Charles Olson Reads from Maximus Poems IV, V, VI

FW-ASCH-7RR-4279

CDR copy Tape Info: An unidentified man (English professor?) reads poems by Charles Olson, perhaps entirely from The Maximus Poems. They are often in the 1st person, told by "Maximus of Gloucester" and often relate to the town of Gloucester and fishing, although the precise meaning is frequently obscure. The recording took place on Mar. 4, 1957, at "KPFA, Berkeley." The following background on Charles Olson and his poetry is quoted directly from Wikipedia : Charles Olson (27 December 1910 - 10 January 1970), was a second generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary Hines Olson. and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts (where his father worked as a mailman) and spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become the focus of his writing. In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound's Cantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writing The Maximus Poems, a project that was to remain unfinished at the time of his death. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled. Dogtown, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre, an itinerant Greek philosopher, and partly on Olson himself.