“I have believed in what you swept up. Now you must make a broom”
—Charles Olson and Raymond Souster
Black Mt Oct 8/55
My dear Raymond/
Thank you for What Time Slays/ Wld like to sit down
and go over each of em
As you know I have a strong sympathy for what you have been doing. And so I want to speak out to you
It comes to this question of what society is (I told a girl here in her dream that 7 is the society of woman but 8 is woman). What this new volume declares is, that you must get on to 8, which is 4, which is 1 (to reverse Maria Prophetissa, or the Jewess, or the Copt, or Isis, or the sister of Moses, or Anti-Mary Magdalen, etc), in fact to make a point of Paracelsus:
that 4 has the power of 1, only it has more power
You will forgive me if I say there is not a personal poem here (and I don’t mean person as personality). I mean Souster the man, like the rest of us, with much coming at him, coming from him, the which is more complex than even any verbal component can declare (no matter how very fine that component)
That is, you must catch all these falling things like as tho you were a kid outside the Leafs park who tried to grab that ball your Pa poled over sd fence into the Bay – as tho that kid was willing to go into the water (is, in fact, as water, you, Souster, or any of us, all fingers, like water, trying to close – trying to close over that long ball
And you ain’t doing that, man. You is Yonge Street. Exactly what you despise. You is staying pavement (instead of the crack in it). You is linoleum.
Now I see that what you sought was a sympathetic magic. But I would urge you that here is a fallacy of another century (a century still hanging in this one): the comparative. (Note, Ray, the number of occasions and subjects which are generalized as a street is. Or a newspaper.
I come back to society. You shld study with some constancy your own line
Or more simply too much pity to waste on thepeople of this earth.
It just ain’t true. Number 1: no manhas enough. #2: it ain’t pity anyhow anybody wants (check DHL on Whitman, and how (for any of us to whom polis: Whitman, me, you, say) how DHL carries the knife good on exactly what shit love is in same. (But his care, note, to distinguish the OPEN ROAD from LOVE:
#3-and here is where I carry the knife: the pity, sir, is home.
Thus man i come in hard. And don’t mind me. I wld be straight with you, like they say. I have believed in what you swept up. Now you must make a broom (the Blind make the best brooms, they say.
Do nothing but disentangle the split seconds (the water drops) of one R S. Forget sd old ladies with no pennies, sd lays, sd self, sd bed, sd poets, sd arts and society, sd whatever – even the sparrows or the squirrels.
SD RS alone. WOW
Society is no more than what is outside. Thus there is no more gen-eralizing possible (sex crime sentimentality) as of the hoomins, than as of how nature happens to you – which is surely not as a tabloid falls down in the street. That is, I am begging you to pay attention to how small and exact your own experience is.
And no matter how the coun-
ters of protest have been of use for some time when you were Yonge, they are for any one of us soon not at all the equal of (that is, the protest forever, but the experience is quicker
It’s this quickness….
No relative or comparative or complementarism – no description will equal it.
There is a sourness you are not heir to. Or why would you have – why not make a success, eh? why not have that ticker tape Miss Scott?At which point one can talk of the verbal component, the art of verse.
You deserve it: you owe it to your
Language is to be as thick as water, to be as hopeless.
Then, if it
can’t catch, you can measure the displacement (you can put a boat in)
You admire too many men – not to practice. The bourgeois are a bore. They are not interesting. No poet can make them interesting – even by slaying them. They are dead before you lift them into your subject. All numbers, dispersed numbers.
The thousand pieces of your littered mind is true and not at all true: that is, at any given instant (verbal instant) there is only 1/ Mind you: 1. Or a choice between 1 or 2. Positively: you are binary not millennial. (The millennial is solely the massa confusa of experience as it is distracted, of the swelling of the mother turtle in us: to be overcome.
My point is to urge you to close, to come in, to deal with the double. Why I say broom. Why I urge, blind.
Words are blind. Let em be. Lightwon’t come from opening the fingers. The fingers want to close.
OK. Hell, but believe me. I wish no more than what you do.
How are you? What’s new? Miss CONTACT, I can tell you. Was a loss. Was a thing (KPA Taylor, by god, summers in the Monte Vista Hotel here in town-and we never see him!! And this Gael Turnbull, what of him? Is he Toronto too? Write me a letter of yrself. And poems of same.
