The Ironic Midden

Recently, I was able to get my hands on the Charles Olson documentary Polis is This, and then to listen to a fairly recent PoemTalk, where they took on Olson's Maximus poems. The documentary made much of the largeness of Olson himself, and we were implicitly asked to imagine how it may have impacted his poetry. In the documentary's archival footage, we can see how he enjoys this largeness, especially when he gestures towards the "thisness" of not only the space of Gloucester, but also his presence in it.

While in PoemTalk Rachel Blau DuPlessis brings the group's attention to this gesturing that seems to self-reference, Charles Bernstein nuances DuPlessis' (and the documentary's) interpretation with a more anti-essentialist (or anti-lyrical) reading: "[Olson] is suggesting that the I in that is the resistance to the present, the possibility of what the future could be, and also the recognition of the past. . . . He's explicitly rejecting the idea that it's about him in just some biographical sense." Later, Bob Perelman will comment upon the "ironic midden" to which the deixis of this section of Maximus ("Plus this--plus this:") contributes, undoubtedly related to Williams' "of this, make it of this, this/ this, this, this, this ."
I will be talking about this "ironic midden" and the possibility of tracing it throughout history, from Shakespeare to Ron Silliman, this week at the Motto Temporary Storefront in Brooklyn. I will be introducing my new multimedia essay on literary minutiae for Triple Canopy--"The Quiddities," in addition to other related events.

Polis Is This! (PBS is . . .)

PBS is airing the Charles Olson documentary Polis is This tomorrow night (check your local listings below.) Now if I actually had a working television, this might be exciting.

3/30 9:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00PM Iowa PTV World 3
4/2 8:00pm Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/3 2:00am KET-1, Kentucky
4/3` 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/4 2:00am Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/5 3:30pm KACV Amarillo,TX
4/5 4:00pm Detroit PTV
4/5 7:00pm WGBH-Boston, MA
4/5 8:00pm WKAR-E. Lansing MI
4/7 7:00pm Ozarks PTV-KOZK, Springfield, MO
4/8 11:000pm WCVE, Richmond, VA
4/10 10:00pm WGCU- Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 6:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 8:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/12 9:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/11 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/12 11:00pm WSIU-Carbondale
4/13 9:00pm Rhode Island PTV
4/13 10:30 WCNY-Syracuse, NY
4/15 8:00pm KMOS- Warrensburg MO
4/15 10:00pm KVCR-San Bernardino, CA
4/19 1:00pm WGBY- Springfield, MA
4/22 11:00pm KCSM - San Mateo
4/24 2:30am WNET, NYC
4/24 12:00pm KCTS-Seattle
4/24 1:00pm WHYY-Phila
4/24 8:00pm WDSC-Daytona, Fla
4/26 7:00pm CET-Cincinnati
4/26 8:00pm Utah Edu. Network, Salt Lake
4/28 midnight KTEH, San Jose/San Francisco
4/29 10:00pm VermontPTV
4/29 11:00pm KUAT Tucson
4/30 8:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers

It's Hard to be Hydrocephalic

Last week, New Jersey as an Impossible Object taped Graham Stowe singing his Patersong "The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf" based off material from Books I and IV (pp. 10 and 192 respectively). The music is by Jonathan Sircy. More of their songs based on Paterson can be found on archive.org. Graham is a doctoral candidate here at the University of South Carolina, and is embarking on a dissertation about Williams' Paterson and Olson's Maximus Poems. Along with Kenneth Camacho, he's kept a blog, The Paterson Project, which documents their use of Paterson as raw material for new poems and songs.

The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf

It’s hard to be a hydrocephalic.
54 inches, head to toe
(27 from my chin to scalp alone;
That makes me a marvel.)

Washington came to see me
(the man, not the city; or, maybe, the city is the man).
He looked at me; marveled at me;
I answered with inactivity.

I floated along, day to day,
endlessly rocking,
loving Jesus and preacher’s conversation,
swelling with pride at the show I could provide.

It was hard for me to move,
my head being so huge,
but I got by without going out;
keeping to the cerebral.

my head's got its own box now,
it's lost all its water!
and now they say my skull is a marvel!
but they say nothing of the parts of me everyone's had.

What I never told in my time
was that, more than theology or phrenology,
all I ever wanted out of life
was to not shit in my cradle.

A tiny outhouse with plenty of headroom,
straps to hold me up and a stand
from which I could read
my Bible or a dirty magazine.

Oh that would be marvelous.
“A marvel indeed,” they would say,
as they tied me in and
sang of my tenacity.

When All Is Become Billboards

I’ve joked that my next project might be Olson’s Maximus Poems, if only because I would be able to summer in Cape Ann rather than northern Jersey. It is interesting that in today’s Gloucester—locus of Olson’s Maximus—most of the street signs are half-hand painted. Could it be that this folksy interpretation of common signage is a response to Olson’s :

But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?

when even our bird, my roofs,
cannot be heard

when even you, when sound itself is neoned in?

I picked up Maximus a couple weeks ago, and reread his piece on projective verse, since I’ve taken on a grad student who is working with both Williams and Olson. This student also has an uncannily similar Paterson blog, in which he and a collaborator have used the book as an occasion for new poems and songs. (note: I am not the professor on campus who “is constantly apologizing for Williams's inability to keep out of other women's beds” but I’d be interested to know who is; sounds like a stock character, though) More from them, soon. Nevertheless, Olson’s stuff is among the many poems and secondary materials I have been trundling through this fall, but have not had the opportunity to synthesize yet for the blog. For example, I reread Eliot’s The Wasteland because Cooper had a copy of the same edition I had in college, and the wee periwinkle paperback made me nostalgic, so I read it, and enjoyed it . . . which may complicate my previous positions, but nevertheless . . .