Introduction

Any discussion of Charles Olson needs define a few key terms in order to identify him from his contemporaries and comprehend how he used these terms in relation to himself. Most importantly, the interrelated terms “post-modern” and “saturation” are typically used to differentiate between the revolutionary energies that emerged in American culture after the Second World War and an exhausted modernism that had run its course. The term“post-modern” has become more and more accepted by critics in the second half of the twentieth century to the point where it now appears to be ingrained in the annals of literature. Apparently, the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee coined the term “post-modern” to refer to the period starting from 1875 onwards, following the modern era of 1475–1875 (Toynbee, 1946, p. 57). Yet, there was no overarching anti-Westernism, de-rationalism, or sense of the primitive as a value supplanting those that had previously been preeminent. Toynbee did not utilize the term to characterize the drastic awareness proposed and embodied by Olson and his contemporaries, but rather on the smaller scale of here and now literary canon. However, Olson was well-aware of what Toynbee failed to do. Emphasizing the duty of postmodern man to make a re-entry to the mesoamerican cultures, Olson summarized all what is done before him in Toynbee: “All that is done is what Toynbee does, diminishes the energy… They do not know how to pass over to us the energy implicit in any high work of the past” (Olson, 1997, p. 163).

It did not happen to Moretti to include Olson’s Maximus Poems in his book, Modern Epic (1996), in which he dealt with Faust, Moby-Dick, The Nibelung’s Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moreover, there was no mention of Olson in any part of his Moretti’s book. This could mean that Moretti sensed that Olson’s poetics has different means and ends and that his epic requires a different epithet other than that of “modern epic.” For Butterick, Olson’s designation, post-modern poet, “serves not merely to advance beyond an outmoded modernism, but it seeks an alternative to the entire disposition of mind that has dominated man’s intellectual and political life since roughly 500 B.C.” (1980, p. 5). Olson was a revolusionary theorist and practitioner of postmodern American poetics and poetry. Yet, it did not occur to Mazzaro to deal will Olson in his critical study Postmodern American Poetry (1980) as dealt exclusively with W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, David Ignatow, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop. But, surprisingly enough, Olson is mentioned in the preface. Mazzaro did not delve into Olson because he sensed that the term “post-modern” has different origin and meaning for the poet. As he put it, “Olson used the term in another context and presumably toward another end” (viii). Therefore, Mazzaro was aware of Olson’s tribute to the Ancient Near East and the author sensed that Olson’s postmodern poetics was likely to mean a different thing.

Olson’s criticism of Greek logos and his alternative post-modern illogical discourse is evident in his writings. In 1951, Olson writes that ours is “the age of quantity,” amid which “I am led to this notion: the post-modern world” in which the modern man “feels he does not belong to… the universe,” while “my assumption is / any POST-MODERN is born with the ancient confidence / that, he does belong” (Maud, 1996, p. 91). This could help him to write his “Human Universe” (1951) and open it with “[t]here are laws” of Socrates (the generalizer), Plato (the idealist and inventor), and Aristotle (the classifier and logician), that separated between man and nature and followed by the West. These Greek discoveries are responsible for modernism and “have invented hugely intermit our participation in our experience, and so prevented new awareness,” as they became “ways as end instead of ways to end” (Olson, 1997, pp. 155–57). “Episteme,” a coinage of Plato, is one “dangerous invention” that made man lose “the Real” and involve himself with certain terminology like “determinism.” Moreover, “we tend to regard politics as an area of choice or purpose, a progressive situation. Well, it certainly is not.” The same is applied to theology. Man “inherited… the idea that people should be helped… We have a very bad discourse system” (Olson, 2010, pp. 86–88). It is this “ancient confidence” that helped Olson to take from Gilgamesh his master, name his hero Maximus, and propose his postmodern posture.

Olson’s greatness as a postmodern poet should be measured by the extent to which he responded, rather than only examined, and the meaning of response is in his prose theory and The Maximus Poems. Olson’s Maximus, a fragmentary and experimental opus, could examine the non-Western origins of American culture and life in postmodern Gloucester. However, Olson’s response implies his refusal to the Greek literacy which should no longer be trusted in the postmodern time of awareness. He instead looks for new pedagogical illiteracy that could adequately respond to the postmodern situation. Olson suffered from Western literacy and its effect on modern man, frustrated by the negative effects of perverse professionalism on his art. Whenever students try to get him to discuss Roman or Greek systems or neglect his saturation poetry of experience, Olson criticizes them as being literate by means of Western education and, therefore, blind to the original Sumerians. Olson’s advice to his students at Black Mountain College was “[y]ou’re too much influenced by Greek and Latin already; too much of our literature and concepts are traced there already. Go beyond that, to the Sumerians… Break the hold time has on you; get outside it” (Ford, 1971, p. 52). Noticing his literate audience’s lack of awareness, Olson once cried, “[y]ou people are so literate. I don’t want to read to you any more” (Olson, 2010, p. 107).

In North America, Olson was the first to apply the term “post-modern” (Anderson, 1998, p. 7). Olson writes that “[t]his is the morning, after the dispersion… I am an archeologist of morning,” describing his postmodern profession. This profession, Olson writes, is “(I) from Homer back, not forward; and (II) from Melville on,” which “put men forward into the post-modern,” discussing “the writing and acts which [he] find[s] bear on the present [saturation] job” (Olson, 1997, pp. 206–207). For him, we have wrong methodology: “history is de-animated,” epic is “atomized” and “constituted,” and the “heroic” is under “examination” (1997, pp. 346–47). Therefore, a new methodology is required: the “dispersion” of the Greeks is to be replaced by the “morning” of the pre-Greeks. Olson’s postmodernity stems from Gilgamesh rather than from the progenitors of Westernism. Olson’s methodology intrigued and problematized his contemporaries. His greatness made Robert Duncan to call him “the Big Fire Source” (Olson, 2010, p. 115) and “the center of our thought” (Duncan and James, 2017, p. 270). Bernstein was astonished by Olson’s “spatial arrangement of the words” where there’s “no meaning but in space,” and his “poetics of the body.” The connection between Olson’s poetics of the body and space appears “on a physical page with printed marks,” as if writing were an “extension of the hand” (1986, p. 322). Despite such innovation, Bernstein criticized the poet for his use of “non-western” and “archaic sources” (1986, pp. 326–28). But the process of change would involve more a return to archaic means than just an innovation of technique. He takes from mythology and historic archaic a methodology to create life events because it originates from a higher source. With Gilgamesh, Olson could make his possibilities great and enormous and have the will to cohere and attempt at a postmodern hero: “I am not named ‘The Greatest’ / for no cause” (qtd. in Butterick, 1980, p. 16).

Olson’s interest in the ancient Sumerian scholarship is accompanied by his interest in the origins of man in an endeavor to move him beyond the modern. As Butterick put it, “[t]he formula seems inescapable: the deeper man returns to his archaic, primoridal, pre-rationalist condition, the further beyond modernism he advances” (1980, p. 12). Olson discovered a new science—the science of mythology—that could take him in this regard. For him, mythology is muthologos or what is said of what is said (Olson, 2010, p. 250). Olson’s muthologos means “a mythology that causes life events, that motivates, because it is from the Cause, some greater power” (Olson, 2010, p. 115). Gilgamesh is the starting point for Olson’s methodology. Olson views Gilgamesh in an entirely new way: “[a]s I read it [Gilgamesh], it is an incredibly accurate myth of what happens to the best of men when they lose touch with the primordial & phallic energies & methodologies which, said this predecessor of ours, make it possible for man, that participant thing, to take up, straight, nature’s, live nature’s force” (Olson, 1997, p. 173). Olson could specify Gilgamesh as a canon of mythology. Heroic deeds and accomplishments have remained hidden from the average person since the time of the ancient Greeks. Olson’s methodology is based on the myth of man, experience, and the forces of nature, and it opposes the entire Western methodology, looking backward to his predecessor and pedagogical precursor, Gilgamesh.

With Olson’s new methodology, the whole field lifted: a universe of saturation that he found embodied in many non-Western cultures, such as the Mayan, Cambodian, and, most importantly, ancient Sumerian, which experienced things and nature directly. Olson situates the Indians outside of the Western literacy and relates them to the ancient people such as the Mayans and Sumerians and their system of coherence: “the American Indian lies outside that comfortable box just as much, I’d argue, as the Americans now do, despite western appearance.” Olson saw the “will to cohere” of these ancient people in the Americans, and in the postmodern age (Olson, 1997, p. 206). The Americans’ future imagination lies in “the genetic” or “prehistory” as well as in morphology: As Olson writes, “I think we live in a time when the future lies as much in the genetic as it does in the morphological.” One “fisherman-type person” that “I still respect from prehistory is Gilgamesh” (Olson, 2010, p. 124), Olson continues, referring to historic inspiration. Olson makes a challenging and interesting proposition in “The Gate and the Center” (1951): “THE FIRST WILL,” the “WILL TO COHERE” manifests itself in “a life turning on THE SINGLE CENTER,” Sumer is back in business in the present, marking the joining of knowledge to culture. Olson looks backward to Sumer in the third millennium BCE as the center, which he takes to be the site of the first city that bested civilizations and provided a coherence that the Greeks failed to provide. For Sumerians, man was the basic deal, and they are credited with inventing the cuneiform―the earliest writing system―near the end of the fourth millennium, and Gilgamesh was the earliest saturation epic (Olson, 1997, pp. 168–173).

Openness and coherence were the characteristic features of Sumer. Rather than the Greeks, only the best Sumerian poets can be trusted and relied upon, because they neither followed a comparative method nor put measure to what man was capable of. Instead, Olson prefers the rule of “particularness” where the text “stays open” (Olson, 1997, p. 374). For Olson, we lost “the recognition, obedience to, and creation of… the Sumerian… we long ago lost the POINT & PURPOSE of what we call–and thus kill–the act of myth” (Olson, 1997, p. 172). Olson’s dream was to be like Gilgamesh, who possesses energy equal to his poem. Olson put forth in Gilgamesh evidence for the archaic period, speculating on Mesopotamian civilization. He gauges the backwardness of literature, problematizing the idea that the Greeks began it, to the writings of the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, and, further back, the Sumerians.

Elaborating on the speculative ancient history, Olson writes that the present presses toward the old concept of the Sumerian order, which is different from the cosmos-logos-dominated world from the sixth century BCE to the twentieth century CE. We must therefore return to that concept of order, the old cosmology of the pre-sixth century BCE (Olson, 1970, pp. 47–51). Moreover, Olson assured that “we [Olson and his contemporaries at Black Mountain College] have completely cleaned ourselves of the biases of westernism, of greekism… we have squared away at historical time in such a manner that we are able to see Sumer as a point from which all ‘races’… culturally… egressed” (Olson, 1966, pp. 97–98). The poet found it important to expand his American civilization to the Sumerian civilization and their scholarship.

