Charles Stein and George Quasha
in Vancouver
Published in Minutes
of the Charles Olson Society #41 (April 2001).
Part 1 (of 4)
At
a meeting of the Charles Olson Society in Vancouver on 27 January 2001 the two
poets and impresarios Charles Stein and George Quasha led a discussion which
was taped and is here substantially transcribed. My introduction gets on to the
tape only toward the end of it. I had on the table George Quasha’s Stony
Brook 1/2 (1968),
the Active Anthology (1974), and America:
A Prophecy (1974),
testifying to their impact at the time and their lasting usefulness. I also had
one of Quasha’s early books of poems, Giving the Lily Back
Her Hands (1979)
as well as one of the latest, Ainu Dreams (1999). I also showed and
referred to Charles Stein’s important book on Olson and Jung, The
Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum, published by their Station Hill Press
(1987), as well as the items mentioned at the beginning of the tape.
— Ralph Maud
MAUD: . . . I
believe you are still the proprietors of Station Hill publishing house?
GEORGE QUASHA: Or it’s the
proprietor of us.
MAUD: I have also
this magazine Aion which
Charles Stein edited in December 1964, which he doesn’t have a copy of, and I
just can’t give it to him! There it is. It’s a “Journal of Traditionary Science.”
CHARLES STEIN: It’s a
genuine piece of oblivion that you have there.
MAUD: Look, it
includes chapter 5 of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book — and you also published
part of the H.D. Book [in
Stony Brook 1/2]; and
we’ve waited all these years and the H.D. Book is finally available — on the net! You can print it out in
toto, if you have a computer (which I don’t).
If you want to
know about Charles Stein, the introduction that Richard Grossinger did for this
book of poems [Poems and Glyphs, Io #17, 1973] is the best account I know of.
STEIN: I’m a
continuously transforming clown in Grossinger’s own fictions. I appear in book
after book at various different points as a fall guy when he needs somebody to
be smarter than.
MAUD: O.K. This is
just one sample of Charles Stein tripping over himself, in Richard Grossinger’s
view. No, there’s quite a lot of good biography about the Horace Mann School in
the Yonkers, which you went to with Richard Grossinger, along with some other
influential people: so this is a good book to have.
Anyway, I’m not
going to do any further introduction. There was something circulated by the
Kootenay School. I won’t say any more. But I will say that you actually have to
tell them what you want to know, because we don’t want
to watch these two people try and guess. And I have already put in my bid for
just, well, utter gossip is what I want. So I’m going to begin with Charles
Stein, who is very good at it . . . You actually went
to Gloucester in 1969 and rented a place?
STEIN: The first
time I went to Gloucester was to visit a good friend of mine named Jonathan
Greene, a poet who eventually founded Gnomon Press, which I think still exists
and produces books occasionally out of Kentucky. He was spending the winter
basically doing typing for Larry Eigner in Swampscott. It was before Larry
became more mobile, as he did in his later years. At that time he was a
probably difficult person, with cerebral palsy — he really could hardly talk,
but he was writing these amazing poems. We knew about him from a person who’s
been important to both of us, who had early published Larry Eigner and
published us as teenagers in a little thing called Penny Poems that came
out of Yale. They would appear in bookstores like Gotham Book Mart and Grolier,
I’m sure, and specifically poetry bookstores. He published Denise Levertov and
Larry Eigner and I think David Meltzer and Mary Ponsett and a number of other
people that are now sort of present or gone. Anyway, I went to visit Jonathan,
and he had been at a party at Ferrini’s, so we went to visit Ferrini, and
Ferrini said, “You gotta go see Charles.”
So he gave us the Fort Square
address and we went marching up to his door, at about three in the afternoon,
and stayed till about two in the morning. It was just this — he saw these young
kids coming and wanting to talk about him, really. We knew about him a bit. So
that sort of started it. That sort of ended my credible relationship with the
fancy prep school I was going to where everybody thought they knew more than
anybody else in terms of literature. It was one of those places where you were
supposed to be in awe of these guys who were English teachers. They didn’t know
about Olson, and suddenly I had been — a transmission or a curse had been laid
on me so that I came back to school and nobody could tell me anything. I had
met Olson.
I visited him
any number of times over the next few years, and in 1969 I rented a couple of
rooms in Eastern Point in Gloucester with a friend, and I basically visited
him, and Gerrit Lansing, very regularly for that summer. That was the last
summer of his life.
