Quail
• “Cry pain, & the dogs of yrself devour…”
• The Alba
• Love I
• “The chain of memory is resurrection …”
• “Anubis will stare..
• The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs
• As the Dead Prey Upon Us
• Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele
• The Perfume!
• “The perfume / of flowers!…”
• “The perfume / of flowers!…”
• The Encounter
• Thoughts of the Time
• “Who slays the Spanish sun…”
• The Business
• Hate
• Who
• Long Distance
• “You know, verse / is a lovely thing…”
• The Loves of Anat, I
• The Librarian
• The Writ
• The Writ
• "I weep, fountain of Jazer”
• She Who Hits at Will
• Anniversary
• The Company of Men
• One Word as the Complete Poem
• Obit
• “Beauty / is to lay hold of Love…”
• Moonset, Gloucester, December 1, 1957, 1:58 AM
• What’s Wrong with Pindar
• “Without the Season of Structure, Modes Lie Like Gods Thrown Down, Helpless Before the Newness Upsets Genesis When the Young Men Pour In”
• Just Inside
• The Treatment
• “It isn’t my word but my mothers…”
• Poemless Rhymes for the Times
• “With what I got out…”
• All Havens Astern
• “I just passed / a swoony time…”
• Of the United States
• "tenementy twilightish landscape…”
• “I was stretched out on the earth…”
• The Year Is a Great Circle or
• Measure
• The Mind’s Notice
• Rosy, It Was
• A Six Inch Chapter—in Verse
• Easter
• The Gonfalon Raised Tonight
• “Rufus Woodpecker..
• Stone and Flower Series
• Memorial Day
• I Mean, No
• “I hang on by..
• Afica
• To Try to Get Down One Citizen as Against Another
• “the Flower grows / from the roots..
• “The liturgical / eighth day…”
• “Undazzled, keen, / love sits…”
• “Sit by the window and refuse…”
• Winter Solstice
• Christmas
• The Song
• Being Altogether Literal, & Specific, and Seeking at the Same Time to Be Successfully Explicit
• Conversation galante
• “the dogwood comes out yellow…”
• “right in my eye…”
• “This man’s weakness is straw..
• “My love is also / like…”
• Incunabula, 1958
• “go / make a bridge…”
• “Its not / the erotic…”
• Every Man His Own Matador; or for That Matter Any Member of the Family
• May 20, 1959
• The Nerves Are Staves, and When the Tears Come There Is Voice
• The Intended Angle of Vision
• “the proper soul / in the proper body…”
• The Distances
• “I am so small you can hardly see me…”
• “All pink from the bath she slept…”
• Assuming the Soul Is a Bitch
• “one night Ma / lay with Pa..
• Carrying Water to the Youth in Honor of Sappho / Jane Harrison & Miss Duncan If / She Had
• The Dance, of the Grizzly Bear
• On All Sides
• “On the equator east of my son…”
• “The Muse / is the ‘fate’ of the poem …”
• The Objects
• “abt the dead he sd..
• “not a rat-hole, a cat-hole…”
• Across Space and Time
• Compleynt Blossoms April to July
• The Disposition
• A Promise
• The Will To
• I’m With You
• Cross-Legged, the Spider and the Web
• The Inadequate Orderly Simplification. But the Three Natural Units. And Only Arbitrary Constants
• Thy Gleeman Who Flattered Thee
• King of the Wood King of the Dead
• “Borne down by the inability to lift the heaviness..
• The Lie of 10, or The Concept of Zero
• “Mazdaism / has overcome / the world…”
• ” In one age or other..
• A 2nd Musical Form, for Dave Young
• A Womans Nipples Is the Rose of the World
• The Mathematical Secret, and the Apron
• “As though there were no flowing…”
• Dylan Thomas, and Now Matthew Mead —As He Himself, ‘To Edward Thomas’
• The Yellow of the Mask
• The Hustings
• The Hustings
• “Pente cost…”
• When One Age Goes with It Suddenly Its Errors Evaporate
• “Sin is inferiority…”
• May 31, 1961
• The Allegory of Wealth
• There Is No River Which Is Called Lethe
• The Red Fish-of-Bones
• The Binnacle
• To Empty the Mind
• What Had to Go
• How Things Change
• The Americans
• The Americans
• The Snow
• “17th century men / who founded
• Examples—for Richard Bridgeman
• On the Shore
• Hymn to Proserpine
• Shang Dynasty Oracle Bone 2 Say
• “some partial cloudiness will flow locally…”
• To a Poet Who Read in Gloucester Before the Cape Ann Historical Literary and Scientific Society
• In an Automotive Store
• “It is a nation of nothing but poetry…”
• “in Wiro language…”
• “Shut in keptoff..
• “there they were…”
• “I saw, from under Him…”
• Ferrini—I
• “As the shield goddess, Mycenae…”
• “Snow White was always waiting…”
• “I had had / a beetle..
• “I met my Angel last night…”
• “Love is the talk…”
• “His house / in the branches…”
• A Part of the Series on the Paths
• “The personality and dourness of winter…”
• For Mac Hammond
• “—the End of the World / is the Turn-About..
• “Color..
• West’
• From The Song of Ullikummi
• “Memory, Mind, and Will…”
• “In celebration of Mitos..
• “the unfinished (raw) hero…”
• Buffalo Ode
• “My belly / sounds like an owl..
• “like a foldout…”
• “barley or rye…”
• “Grinning monster out side the system…”
• “her skin/ covered me..
• The Lamp
• Shenandoah
• “will: termite mothers..
• “will: the rat… ”
• The Grandfather-Father Poem
• for my friend
• The Drum World
• “my apple branch…”
• Absolutely Vernal
• An ‘Enthusiasm’
• This Year
• “as if Hallam Movius..
• A Scream to the Editor
• “He is the Devil…”
• “As snow lies on the hill…”
• “turn now and rise…”
• “So the Norse / were neurotic…”
• “Indian trinity…”
• “Not to permit himself…”
• “the Heart is a clock…”
• “A big fat fly..
• TEXTUAL NOTES
• INDEX