Gilgamesh can serve as the signal precursor for Olson regarding the latter’s attempt to restore the human physiology to its position as the center of the world and free man from the will of the West. Olson’s admiration of “imago mudi” (that “we have our picture of the world and that’s the creation”) and myth (that “everyone have their own recognitions”) (Olson, 2010, p. 250) reveal Olson’s addiction to Gilgamesh. One point is Olson’s refusal to the Greek system: his insistence that “I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage / And of course, no Roman,” (Olson, 1960, p. 10);” his refusal to Ezra Pound for the latter’s staying “inside the Western Box” (Olson, 1966, p. 129); and “There is no strict personal order / for my inheritance. / No Greek will be able / to discriminate my body” (Olson, 1983, pp. 184–185). The other point is looking backward to the Sumerian system: Olson opens “TOMORROW”, a poem written in 1941, with “I am Gilgamesh, / an Ur world is in me / to inhabit” and concludes it with “They called me Gilgamesh / and gave me Ur / where I dwell” (Olson, 1987, p. 9).

The old Mesopotamian poets are fully engaged with man and direct experience. Their poems are not composed in closed verse but depend on projective language, unlike the Greek epics, which are written in meters (Noegel, 2015, pp. 234–249). The rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century participated in the Victorian and post-Victorian tension whether historical, religious, literary or philosophical (Al-Hadi and Xiaoling, 2024, pp. 1–17). The return of the Mesopotamian epic has inspired American poets and figured in their thoughts and writings. Such poets are Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Donald Halland, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The reason behind the turn to the Gilgamesh Epic is that the Americans recognized aspects of themselves in the ancient Mesopotamian epic and its hero (Ziolkowski, 2011, pp. ix; 190–192). Mesopotamian culture and literature offer a wholly different set of non-Greek problems, “whose glories have been exposed to our eyes by first-rate scholars of the Near East,” has in the modern age caught the imagination not only of poets, but also all kinds of authors as well as the general public in the Western world (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 10). Moreover, Mesopotamian culture “is idealized as an archetypal paradigm for the life of eternal values in the midst of an often corrupt or degraded modern civilization” (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 88). The reuse of the Gilgamesh Epic in North American texts since the 1960s has been of special interest, realizing the importance of the epic and the culture in which it was composed in transforming North American society (Hopps, 2001).

Olson was looking for “foreign policy,” and his “‘refusal to accept the limits of knowledge’ was a virtue of his poetry, where ‘the limits of knowledge’ are understood as restrictions cultures impose on human inquiry.” Therefore, one must investigate “the extreme physicality” of his art and “his explicit interest in other regions of the world, especially the ancient region of Sumer” (Herd, 2010, pp. 378–381). In 1951, a year in which his “Projective Verse” and “Human Universe” were published and the project of saturation epic in Maximus was already set out, Olson writes: “My desire is to go to IRAQ to sleep myself, on the ground, in all aspects of SUMERIAN civilization… especially the architecture and the people’s cuneiform texts” (qtd. in Maier, 1983, p. 227). Olson’s journey to Sumer, “was fundamental, crucial to his poetic re-mapping, to his re-thinking of… what was once said in Sumer is of importance to an American readership” (Maier, 1983, pp. 389–390). Olson’s intellect suspected and refuted the Western intellect and scholarship. Instead, he drew upon the Ancient Near Eastern scholarship. “Nothing is more characteristic of Charles Olson than his rejection of the Western tradition in favor of Hittite, Akkadian, and especially Sumerian literature” (Maier, 1983, pp. 227–228). Maier further explained the relationship between Olson’s poetry and the Epic of Gilgamesh, examining the “concision” whereby Olson makes his version postmodern. Part of Olson’s poetry is observed as a “transposition” of the Babylonian epic (Maier, 1983, p. 230).

Although Olson’s interest in the ancient world is focused almost entirely outside the “Western Box,” he was highly interested in the other Greeks of himself, namely, Maximus (of Tire), Hesiod (of Theogony), Herodotus (of Halicarnassus). These figures were muthologos, finding out for themselves, and their works open and echo the world of the Sumerians. One of Olson’s gates to the Mesopotamian world was Maximus of Tire, a second century dialectician, who was interested in writing intellectual subjects, wandering around the Mediterranean world from the ancient Tire, and whose favorite topic was Homer’s Odyssey. Olson took from Maximus as an example to be the Maximus of Gloucester in the postmodern age. For Olson, Tire confronted the universalization of Alexandar III of Mecedon, most commonly known as Alexander the Great, that was a complement to the modern universalization (Olson, 2010, pp. 15–22). Alexandar, the student of Aristotle, led armies from Greece to conquer North Africa and Eurasia from Egypt through the Indian subcontinent, putting his tutor’s theory of “universal state” into practice.

Another gate that Olson used to move from the Western Box to the Sumerian Box was Herodotus, a fifth century Greek philosopher and historian who was interested in geography and direct experience. As Olson put it in the epic, “I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking / for oneself for the evidence of / what is said …” (Olson, 1983, p. 104). This revelation invades most of Olson’s writings. Olson strongly stated: “I am the more convinced of this argument that… by way of… Herodotus… it was just about 1200 BC that something broke, that a bowl went smash, and that, as a consequence, this artificial business of the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ came into its most false being” (Olson, 1997, p. 170). Olson criticized the Thucydidean method and literature based on wars and called for Herodotean method of direct experience of finding out for oneself (Olson, 1997, p. 47–48). He considers Herodotus as “the other Greek of [himself] beside Hesiod” (Olson, 2010, p. 250) and “the most like Homer of all his successors” (Olson, 1997, p. 353). History is always a problem when it comes to Olson’s saturation epic. Olson breaks the word “history” back to a verb ’istorin, meaning “find out for yourself” and then tell a story, a reference to the Herodotean technique. Following Herodotus, Olson says, “I’ve put a whole lot of working on a longer, a long’ poem” (Olson, 2010, pp. 45–48), suggesting a “sort of saturation” which “to saturate myself on all the history of it which is now known” (qtd. in Butterick, 1978, p. 144). In his postmodern saturation epic, Olson criticizes the modern poetics that followed the Thucydidean method rather than the Herodotean method. Instead, he looks for a method of penetration, intersection or collision with an eternal event. Such poetics is still to be found in the postmodern age:

In English the poetics became meubles ̶ furniture ̶

thereafter (after 1630

& Descartes was the value

………………………….

& that concept of history (not Herodotus’s,

which was a verb, to find out for yourself:

’istorin, which makes any one’s acts a finding out for him or her

self, in other words restores the traum: that we act somewhere

at least by seizure, that the objective (example Thucidides …

…………………………………………………………………

……………….The poetics of such a situation

are yet to be found out (1983, p. 249)

Hesiod and Homer are topics of special interest. For Olson, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Song of Ullikummi, a Hittite Version of a Hurrian Myth, are marvelous Hesiodic poems because the stories are concerned with growth and finding out for oneself through direct and mushroom experience (Olson, 2010, pp. 123–126). Olson not only suggested translation of Hesiod for the American Psychedelic Review (1963–1971), but also wrote poems which were actual translation of passages from Hesiod’s Theogony and published them in the same Review. According to Von Hallberg, Hesiod is one of Olson’s earliest sources who provides important source material for major poems like “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN” poems. Hesiod is “the presiding genius” of those poems, and Olson “explicitly imitates the manner of the Theogony” in them (1978, pp. 33–34). Grieve-Carlson finds an affinity between Olson and Hesiod: “Maximus’s ‘privileged ground’ is similar to Hesiod’s: each speaks from the privileged ground of the visionary” (2014, p. 137). No one received Hesiod positively in terms of organism and epic structure as Olson did (see Martin, 1992, p.11; Grieve-Carlson, 2014, pp. 136–137). Olson himself once announced that Hesiod “is the greatest poet now for us” (2010, p. 215). Summarily, the poorly received wisdom about Hesiod did not divert Olson’s attention away from one of his greatest masters and gates toward the mushroom world of Gilgamesh.

As a matter of fact, Olson discovered in these Greek masters evidence for “The Will to Cohere”. Olson’s prose writing is full of deep speculations on the Mesopotamian culture and literature in the third and fourth millennia BCE, looking backward through some gates to the Mesopotamians and forward optimistically to a post-modern literature that may emerge: “We are only just beginning to gauge the backward of literature, breaking through the notion that Greece began it, to the writings further back: to the… Sumerian poets” by way of “Homer, Hesiod & Herodotus” (Olson, 1997, p. 171). For Olson, these Greek figures are the last voices for prehistory on which Olson built his post-modern literature. Olson insists that a postmodern thinker “would never find it necessary, as Plato did, to exclude Homer as a danger to the state, to paint both Hesiod and Homer, as Polygnotus did, in hell suffering like torments to Sisyphus and Tantalus” (Olson, 1997, p. 137). Olson’s postmodern world is that of the pre-sixth century BCE cosmology, an alternative to the post-sixth century Greek system. As he puts it, “the present presses toward a concept of order which is different from that one which the attention to Kosmos involved man in… from the 6th century B.C. to the 20th A.D.” (Olson, 1970, p. 51). Olson explains the importance of Homer in the literary cultures of East Mediterranean and the process of blocking out that literature to which Homer belongs: “An important thing is done here: an ‘East Mediterranean literature’ is blocked out, as of and inside 1400 BC, of such size and import that Homer’s poems belong to it” (1997, p. 345).

Olson was looking for a new kind of literature, “rather than that… of modern history and politics,” but of “total placement of man and things among all possibilities of creation”. This literature was lost for two millennia and can rise again by way of Hesiod among others of the same kind: “What I am gesturing in, is a ‘literature’ (of which Hesiod seems to be a conclusion) which is now for the first time again available, and it amounts to something like Hesiod’s own title, a Theogony.” Olson is confident that “there is a new one, and Hesiod is one of its gates” (Olson, 1997, p. 197). He looks backward to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Greek figures concerned here are the final gates to the second and third millennia BCE, a time in which Gilgamesh was composed. These Greek figures are the last sense of Indo-European World and their poems are the last “Indo-European poems” (Olson, 1997, p. 361). For Olson, “Homer was an end of the myth world from which the Mediterranean began” (1947, p. 117). The poet sometimes uses these classical figures individually and sometimes collectively and he is known for his binary oppositions. He uses projective verse as opposed to closed verse; the will of coherence as opposed to the will of dispersion; Herodotus as opposed to Thucydides; Hesiod and Homer as opposed to Plato and Aristotle; illiteracy as opposed to literacy; archaic postmodern as opposed to Socratic tradition; poetry of saturation, energy, and direct experience as opposed to that of modern economics and politics, etc.

Olson’s theory of saturation

Terms that are used ambiguously lead to misunderstandings and one obvious example is the term saturation. The term comes from the Latin word saturare (satur full). Saturation remains an interesting term within different fields of knowledge, particularly with regard to issues of origin, meaning and process (Constantinou et al. 2017, pp. 1–18). For instance, in research aligned with humanism, the origin of the term was first described by Glaser and Strauss in their The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967), where a qualitative research “is to collect data until saturation occurs. Yet although we repeatedly read this statement… little thought has been given to the rationale and principles underlying saturation” (Morse, 1995, p. 147). The term was also considered as “the most frequently touted guarantee of… rigor offered by authors to reviewers and readers, yet it is the one that we know the least about” (Morse, 2015, p. 587). Moreover, studies and reviews have poorly described saturation process, though they referred to data saturation (when data stops giving new information) (Francis et al. 2010; Constantinou et al. 2017, p. 2).

