The American Century: Literature since 1945 601flow. Nor does the flow end with the nominal end of the poem: as the last line,
“I hunt among stones,” indicates, it is simply stepped aside from, not staunched.
The poet remains committed to the activities of attention and discovery.
Undoubtedly, though, Olson’s major poetic achievement is the Maximus Poems.
The Maximus who gives these poems their title is an “Isolated person in Gloucester,
Massachusetts,” the poet’s home town, who addresses “you / you islands / of men and
girls” – that is, his fellow citizens and readers. A “Root person in root place,” he is, like
Williams’s Paterson, a huge, omniscient version of his creator. The poet is the hero
here, as he normally is in the American epic, and this poet is notable as an observer,
correspondent (many of the poems are described as “letters”), social critic, historian,
pedagogue, and prophet. The poems that constitute his serial epic vary in stance and
tone. The ones in Maximus IV, V, VI, for example, published in 1968, are more clearly
mythic, more openly preoccupied with convincing their audience that “the world / is
an eternal event” than are the pieces in The Maximus Poems, first published eight
years earlier. Nevertheless, certain themes recur, supplying a stable center to this
constantly shifting work. Olson’s aim is a reading of the history of Gloucester, and
the surrounding area by land and sea, that will enable a revelation of truth: one
particular “city” will then become the “City,” an “image of creation and of human
life for the rest of the life of the species.” The opening lines of the first poem announce
the quest: “the thing you’re after / may be around the bend.” The voyage of discovery
is in search of the near, the familiar: “facts” or particulars which must be dealt with
“by ear,” spontaneously and as if for the first time. Such a goal is not easy, Olson
suggested, at a time when “cheapness shit is / upon the world” and everything is
measured “by quantity and machine.” Nothing valid is easy, even love, when
“pejorocracy is here,” the degradations of capitalism and consumerism – and where
the familiar has been contaminated by the “greased slide” of “mu-sick,” the evasions
of modern mass culture. But it is still possible to live in the world, achieving the
recognition that “There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there
are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of.” It is still possible, in fact, to resist
the myopic barbarism of “Tell-A-Vision” and “the several cankers of profit-making”
so as to pay reverent attention to the real (“The real / is always worth the act of /
lifting it”), to realize contact with particular places and moments (“there is no other
issue than the moment”), and to build a new community or “polis” based upon
humility, curiosity, and care.
Like many other American epics, The Maximus Poems juxtapose America as it
is – where “The true troubadours / are CBS” and “The best / is soap” – / with America
as it might be. “The newness / the first men knew,” the poet informs us, “was almost /
from the start dirtied / by second comers.” But “we are only / as we find out we are,”
and perhaps Americans can “find” a new identity and society; Gloucester itself, we are
told, is a place “where polis / still thrives,” and it may be that enough will be found
there to promote a “new start.” Certainly, Olson hoped so and worked hard, in both
his art and his life, to realize that hope: he had something of the evangelical fervor of
Pound, which came out in particular during the years he taught at Black Mountain
College in North Carolina. Among his colleagues and pupils there were a number ofGGray_c05.indd 601ray_c 05 .indd 601 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM