Snapshot of Northwood Campus. Northwood was an addition built to accommodate the surge in the student population after Allen Ginsberg declared Goddard College “the center of the universe.”
Charles Olson In Vermont
by KYLE SCHLESINGER
The process of transcription is characterized by variation.
— WW Greg
I stumbled on these recordings of Charles Olson when I was a student in a seminar on the history of medieval education that was conducted in the basement of the Eliot D Pratt Library at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. The course was taught by archivist and volunteer firefighter Forest Davis who, after graduating from Harvard College, joined the Air Force in 1943 and served in the Pacific until the end of WWII. After the War, he returned to his studies at Harvard Divinity School on the GI Bill, and shortly thereafter, became a Dean at Goddard College where he worked until 1967. He left to pursue careers at other universities, but when he retired, returned to rural Vermont where he taught part-time and contributed much to our understanding of the college through his extraordinary histories, Things Were Different in Royce's Day (1996) and earth.goddard.edu (2003), both published by his own Adamant Press.
There were four ninety-minute cassette tapes of Olson, each neatly labeled with a typewriter. Recordings of Robert Creeley and Richard Grossinger reading at the College were in the same drawer as the Olson tapes, but the sound quality of both were less than desirable. Davis gave me permission to take the cassettes to one of the listening stations on the first floor of the Library where I spent days transcribing the recordings, donning classic, plastic DJ headphones. Rewind. Pause. Play. Rewind. Pause. Play. Repeat.
In the spring (or “mud season”) of 1962, Olson descended upon the experimental college to read from The Maximus Poems and The Distances, and to lecture on Herman Melville. His captivating performance sparked lively debates with the audience on the nature of myth, history, etymology, narrative, knowledge, and sexuality. Charles Olson at Goddard College is an enthralling and indispensable annotated transcript that celebrates the intersection of Olson’s poetics and a hopeful moment in American education. Olson’s poetry reading was recorded in the Haybarn Theater on April 12, and his lecture on Melville was recorded in the same location two days later (according to the cassette labels).
Olson began the first event by stating his problem with poetry readings, "It gets to be kind of a bore, because it's become a performing art, you feel as though you have an audience, and as if you’re supposed to do a concert or something." He concludes, "I don’t think I believe in verse in this respect at all. As a matter of fact, I know I don't." Hearing this as a student then engaged with medieval education, it struck me that poetry has always been a "performing art," even if it wasn’t thought of as such at the time.
In The Muse Learns to Write, Greek scholar Eric Havelock examines the ways consciousness changes when oral cultures become literate, and suggests how new forms of communication affect the content and meaning of language. Olson shared many of Havelock’s interests and even published a review of his Preface to Plato in the first issue of Niagara Frontier Review in 1964. From Dada to the Bauhaus to the Beat poets reading poems with jazz musicians, by 1962 poetry as a performing art had become a staple in twentieth century American and European poetic practices.
President Royce Pitkin’s offices in the early 60s.
At a time when some historians were lamenting the loss of the common culture of reading, Marshall McLuhan published his tour de force, The Gutenberg Galaxy (also 1962) wherein he announced the end of the printing press' monarchy, examining the interaction between mass media and the transformation of global consciousness within a transhistorical context. A few years later, ethnopoetic pioneers Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock would introduce the expansive history of poetry’s oral traditions to the avant-garde, while poets such as David Antin would blur the lines between poetry and performance art, much in the way that performance artists, many associated with Fluxus and Something Else Press, used language as a visual and oral muse and medium.
In the days before PennSound and Ubu Web, hearing poets read was a rare occasion for most people. There was some poetry on vinyl, but one couldn’t hear a fraction of the diverse number of poets whose readings are represented online today. During the ages of cassettes and compact disks, there was a dearth of professionally produced and distributed studio recordings, but a rise in amateur productions, creating a more eclectic and decentralized record of poetry’s sound. Cassette tapes were easy to dub, and quickly became part of poetry’s cultural currency (Olson mentions that a recording of Creeley reading at the College "ran from this room (was it?) into our kitchen in Gloucester, directly almost. I think it was in a matter of hours — it was like hotcakes."
Forest Davis teaching a philosophy class in the Manor.
At the time I encountered these tapes, I had been reading Olson for a year or two but still felt baffled, if not bombarded, by the bard’s esoteric references, unconventional poetic forms, the mass of Maximus, etc. Sitting in that listening room, hearing Olson read his poems for the first time, was an unforgettable experience. "Projective Verse" became an immediate, irrevocably apparent source of energy and information — everything changed, and was charged by the sound. Listening is an aid to memory.
Goddard’s founder, Tim Pitkin, conceived of the College as a place for "plain living and hard thinking." Goddard was celebrated for its progressive and experimental practices that, like Black Mountain College, were inspired largely by John Dewey’s philosophy of education. In the ’60s, the student population was approaching its peak, with just over one thousand students enrolled after Allen Ginsberg claimed it was the “center of the universe.” According to Goddard alumni Don and Susan Wilcox, the reading was organized by Paul Winer, a student at the time, remembered fondly as a "honky-tonk piano player" who later "became a kind of traveling cabaret act calling himself 'Sweet Pie'." Winer eventually stopped touring to raise a family, and became known as the "naked book guy" and proprietor of the Reader’s Oasis Books in Quartzsite, Arizona. In Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, Tom Clark sets the stage for Olson’s New England tour:
On an April reading swing through upper New England he took Betty along, but her presence did little to curb his need to force the public moment with artificial spirits. At Dartmouth, English professor John Finch, who had set up Olson's reading, could not help noticing his former eccentric roommate was acting 'more rambunctious' than ever before. At Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, Olson's next stop, he was at his outgoing best for the first few days of a week-long reading/lecture visit, helping a young but receptive student audience though his latest mythohistorical Maximus run by airing his views on the poet’s role as mythmaker—reformulated, he said, following discussions a few days earlier with Dartmouth French poetry expert Ramon Guthrie. (Guthrie had pointed out to him that the medieval French verb trobar meant to find, allowing word-root fanatic Olson to link the troubadour poets with Herodotus, Homer, and himself in the tradition of the investigative storyteller, 'the man who finds out the words.') But by the end of the week, both the poet himself and his wife had been summoned before the college Judiciary Committee, reprimanded for taking part in a wild drinking party on campus, and sternly 'told to abide by community laws while there.'
Long-time Goddard College professor of literature and fellow Black Mountaineer Will Hamlin confirmed the report when I interviewed him about the College’s history: "We threw that louse out of here." He also referred to Creeley as a "love" poet. Will was a student when BMC’s founder John Andrew Rice was still rector, long before Robert Duncan, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Motherwell, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, or Olson arrived on the scene. Hamlin wrote, but never to my knowledge finished, an excellent memoir about his time at Black Mountain. Rice once professed: "All colleges should be in tents, when they fold, they fold." He felt that the problem with institutions was that they were designed to survive, to sustain themselves, regardless of their function or relevance. Like any entity, Rice felt that a college should not live beyond its necessary years, and like Black Mountain decades earlier, Goddard shut down the campus early in the twenty-first century, signifying the end of progressive higher education in America.
Early in the recording, someone in the audience asks, "You don’t mind using a tape recorder do you?" to which the poet responds, "No. As a matter of fact I'm going to just watch it like a fire — let's sit here and watch that tape." The poet goes on to present an exegesis on the second century dialectician Maximus of Tyre in order to offer the uninitiated audience a context for The Maximus Poems. Olson’s critique of the poetry reading is the perfect introduction for a tremendous performance where the poet reads from the third and fifth volume of The Maximus Poems with selections from The Distances. From time to time, the audience asks Olson to re-read poems; other times, Olson reads poems twice or starts over in an effort to accurately perform the written word: "You dig? You want that again? I don't know. Call me if you'd like any one of these again. I have this problem with scoring, it's more difficult than music. Like one writes music one doesn’t play it. That’s that problem with this kind of performing situation. I'm not, I'm not, I’m not — I’m Beethoven!"
View of the Campus from Route 2, as Olson would have seen it
The technical and conceptual problems of transcription have been variously addressed by Havelock, as well as textual critic Jerome McGann, poet Jerome Rothenberg, and multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann, who was once told by Olson that "...when the cunt began to speak [when women were finally allowed to perform], it was the beginning of the end of Greek theater." Although the reading and the lecture are built around extant texts, they are performances of "thought thinking"; much of what is said is improvisatory, humorous and insightful.
Kyle Schlesinger is a contributor to This Recording. His most recent book is Poems and Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book 1946-1981 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). Two books of poems are scheduled to appear in 2011: What You Will from NewLightsPress and Picture Day from Electio Editions. Schlesinger teaches the core courses in the online MS in Publishing Program at UHV.
Charles Olson at Goddard College is due out from Cuneiform Press in July. The above was adapted from the introduction to the volume. You can preorder the book by e-mailing Kyle here.
All photographs are courtesy of the Goddard College archive. You can find recordings of Olson reading at PennSound.
The Manor via. fisheye lens