Searching for the lost Aphrodite Sequence

This is an interesting visual interpretation of Aphrodite by Claude Verlinde.




I spent two hours searching again, for the rise of Aphrodite in Charles Olson's, Maximus poems to no avail. I love the brilliant angelic and oracular voice of Olson. The power and breath in his poetry is everything that trite American poetry is not and that includes most derivative beat poets and after Ginsburg they were pretty much all derivative. Not that there weren't differences in their choices of addictive substances. I am going to put a good word in for Gary Snyder and Michael McClure not to mention the infamous Crispin Edgewood.

But back to Olson- who is one of the most brilliant of all American poets. I am asking myself why it is I long for these particular words he wrote so long ago; the encapsulated uncoil of an archetypal mermaid turned Goddess into bitter gold light, dazzling with beauty and impermanence. I just do. Poets need poetry and dreams the way others need bread.

Her is a snippet of an interesting discussion about Olson.

Poetry, like any art, must renew itself continually. Charles Olson’s manifesto "Projective/Verse", published in 1950, describes poetry’s need to recover the energy of its sources from the exhausted (in his view) formal practice of Eliot and the New Critics. Projective verse, a.k.a. "composition by field" and "objectism," sees the poem not as words in lines upon a page, but as a field of energy-charged objects representing the poem’s psychic content in a state of immediacy, before laziness and habit have conspired to turn it into mere verse. Olson exhorts poets to attend to language with their ears, to compose according to the measure of their breathing (spiritus), to work with the "elements and minims of language...to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical," and so to fix the pulse of energy before it reaches the stasis of conventional form.



Below is a small poem from Maximus.



flower of the underworld



to build sand out of sound the walls of the city
& display
in one flower the underworld so that,

by such means the unique

stand forth clear itself
shall be made known

love in the poetry of Charles Olson

*****
...flight
(of the bird
o kylix, o
Antony of Padua
sweep low, o bless
the roofs,
*****
love is form, and cannot be without
important substance
*****
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you
listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
*****
one loves only form,
and form only comes
into existence when
the thing is born

born of yourself,
*****
love is not easy
but how shall you know,
New England, now
that pejorocracy is here,



Olson, Charles.
"I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You." _The Columbia
Granger's World of Poetry._ December 3, 2007.
http://www.columbiagrangers.org.




Biography
Olson, Charles (1910–70)

Charles Olson, American critic and poet, was born in Worcester,
Massachusetts, and received his education at Harvard (B.A., 1932; M.A.,
1933). His literary reputation was established with / Call Me Ishmael /
(1947), a study of the influence of Shakespeare and other writers on
Melville's / Moby Dick./ In the
1950's, he became noted as a poet, a central figure of what is now known
as the Black Mountain School, which also included Robert Creeley, Denise
Levertov, and Robert Duncan. Olson wrote what he called projective
(open) verse, which he believed transmitted energy from the past to the
reader. His works include his lifetime poetry project, /The Maximus
Poems / (1960 and
1968), along with / Causal Mythology / (1969), and / Poetry and Truth /
(1971). His best known poem is "The Kingfishers"
, which opens with
the line "What does not change / is the will to change."


Bibliography:
Clark, Tom. / Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life./New York:
Norton, 1991. Merrill, Thomas F. /The Poetry of Charles Olson: A
Primer./Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982. Olson, Charles. /The
Maximus Poems./Ed. George Butterick. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983. ———. /The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, Excluding the
Maximus Poems./ Ed. George Butterick. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987. Von Hallberg, Robert. /Charles Olson: The Scholar's
Art./Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.


To cite this biography:
Biography of Charles Olson. _The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry._
December 3, 2007. http://www.columbiagrangers.org.