MAUD (showing the photographs of Olson in the Jung book): We have these
photographs Charles took at the time. Was that your painting on the wall?
STEIN: No, it’s
actually Linda’s painting.
I guess I was
interested in Jung all that time and had talked to him quite a bit about Jung,
so when he died in early 1970 and it was clear his papers were going to the
University of Connecticut in Storrs and George Butterick, whom I had met that
summer, was going to be the curator and Charles Boer was a professor there,
they got me an assistantship, because I was in the process of not being able to
finish a master’s degree under John Hollander in the city and I was supposed to
be working on Yeats and I just was not having fun. And so Storrs was very nice:
they gave me a bye on the master’s and accepted me into the Ph.D. program. I
got to hang out with Butterick and spent a lot of time in the Archives before
they were put in nice little folders and made to look very — y’know, you take
every piece of paper and it has to have its folder and its identification so
you can find everything. You totally lose the sense of them. I thought there
was a tremendous amount of power in these chaotic boxes of pieces of paper
totally scribbled over to a degree of density that defies the mathematics of
the continuum to actually look at: amazingly dense, mad writings. As one also
later found out was the case of his walls. When I would go to visit him — maybe
there were people who got past the kitchen, but — Fort Square was this flat
that went out towards the harbor. You came up from the back yard. The first
thing you entered was the kitchen, then there was another room and then there
was a bedroom. But I never got past the kitchen. It was always sitting in the
kitchen. Then he’d run out to the back and bring some book, and he’d never let
you see what was in these books. So after he died I had this almost
embarrassing sense of invading his library which he
had protected with such incredible ferocity, that sense of secrecy, almost like
a chemical closure.
GEORGE BOWERING: I guess a lot
of those were books he never gave back to the people.
. .
STEIN: Yeah. [Laughter.] But mostly it was just he
had a definite sense that a hot piece of information or whatever that you had
found lost its charge if someone else laid eyes on it before it had released
itself into the work. If you have a conversation about something that you’ve
just gotten very excited about — he felt that he
frittered away his best energy by liking to talk more than to write. Anybody
who was really of ear for him, he would just talk you into the — When I was a
little older I couldn’t maintain it so much. One time I went to his house and
came out with tonsillitis. He sort of finished me.
But, then, also
because my friend had lived with him — After she was living with me she moved
in with Olson at the end of that summer. Then she continued to live in Fort
Square. So over the next couple of years while she was living there I was in
his space, and the space was covered with, like all the strips on the side of
the windows were covered with writing. Did you see this?
MAUD: You were
living with Linda after. . .?
STEIN: We were sort
of breaking up that summer, if the truth be told, and
she ended up moving in with Olson, and after Olson died we had another round of
it about a year or so later. The piece that’s in Active Anthology . . .
QUASHA: She was
collaging these sounds. They’re like pieces of paper collaged — just sounds,
pieces of words. It’s a powerful thing.
JUDITH COPITHORNE: Linda . . .?
STEIN: Linda Parker.
She eventually changed her name to Crane. She in a
sense was pushed aside when Olson died by the family because when he was in the
hospital he kind of remade contact with his daughter, and it was a little
awkward. So she wasn’t around at the very end, although she was still in his
house. And it hurt her a lot. There was a month when she was
practically speechless, she couldn’t talk at all.
And when she began to pull out of the silence, before she was talking, she made
these collages which were cut-out letters from different magazines, and those
were literally her first utterances on coming out of the shock of Olson’s
death. She would read them — before she was really talking she would read them
as a kind of sound poetry, just read those texts. Some years later I tried to
record her. I actually have a recording of her reading them, but she couldn’t
quite do it the same way any more. But it’s an interesting thing because it’s
another one in the actual wake of his demise, that piece.
MAUD: But of course
one doesn’t remember anything Olson said in these days and nights. It’s very
hard to remember any particular thing?
STEIN: Well, you remember
some things, particular tendencies and directions, actually, for me. I have
views about aspects of his work that I know came from his conversations, but I
couldn’t quote them. They tended to come like brrtt! The kind of articulateness
was so completely visceral that. . .
QUASHA: Olson’s sense
of secrecy extended to not wanting his conversations taped. And Gerrit Lansing
has that same disposition, which to me is a big loss.
. . .