Charles Olson reads 'The Librarian' (Mar 1966)
4:01
NET film
Tags: charles olson poetry frank moore poet
Added: 3 years ago
From: generoix
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From answers.com:
Charles Olson, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1910, was an energetic giant of a man. In his youth his energy took the form of conspicuous academic success. He was Phi Beta Kappa and a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship at Wesleyan University, where he earned a B.A. in 1932 and an M.A. in 1933 with a thesis on Herman Melville. By 1939 Olson completed course work for a Ph.D. in American civilization at Harvard University, published his essay "Lear and Moby Dick," and received his first Guggenheim fellowship to continue research on Melville. In the 1940s Olson moved away from a traditional academic career, through a disillusioning flirtation with politics, to his lifelong work as a poet. His youthful energy and scholarship came to distinguish his poetry.
[...]
In Olson's poem "The Librarian" (1957) traditional distinctions between the mind and external reality evaporate.
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From google.com:
One of Olson's best poems, "The Librarian," is set in a "Black space," a nightmare landscape occupied by not wholly imaginary phantoms - yet it's Gloucester too. Olson begins the poem with an exclamation of surprise that Gloucester is within him:
The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester,
the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which
(from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.
Where the syntax demands a first-person pronoun Olson supplies the parenthetical paraphrase of the opening of the Maximus Poems: Who is speaking? Olson, or Maximus? Olson thought he had his subjects, his personae, sorted out neatly. That rhetor Maximus, he thought, was different from Charles Olson, citizen of Gloucester. The confusion and recombination of people out of Olson's memory and imagination keeps the poem swirling around in a landscape that is neither real nor exactly unreal; his father puts on "an old guise" of bookseller, then becomes a young musician Olson remembers from somewhere other than Gloucester, as the bookshop metamorphoses into a wharfhouse. Olson is surprised to see that he has internalized this young man and his girlfriend; he brought them into his psychic replica of Gloucester ("I had moved them in, to my country"). The poem ends with Olson looking around in this interior landscape for the known landmarks of Gloucester:
Only on the headland
toward the harbor
from Cressy's
have I seen it (once
when my daughter ran
out on a spit of sand
isn't even there.) Where
is Bristow? when does I-A
get me home? I am caught
in Gloucester. (What's buried
behind Lufkin's
Diner? Who is
Frank Moore?
Olson as Maximus has immersed himself so deeply in Gloucester that even when he is removed from there (as he is, I gather from the first three lines, when dreaming the dream that goes to make the poem) he is "caught/ in Gloucester." The poem is about Gloucester climbing down into Olson's mind: the librarian, keeper of the records, has been intimate with Olson's former wife in his parents' bedroom; the poet's subject matter has come to life and invaded all his psychic sanctuaries. His only defense was to keep "The Librarian" out of the Maximus sequence. The burden of Olson's Dantesque poem (its tercets pay quiet homage) is not just the equality of the subject and the object, as Whitehead would have it, but the terrifying reciprocity of these poles of experience.
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From poetryfoundation.org:
The Librarian
By Charles Olson
The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester,
the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which
(from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.
In this night I moved on the territory with combinations
(new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader,
my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts.
My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop,
there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then,
I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me)
before. It turned out it wasn't a shop, it was a loft (wharf-
house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago
came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son,
I didn't remember, he presented me insinuations via
himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years.
But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country.
His previous appearance had been in my parents' bedroom where I
found him intimate with my former wife: this boy
was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts!
Black space
old fish-house.
Motions
of ghosts.
I,
dogging
his steps.
He
(not my father,
by name himself
with his face
twisted
at birth)
possessed of knowledge
pretentious
giving me
what in the instance
I knew better of.
But the somber
place, the flooring
crude like a wharf's
and a barn's
space
I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter
was there - that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I
hadn't even connected her with my being there, that she was
here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut!
But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews
were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party
I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped
around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort.
The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton's Wharf, where the Library
was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang
was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth
of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking
down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops
tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern
The places still
half-dark, mud,
coal dust.
There is no light
east
of the Bridge
Only on the headland
toward the harbor
from Cressy's
have I seen it (once
when my daughter ran
out on a spit of sand
isn't even there.) Where
is Bristow? when does I-A
get me home? I am caught
in Gloucester. (What's buried
behind Lufkin's
Diner? Who is
Frank Moore?
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