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Six Olson’s “Long Exaggeration of Males” Anyway it was striking how there were no females in this generation; & the first children of the male-­ females & of Olson & their other­ brothers were all males, and there were very many of them because of their fathers’ incredible promiscuity. Alice Notley, Dr. Williams’ Heiresses 1. “Write as the father to be the father” The “long exaggeration of males” that Olson acknowledges to his estranged partner Constance Wilcock in 1952 (Olson 2000, 176) is a historical as well as a personal artifact.1 “Manliness and hypermasculinity,” Suzanne Clark proposes, were ideological formations in the American Cold War era. Yet while manhood “was everywhere invoked and women were largely silenced,” there was a general disinclination to credit this as a temporary formation in cultural politics (Clark 2000, 15, 203). Further, the manhoods evinced by rational or economic men, by the “professional and managerial classes,” were in denial that “subjects were marked by any gender, race, or class at all” (Clark 2000, 203). Resisting this culturally sanctioned blind spot, some white intellectuals and poets responded by aggressive uses of ethnicity (not necessarily their own), class (not necessarily their own), femininity, and—yes, maleness (“hypermasculinity”) as a self-­ conscious marker of revolt. It might be counterintuitive to acknowledge “exaggeration” of the masculine as a social revolt, because it also replicated and heightened social norms, but this position, with its many consequences, is the focus of an imperium of gender materials central to Olson. Maleness and related gender ideas offered topics of tremendous seriousness to Olson. If Olson’s self-­ conscious social affirmation of manhood resonated with his historical era, it is also a politics to which he migrates after having tentatively proposed alternative sex-­ gender frameworks . His attempts to negotiate theoretical curiosity about gender coequality and/or equal complementarity (discussed in chapter 5) proved impossible for him to enact with actual women. Yet multiple female Olson’s “Long Exaggeration of Males” 143 traces occur in the mythography of his later work, which delivers many rich and contradictory subject positions to men, including feminine or passive ones. Charles Olson’s career reveals the limits of any model of a teleological narrative (like Edward Said’s) that postulates a passage from filiative relations to affiliative ones as a mark of modernity. Olson’s construction of poetic community collapses the familial and sexualized into the professional and social, articulating an influential poetic subjectivity centered on self-­ consciously gendered cultural politics. This construct is patriarchal: it both assumes male power and polices it, and it also deploys for men an imperial array of conflicting subject positions involved with sexuality and gender. What does it mean either to write as or to be the father? From his early career to beyond 1956, Olson’s variable and volatile patriarchal claims provided a cover for gender performances of all kinds, so long as these were authorized by two features. He asserted that these performances were the work of maleness and of the father, evoking the physical, emotional, and unstinting support of others (both male and female) for love, for respect, for assistance—by sheer force of charm and energetic will. Olson’s own relationships included and combined companion, son, “androgyne,” and more, yet all were organized by his term “father.” “Big Baby” was among these positions. This is Charles Boer’s intelligent term, shared with a delighted, approving Olson, for certain great men (politicians and artists) whose “charm was a lifelong continuation of babyhood and disguised an enormous ravening ego that secretly consumed everything and everyone” (Boer 1975, 35–36). “Big Baby” is hardly Olson’s only gender performance; at the same time, Olson claimed Boer (and perhaps other followers) not as his metaphoric “son” but rather as his own “father.” “‘I’m your son!’” Olson affirmed, a comment that shows how much he desired the mobility of male positions and the narcissistic pleasures of being cared for and cared about (Boer 1975, 88–89). Then, deploying the ultimate binary while also entertaining androgyny, “I am more woman than man. The woman is the creative part of me. All artists are part woman” (Boer 1975, 144).2 For Olson, the subject position of “patriarch ” involved gender-­ mobile elements, interestingly conflicted, mercurial , generative, and omnivorous. This is patriarchal insofar as the user imperially claims all available spaces and many sex-­gender positions and deploys them to subsidize the self.3 While metaphoric/mythologized femaleness was a delight and a fascination, real women, for the most part, 144...

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