Before arriving in Storrs I was confident I had a good plan of research going in.\u00a0 Within only a few minutes of arriving at the Charles Olson Research Collection, however, I realized the most important, and unexpected, task of my week: orienting myself to Olson\u2019s often unintelligible handwriting!\u00a0 The image below demonstrates both the difficulty in reading Olson\u2019s handwriting, and offers us a glimpse of how his mind worked.\u00a0 Note the multiple directional orientations of his handwriting across these two pages from a notebook dated 11 November \u2013 13 December, 1964 (Box 56, folder 103).<\/p>\n
But for all the frustration readers and researchers may find in Olson\u2014 his layered and obscure allusions, his frequently challenging syntax, his penmanship\u2014there are some constants in Olson\u2019s writing, especially in his magnum opus, The Maximus Poems<\/em>.\u00a0 Olson\u2019s modern verse epic is populated with many historical and geographical explorations of his adopted hometown of Gloucester, MA.\u00a0 We see through Maximus\u2019 (Olson\u2019s?) eyes Stage Fort Park, Dogtown, the waters and islands off Cape Ann and its surrounding environs, the settlers and early inhabitants of the area, its fishermen, its modern inhabitants, its poets\u2026we even get a sense for life inside his 28 Fort Square apartment and the very desk he enveloped with his physical and intellectual magnitude.\u00a0 The early published versions of each of the three volumes of Maximus<\/em> featured maps on their covers, maps which would later feature as the first pages of the volumes in the collected edition (ed. George F. Butterick, 1983).\u00a0 This was not merely a decision by Olson and his publishers to add cover art to the Maximus<\/em> volumes.\u00a0 These maps serve to orient the reader to the directions which the subsequent poetry will take: from Gloucester out to the sea; from Gloucester back through deep and mythological history; and finally from Gloucester toward the West.<\/p>\n And later in the volume, on the first page of Book IX of The Odyssey<\/em>, Olson again appears to be orienting himself to his reading, this time drawing a map of the west coast of Italy and the Tyrrhenian Sea.\u00a0 In his challenging fashion, the map is drawn right through the type!<\/p>\n This kind of interaction with his books is apparent throughout his library\u2014as if Olson were responding to the text in his own hand in live time, creating a sort of interactive textual dialogue with whatever he was reading.<\/p>\n To conclude, Olson\u2019s work is if nothing else rooted in place.\u00a0 It expresses particular locales with an energy that, for me at least, few poets have been able to transfer \u201call the way over to the\u2026reader\u201d as successfully as he does.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Fitting that a particular place exists\u2014the University of Connecticut, where Olson taught briefly during what became the last year of his life\u2014where Olson scholars can enact the very \u201cprospecting\u201d which his projective verse calls for, digging through his archived material to, hopefully, uncover some new place on the map of his thought\u2014a new connectivity between his writing, his life, and the places, peoples, histories, and literatures which live in his work.\u00a0 Thanks to the generous support of a Strochlitz travel grant, I was able to at least begin the digging for my own research project.\u00a0 The Charles Olson Research Collection reinforced the aspect of his work which I think most gives it a unique vitality: it emanates a multiplicity of intense localities he\u2019s \u201cprospected\u201d: places (physical, literary, and psychological) he inhabited, studied, and mapped.<\/p>\n Matthew Kroll <\/strong>is\u00a0a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University working on his dissertation titled \u201cThe Poet and the Polis: Early Greek Thought in Charles Olson\u2019s The Maximus Poems.\u201d \u00a0Mr. Kroll was awarded a\u00a02015 Strochlitz Travel Grant from\u00a0Archives and Special Collections at the University of Connecticut to support his ongoing research.<\/em><\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Olson\u2019s line is in \u201cA Later Note on Letter # 15<\/u>\u201d [Maximus<\/em>, 249 (II.79)], in reference to Herodotus\u2019 \u201cconcept of history\u201d, \u2018istorin<\/em>, which Olson tells us \u201cwas a verb, to find out for yourself.\u201d\u00a0 This understanding of the term is largely informed by J.A.K. Thomson\u2019s The Art of the Logos<\/em> (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1935).\u00a0 Olson\u2019s copy is in the Charles Olson Research Collection in Storrs, call no. Olson 450.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> \u201cProjective Verse\u201d, in Selected Writings<\/em>, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 16.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Matthew L. Kroll To say that readers need a roadmap to guide them through the prolific, often perplexing work of American poet Charles Olson (1910\u20131970) perhaps edges too close to clich\u00e9 \u2014 \u00a0the kind of bland and general statement … Continue reading ![\"KrollCOB56f103pp45rev\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2016\/01\/KrollCOB56f103pp45rev-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>A dizzying experience, indeed.\u00a0 This image is particularly relevant here as it shows us Olson working through Whitehead\u2019s concept of the \u2018extensive continuum\u2019 (from Process and Reality<\/em>), essentially, the spatio-temporal extensiveness of the world.\u00a0 This is vintage Olson: working through a philosophical concept which is fundamental to how human beings orient themselves in the world, doing it with such freedom and instantaneous changes of direction that he actually writes along several different axes across the page.<\/p>\n![\"KrollCO710Homermapcovrev\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2016\/01\/KrollCO710Homermapcovrev-665x1024.jpg\")
<\/a>As I came to \u201cfind out for myself,\u201d Olson himself mapped out the geography present in his favorite literature.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t help but laugh when I came across Olson\u2019s Modern Library Edition (1935) of The Complete Works of Homer<\/em> (Olson #710).\u00a0 Upon opening the front cover, I found a rather impressive freehand map of Greece which Olson drew in pencil.<\/p>\n![\"KrollCO710Homerpp126rev\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2016\/01\/KrollCO710Homerpp126rev-678x1024.jpg\")
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