Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley : From The Maximus Poems, Letter 9.
Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley: Coyote 1966, top of page 18 as transcribed by Zoe Brown:-
Olson: And I'm going to read you also a poem, Maximus 10, after I read you the next poem I propose to read, which is Maximus 9---- But my point is, I want to read you 9 because of Robert Creeley.
Note: as you probably know Olson never did get to read 9 and it was published at the back of the Coyote publication, pages 57, 58 and 59 ( the last two being transposed).
LETTER 9
"I had to clobber him.
Hold his hand (though I can't see he deserves
forgiveness. There are these necessities
are bigger than we are.
Only hate it,
that he had to go and get himself caught
in the wringer."
1
the flowering plum
out the front door window
sends whiteness
inside my house
as the news that the almond
was in bloom Mallorca
accompanied the news
that that book was in print
which I might wish to stop
the workings of my city
where so much of it
was bred
(as, in another spring,
I learned
the world does not stop
for flowers
2
it puts a man back
to find out how much
he is busy, this way,
not as his fellows are
but as flowering trees
turn several greens
(as many greens as there are greys
of their several trunks
it was the reds of buds
sent me this spring,
lighting up the valleys
as now the fruits do,
and these pages have come in,
of a white so right
the print is brown
I, dazzled
as one is, until one discovers
there is no other issue than
the moment of
the pleasure of
this plum,
these things
which don't carry their end any further than
their reality in
themselves
3
It's the condition in men
(we know what spring is)
brings such self-things about
which interests me
as I loll today
where I used to,
atop Bond's Hill
with both the inner, and the outer, harbor,
the Atlantic, back of the back-shore,
the Annisquam and her marshes, Ipswich Bay
all out before me in one view
And all such colours as spring is, plus
the colors men's buildings are, the differences
his whitenesses are,
the tidinesses
he uses for greens for, the bricks
he lights his city up with
As of myself
I'd pose it,
today,
as Alfred at Ashdown, a wild boar
( aprino more, Asser says)
versus
my own wrists and all my joints, versus speech's connectives, versus the tasks
I obey to,
not to a nation's
or at all to history,
or to building
Flowers , like I say.
And I feel that way,
that the likeness is to nature's
not to these tempestuous
events,
that those self-acts which have no more end no more than their own
are more as plums are
than they are as Alfreds
who so advance
men's affairs
(who threw Guthrum back
even when he held Glow-ceastre
and he himself was holed up
in the Athelney swamp)
4
I measure my song,
measure the sources of my song,
measure me, measure
my forces
(And I buzz,
as the bee does,
who's missed
the plum tree,
and gone and got himself caught
in my window
And the whirring of whose wings
blots out the rattle of
my machine)
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