Charles Olson, [my] Whirld Saviour* – The Worcester Journal

by Casie Trotter

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Ezra Pound is famous (and infamous) for a lot of things: writing the Cantos, reinventing American poetry, and supporting Fascism. The third, which involved radio broadcasts he made in Italy supporting the Fascist cause during World War II, landed him in a mental hospital for 12 years after the war.

It was during this time that Charles Olson, a budding poet, began to visit Pound, providing comfort and conversation as Pound awaited the results of his trial for treason.1 Olson also worked through a lot of conflicted feelings about how someone who could produce such beautiful language could also spew so much hate. Later, after the hospital visits stopped, Olson would shout through the mail at Robert Creeley about Pound’s shortcomings, sometimes using their letters to speak indirectly to his former “Papa”: “Look you old bastard if you want open war come on it and get it.”2

But before that, Pound wrote to his attorney in the early St. Elizabeths days, “Olson saved my life.”3

For the past year and a half, the same has been true for me. It happened first in sudden leaps, then gradually—an instant love affair with his epic, Maximus, my first semester of grad school; then an easy decision to make a line from my favorite poem into my first tattoo—“hungry for every thing” (I spent days examining the deliberate space between the last two words); then a slow but all-consuming coming back to him at the lowest point in my five-squared-years-long life.

casie trotter/CASIE TROTTER

One day I picked up the book, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. In my roommate’s words, it was like I “absorbed the whole thing without even having to read it.” It went everywhere with me. In a drive-thru lane one afternoon, I tried to turn while reading and slashed a line through my thigh with my pencil; when I got home and showed it to Amy, I said, “I hope it scars.”

That’s the kind of commitment that Olson brings out of you. When someone makes his whole life scream at you on paper, you listen. You let it open you up. There’s no time for questions of practicality, of whether or not a course of study is “sensible,” of whether it will get you a job. When love comes, you eat it. That’s why the Olson tattoo on my forearm is in a place always visible when I want it to be, to remind myself not only that hunger comes before anything else, but also that it never quite goes away either.

At least, that has been my experience of this poet who’s been dead for forty-five years, gone a generation before I was born. The time collapses when I come to his words, come to taste and see what his life gave him. Over the course of those months following the Olson-Pound book, I snatched up everything I could find by him or connected to him, gathered all the pieces into a fragmented whole: over fifteen volumes of his letters; virtually every book about him on the library shelves; dozens of articles and special issues found in academic databases; and all the collections of writings.

In that process, Olson and I developed a metaphysical closeness. It felt like he was with me. Words keep people breathing beyond the space they once contained. When Michael, the (living) love of my life appeared in the middle of my year with Olson, at first I told him that he would have to wait. I made him sit with me watching CO read on YouTube to celebrate the dead guy’s birthday. Even when I found myself preferring living flesh to a printed one, the latter burrowed its way into me to keep warm for the winter.

By the time the actual work of my master’s project came around, Olson had grown even bigger, more real. Connections between us multiplied: the same love for learning and respect for “scholarship” coupled with rage at and doubts about academia; the hatred for abstractions; the craving to be a “whole” person; the ceaseless hunger, openness, and love. There were things I couldn’t talk about (or tell in their fullness) to anyone, but I could read them in Olson. Over the course of 210 published poems, 15 essays, his book on Herman Melville, two plays, and several hundreds of letters, I traced the stages of his development and how he turned into the person I’d come to love so viscerally. Some days, the heaviness would blot out all but the space he’d dug into me, make me start to wonder if I’ll ever feel the same kind of love from a blood-pulse hand as I do from his.

This is where the story gets a little harder to tell, because it brings up things that people don’t like to think about. To say that I got “suicidal” that summer after Maximus would probably be a stretch, but it’s the word that has the most roots in it for how I felt then. There were days in New Orleans, left to my brother’s empty apartment and Lake Pontchartrain, when I would drive across the water and have to consciously tell myself not to drive into it. Sometimes, whole weekends were spent in bed, stroking his words on my arm and trying to feel them underneath the skin, in the blood. I didn’t have to tell Olson these things because he’d already written them, lived them in his own bones.

Days, weeks, months like that prepared me well for understanding how someone whose vast output had such a lasting influence could also feel “grim,” as he once told friend and writer Frances Boldereff, convinced he should just stop writing.

These past two years with Olson have brought me to a place where the words to describe him mean less than the ways I’ve come to embody him. I’ve read his words so many times that they run through my head and into my own work without me fully realizing it. In a way more physical than spiritual, I feel his ideas make sense of mine, put the pieces together of how to inhabit a world.

I don’t know what all this says of me. But on the low days where the grimness sets in and threatens not to leave again, Olson keeps me open to what’s coming, even if “openness” means being sprawled on the ground.

Casie Trotter is from Owasso, Oklahoma, and has lived on Elysian Fields in New Orleans and in a Chicago soup kitchen. Casie has been a featured poet at Short Order Poems in Oklahoma City and her work is forthcoming in This Land. She was awarded two research grants to study in the Charles Olson archive at the University of Connecticut. Read more of her work at somethingliketwentysomethings.wordpress.com

Notes

* The phrase “whirld saviour” comes from an angry letter Olson wrote to Robert Creeley on June 19, 1950. It was spurred by Creeley’s mention of some disdainful things Ezra Pound said about Olson, which reminded him that Pound had referred to him dismissively as a “world saver”—it turned out to be a very sensitive subject. See pages 109-11 of The Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Vol. 1. Ed. George Butterick. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.

1 For more context about this relationship, see Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. Ed. Catherine Seelye. New York: Grossman, 1975.

2 See the same letter, p. 110.

3 For more context, see Cornell, Julien. The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the aTreason Case. New

York: John Day Company, 1966. A copy of this particular letter is on page 71, though Cornell mistakenly identifies Olson as “a doctor who apparently gave him some comfort” (70).