Despite being a generic term, saturation is rarely used in casual discourses. However, it has multiple parallel definitions within formal contexts in different fields, where it is typically employed. As Anter et al. put it, the term saturation “is widely used in professional languages of art, design and science, though, and there it has got several parallel definitions… referring to more or less the same thing” (2015, p. 208). In the fields of art and design, for instance, color saturation is most often used to refer to the intensity or vividness of a color. As a matter of fact, in our new information-saturated world there is a constant tendency of using the term saturation in newly developed concepts. Such other concepts are media saturation (the overwhelming presence of various forms of media) and market saturation (where a product has reached its maximum potential).

Just as Olson received critics’ and readers’ praise for his innovative term “postmodern,” describing himself and pastwar American poetics, the poet must also be credited with coining the term “saturation job” in reference to postmodern poetics and poetry. Olson undoubtedly sensed that his culture is that of saturation. Therefore, he called for a saturation art that could satisfy the spirit of the time. Olson’s theory of saturation invades his prose writing as well as his poetry. His essay-manifesto “Projective Verse” is of critical importance in identifying the problem. Olson defines the poem as “a highly energy-construct” and “an energy discharge” (1997, p. 240). His theory of “Composition by Field” was not meant simply as theory of technical change from closed verse to open verse, but that of saturation—a new stance toward reality that “involves… a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may… lead to new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of epic… emerge.” Those who involve themselves in the new process, they are to confront “a whole series of new recognitions,” putting themselves “in the open”, and must “behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined” (Olson, 1997, pp. 239–240). The process is as follows:

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION… keep moving, keep in, speed, nerve, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER! (Olson, 1997, p. 240)

Olson’s poetry of energy translates his sense of living in a fast world in which the question of limits seems to be historically shrinking, that “there we are, fast… Which gets us… inside the machinery, now, 1950, of how projective verse is made” (Olson, 1997, pp. 240–241). Change often opens Olson’s meditations. “The Kingfishers,” a widely studied poem written in 1949, opens with a paradox which laments that only change itself is unchanging: “What does not change / is the will to change” (Olson, 1960, p. 5).

The project of Maximus Poems (1960, 1968, 1970) began in the early 1940s, immediately after Olson dispensed with politics and modern history. However, it was only in 1950 that Olson started to announce his saturation project. Olson thought of a huge poem entitled WEST, a “history of the Western man for the past 2,500 years.” Due to constant contemplation, Olson modified the proposal into a planned saturation project titled “Red, White & Black,” a morphology of American culture from the beginnings to the present. The project was intended to be a “saturation job,” built on philological and scholarly research and moral commitment, to “track down any event or person so completely” (Butterick, 1978, pp. xxi-xxii). Olson’s “saturation job” included not only mythological but also morphological methodology for fully enacting the moment, and served as a means for internalizing experience and directing attention to the human being. In “A Bibliography of America for Ed Dorn” (1955), Olson writes that modern history is “now mostly hogwash. Morphology has knocked this stuff cockeyed.” What is needed now is “yourself” and “geography: the locus is now both place & time (topology).” Saturation is (1) man, with his (2) tongue, and always (3) geography. Olson’s saturation job, his epic poem, is an act of investigation: The “best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man… Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you’re in, forever.” Therefore, the “saturation job,” or “archeology of morning” as Olson sometimes calls, is a special way of using history: Olson had warned Ed Dorn against “the strict treatment of history as events.” Historical studies, for Olson, are not “how much one knows but in what field of context it is retained and used…” (Olson, 1997, p. 307).

The bibliography was written in 1955 for Ed Dorn who aspired to try his hand at a saturation epic poem of the West. Dorn learned from Olson the key principles for a “saturation job.” Olsonian pedagogy resulted in one of the high achievements of the twentieth-century American saturation epic in the postmodern canon: Slinger (1975). Following Olson’s methodology of archaic postmodern and/or the relationship between projective verse and history, Dorn’s epic takes a journey to southwest America, in search of the allusive Howard Hughes, drawing attention to focus on the critique of the modern world. Dorn, tutored by Olson, reimagined southwest America’s frontier myths that would supply to his creative imagination all those elements of the archaic. Another example of a poet who was inspired by Olson’s “saturation job,” consider Clayton Eshleman, who wrote Juniper Fuse (2003). The poet delves too deeply into the prehistoric cave art, taking from Olson’s theory of saturation as an early inspiration: “it [“A Bibliography of America for Ed Dorn”] planted a seed in me for the writing of this book” (Eshleman, 2003, p. xii), as Eshleman put it in the introduction. Olson was the poet whom Eshleman admired the most because he was very interested in prehistory and made some stabs at it. Although Olson did a lot of work in the library, he couldn’t afford to go to Europe, therefore, Eshleman identified a theory and a research gap and realized a project that he should get to the caves. However, Eshleman still benefited from Olson and rewrote Olson’s Saturation art. In “At the Hinge of Creation,” a poem in Juniper Fuse, Eshleman writes,

Olson, out of Fowler, writes:

“licked man (as such) out of the ice,

the cow” Authumla

comes into being to provide food for Ymir,

“a rich, hornless cow”

the streams of milk from her udders nourish

Yggddrasil

The entire Olson poem referred to here reads”

Licked man (as such) out of the ice,

the cow---------------did who

herself came into being

so that Ymir would have some source

of food (her milk one supposes

Odin was born of either this man directly

or one generation further on, Odin’s mother

was the giant----------------. (Eshleman, 2004)

Eshleman finds Olson’s reframing fragmentary information from Norse mythology into his own context is still beneficial and he justifies that “[w]hile the mythology here is Norse, and not prehistoric, as a creation myth it strongly evokes the Ice Age” (Eshleman, 2004). One point of “saturation job” is to look backward to pre(history) and take the reader through the landscape of a certain postmodern period. Eshleman could understand Olson’s project and went back to Ice Age cave art of southwestern France to direct his readers’ imaginations to new onto-epistemological views in the postmodern world. However, how Eshleman and Dorn constructed their saturation jobs and to what extend they succeeded require a separate detailed study. The other point of “saturation job,” as Olson writes, is “to get all that has been said on given subject” and not just through “books: they stop” but rather primary sources, archive materials, and additional sources that broaden the limited scope of published material (Olson, 1997, p. 307). Olson’s argument here is to know it all within these sources―to know all there is to know about the subject until one’s knowledge is exhaustive (dig it). As a matter of fact, Olson founded an important genre of postwar American poetry as an influence, “saturation job.” This saturation job is a multi-decade research project that may sum up the entire literary career of the poet/writer. Olson devoted more than two decades to complete Maximus Poems, Eshleman spend more than three decades to finish Juniper Fuse, and it took Ed Dorn almost two decades to complete Slinger. Thus, saturation job, in one sense, means a quest to learn everything possible about an object—no matter how long it takes: digging one thing in a saturation job that might require a lifetime of assiduity.

Olson spent his career digging into non-Western archaic materials. As a matter of fact, he had a great access to Ancient Near Eastern material at his time. According to Miller, Gilgamesh mythos has been incredibly received and creatively reused by Olson, in this case as part of a saturation literature inheritance, generating new meanings for postmodernism (2020, pp. 141–142). Robert Creeley writes that “I am impressed with the rapidity with which Olson was able to read and assimilate materials… on the archaic.” Such materials included: S.N. Kramer’s “The Epic of Gilgamesh and It Sumerian Sources” (1944), Leo Frobenius’s and Douglas Fox’s Prehistoric Rock Pictures (1937), Henry Fairfield Osborne’s Men of the Old Stone Age (1915), C.F.C. Hawkes’s Prehistoric Foundations of Europe (1940), Gertrude Levy’s The Gate of Horn (1948), Max Raphael’s Prehistoric Cave Paintings (1945), and Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy (1951) (Eshleman, 2004). These were only examples. Charles Olson was an enthusiastic reader of the scholarship of these authors in their ancient Eastern scholarship including the Sumerian. Consider S.N. Kramer, for instance. Olson enthusiastically read his other books: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium (1947), Sumerian Literary Texts from Nippur in the Museum of the Ancient Orient at Istanbul (1944), and, as editor, Mythologies of the Ancient World (1961) (Bertholf and Smith, 2017, p. 219).

Olson’s project was to extend his studies of American civilization back to the ancient Mesopotamians. Olson contributed to the ethnopoetics magazine Alcherigna (1970 and 1980), intending to publish ancient Mesopotamian materials. The intention of Alcheringa was a platform where the best postmodern talented authors like Olson bring back the archaic and primitive cultures and literatures like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the culture of its composition to the Americans’ minds (Rothenberg and Tedlock, 1970, pp. 1–77). Preparing himself for such a task, Olson collected sources on ancient non-Western scholarship, including works of archeology, history, mythology, and literature. He continued to do so until his death. Olson’s Ancient Near Eastern material amounted to hundreds and hundreds of texts including the works of Alexander Heidel, N. K. Sandars, W. G. Albright, and others. In Olson: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, many of Olson’s readings were published, including texts collected and annotated by Olson himself. During his tenure as rector at Black Mountain College, Olson invited many scholars who specialized in the Ancient Near East to both deliver lectures in their field and correspond with him. Such scholars were Robert Braidwood, an American leader in the field of Near Eastern prehistory, and Samuel Noah Kramer, an Assyriologist and expert in Sumerian history and language. Olson also wrote to Hans Güterbock, an American-German Hittilogist, and Cyrus Gordon, an American scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages. All scholars Olson contacted were interested and agreed on participating in his Seminar “Pre-Homeric Literature” in 1955–1956, but Black Mountain College folded before the seminar could take place. In 1959, a symposium was held, resulted in Samuel Noah Kramer’s Mythologies of the Ancient World (1961). The title of Olson’s seminar is so important because Olson believes that the literary figure is the best pedagogue and saturation job is the only choice that can reflect living reality.

The idea of the Seminar continued and resulted in Olson’s extensive essay “Causal Mythology” (1965). Among the texts that Olson studied are James Pritchard’s (ed) Ancient Near Eastern Texts (1950, 1955, 1969); some of Samuel Noah Kramer’s works, including History Begins at Sumer (1956), From the Tablets of Sumer (1965), Sumerian Mythology (1961), and Mythologies of the Ancient World (1961); and some of L. A. Waddell’s works, such as The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet (1927) and The Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered (1925). The idea of Sumer as the center or home is a leitmotif in Olson’s work, and the scholars specialized in Ancient Near Eastern studies are a medium for achieving Olson’s task. In “The Gate and the Center,” the scholars Edith Porada, S. N. Kramer, and L. A. Waddell received Olson’s praise for their translation of Sumerian poems from 3378 BCE, which created a chronological method of presenting the coherence and unity of Sumer (Olson, 1997, pp. 169–170).

As early as 1949, Olson received S.N. Kramer’s article, “The Epic of Gilgamesh and It Sumerian Sources” (1944), a scholarly poetic translation of two sections from the Epic of Gilgamesh, published in Journal of the American Oriental Society. Olson’s reception of the translation resulted in his adaptation of some lines from the ancient epic in “La Chute,” “La Chute II,” and “La Chute III.” According to Robert Creeley, these Olson’s adaptations result in captivating, intriguing, proposing “a contemporary entry into the archaic, as well as protocol to be followed in such a descent. They are the first signals in Olson’s body of work that the archaic is the post-modern, and that stripped of its historic context its content is potentially our own.” These poems, along with others like “Bigmans,” “Bigmans II,” and “The She-Bear,” “make up Olson’s first archaic focus in poetry”. In a letter to Francis Boldereff, Olson writes that “Bigmans” and “Bigmans II” are inspired by Gilgamesh material. In the first poem, Bigmans is begged to leave the home of an unidentified deity and wake up unidentified civilizations. While the second poem addresses a pedagogical master, Bigmans, who knows the secrets of everything, to remove all the dangerous plants from an unidentified land. Moreover, a multitude of people complain about Bigmans’ despotic untamedness and beg an unspecified force to create an equal to test him. This equal or rival would be Enkidu (Eshleman, 2004).

The Maud/Olson Library, located in Gloucester, Massachusetts, combines aspects of conceptual art, academic research, and Olson archive. Ralph Maud, an expert on the work of Olson, who became Olson’s scholar, gathered all the books that were owned or read by Olson. The inventory was named “Catalog of the Ralph Maud Collection of Charles Olson’s Books” and was published as Issues #64, #65, and #66 of The Minutes of the Charles Olson Society in 2010. When Maud passed away in 2014, colleagues packed up the library and moved it to Gloucester. Over three thousand volumes of books made up this collection of books that were moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, and given the name Maud/Olson Library. Uncertainty of its future and finance is under discussion. Describing the importance of the library, Kinniburgh writes that “[t]he collection is community-oriented, with the scholars, writers, and artists that know the most about Ralph Maud and Charles Olson… the Maud/Olson Library is not just a museum of Maud’s collection, but continues to be curated collectively by those who understand its context best (Kinniburgh, 2019, p. 31). Olson was extremely talented in archival work and book cataloging. His work is described by DuPlessis as a “borderless archive” (DuPlessis, 2015, p. 135). He is not only a pedagogical scholar or academic critic, but more significantly, a fundamental restructurer of the entire human universe or postmodern awareness. One of the defining characteristics of Olson’s influence is his use of figures, books, and bibliographies as components of a broader cosmological and poetic movement (Charters, 1968, p. 4; Kinniburgh, 2019, p. 27).

Olson’s tool for saturation is attention. First, Olson’s assumptions are that politics, economics, sociology, and history are all unrequired in the modern world, because they are either only individual experience or produced by the most dead people or are just events and laws. Second, “millennia… or quantity as principle instead of commodity.” The working premises are that millennia and person “are not the same as either time as history or as the individual as single.” Hierarchies of taste, quality, and plural must be displaced by the principle of quantity where attention saturates or circumvents an object. Thus, Olson calls for applying to quantity as a principle and process “as the most interesting fact all attention,” not what it is but how it works (Olson, 1997, pp. 306–307). Olson himself draws the crossed-stick of the axes as follows:

It is millennia and quantity: not how much information you acquire, but in what context the information is recalled and selected; and person and process: What you are making of the information you’ve acquired. For Olson, attention is applying all these axes simultaneously and the local becomes critical once the crossed-stick of these axes is used to select it. Thus, “the local loses quaintness by the test of person… itself as crutch of ambience, by test of millennia… its only interest is as process… or as it may be a significant locus of quantity” (Olson, 1997, pp. 297–298). Rather than the Greek false forces like comparison, symbology, description, Olson prefers particularity and selectiveness which are man’s original “impulse by which he proceeds to do something about the unselectedness [chaos]” (pp. 157–160).

Maximus Poems and the high level of saturation

Olson’s saturation stance—his understanding of himself as a poet saturated his poetry with mythological and morphological experiences—is expressed vividly by his use of language, graphics, and spacings. Maximus Poems is characterized by a practice of a new typography: coining new signs (words) and idiosyncracies of spelling, parenthesis, indentation, capitalization and distribution of typographical markers on page. Olson’s sentences are usually incomplete, and the addressee is marginal. However, the process, language, and Polis have a sort of coherence. Morphologically, there are three basic constant elements in Olson’s saturation epic poem: man, word, and polis.

Why Maximus? man is the basic deal

The hero of Olson’s epic poem takes his name from the Greek philosopher Maximus of Tire. There are some parallels between Maximus of Tire, who resided in a coastal town of ancient origins, and Olson’s postmodern Maximus of coastal fishing Gloucester. Tire and Gloucester, coastal towns on the Mediterranian and Atlantic respectively, played a crucial role in the history of their regions. While the Mediterranean was considered as an extraordinary ocean, the Atlantic has become the extraordinary ocean of the new age. Olson sensed the importance of Maximus of Tire to the twentieth century American Maximus’s imagination. As the poet decides to “hark back to an older polis” and declares that “(I am not named Maximus / for no cause,” (Olson, 1983, p. 24). He introduces Maximus as “a second-century dialectician,” who is also the navel or center of the world (Butterick, 1978, p. 7). A dialectician is a philosopher who sees the world through the lens of complementary opposites and their interconnections, and dialectic is necessary in the process of becoming intellect. Olson often uses parentheses to indicate opposition, exclusion from the previous statement, or an insertion in to the main text. However, Olson’s parenthesis in this example, “(I am not named Maximus / for no cause,” contains only an opening bracket but no closed bracket. This indicates emphasis that requires attention, and leaves space for the reader to add meaning. Thus, the role of the reader is complementary, since the reader is required to participate in the making of the poem by adding more information about the cause. As Burrows put it, “the poem [of energy] is an art-form we experience as a dynamic event, one involving both sound and sense. Poems ‘happen’ to us. They are events that constitute something within us. They call us not to comprehend something, but rather to participate in the reality they gesture toward” (2013, p. 20). Hirshield suggests that energy poems “preserve their inaugural newness in part because they are like the emotions—not object, but experience, event,” brought into a state of saturation (2008, p. 46).

Both Old Maximus and Olson’s Maximus experienced the city in the same way. For Olson, Maximus is the real myth because myth is man’s experiences and recognitions. Olson once declared, “I’m professionally a mythologist” and he once taught a course titled “Myth and literature.” He also wrote that our “inattention to the static,” or inattentive recognition, causes a collective lack of direct vision. Attention is “‘eternal’ as instantaneous.” By migration, going under experience or mushroom, one can discover the truth (Olson, 2010, pp. 112–113). As Christensen writes, “Migratory history is the largest frame in which to cast the identity and history of Gloucester” and “myth is indeed the record of migratory people” (1979, p. 143). Maximus serves as a gate to Gilgamesh, migrating and displaying his activity and participation to others, rather than showcasing a sense of belongingness. Olson provided further understanding of the role of Maximus: “the purpose of Maximus, the person who addresses himself to the City, is to measure: the advantage of a single human figure” (qtd. in Butterick, 1978, pp. 6–7). Olson realized the importance of man and discovered in Maximus some kind of myth “measure.” Later, Olson would say that “I chose to use Maximus of Tire as… figure of speech” (1978, p. 8).

Olson preferred rhetoric and practical reasons as alternatives for Greek logic, reason, and order. The Greeks’ approach to reality is based on logic, thus reduces all variation to homogeneity and undermines people’s capacity to find the truth for themselves. Truth is constrained by facts, theories, and abstractions; it eventually becomes referential, unchangeable, static, and complete. Here, Olson defines the importance of Maximus. The choice of Maximus “as the figure of speech,” makes its meaning more than referential and static. Everything depends on man, who is an object among other objects and images in the world, but it’s the only object migrating from West to East and vice versa. Thus, man is discovering and going on: “… man at his peril breaks the full circuit of object, image, action at any point… If man is active, it is exactly here where experience comes in that it is delivered back, and if he stays fresh at the coming in he will be fresh at his going out” (Olson, 1997, p. 162). Maximus starts from Gloucester, but looks to the East. There is the act of looking East, which may be interpreted as an impulse toward the direction of lost causes, and facing a natural, cosmic order from a limited and unstable vantage. Maximus represents a recovery of cohesion by moving, as Paul puts it, “in two ways and from two directions… from the East with the discoverers in the outer (and inner) sea to the New World and by moving from the West, from Worcester, his ‘inland waters’, to Gloucester” (1978, p. 156). Maximus performs his saturation epic in Olson’s fishing town of Gloucester from where the poet watches the present fast-changing world. Bram summarizes Olson’s Maximus and his role in the world of multiplicity:

a finite but borderless… expanding universe–[turning]Olson into Maximus: multidimensional, growing expanding, influencing the world and influenced by it. In non-Euclidian geometry, the individual does not tower beyond space, observing it from outside or form above, projecting himself on it, and space itself is no longer absolute; the world is multiplicity within unity, meaning that human beings are merely part of that multiplicity, and at the same time participants in building its unity. (Bram, 2004, p. 39)

Olson’s rule is always that man’s relation to the world is the relation of the part to the whole, and man is the only active object or image that can bring about change. Olson is against every kind of division. He writes in “Poem 143. The Festival Aspect”:

The World

has become divided

from the Universe. Put the three Towns

together

The Individual

has become divided

from the absolute, it is the times promised

by the poets. They shall drop …….

……………al forms

of symbols

and mystery. As well as all

naturalism. And literalness. The truth

is fingures holding it all up

underneath……..

Absolute: we shall stand on our heads and hands

truly, kicking

all false form off

the surface

of the still, or active,

water-surface, There is no image

which is a reflection. Or a condition … (Olson, 1983, p. 441)

The “Three Towns” are the earth, sky, and everything in between. According to an ancient Vedic conception, the universe comprises three worlds (triloka), (1) the earth, (2) the middle space or atmosphere, and (3) the firmament or sky. These are called “The Three Towns” (tripura) (See Zimmer, 1953, pp. 185–187). “The individual / has become divided/ from the absolute…” because the real absolute depends on action and participation. In order to put an end to all sorts of divisions, we need to stand on attention, or the “mind”; body, as in “hands”; and activity, like “… kicking / all false form off / the surface / of the still …” Olson seems to believe that the Greeks put an end to the “three Towns” as he calls them here, or what he calls elsewhere “Three Heavens” (Olson, 1983, p. 494) because only man can bring unity and coherence to the world and

……..When the World is one again

with the Universe the Flower

will grow down, the Sun

will be stamped

on the leather

like a growing

Coin, the earth

will be the light, the air and the dust

of the air will be the perfume (Olson, 1983, p. 441)

There is a focus on the particular that results in wholeness, beauty, love, and destruction of reason, and a poetry saturated with direct experience and emotion. This is a sign of man’s glory and the return of the body to its relevance: “… the gloire / will have returned / will glow,” and “… the man / shall have arisen, he shall have concluded / any use of reason…” (Olson, 1983, p. 442). Olson’s prose writings are full of criticism on modern man himself. This is because of Olson’s belief that man chooses to be fooled by the forms of Westernism. “Man has made himself an ugliness and a bore” (Olson, 1997, p. 164), and like Moby-Dick, “had to be wild or he was nothing in particular. He had to go fast, like an American, or he was all torpor. Half horse half alligator” (1997, p. 18). Olson admired Fyodor Dostoevsky who “found the disintegration of society a consequence of man’s disintegration and not a cause. He pushed his attention beyond the enemies of man to man himself. To Dostoevsky the real danger does not lie in the devils outside ourselves” (1997, p. 129). As Olson put it, “we are both the instrument of discovery and the instrument of definition” (1997, p. 155). Beach states that “Olson’s conception is less concerned with control and order than with discovery” (1992, p. 89).

In 1946, Olson was thinking of presenting his plan for writing “a book on Human Body” (Olson, 1975, p. 82), a book that he never wrote. However, in a certain sense, Maximus Poems are that intended book. For Olson, postmodern poets, an exception but not a rule, are “of the heterogeneous present and not of the old homogeneity of the Founders, and the West,” (1997, p. 205). In Maximus, he writes that “only the glory of / celebrating / the processes / Earth / and man” (Olson, 1983, p. 540). Our duty, Olson writes, is to make “a re-entry of or to the universe. Reality was without interruption, and we are in the business of finding out how all action, and thought, have to be refounded” (1997, p. 121), a substitution to the Greeks’ laws. As a matter of fact, Olson is concerned with the origin, the capabilities of nature’s energies, and how man becomes an image of possibilities implicit in these energies. Since the Greeks, man has been blind to the achievements and undertakings of heroes. Olson’s methodology, which challenges the whole of Western prescribed methodology, consists of the Myth of man, experience, and nature’s energies. Olson’s policy is to look backward to the origin, from Maximus back to Gilgamesh.

Why Gloucester? the last polis

People have long associated Olson with Gloucester, regarding him as inextricably linked to the place. Gloucester was chosen for changing the idea of polis. Olson would consider Gloucester as “the final movement of the earth’s people, the great migratory thing… migration ended in Gloucester… the last polis or city is Gloucester” (Butterick, 1978, p. 8). He notes that “the choice of Gloucester is particular—that is the point of the interest, particularism itself” instead of abstract ideas of the absolute and the universal. Olson seeks to experience the thing, “its particularity.” For him, the cultural colonialism that disturbed the idea of the epic in the modern world is just one product of a widespread and multi-faceted false methodology, existing since the time when the East Mediterranean scholarship was blocked out since around 1400 BCE (Olson, 1997, pp. 345–346), while Tire was “the only city which resisted Alexander’s universalization” and “the only thing in the world that confronted the universalization that Alexander proposed—which I think is the great complement to the present.” Universalism is problematic for Olson’s saturation art. The choice of Gloucester is a focus on the particular thing as a resistance to universalism and the absolute in the modern world. Gloucester is analogous with the second century BCE Tire. It “serves as a temenos or holy place” and it “contains hidden within itself a polis or ideal city—a ‘redeemable flower that will be a monstrance forever, of not a city but City’—which is to be struggled toward and attained, and which the poet will reveal by his act of imagination as well as personal investigation into the historical reality of the place or topos” (qtd. in Butterick, 1978, pp. 8–9). Olson emphasizes the importance of this historical turn in his epic:

1400 BC―exactly

60 years later than 2 generations birth

Hercules

Was born the

Greek Hercukes thereabouts

Tiryns or Thebes or My

cenae

Europe was beautiful (Maximus 526–27)

Olson regrets that Taurus, King of Crete, destroyed the city of Tire when Agenor and his sons were rallying from a sea-battle. As Olson writes,

…the Evil Night

of Tire john Malalas

calls it,

when Cretans

took everything

and blasted her

back in to the sea (1983, pp. 272–73)

Olson relates Tire to the Ancient Near East and considers Agenor descending from ancient Egypt, and back to Hittites, Hurrians, and further the Sumerians:

…that the Libyans

and the Phoenicians (Agenor

was said to come from Egypt

& to be the son of Poseidon

by Libya ̶ who herself

was the daughter of

the king of Egypt) …

……………………..

is there anything

to the possibility

that some of the non-Euclidean

roughnesses are here

involved ̶ Hittites, or Hurrian

may not be the only evidences,

there may be East African

̶ and again what about Libyan?

movements to the center

of the 2nd Millenium:

…………………….

(where did the Sumerians

come from, into the Persian

Gulf ̶̶ sea peoples (1983, pp. 274–275)

While Gloucester is on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, on the Atlantic coast around 30 miles northeast of Boston. It is the home of Olson, both where he grew up and where he settled. Many painters came to Gloucester because they saw something extraordinarily unique, and Olson saw Gloucester as an unspoiled haven. Olson admired the painters who came there because, like Olson, they followed the historical method of Herodotus by setting out to places to find out for themselves. Olson praised the painter Marsden Hartley who shared with and contributed to nearby Dogtown. Hartley was a painter who participated in nature and showed others what man can do (Olson, 1983, pp. 37–38). Hartley painted an attribute to Hart Crane entitled “Eight Bells’ Folly: Memorial for Hart Crane” (Butterick, 1978, p. 57). For Olson, what Hartley finally produced was “a meal of fish a final supper / –made Crane a Marsilles matelot” (Olson, 1983, p. 37). Crane means so much to Olson as the former called for extrication and restoration of language by getting back to hieroglyphs and ideograms of the Maya and the focus on particularism. Crane’s punitive language gets Olson back to jarred syntax. Hall suggests a different critical approach to Crane as a “new world poet” because of his transnational experience in Mexico and his involvement with the Indians that troubled his epic The Bridge (1930) (2013, p. 137). For Macgowan, Crane’s poetry proves “his ability to suggest a whole history from a contemporary moment and a particular object” (2005, p. 76). It is also argued that Crane’s interest in non-Western and mesoamerican cultures provided the inspiration for his epic (Nilsen, 1971, p. 127). However, Crane’s The Bridge is, in Olson’s eyes, a semi-saturation epic (see Olson, 1997, p. 244). According to Gillott, by getting back to hieroglyphs and ideograms and archaic topos Olson meant to “turn poetry back towards ‘the world’ and away from ‘discourse’; that is, to stop talking about the world and instead be an active part of it. Poetry was not to be a commentary on the world but an actor within it, inscribing reality into itself and itself into reality” (2018, p. 13). According to Olson, the hieroglyphics are a form of visual art. In “Human Universe,” he writes that hieroglyphs preserve the strength of the objects that they represent (Collected Prose 163–164). He contends that we should take inspiration from ancient cultures to revitalize our own language that lacks the same vibrancy (Thurley, 1977, p. 130). Olson comes to the conclusion that, in contrast to the more abstract languages of the modern West, which reduce awareness to nature spirituality, pictographic languages are more in line with the spiritual forms of nature.

Olson dedicated much of his time to writing about Gloucester. Because of “the original Indian” and “the possible Norse occupation of it,” Gloucester was nicknamed “Grapevine Corner.” Its uniqueness stems from being both the angle for Olson and an angle in the world. It is a particular place from which all the universal may mushroom. Gloucester offers to Olson the concept of “locus”–not place–but better meaning “topos” or “typology,” and more specifically “tropos” (Olson, 2010, pp. 461–462). Part of Olson’s mission is the search for terms that imply turning together. The term “tropos” implies all these meanings. Maximus Poems originally was intended to be called “typos” or “West.” The choice of Gloucester, therefore, meant a reduction or selectiveness: Gloucester “is not a place as such but an engagement of attentions which is necessarily located” (Byrd, 1980, p. 64). According to Stephens, “[t]he saturation job has necessary to be selective. Fragmented knowledge (or so the metaphor runs) remains, like the individual, severed from the collective” (2012, p. 199). Bollobás argues that “in Maximus hero and locality come together exactly by… engagement of attentions:” Maximus is a “root person” anchored in a “root city.” Unlike Paterson the man in Williams’s Paterson (1946–1958), another semi-saturation epic, who is related to Paterson the city metaphorically, Olson’s Maximus is related to Gloucester metonymically, “by history and topography” (Bollobás, 1992, p. 114). However, Maximus of Gloucester and Maximus of Tire are metaphorically connected. Both are images of possibilities. Both are poets, historians and pedagogues. Both are concerned with the relation of man to nature.

Olson’s care of Gloucester is not at odds with his active mind and imaginative flights towards other parts of the planet. As Herd, put it: “Olson… was both profoundly a poet of a given American place… and also a poet of elsewhere–a poet who understood the connection between the settings of a nation’s poetry and the violence of its foreign policy” (2010, p. 377). Gloucester is considered one of the sacred artistic places in the world. It is true that Olson’s project of the long poem goes back to the whole project of modern American poem invented by Walt Whitman. However, the way the small town of Gloucester acts as microcosm, opening into the universe, gives Olson a different intention. For Butterick, Maximus focuses “on a single locality that serves as a microcosm by which to measure the present and the nation and which grows to encompass earth, heaven, and hell” (1978, p. xix). Though Olson opens Maximus Poems with Gloucester, showing his anti-politics and language of anger, the second volume shows Olson as a mythologist and historist: a fisherman who flies through Egyptian, Assyro-Babylonian, Phoenician, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Teutonic, Celtic, and American Indian lands, and fishes in the Mediterranean. According to Beach, the epic blends fragments from various sources in a meditation on history, philosophy, methology and political action all over the world, especially everything connected to the Mediterranean (1992, p. 104).

Maximus Poems starts with epistolary poems addressed to the people of Gloucester but ends with an attack on the idea of the division between East and West, Mesopotamia and Europe, thusly becoming more open and informative. Olson writes:

removes the division

of Mesopotamian and

European. Mesopotamian

and European is only due

to

Mediterranean

mindedness. MINDEDNESS (1983, p. 445)

Olson is interested in the Bronze Age Collapse and the East-West divide (Olson, 1997, p. 170). He not only wants to re-bridge East and West, but also emphasize “Mediterranean / mindedness. MINDEDNESS,” spelling it large. Olson’s capitalization is meaningful here, as it is elsewhere. The emphasis, “MINDEDNESS,” refers to the high degrees of mindedness and openness. When Olson talks of the importance of space, he uses capitalization, “SPACE,” and he comments, “I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy” (Olson, 1997, p. 17) and “it was to be linked somehow to the earliest culture-hero Olson was aware of, Gilgamesh of Ur… as well as to the figure he called Bigmans—an obvious prototype, by name alone, of Maximus” (Butterick, 1978, p. xx). Other important capitalized words or phrases used by Olson are LOCAL, OPEN, WILL TO COHERE, METHODOLOGY, GILGAMESH, SUMER, PROJECTIVE VERSE, QUANTITY, POST-MODERN, to mention but a few.

