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1. “Dear Gloucester”
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 “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 selfconsciously 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.1 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, pub- “Dear Gloucester” / 23 lisher, 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.2 Like Walter Benjamin, olson pursued a “contextualist program” and was “antiformalist ” in his approach to a poetics grounded in a materiality of communication .3 The archive of these actions provides a public record for understanding how such strategies influenced a region of the American northeast, 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,”4 ) 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.”5 This criticism of the proliferation of postwar consumption—a contrived system of growth leading to environmental devastation and disciplined socioeconomic relationships—correlates...