Photographer unknown. Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, ca. 1952. Source
Reading Charles Olson’s “Maximus, to Himself” (1960) in isolation from the collected The Maximus Poems struck me with a particularly uncanny feeling given the poem’s repeated fascination with estrangement and the complicated status of the individual.
The poem is predominantly declarative, even in its reflective manner, which I believe creates a sense of authority in the speaker, not to mention the allusion to pre-socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus in the extended first stanza (I sincerely thank you, footnote!). Despite all that it means to have the kind of mind that grasps erudite dialogues and ancient texts, who can casually command Latin, there lies a caveat: “the known? / This, I had to be given…and from one man / the world”
To this effect, the poem considers what we may arrive at being our “trade” or true calling as something that may not or cannot be sought out, or discovered by us at all but must instead be provided. I take it to be implied as revelation as a gift for the mind. Yet I also believe that the speaker sometimes evades us; this singularity of knowledge seems almost contradictory to the speaker’s earlier musings in the abstract: “That we grow up many / And the single / is not easily / known’”. To me, this also speaks to a more philosophical outlook, searching a world of forms seeking answers for what is confined to the mind. Olson seems to be at once speaking to a collective society and meditating on a life of precise focus on the individual. In my reading, I take the ambiguity of the man providing a universal identity to suggest both a reflexive impulse or a higher-power figure, possibly religious or philosophical.
The poem also reads to me as circular insomuch as its punctuation and indentations lean towards being disjunctive and asymmetrical in its rhythms. By this, I mean that I envision the speaker’s meditations occurring all at once, as contemplation culminates in revealing that most conclusions hinge on their incompleteness, being “neither” or both “wind and water.” I am also called to the corporal position of the poem’s speaker, who is upright in the first stanza— crossing the deck, then estranged.
While the use of “stood” is certainly idiomatic in its usage, the latter half of the poem reveals that the speaker has moved to “sitting” and returns again to the water, now seemingly at its border. This is also an interesting shift to me in that we move into the present continuous tense. As a reader, this indicates a tonal shift to me in that the poem’s speaker is now more grounded; literally sitting, but also, now in action. I believe that this gives us a small signal so that we are less surprised arriving at the final stanza, in which Olson reveals the poem’s apparent purpose in plain language: “It is undone business / I speak of, this morning” And returns to rest on an image of a return to water, and delegating the very last word of the poem to the part of the body which most naturally often makes contact with the ground as able bodied human—feet! locating the very last word of the. The sea at his feet—- this makes me think of waves or conjures an image of our speaker, presumably Olson, a meditative rest and cliffhanger end, concluding the poem without an end-stopped line.
I think the speaker invites us to consider our own moments of slowness or of coming late to things, be it a profession or a realization of a moral truth. In part, my reading here comes from a more general line of thinking that would say that what learning does is reveal to us how much more we do not know. I think part of this speaks to a more lofty idea of what it means to live a “learned” life and a thinking life as much (or more) as a life rooted in the body.
As cliché as it sounds, I believe this poem extols the relief that not everything we attempt needs to be done quickly to be worthwhile. Moreover, what we first set out to achieve with starry eyes may not always be what ultimately calls to us, and that’s just fine; we try different things to see what resonates. I am curious if anyone else that this poem is attempting to displace, or at least disrupt, the notion of assigning value to being defined by one thing? Or totally disregard the notion of a life’s calling?
I was also curious if anyone has a read on the mention of tokens in the poem. Are they representative of a life? In what ways do we tokenize our lives or personal philosophies?
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