Customer Reviews

Collected Prose

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Charles Olson is THE giant of post-war American poetry. Massive in every way - 6 foot 7 & a half inches tall, enormously influential as writer & teacher, a voracious reader, intense visionary, a mind second to none & a heart as big as the planet, his poetry & prose should be on every curriculum & syllabus in every school & university on the planet. What is so exciting about his work is that it proposes not just a new way of looking at things, but a new & vital way of engaging with life & destiny (ENERGY & INSTANT is how he put it) - "the poet is the only pedagogue left, to be trusted" - he teaches "man, that participant thing, to take up, straight, nature's, live nature's force". As you can see his prose is difficult & takes time to get used to - best to read it aloud & let its energy transform you as much as its meaning: energy transferral is how Olson saw communication & to receive energy you must first give it, & to bring energy from the page you must first bring it into the air in the act of speech: language for Olson was as much physical as mental - "I believe in God as fully physical" - & when you read Olson you feel yourself in the grip of energy - what he called the WILL TO COHERE - THE PROJECTIVE ACT - the very grip of LIFE, which flowed thru him with such intensity. His style is crucial to his message - FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT - which brings me to my only quibble with this book (& it's a major one) - its design. Olson was a real stickler for design - layout & typefaces were crucially important to him because they all contributed to the impact of the page on the reader, which is why I cannot understand the reason for the cool (the last word you'd ever call Olson - he was too hot even to get close to), sans serif, bland layout of the pages in this book. Olson often capitalises phrases - like he's shouting them at you - here they're barely a whisper. Is all I can think is that the book was designed by someone more familiar with fashion than with the contents - a big mistake I'm afraid because a lot of the power is lost. Anyway, that said, it is all here - Call Me Ishmael, Human Universe, Additional Prose & other snippets, & the photo on the cover is wonderful. As I see it, Olson's big mistake was not living a long enough life - not completing his work - not actually having the intelligence to see & feel his life as a complete entity - not actually having the heart (as Spinoza had) to realise that ENERGY & INSTANT are in fact, in essence, the same, & that if one lives a responsible life & looks after ones health because certain things can only be learnt at a certain age & one must live that long at least, then time is consumed & one comes to something real & godly which Olson never managed, despite the promise of the final poems. The archaeologist of morning died TOO young & I miss him.

Agree with Irish --- big mistake to lose the punctuation and spacing. As big as it would be with Cummings or Williams. I was surprised at Ishmael -- the power comes from watching the mind work out issues on the page, shown in the rhetoric and the spacing / syntax. Good to have the arguments, annoying to miss the power and intent. This is, alas, only half a book.