Affectionately,
Olson
***
The Contact Poetry Readings ran from 1957 to 1962 in Toronto. The driving force behind the series was Toronto poet Raymond Souster. Charles Olson appeared on April 30, 1960 for the final reading of the third season. This was the first time Olson and Souster had met face to face. Souster had been trying to organize a reading by Olson in Toronto for years. The two had begun corresponding in 1952 and Souster first suggested a reading by Olson in 1953 on the heels of an appearance by Cid Corman and then was formally invited in 1957 during the series’ first season. Souster wrote to Olson on November 19; “Would you be interested in hitting this here neck of the woods sometime around the middle of January? . . . We’ve had four readings so far – three local people and Irving up from Montreal” Souster mentions the “15.90 plus tax” that it would cost Olson to take the bus from Boston, as well as potential sleeping arrangements; “You can stay with us here in Toronto (my mother-in-law is an excellent Italian cook).” Souster insists that Corman’s visit did Canadian poetry an invaluable service, suggesting that Olson “would have an even more important effect.” In a letter of February 2, 1958 Souster laments the fact that this event didn’t materialise; “Still wish you could have made the local scene, for that reading. We need someone like you to jar us loose from a lot of petty ideas of what makes a poem” .
The first two seasons in the Contact Poetry Reading series drew on a limited pool of contacts in Montreal and Toronto because of financial limitations, but in the third season (1959-1960), the Canada Council of the Arts awarded a small grant to Souster’s loosely formed organization, which allowed them to present an impressive list of emerging and established poets from across Canada and the United States. Unlike his partners in the small press book publishing venture, Contact Press, Louis Dudek and Irving Layton, Souster was a working-class non-academic. He worked in a bank most of his life.Souster’s publishing partners were ambitious Montreal Jews anxious to stir things up in the moribund Canadian literary milieu of the 40s and early 50s. Layton had begun a correspondence with Robert Creeley early in 1953, and in 1956 Creeley’s Divers Press published Layton’s first substantial collection, In the Midst of My Fever. Dudek, while earlier at school in New York City, had struck up a friendship with Paul Blackburn and was already corresponding with Ezra Pound. Layton was subsequently published by Corman and Creeley in Origin and The Black Mountain Review, respectively, but both Montrealers were vocally wary when Souster started to take Corman’s editorial advice for the inclusion of US poets in Contact. For Dudek’s part it was largely that he didn’t think Souster aimed high enough – Pound and Williams, even Stevens, were acceptable to Dudek; but Olson and Creeley? Really!
By 1957 Souster was already a firmly established presence in Canadian poetry through his own writing and his editing of the two mimeo magazines: Direction and Contact; and in January 1957 he launched the first issue of Combustion, a new little magazine that would run until August 1960 in tandem with the reading series. Contact was subtitled “An International Magazine for Poetry” and Souster worked diligently to maintain that international emphasis. He first came in contact with Origin, and its editor Cid Corman, in 1951, and with Corman’s urging began to publish many of the Stateside writers Corman put him in contact with, as well as some translations of European and Latin American poets.The Contact readings were the first sustained, organized poetry series in Canada. In a 2002 interview, Souster reflected on the influence of the series: “It was that Series more than the magazines that had . . . the greatest impact on Canadian poets of the 1960s . . . because it brought the world to us. We could almost see the influence happening . . . these Black Mountain and City Lights people were avenues to the wider world. When they started to come, our own poets started to change. It was like flowers germinating” .Season Three of the series (1959-60) featured well promoted and well attended readings by Leonard Cohen, Denise Levertov, and Olson. Season Four (1960-61) featured readings by LeRoi Jones, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Margaret Avison, and Theodore Enslin.
Corman, for his part, felt that “most of the [Canadian] poems [in Contact] seem amateur to me” . And Corman never did print anything of Souster’s, although he devoted 11 pages to featured writer Margaret Avison’s “The Agnes Cleves Papers” in the last issue of Origin’s initial series (# XX) and another 21 pages in the 2nd series #4. An interesting, even bizarre, case of misattribution happened because Olson published something in the first issue of Souster’s Combustion in January 1957 which was followed by a short Souster poem called “Queen Street Burle-Q.” When George Butterick and Albert Glover were compiling the uncollected non-Maximus poems for the Cape Goliard edition of Archaeologist of Morning, the Souster poem, which was typical of Souster’s, not Olson’s, work at the time, was inadvertently included in the book. One could speculate that Olson saw the cosmic humour in its inclusion, but probably he was just too unfocussed to have noticed.
