'Tansy City': Charles Olson and the Prospects for Avant-Pastoral

Abstract

This essay examines the work of the American postwar poet Charles Olson as a site of convergence between the imperatives of postmodernism and pastoral poetry — discursive fields whose relation is generally constructed as one of mutual hostility or indifference. The postmodern difficulty, as described by Fredric Jameson, of constructing a viable relationship between individual experience and the conceptual totality of globalized capitalism, has tested the viability of naively referential pastoral as a mode by which the human relationship to nature can be represented. Within the poetic context of his hometown, the 'tansy city' of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Olson's poetics suggests possibilities by which an 'avant-pastoral' might extend Jameson's notion of 'cognitive mapping' beyond the totality of capitalism to the ecological totality that is the horizon of all human and non-human life, thereby creating a usable past for contemporary practitioners of an avant-garde ecopoetics.