Olson considers himself a man of the heterogeneous present, not of the homogenous past. Assuring his mixed and immigrant parentage, he writes of the last first people, the Native Americans, and how they are being tempted by capitalism and its consequences such as aggressive wars, or “mu-sick”: “As the people of the earth are now, Gloucester / is heterogeneous, and so can know polis / not localism, not that mu-sick” (Olson, 1983, p. 14). Olson changes the idea of polis from being homogenous to heterogeneous (qtd. in Butterick, 1978, p. 25). Rejecting Western universalism which was based on Greek’s discipline of word-thought, Olson speaks to the minority and urges them to be more open so that Gloucester could open to the world, and therefore, mean a different thing. The addressee is usually marginal and polis is “a few”: “I speak to any of you, not to you all, to no group, not to you as citizens” but the process, language, and Polis have a sort of “coherence” (Olson, 1983, p. 15). It is “the few” rather than “the many” who can return Gloucester to its relevance and position. He suggests that only some pedagogical schools (surely he has in mind Black Mountain College) and a few men, like Melville and Olson himself, can write Gloucester’s real story and history. Olson addresses Ferinni as part of the majority and their universalism:

It is not the many but the few who care

who keep alive what you set out to do:

to offer Gloucester poems and stories

the High School Flicker’s not the end of

but what you here bring in

is no such young thing

such as you, perhaps (I did,

and Helen Stein,

and Herman Melville) (Olson, 1983, p. 22)

The Maximus of Gloucester does not believe in culture and nation. Now his task is to restore place to its integrity and perfection, reconstructing Gloucester into the origin place, the “root city:”

o tansy city, root city

let them not make you

as the nation is

……………………….

polis now

is a few, is a coherence not even yet new (the island of this city

is a mainland now of who? Who can say who are

citizens?

……………………………………………..

Root person in root place (Olson, 1983: 15-6)

Here, Maximus addresses himself and Gloucester: “Root person in root place.” Later, the hero regrets that:

Dogtown: the Harbor

the shore the City

are now

shitty, as the Nation

is – the World

tomorrow… (Olson, 1983, p. 179)

Here, Maximus addresses himself and Gloucester. Thus, the voice of Maximus seeks to bring back the very notion of a polis as a dynamic and self-sufficient entity, and an aggregate of people and events. Despite the use of the Greek etymology, this is a pre-historical idea because Olson’s avatar looks back to an older polis, dating back to Homer. It is the minority, not the majority, who hew to experience and lay claim to “polis:”

And the few―that goes, even inside the major

economics. It is not true that the many,

even in fishing, say, Gloucester,

are the gauge

(where Ferrini, as so many,

go wrong

so few

have the polis

in their eye

…………………….

So few need to,

to make the many

share (to have it,

too)

but those few … (Olson, 1983, pp. 32–33)

As a matter of fact, most of the first letters of Maximus Poems were directed to Vincent Ferrini, editor of Gloucester literary magazine, Four Winds. This was because Ferrini ignored Gloucester’s possibility for becoming the last first place and fishing thing. For Olson, Ferrini’s magazine worked as a Gloucester publication, but it was restrained by “the limits of / literacy” (1983, p. 21) and without “one small Gloucester thing”:

I do not know that Four Winds has a place

or a sight in it

in a city where highliners breed,

if it is not as good as fish is

……………………………………………………

Nor assuage yrself I use the local as a stick to beat you. Such pages

as you now have published twice, do not need one small Gloucester thing to be a Gloucester magazine… (Olson, 1983, pp. 23–24)

In Maximus Poems, Olson draws on all kinds of things in Gloucester, including its history, economics, and geography. Gloucester has the advantage of being the first original English fishing settlement in the industrial North American Atlantic region, and it continued well after then. The city represents a novel physical, open, and aboriginal space that was inhabited by the last first men. Olson’s care for the Native Americans seems to be a reaction to how perverse professionalism has frustrated his saturation art. Consequently, Olson’s saturation art serves as a reaction and resolution. Olson relates Gloucester to the origin, to “the last first people” and their “will to cohere,” rather than to those since Socrates and their “will to disperse”. As Paul put it, “the horizontal belongs to the conquest of space, here to the discovery of America and the subsequent westward movement… the course of post-Sumerian history… dispersion, loss of center and coherence. Horizontal movement, accordingly, no longer serves ‘the last first people’” (1978, pp. 134–135). In his recovery of the ancient past, Olson prefers Sumer as the center, “the culture hearth where the city was coherence (polis), nourishing and advancing all people” (1978, p. 57). Olson relates in “The Gate and the Center”: “civilization had ONE CENTER, Sumer… this one people held such… superior force that all peoples around them were… advanced, that a city was a coherence which… gave man the chance to join knowledge to culture and… shape dignities of economics and value sufficient to make daily life itself a dignity and a sufficiency” (1997, p. 170).

Why new typology? words are epic and heroic

Olson’s postmodern poetry serves as a revelation of the unknowable thing through rejecting modern history which descended from the Greeks. The Western humanistic tradition created certain laws and restricted man from direct experience, keeping him apart from the world. Thus, everything has been infected with Greekism. Olson writes in “SONG 1” of “The Songs of Maximus:” “And words, words, words, words / invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses / including the mind…” (Olson, 1983, p. 17). The repetition of “words” emphasizes the Greek/Western literacy. Repetition provides emphasis as well as clearness. Moreover, more energetic multiple repetition like this expresses extreme agitation and outburst. Maximus is addressed “o Gloucester-man /…o kill kill kill kill” everyone “who advertise you / out)” and be “with others like you, such / extricable surface/ as faun and oral, / satyr lesbos vase” (1983, pp. 7–8). First, “faun and oral, / satyr lesbos vase” refers to pre-Homer, pre-literate, and genetic culture, while “those / who advertise you / out” are those from the time of Socrates forward. Second, the word “kill” is repeated four times and written without commas, suggesting a high degree of agitation. But in general, repetition emphasizes emotions. As Olson compares the Mediterranean men to others such as “Germans” and their rigid systematizing mind, he writes that the Mediterranean people “taste sweet sweet sweet” (1983, p. 60). Another example of repetition of words is “fish fish fish” (1983, p. 108). Cheap and empty words kept the body from discovery and participation. “No eyes or ears left / to do their own doings…,” even “Both: / the attention, and / the care” or “the mind” is suspended (1983, p. 32). Addressing Ferrini and the limits of modern literacy, Olson writes that “… I can’t get away from the old measure of care…” (1983, p. 26). Olson’s critique on Western literacy is severe as he postulates that it prevented everyone from having their own history. For Beach, Olson’s view of history “should reflect individual exploration and personal experience rather than doctrine or state ideology” (1992, p. 103). For Olson, this creates interest because it gets “the whole thing reversed, so that we don’t have cause anymore; we have motive.” Olson laments that “[w]e have lost motive almost entirely out of our mental capacity and have had cause instead.” In the new world of saturation, our attention mobilizes the original object. Man is care and care is man, and the nature of mind is an open process. Olson also command, “Say ‘attention.’ Give ourselves that great quality… Attention [is] the source of our very existence as being human beings.” The motive is the very moment that attention picks its object (2010, pp. 111–112). Olson addresses Ferrini, defending man’s magical possibilities:

The mind, Ferrini,

is much of a labor

as to lift an arm

flawlessly

Or to read sand in the butter on the end of a lead,

and be precise about what sort of bottom your vessel’s over

(Olson, 1983, p. 27)

Thus, Olson emphasizes man’s capabilities of hewing to experience to proceed in knowing the unknown, that is, the hidden, “to read sand in the butter,” thusly discovery and foundation. Saturating oneself in the unknown to the point where you re-enter the world through it. In fact, this is a Gilgameshian posture. The Mesopotamian epic opens with: “[who] knew…, was wise in all matters! / [Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,” (George, 1999, p. 1).

Olson’s postmodern poetry of experience, energy, and saturation is directed towards illiterate people rather than literate ones, toward open audience rather than passive professors, and toward uncovering the unknown rather than the known knowledge and world. Olson revolts against Western epistemology, literacy, and the universe of discourse. Instead, he proposes an alternative universe of illiteracy and saturation. Olson’s postmodern illiteracy, or what he calls “the new illiteracy… In our post-pre-literate period” is directed toward the illiterate people as human beings uninfected by Western onto-epistemological thoughts (Cech et al. 1974, p. 26). Beach argues that Olson posits “an entirely new epistemology” (1992, p. 89). Thus, the first step for Olson was to destroy the Greek epistemology: “The Tower is broken, the house / where head was used to lift.” Then space is automatically created where man can participate:

Where there are no walls

There are no laws, forms, sounds, odors

To grab hold of

Let the tower fall!

Where space is born

man has a beach to ground on (Olson, 1987, p. 190)

The “tower” refers to the Greek epistemology that haunted Western culture, and which must now “fall.” The emphasis would then transfer to man and space. In “The Kingfishers,” Olson tries to uncover non-Western traditions that are toppled by the conquistadors who “tore the eastern idols down, toppled / the temple walls…” (Olson, 1960, p. 10). Gilgamesh the discoverer and founder of the world “opened his mouth” to speak where “words,” and “speech found favor” (George, 1999, pp. 13–15). This is a leitmotiv in the Mesopotamian epic. For Olson’s Gilgamesh, if man is the instrument of both definition and discovery, then “language is a prime of the matter” and “it is necessary to examine the present condition of the language… in its double sense of discrimination (logos) and of shout (tongue)” (Olson, 1997, p. 155). Olson proclaims that “the struggle for language today is THE PRIMARY,” and that “the Poet… is the one finally responsible agent of culture.” Olson is also convinced that “it was language—words, goddamn it, WORDS—which freed man from his hands and any extension of same” (qtd. in Eshleman, 2004). For Olson, the text is typological; it is open and in process and words are “epic and heroic”: what we need is “more light on every word, every device of syntax, each difference of morphology in structure and in form, until it’s all laid clear. When the attention is that steady and intense, stays that way, there is nothing but gain, on all sides… words like epic and heroic: typology.” Breath or breathing “is man’s special qualification as animal,” sound “is a dimension he has extended,” and language “is one of his proudest acts” (Olson, 1997, pp. 247–248). Olson took man, language, and space seriously:

Let those who use words cheap, who use us cheap

take themselves out of the way

Let them not talk of what is good for the city

Let them free the way for me, for the men of the Fort Who are not hired, who buy the white houses (Olson, 1983, p. 13)

“The men of the Fort,” refers to the Native American people who do not “use words cheap” or “who use us cheap” (Olson, 1983, p. 93). Boer writes that Olson “knew the words that everyone wanted to hear… a man who had all the answers” (1975, p. 33). Poetry of energy, for Olson, is a field of events, while language is the action. Olson prefers Gilgameshian universe of experience to Western universe of discourse because the former uses projective language to re-enact experience. For him, the kinetic of language is an event or an action taking place, rather than discourse. “There is only one thing you can do about kinetic, re-enact it. Which is why the man said, he who possesses rhythm possesses the universe. And why art is the only twin life has ― its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact” (Olson, 1997, p. 162).