Souster’s explanation: “I had a little space left on Page 6 of the first number so inserted my short poem as a space-filler . . . As editor of [the magazine] I didn’t want my name to appear on any of the material used in the mag.” Only the title and the first two lines of the poem were retained when it was collected in Souster’s 1965 Ryerson Press collection, Ten Elephants on Yonge Street.
The organizers of the reading series were finally able to secure an appearance by Olson in October 1959. Souster’s enthusiasm had increased over the six years since it was initially suggested: “The charge that you could give to the poetic scene here . . . most of the younger member poets seem to have turned their back on contemporary matters and retreated into the sixteenth century” . Olson wasn’t to make his historic first visit to Vancouver until the summer of 1963, when, along with Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser, he contributed to the stirring up of the young University of British Columbia students who had already started Tish.
Olson’s reading was reviewed by Robert Fulford in the Toronto Daily Star on May 2, under the headline “A Poet of Substance”. Fulford focuses on Olson’s stature, opening with “the largest poet in the world came to Toronto on Saturday night. Charles Olson turned up at the Isaacs Gallery . . . looking like a substantial part of the American poetry scene. He comes on like an intellectual Paul Bunyan.” According to Fulford, Olson read for two hours, and “delighted the audience not only with his ability as a reader but with his informality.” Avrom Isaacs, the putative host of the event, added “he sat on two chairs because of his dimensions (no pun intended)” . Souster’s pleasure at Olson’s appearance is evident: “My head’s still in a whirl from your visit.” Souster wrote in the letter he sent to Olson on May 3. “Ken [McRobbie] says he’ll never be the same again. I think 1960 will go down in the history of Canadian poetry as the year Charles Olson invaded Canada with a fighting column of poetry . . . believe me, it was the greatest weekend” .Souster would return to the reading later in a series of poems. In “Readings Remembered” he records: “I was one of a Toronto audience in the early sixties when New England guest Charles Olson, warmed up from gargling internally half a twenty-sixer of Scotch, began booming out his Maximus and other poems so it sounded as if the Atlantic off Gloucester’s Ten Pound Island was crashing against the front door of Av Isaacs’ Greenwich Gallery; then turned that wave-roar into a raging storm after intermission (during which he’d killed the other half of that bottle of Cutty Sark), so even Irving Layton and his noisy gang of unbelievers turned loose from O’Keefe Centre had all the bull knocked out of them, at least for that evening.”
Another poem referencing the reading is 1998’s “Charles Olson at the Ford Hotel” which describes the demolition of the legendary hotel where Olson (and later Thelonius Monk) stayed during “his first huge appearance / before the faithful at the Isaacs Gallery”. A question and answer period followed Olson’s reading. Douglas Lochhead records the event in Raging Like a Fire: A Celebration of Irving Layton: “Irving entered from the back of the gallery along with a fellow poet from Montreal. The two late-comers search around for seats. None were available; so they, as I remember it, leaned against the walls like sentinels. Finally Olson finished his reading and there were to be questions and comments. Up to a point. The only question and comment I remember came from Irving Layton or his friend. ‘Do you call that poetry? That’s not poetry.’ Olson glared, shrugged and gave out a groan close to a lament. Olson relit his cigar and, after applause, ambled off.”
While in Toronto, Olson also appeared on both CBC television and radio. Although the CBC archives do not have a recording of his appearances, Souster wrote to him describing it as “a great broadcast and did you proud” . Olson wrote to Donald Allen in May 1960, stating that the “Toronto trip was especially meaningful for me, and the reading worked – I always have that trouble that I wish to do it by composition then and there, and this time it did. Got a tape of the whole thing by CBC, and they promise me a copy: ought to be the record volume Jonathan [Williams] has been asking for, if he still wants to do it. Also was on TV! and, shopping the next day for something for Bet on Bloor St., by god if the clerk doesn’t say that another clerk saw me and wants to meet me lawdy, altogether over, into, the TWENTIETH CENTURY.” . He also wrote to Kenneth McRobbie after the reading . The letter included a set of seven poems under the title “A Day’s Work, Toronto” written May 3 1960 (Collected Poems, 993). Three of the poems are included in The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, “The Disposition,” “A Promise,” and “The Will To.”
