Muthologos
Charles Olson
Lectures and Interviews
Revised Second Edition
Edited by Ralph Maud
Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2010
494 pp.
This
new edition of Muthologos reiterates the intensity of attention that
Olson brought to his final six years in the public performance of his immense
poetic archaeology. These talks and interviews document the processual nature
and intellectual hunger that situate his poetic imagination not only in the
poem but in the range of perception that can be talked about Òwith some life.Ó
When I heard him talk about his poem ÒPlace; & NamesÓ at UBC in 1963, the
poem as discourse for place and history provided a crucial tap for my own sense
of poetryÕs possibility. His Beloit lectures on ÒThe Dogmatic Nature of
ExperienceÓ in 1968 coalesce and amplify his most singular pedagogy,
ÒProjective Verse,Ó as the cultural shape shifter it has been. By re-inserting,
and supplementing, the tape-recorded era of OlsonÕs poetic life, Ralph Maud
continues to sustain this material as consequential and amazing.
Fred Wah
Introduction
to the second edition, 2010
George Butterick did not
divulge in print why he chose Muthologos as
the title for this volume. I think it was because Olson once deÞned the word muthologos as Òwhat is said about what
is said,Ó which has a breadth that would recommend it for a volume that stands
as the range of where the poetÕs mind went in a lifetimeÕs intent to go places.
The three volumes of AthenaeusÕs Banquet
were among OlsonÕs favorite books; Muthologos
is like the expansive table-talk of the deipnosophists, those called to the
feast of the learned. The poems are allowed in as part of the banquet, but the
totality is in the life, which was chießy talk. It is in this compilation of
transcribed tapes that we get what is preserved of OlsonÕs life of talk; hence
the claim, as close as it gets, to totality.
This second edition of
Muthologos, coming some thirty years after
the Þrst, is able to add several new items: ÒAt Goddard College, April 1962Ó; a
second Vancouver 1963 discussion, ÒDuende, Muse, and AngelÓ; a short addition
to the ÒBBC InterviewÓ; ÒOn Black Mountain (II)Ó; and a further hour of the
conversation with Herb Kenny.
All the available
tapes have been listened to again. Many of the problems have been cleared up,
as explained in the Textual Notes, which also give the provenance of the tapes
and the particular way in which each transcription was handled.
Another procedural
difference is that the Þrst edition separated the footnotes from the text,
putting them at the back of the volume, and giving as much information as
possible to supplement OlsonÕs points. Butterick wanted to set us at ease by
showing that Olson knew what he was talking about. This second edition assumes
that we have acquired some faith in OlsonÕs erratic brilliance and that we
would prefer to be left more or less in the same position as Olson would expect
his audience at that moment to be in, reasonably aware of things but not too
prepared ahead of time. One does not usually stop a conversation (or the ßow of
a tape) to ask for a reference or to look something up. Sometimes, however, one
is inclined not to let a puzzling thing go by, and the notes at the foot of the
page of this edition are a recognition of such occasions. An annotated index
will be found useful for remaining difÞculties.
The two simple devices
used to communicate the stop and ßow of OlsonÕs speaking manner are (1) the
dash (—), where Olson interrupts his own sentence while continuing the
thought with new syntax; and (2) ellipses (...), which do not indicate words
omitted editorially but are reserved for when an incomplete sentence trails off
or is interrupted by an interlocutor. Overall, it has been the chief duty of
the editor of these transcriptions to use punctuation as skilfully as possible
to recreate on the page the brilliant timing with which Olson almost always
puts out his meaning when intellectually aroused.
Ralph Maud
Textual Notes
6. Reading at Berkeley
I Þrst heard the tape of
this Berkeley Reading of 23 July 1965 at Jack ClarkeÕs house in Buffalo exactly
a year later. It was a year after that that Zoe BrownÕs transcription, Reading at Berkeley, was published by
Oyez, and the commitment I had made at the time of Þrst listening became a call
to action. I had missed the event itself; I was now determined to recreate it
on paper. I obtained the tape from Berkeley and began annotating corrections in
the Oyez edition, which turned out to be full of errors and omissions. In the
summer of 1968 and spring of 1969 I had students in my Simon Fraser University
classes follow the tape and help decipher some of the cruxes in sound and meaning.
Many ears and much library research were involved in producing the typescript
which I was able to drop off with Olson in Gloucester on 6 June 1969. I sent a
copy to George Butterick, and he and Olson talked about it over the telephone.