For Olson, language, “in the hands of Hesiod and Homer,” was completely different “than it had become, and that language has been since” (Olson, 2010, p. 311). It is “the Americanization of the world” that has “eaten up even as things as languages, live languages.” It is this fact that has sent Olson, for example, to Central America to study the Mayan culture and its language. This serves to open one’s areas of consciousness, where man exists under the mushroom―not a lyric subjectivity or hallucination or sensation, but the reality that binds one to creation. Olson writes that “Myself, being a terrible literalist and a secularist if not a particularist, I think that our vocabulary ought to be set aside until we actually have the experience. And, in fact, if we use a vocabulary, we already are turning the advantage away” (Olson, 2010, pp. 464–465). In “Bridge-Work,” a subheading in “Proprioception” (1965), Olson writes that “there is an advantage to the leaping outside as well as connecting backward: for example, American Indian Languages offer useful freshening of syntax to go alongside Indo-European” (Olson, 1997, p. 189). Rather than the Western writing system, Olson looks to the Sumerian logographic system: “etymology as well as alphabet to write words by” (Olson, 1997, p. 354). Olson’s reference to “alphabet,” in addition to “etymology” is significant. This is because alphabets, called phonograms linguistically, represent sounds only, their meaning is created only in combination with other phonograms. Olson here emphasizes interaction and experience, rather than depending on pre-existing concepts. In “Projective Verse,” Olson declares that “Let’s start from the smallest particles of all, the syllable [the] king and pin of versification” because it “rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem.” And both the syllable and the line make the poem, the world (Olson, 1997, p. 242). Olson calls this art as “logography” and “the discourse which makes it possible” as “mythological.” This discourse results in an interaction between earth, sky, and anything in between, figuratively and literally. Olson also calls this process of interaction “proprioception,” differentiating between perception (present) and conception (past). He writes, “perception is refound to be primary or morphological, and that conception is put back where it does occur.” Olson chooses to be phenomenologist (see Al-Hadi, 2022, pp. 47–48) because he believes that art is the creation of events, a re-entry to the world:

One wants phenomenology in place, in order that event may re-arise. There are only two facts about mythology which count: that they are made up of tales and personages, in place. Words then are naming and logography is writing as though each word is physical and that objects are originally motivating. This is the doctrine of the earth. (Olson, 1997, p. 354).

One of the radical concepts in Olson’s philosophy of saturation is obedience to nature, which encounters the relationship between words and the world. Olson’s use of words independent of etymology, semantics, and morphology make their meaning open and uncertain. For example, “pick-nicks” in “Letter 6” (Olson, 1983, p. 31), and “pejorocracy” and “mu-sick” in “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You” (1983, p. 7). The word “pejorocracy” means worse-rule, or a worsening form of rule. Moreover, the word was already used in “The Kingfishers”: “what pudor pejorocracy affronts” (Olson, 1960, p. 11). Meanwhile, the word “mu-sick,” repeated three times “mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick,” means worse than war. Bollobás writes that a “belief in the value of words and in the importance of communication between two persons, a refusal to employ words in a causal and careless manner, a demand for precision and explicitness―these are the features that characterize Olson’s stance toward language” (1992, p. 45). For Olson, Hellenistic rational discourse and abstract language depended on referentiality and allegory, neglecting the laws of instantaneous experience. Abstract signifiers have no concrete and literal reference in physical reality. As Olson writes in “Tyrian Business”:

There may be no more names than there are objects

There can be no more verbs than there are actions

It is still

morning (Olson, 1983, p. 40)

These lines are better read together with Olson’s essay “Syllabary for a Dancer” (1952): “language is simultaneously a sign and a sound… there can be no more verbs than there are actions in the human universe” (qtd. in Butterick, 1978, pp. 59–60). Olson’s typology focuses on sound and meaning. He always prefers nouns, proper nouns, because his impression, as he put it in “Projective verse,” is that “all parts of speech suddenly, in composition by field, are fresh for both sound and percussive use, spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetables in the patch, when you work it, come spring.” Olson’s great master in this respect is Hart Crane, of which he writes, “Now take Hart Crane. What strikes me in him is the singleness of the push to the nominative, his push along that one arc of freshness, the attempt to get back to word as handle.” This is the Olsonian system “word as noun” as a substitute to the Greek logos “word as thought” (Olson, 1997, p. 244). Olson defines “logography” as “word writing. Instead of ‘idea-writing.’” This “logography,” leads to an open saturation art, or a process of representing sounds— “phonetization.” Olson states that logography is “leading to phonetization―as though we didn’t know identity of sounds, meaning two things, any longer did mean. The proposition wld seem to be that we don’t” (Olson, 1997, p. 184). This is Olson’s other word for “mushroom” or “direct perception,” which is open and requires attention. Olson cites from around 3500 BCE:

Uruk

Erech

Orchoe

Warka (1997, p. 184)

Such logographic writing is often adopted by Olson. To generalize it to Olson’s logography, this is a speech delivered in France and used in “The Kingfishers”:

Mao concluded:

nous devons

nous lever

et agir (Olson, 1960, p. 6)

Olson translated Mao Tse-tung’s words in the same poem as “we must rise, act” (Olson, 1960, p. 9) and paraphrased it in “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” as “… man, as his acts must, as there is always / a thing he can do, he can raise himself…” (Olson, 1960, p. 27). Proper names require “adequate representation,” a fact that “led to the development of phonetization.” Olson here confirms the importance of Mayan writings “which employ the phonetic principle only rarely and then almost exclusively in expressing proper names” (Olson, 1997, p. 184). Although Olson’s art of logography is not complete, the point that he makes is interesting and impressive. He closes his argument, writing that “I stop there. My own sense is I don’t know that we are any further” (Olson, 1997, p. 184). However, Olson’s use of the art of logography and jarred syntax necessitates more explanation. Although he admired Crane’s use of puns and proper names, which lead to openness and needs for phonetization, Olson deems Crane’s syntax, though jarred to a certain extent, still inadequate:

But there is a loss in Crane… in syntax, the sentence… as passage of force from subject to object, quick, in this case, from Hart to me, in every case, from me to you, the VERB, between two nouns. Does not Hart miss the advantage, by such an isolated push, miss the point of the whole front of syllable, line, field, and what happened to all language, and to the poem, as a result? (Olson, 1997, p. 244)

What Olson might mean here is that with phonetization, grammar is not always required. Olson explains that “the need for indicating grammatical elements was of no great importance in the origin of phonetization can be deduced from the fact that even after the full development of phonetization writing failed for a long time to indicate grammatical elements adequately” (Olson, 1997, p. 184). In fact, the physical appearance of Olson’s poetry (scattered, broken, and indented lines over the pages) is part of a comprehensive definition of his saturation stance.

Thus, nouns, except proper nouns, according to Olson, are only signs “of the objects which man has found important enough to give a name to” (qtd. in Butterick, 1978, p. 60). Mallarmé postulates that “to name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little: to suggest there is the dream” (qtd. in Eco, 1989, p. 8). Bollobás writes that “seeking always for the right word,” Olson “wishes to recover the primordial integrity of language, where words act as objects, basic realities, with one-to-one verbal correspondences” (1992, p. 116). This requires care, attention, particularity, clarity, and a pervading morality of perception. Olson prefers open/unbounded wholeness to completeness (“complete thought”). Olson’s use of flexible syntax and unfinished sentences is commonplace. “I, Mencius, Pupil of the Master” is composed of fragmented phrases:

go still

now that your legs

the Charleston

is still for us

You can watch

It is too late

to try to teach us

we are the process

and our feet

We do not march (Olson, 1960, p. 63)

Olson’s style is often spontaneous and disjunctive, his sentences are often grammatically incomplete, and the tone is often excited and energetic. His’s sentences are open and each one leads to another like energy. It mimics one’s direct and immediate perception. Bollobás writes that “Olson’s language is processual (that is, only a means to an end, and not also an end to an end in itself). This processual nature of Olson’s syntax is evident in his refusal to write complete sentences and in his use of a quick language to follow his quick thinking” (1992, p. 58). Olson’s sentences often change directions: he hesitates, stops in the middle of a sentence, and then continues in a new line, in a new digressive way. Thus, sentence is a continuous process, rather than a completed state. Olson regrets that “There is a discourse. There is a grammar. There is a complete sentence” (Olson, 1997, p. 358). But although Olson’s sentences look incomplete syntactically, they are open and whole semantically. This is Olson project of saturation: openness, wholeness, fragmentation, digression, instantaneous experience, to mention but a few, but not completeness. Olson encourages everyone to focus on how unique every experience is. The structure of language is one of the things that keeps people from experiencing this kind of quality. For Christensen, Olson “was fond of observing that the mere syntax of the simple sentence in English implied a contrived reality of cause and effect; worse, it constrained us from rendering what lay beneath the surface of our immediate awareness” (1979, p. 8).

The one quality Olsonian polis or community or people have in common is their “eyes,” the quality of their attention, the tool for saturation. Some call this quality of attention “a radical phenomenology… The fishermen provide a model of perceptual precision and care for both the city… and the poet… Maximus insists upon the absolute primacy of the visual” (Byrd, 1980, p. 81), while others consider Olson’s Maximus as “the apostle of total awareness” (Christensen, 1979, p. 123). With the tool of attention as the key standard for citizenship in Olson’s proposed polis, it leads to a reality in which “there are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of” (1983, p. 33). Instead of commodity, we have the principle of quantity where attention is the key criteria for polis and saturation and where the information is recalled and selected in a certain context. In a 1969 interview with the BBC about his “saturation job”, projective poetry, and Black Mountain College, Olson announced that he and John Rice were elected rectors to investigate flawed ideas of polis and sociology and the hierarchical structure of institutions:

The reason why he was Rector and I was Rector was because he wouldn’t even permit the word ‘President’: it offended his sense of some sociology which really functioned like flag that flutters in whatever breezes cause it to stand up, or if there are no breezes it falls down. Something like that, some real successful non-administrative society. Instead of a society of flag and pennant, a state should be just another thing which is affected by nature. (2010, p. 292)

This absence of hierarchy among community further demonstrates participation and interest in a liberal education, experience, and change. Black Mountain College aimed to take apart hierarchies in every aspect of its structure.

