Andrei Codrescu To Celebrate Gloucester Writers Center, Charles Olson

According to this article in the Gloucester Times, Andrei Codrescu will deliver a talk on Charles Olson titled "Teaching Olson in Baton Rouge" at the Gloucester Writers Center, where he is an advisory board member and current writer-in-residence.

From the article:

When asked how he came to learn about Olson — a name not always known even to some Gloucester residents — Codrescu said he learned about the poet almost instantly after arriving from Romania and moving to the Lower East Side in New York City. There he met several poets who had participated in a conference led by Olson, who stood 6-foot-8 and had a commanding presence even beyond his literary work.

"Olson's brilliant mind held them in thrall for days, and changed forever the landscape of American poetry," said Codrescu. Later Codrescu would meet Felding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Diane diPrima, and other Black Mountaineers.

"(They) had the good fortune of being present at Olson's genius oral performances. I never met him, always wanted to, but I had enough secondhand hero worship in me to delve into the Maximus, read his essay on Melville, and study the George Butterick companion to Maximus," he said.

Olson's last work was an epic titled "The Maximus Poems," which was about the city of Gloucester.

When Codrescu started teaching at Louisiana State University, he realized instantly that "Maximus" would make an ideal object of study for his students.

"The side benefit of studying a mad Yankee's attempt to tell lyrically the epic story of a town (Gloucester) beginning in prehistory, and following every line of geographical, economical, and political thought his mind could conceive of, was that the method was good for any place, depending, of course, on the quality of mind working it," said Codrescu.

"My students started thinking in Olsonian terms about Baton Rouge and the lower Mississippi, an exercise that proved most useful when the catastrophe of Katrina found us," he related. "When Katrina turned everybody's life inside out, it became necessary to think like Olson, because the disaster had historical and social precedents, as well as environmental ones."

Codrescu noted that Olson's words were prophetic.

"He was sometimes overblown in his lyrical outbursts, occasionally megalomaniacal or mean, or felt too big for his britches, but these flaws are part of the process," he said.

Read the rest after the jump. Codrescu's talk will take place at the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church on Thursday, Aug. 25 at 7:30 p.m.