A Life of Olson & a Sequence of Glyphs on Points of his Life, Work & Times ed. by Sanders

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Life of Olson & a Sequence of Glyphs on Points of his Life, Work & Times ed. by Sanders Thomas C. Marshall (bio) a life of olson & a sequence of glyphs on points of his life, work & times Ed Sanders Spuyten Duyvil http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/a-life-of-olson.html 182 pages; Print, $40.00 Ed Sanders has now added another dimension to his colorful oeuvre and the practice of what he calls "investigative poetry." Beyond history and poetry, song and performance, Sanders now gives us a biography of ideas in the work and life of one of his poet-heroes: Charles Olson. Olson's place in poetry is significant for many. He serves both as a positive model and as an object around which critical ideas have been focused. Olson is not universally adulated. In recent years, the poet and scholar Heriberto Yépez has centered some sharply critical thinking on the life and times of Olson (The Empire of Neomemory; 2007, trans. 2013). This thinking aims to deconstruct and expose sexism, racism, and bellicosity in the Gloucester poet's works, letters, and biography. Yet he has been praised by a diverse range of poets and scholars, including Amiri Baraka, who (almost surprisingly) doesn't call him out for much of anything except positive poetic influence. Sanders also takes a positive tack and uses a fairly original lens to look at "O." This Life with "Glyphs" is "an expanded version of an illustrated lecture given at the Cape Ann Museum for the Gloucester Writers Center, October 27, 2018" (frontispiece). In it, Sanders does not honor the critiques of others with any direct responses; he chooses instead an intriguingly fresh way to celebrate the poet and key moments in his life with anecdote and image. Sanders underscores Olson's image as a big man and a man of big character. His broad grasp of poetics and history was impressive. He drew many ardent followers and still has most of them to this day, a half-century after his death. Sanders admits in this book to being an early follower, literally a "glue-shoe" following Olson around the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965. Sanders's own accomplishments in writing, with his band The Fugs in concerts [End Page 170] and recordings, and as publisher and purveyor of books are all huge, but here he uses his talents to pay homage to one of his greatest mentors. He has honored others in similar ways, but here he has done a particularly beautiful job. This book is attractive and enjoyable. Sanders's "glyphs" are "color drawings combining images and texts, which trace key points in the life of this amazing poet." Some of them are gorgeous; all of them are fun. Interestingly enough, these pictured points ("Such a bewildering sequence / of interesting points / in Olson's life"), of which Sanders laments that he is "only able, for now / to 'Glyphize' / such a few," sort of give the book a feeling of hesitation or stopping and starting. They suppress time and narrative into an album of snapshots—nice ones, complex ones, but ones that leave out much. The film by Ferrini Productions of the talk in Gloucester (available on YouTube) gives a more lively version of these points of focus, with Sanders lecturing as he shows slides of the glyphs. Even in that version, though, there are parts of Olson's life, and the lives involved with his, that are left out or minimized. The sense of history, so important to both the poet and his poet-biographer, is broken up. This is exactly Yépez's main complaint against the culture of "neomemory" that Olson participated in, "Language converted into space for only-echo." Sanders has unwittingly replicated this sonar of self in his celebration of Olson's big self. As he "glyphizes" the life he admires, Sanders runs the risk of halting its flow and its web of interpenetrations into still objects in space—slides of a projected narrative that mythologizes the poet. Little in the life told here will be new to those who have studied it in the biographies and critical works spawned among the academics by Olson...