The concept of polis, which Olson defined as “eyes,” “attention,” and “care,” bring one back to Olson’s stance toward reality, one that is open and attentive. Bollobás describes this connection between Olson’s new stance toward reality and the quality of attention it requires:

Attention, “the source of our very existence as human beings,” makes subject and the world coincide: “only if there is a coincidence of yourself / & the universe is there then in fact / an event”… Life only happens when one is interested, concerned, open to experience, in a condition of alertness… only… attention, interest, a turning toward the world can make life happen, or bring about events. And the world lying around us can only be known and understood compassionately, through this attentive concern. (1992, p. 40)

For Olson, poetry requires a new theory of truth: The recognition that the poet’s new job of saturation is describing a new stance toward reality that creates a space, a multidimensional field in which a dialog between objects and things takes place and that results in open and unlimited meanings and possibilities. It is in this sense that Maximus (as object) is a figure of speech that is rhetorical and practical rather than static or referential that characterize Platonic truth where there is no room for play and words represent reality rather than create it. In Maximus Poems, Olson creates a space where readers are invited into the open space and scope of the epic to join with him (Maximus) for an open-ended dialog or experience. In “Maximus, to himself” Olson writes,

I have made dialogs,

have discussed ancient texts,

have thrown what light I could, offered

what pleasures

doceat allows (Olson, 1983, p. 56)

Readers need to use their eyes, ears, breath and bodies to engage the text. They need to use their attention to participate in an open, fast dialog in order not to miss meanings, and be able to create the “polis of the self” (Christensen, 1979, p. ix) that the text challenges them to create. The readers are strongly encouraged to locate and take role in approaching the text.

Olson was using his particular media technique to express an instantaneous perception of reality. The saturation project was to study primary materials as though he were experiencing and comprehending these materials for the first time. By embracing the present, which is the only setting in which a real past can exist, he aimed to express the materiality of history. As Kroll writes, “for Olson history is something we are constantly creating in the present. Each present moment is thus saturated with history” (2018, p. 27). The urge to restore the ancient lies at the heart of Olson’s saturation or projectivism. According to Minter, this can be achieved by “recuperating a primal mode of sentience in which the body and sensation, cognition, language and history are poetically substantiated” (2015, p. 265). As a matter of facts, Olson wants us “to pick up, to take up, to get back, in order to get on” (Olson, 1997, p. 168) and “The new way does promote / cleverness, the main chance is / its law” (Olson, 1983, p. 25). Olson dramatizes his collection of sources to produce a social history analogy, redefining Gloucester as a place-specific image “where polis / still thrive” (1983, p. 26). His approach to language ignores orderly representation in favor of situations where grammatical norms are torn apart to match the present complex situation in order to grasp the unfolding moment with a projective sensibility. For Christensen, Olson “seemed to suppress any control over form in order to register perception exactly as it happened to him” (1979, p. 43).

Olson promotes a return to the syllable and the line as key poetic elements in his quest for liberation and saturation: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” The syllable and the line are kingly children born spontaneously. The former comes into existence from “the union of the mind and the ear,” while the latter comes from the breathing of the poet at the moment that he/she creates a projective thing, composes a projective poem, the “Single Intelligence” (1997, 241–242). Those operating in the open field will be able to explore new areas of awareness by being physically in tune with the energy that flows through the body. By revisiting pre-Western knowledge and perspective, the poet can reach far beyond the realms of reason to deal with space.

Olson was interested in past cultures, especially in prehistoric fragmented literature and the arts. For instance, he admired “the dug up stone figures, the thrown down glyphs, the old sorells in sheep dirt in caves, the flaking iron” that characterized Cy Twombly’s paintings (Olson, 1997, p. 177). Olson also noticed the difficult project of Twombly: “I knew what Twombly was fighting for, even in this canvas. It is always what he is trying to get down, what he so often does so succeed in getting in to what he is confronted by” (p. 176). In these densely paintings, Olson perceives fundamental and ancient aspects, and he understands how Twombly is referencing myth and history in a straightforward manner that is consistent with his own poetics of saturation. Olson is fascinated with the earliest forms of writing, particularly the Mayan glyphic form or the saturated Sumerian poem: “I take it, a Sumer poem or Maya glyph is more pertinent to our purposes than anything else, because each of these people & their workers had forms which unfolded directly from content (sd content itself a disposition toward reality which understood man as only force in field of force containing multiple other expressions” (Olson, 1968, p. 101).

Olson wants history, geography, and archeology to be projectively synthesized, where “proprioceptive sensation in the present moment is fused with a genealogy or archeology of locality and its lived archive” (Minter, 2015, p. 267). Similarly, in Maximus Poems, as the narrative progresses, things and images come together over a landscape of compressing space and time, making Maximus’s journey an excavation process:

far enough up into the North

for the Atlantic to be known

Portuguese

are part Phoenician (?

Canary Islanders

Cro-Magnon

Islands,

to islands

headlands

and shores

Megalithic

stones

Stations

on shores

And Sable

Then England

an Augustine

land (Olson, 1983, p. 251)

Despite the forward motion, these movements are as vast and substantial, as “Megalithic / Stones,” as the subsequent moment of discovery, as each trajectory moves through space. These offshore “Islands, / to islands” movements in space-based imagination open to nomadic forces enable Maximus to explore beyond Gloucester in search of a worldwide trajectory. Reflecting on Maximus’s creative possibility, Olson writes that “in the midst of it,” “Quantity… the external world, that all things do extend out,” and “knowing well how he was folded in, as well as how suddenly and strikingly he could extend himself, spring or… go, to far, the farthest―he was suddenly possessed or repossessed… which I shall call his physicality. It made a re-entry of or to the universe” (Olson, 1997, p. 121). A sequence of paratactic movements mapped by the poetic space’s expansive texture: From “Island to islands,” from and to “Stations / on shores” and from ancient Paleolithic fragmented objects at the “Cro-Magnon” rock shelter to Saint Augustine’s foundation of a Christian “England.” Some of Olson’s thoughts “were grounded in Cro-Magnon imagination” (Eshleman, 2004) and such comments suggest an affinity with prehistoric sensibility.

Swensen emphasized Olson’s refusal to “the Greco-Roman tradition of discourse, which he felt made language into a shield against actual experience” (2011, p. 16). According to Byrd, Maximus Poems examines the essence of the creative process itself, by which the poet, like a dancer, “becomes the center at which creative accidents are recognized and become factors in the growth of consciousness” (1980, p. 88). What characterizes Olson’s poems is his interest in the human body, its gestures and movements. His poems, like painting or dance, are “generated through felt experience where utilizing the body’s knowledge becomes paramount. By bringing his compositional practice closer to the concerns of modern dance,” Maximus Poems “emphasizes the self-originating kinetic of the poet” (Gillies, 2016, p. 190). Rhythm and dance are metaphors to describe real poetry and real activity in the world: “there is only one thing you can do about kinetic, re-enact it. Which is why the man said, he who possesses rhythm, possesses the universe” (Olson, 1997, p. 162). For Paul, Olson “invokes the dance… as a practical discipline of body-consciousness of proprioception, posture, movement. He invokes dance because for the dancer - he speaks always as a participant and not as an observer - it is projective art, the paradigm of stance and movement-in-space and of the truth he so highly prizes, that ‘we use ourselves’” (1978, p.88–89). Through participation, Olson’s projective poetry expands consciousness by drawing in momentary experience and being vividly aware of the ever-changing state of existence.

Olson identifies the greater space of images in which the projectivist poet may participate with dimensions greater than the man. Olson uses his own physical being as a measure, and the melody of the breath allows him to connect this to his entire self:

I measure my song,

measure the sources of my song,

measure me, measure

my forces (1983, p. 48)

Olson views the larger space as an arena of awareness that is controlled by the energy of engagement; his poetic drive is to capture things exactly as they are, and the empty page becomes an open field in which to act, the poem itself is a high saturation-construct and a saturation discharge. The empty page turns into an image or medium that may project fluctuations.

Conclusion

When the modern world witnessed the tendency of writing what we would call semi-saturation works that puzzled literary history, few attempts were made to free them from some oddities and anomalities, though found them semi-failures or flawed masterpieces. However, Charles Olson, a remarkably talented artist, postmodern poet and essayist in post-war America, sought to review Western terminology, methodology, and epistemology. Sensing the danger of Western scholarship and the failure of modernism to bring to the postmodern culture of saturation the richness of the pre-history, Olson created the highest achievement of twentieth-century American poem in the postmodern canon. Therefore, this paper created a new–and better–category for the poet’s Maximus Poems: “postmodern saturation Epic.” Olson’s Maximus, the best exemplary postmodern sasuration epic, meant as a comprehensive knowledge of a single thing, local subject, informed by attention―the four topics of person, process, millennia and quantity, leading to something like universal insight. After having conducted an extensive research on pre-historic art and culture, especiacially Gilgamesh and the culture of its composition, Olson decided to undertake a “saturation job” and attempt his hand at Maximus, an iconic postmodern saturation epic in a culture of saturation and energy.

This paper exhibited how Olson’s esthetics look backward to the original, dynamic, pre-history–the ancient Near East Mediterranean society and literature as well as later cultures that evoked the Ancient Near East. This serves as a back-door of sorts to Olson, who lies outside the whole Greek system. Olson’s Maximus Poems is an extension of and inclusion of the ancient and ongoing cultural being, which is meaningfully aligned to his “saturation job.” This inclusion, which remains so far hardly examined, is of indigenous Mesopotamia before East-West dichotomy came into being as a business project, and, therefore, undervaluing the Mediterranean open-mindedness. Thus, through his problematization of Western cosmoslogos and utilization of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, Olson’s Maximus is a postmodern saturation epic of immediate experience outside the closed “Western Box,” providing a framework for Sumer’s value to an American audience. Thus, Olson’s postmodern poetry of saturation is either of Sumerian material, non-Greek or Roman, or informed by aspects of Eastern policy.

Olson’s methodology includes the Myth of man, experience, and nature’s energies. The policy seems unavoidable: looking backward to the origin, Gilgamesh. Olson’s saturation job was inspired by Gilgamesh whom Olson considers as his predecessor and who embraced experience and touched the very object. Olson can trust only the Sumerians, Babylonians, Phoenicians and some Greek figures because they are the only pedagogues who chose a saturation job and proposed no limits to the capabilities of man. Modern man lost the recognition and creation of the Sumerians, along with the purpose of Gilgamesh. Man must have his own image and recognition of the world. Olson considers Gilgamesh his greatest master, poet-pedagogue and the best fisherman, and Maximus is one of the greatest gates to Gilgamesh.

Maximus Poems is a postmodern saturation epic: a morphology of life, wherein geography and history appear attractively intermingled, and Maximus is modeled explicitly on Gilgamesh as a pedagogue or culture-hero, taking from Goucester an original and dynamic polis of the pre-history. Olson’s saturation epic job is an open field that exhibits the postmodern man’s re-entry to pre-and-non-Western literary cultures by way of especially some Greek historians and epic composers that have the characteristics of the Mesopotamian world. Those operating in the open field will be able to explore new areas of awareness by being physically in tune with the energy that flows through the body. By revisiting pre-Western knowledge and perspective, the poet can reach far beyond the realms of reason to deal with space. Finally, Olson could bring the epic to its position in the postmodern age after the genre being debased and exhausted.