ÒCharles equally and especially pleased with it,Ó Butterick wrote to me on 11
July 1969, Òthough he did wax somewhat and grow dark about your ÔaccuracyÕ to
the point of including every ÔerÕ and other such stutters, noting the
wastefulness of same, how boring and distracting.Ó And Butterick added, ÒI must
completely agree.Ó I didnÕt myself completely agree, and left in a good many
ÒersÓ when I retyped the text with footnotes in what I called a ÒtriptiteÓ
edition—voice, text, and annotations—for use in English 414 in the
Spring semester of 1970 at Simon Fraser. (This hand-out Butterick digniÞed with
a bibliographical entry in a list of Olson posthumous publications in OLSON 7, p. 43.) By the time this
triptite edition reached Olson he was in Connecticut and became terminally ill
before he could write to me. However, he did have Linda Parker pass on the
message that he was happy with it, especially the index, Òone of the most
successful evidences of the lecture itself.Ó
Olson did not mention
the remaining Òers,Ó but when I came to prepare the text for inclusion in Muthologos I remembered ButterickÕs
opinion and tempered my enthusiasm for such stutterings. Having become resigned
to the comparative smoothness of the Muthologos
version, I have had no inclination to return to a choppier sailing. Neither
has there been much need for changes, the only notable one being the word Olson
uses to describe Creeley: Òunco,Ó as in Robert BurnsÕs Òunco guid,Ó which I
restore over ButterickÕs veto (see the Minutes
of the Charles Olson Society 39, p. 5).
There are several aids
to understanding and appreciating this extraordinary speech-event, the top
billing at the Berkeley Poetry Conference of July 1965. Of the series of
ÒBackgrounds to BerkeleyÓ in the Minutes of the Charles Olson Society,
the following are of particular use. In Minutes
4, ÒThe Re-enactment,Ó a reprint of Robin EicheleÕs diary of the conference
as a whole, along with a ÒLog of OlsonÕs Berkeley Reading 23 July.Ó In Minutes 6 ÒDocuments in American
Civilization,Ó the written exchanges between Suzanne Mowat and Ed Sanders
during OlsonÕs reading, followed in Minutes
7 by ÒThe Suzanne Mowat-Charles Olson Correspondence.Ó Also in that issue
is ÒZoe BrownÕs Transcription,Ó letters revealing the history behind the Coyote
edition of Reading at Berkeley (1966).
In Minutes 16 there is an examination
of Tom ClarkÕs account of the reading, and a discussion of proposed emendations
to the Muthologos text.
15. The Paris
Review Interview
It was very gratifying to be
able to get a proper version of this interview, or kitchen discussion, into
print in Muthologos. The original
attempt published in the Paris Review 40
(1970) was totally unsatisfactory (there is nothing at all to recommend it).
Unfortunately, that version with all its ßaws has been included in the Paris Review omnibus volume, Beat Writers at Work (Modern Library,
1999), extending to a new readership this old defamation of the poet.
The Muthologos version was made
possible by my receiving four tapes through the good ofÞces of Jeremy Prynne.
Two of the participants, Harvey Brown and Gerrit Lansing, listened through the tapes
with me and elucidated many difÞculties. Many remained, and the Muthologos version chose to pass them
silently by rather than burden the reader with too many uncertainties. More
digging has been done since then over the years, so the present transcription
is much augmented. In addition, in 1992, Charles Watts of the Simon Fraser
University Contemporary Literation Collection became alerted to the fact that a
Þfth tape had been deposited by Malanga at Texas; he made a trip there and
transcribed the tape for the Minutes of
the Charles Olson Society 2 (June 1993). His text appears here edited to
conform to the format of the rest of the volume.
Addendum: The CBC Interview
The following text became available after the body of this second
edition of Muthologos was set in print, and is here presented
as an addendum. Robert McTavish in the process
of making his documentary Þlm The Line Has Been Shattered, concerning the 1963
Vancouver Poetry Conference, retrieved from the CBC Archives a stenographerÕs
transcription of an interview Olson had with the Canadian poet Phyllis Webb at
the time of the conference, August 1963. The many ßaws in the stenographerÕs
typescript are understandable for someone not versed in OlsonÕs idiom, but remedial
attention can extract a readable version.
We have been aided by an audiotape (received from Library and Archives Canada), in which Phyllis Webb culls from interviews with Þve poets—Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, as well as Olson—an hour-long program called ÒFive Poets,Ó due to be broadcast 19 January 1964, but apparently canceled. From these extracts made by Phyllis Webb in preparing the edited broadcast, we have been able to conÞrm portions of OlsonÕs interview as transcribed by the CBC stenographer.