OlsonNow

Charles Olson: Only One Poem

2010-09-27T10:52:00.000-04:00

If you could choose only one poem by Charles Olson—for inclusion in an anthology, or to teach to undergraduates, or for a graduate seminar, or as your personal favorite, or as his very best, or his most significant—which would it be? The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a roundtable discussion at the May 2011 American Literature Association conference in Boston. Six roundtable participants will be invited to offer ten-minute justifications or explications or celebrations of one poem by Charles Olson. Some might argue that Olson’s poems don’t stand alone as well as, say, Frost’s or Stevens’s—that Olson needs to be read in bigger chunks. This roundtable challenges that assumption, and asks us to consider the criteria by which we value an individual poem. What makes it matter? Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by December 1, 2010. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

Olson 100 in Gloucester

2010-05-12T21:30:00.002-04:00

To the extended Charles Olson community:

Gloucester's Charles Olson Society, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, is organizing a series of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Olson's birth. The main events will take place in downtown Gloucester on Columbus Day weekend (Friday, October 8 through Sunday, October 10), though other events will be held before the main festival. We need your donations to make it all happen.

Events will include a Charles Olson study group of local citizens meeting once a week for five weeks prior to Columbus Day weekend; nightly readings at venues throughout Gloucester in the week prior to the main events; symposia and panel discussions; a marathon reading at the Independent Church on Middle Street on Friday, October 8; featured readers on Saturday, October 9; an Olson walk with readings highlighting sites in the Maximus Poems on Sunday, followed by a performance of Apollonius of Tyana.

These events, and several others being discussed, will complement an Olson exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum, which will open the first weekend in October. In addition the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library is sponsoring a special catalog/exhibition of rare, inscribed, and out-of-print books, letters, magazines and broadsides by Olson, curated by Greg Gibson of Ten Pound Island Book Company.

The Olson centennial celebrations in Gloucester in October will provide people with an opportunity to extend and intensify discussions and debates begun in Worcester in March and at Simon Fraser University in June. The Gloucester events will also provide a unique opportunity for Olson's readers to encounter many Maximus sites in the company of other poets, scholars, and enthusiasts. The ways contemporary poets, artists, teachers, and activists are responding to Olson's work -- exploring, extending, critiquing, revising-- will be at the core of the Gloucester events. With your help we can make Gloucester's Charles Olson centennial events challenging, nourishing, and of essential use to those who attend.

Please send checks to Charles Olson Society c/o Kent Bowker, Treasurer, 11 Indian Rock Lane, Essex, MA 01929, with "Olson 100" in the memo line. Those interested in contributing toward the establishment of the Vincent Ferrini/Charles Olson Writers Place should send donations to The Charles Olson Society c/o Henry Ferrini, 5 Wall Street, Gloucester, MA 01930.

Sincerely,

The Charles Olson Society of Gloucester
Olson100.blogspot.com

Olson Events This Week

2010-03-25T16:07:00.001-04:00

Project Verse:
Wednesday March 24th

A Reading by Students in Worcester Area Colleges
Led by Susan Richmond and Ian Williams
Clark University 7:00 PM
Jefferson Hall, Room 218

Thursday March 25th

Anne Waldman
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Discussion: Activism and Poetry, 3:00 pm. Higgins Labs Room 116.
Poetry Reading: 7:00 PM, Salisbury Labs 115

Friday March 26th:

Dana Commons, Clark University

Registration and Morning Reception 9:00 - 10:00

Opening Remarks: John Bassett, President, Clark University

Opening Discussion: 10:00 Moderator: Mark Wagner

Ammiel Alcalay and Fred Dewey: Olson as Public / Political Figure

Olson and Politics of Place: 11:00 - 1:00: Moderator: Ken Gibbs

Fred Dewey

Jim Fay: Olson in Worcester in Pictures

Laura Jehn Menides: Charles Olson and the Blackstone Canal.

Peter Anastas: Charles Olson's Call to Activism

Lunch: 1:00 - 2:00

Photographs of Denny Moers.

Olson as Educator: 2:00 - 4:00: Moderator: James Cook

Jim Cocola: Olson as Educator

Bernard Horn: Olson's Last Class at UConn

Edmund Schofield: Anna Shaughnessy, Teacher to Kunitz and Olson and Donald Baker.

Friday Evening: Clark University

4:00 PM: Poetry Polis: Moderator: Rodger Martin and Eve Rifkah

Readers: Sasha Steensen, Pierre Joris, Bill Tremblay, Don Wellman, Dan Lewis, Robert Cronin, Anne Waldman, Jonathan Blake, Charles Stein and others . . .

Centenary Dinner: 6:00. Dana Commons, Clark

******************************************************************************************

Saturday March 27:
Dana Commons, Clark University

Registration and Morning Reception 9:00 AM

Presentation: 9:30 - 10:45

Charles Olson Society of Gloucester presents:
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
w/ Filmmakers Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf. Q&A will follow the hour film.

The Body and the Personal: 11:00 : Dr. Stephen Gilson

Ammiel Alcalay and Kate Tarlow Morgan: The Body is a House

Donald Wellman: Olson and Autobiography

Roy Skodnick: Olson, language and gesture.

Lunch: 1:00 - 2:00

Olson's Influence of Anxiety: 2:00 - 4:00 : Moderator: Jonathan Blake

Richard Owens: The Practical Limits of Daylights: Charles Olson and Cambridge Poetry.

Pierre Joris: Olson's Influence on Contemporary European Poetics

Kenneth Warren: Charles Olson's Grail of Intuition

Sasha Steensen: "Great Mother, Cow or Whore: Charles Olson's Unlikely Influence on Contemporary Female Poets"

Influences on Olson: 4:00 - 6:00 Moderator: Gina Ortiz

Don Byrd: TBA

Carla Billiteri: Olson's Politics/Poetics of Transnational Utopia

John Woznicki: Myth, Magic and Movement in the work of Charles Olson

Charles Stein: The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum: Olson and Jung

Closing Event
Saturday evening: 7:00 pm.
Fuller Theatre, Worcester State College

Kim Spurlock: In Cold Hell In Thicket

Dance-Play: Apollonius of Tyana . . . Stage Direction: Sarah Slifer; Music: Bob Jordan, Elote Maldanado, Derek Byrne, Mark Wagner and Atom Xelny.

Ed Sanders Sings and Talks and Plays

Olson at Eoagh

2009-10-14T13:43:00.002-04:00

A PANEL, READING, & EXHIBITION

CHARLES OLSON: LANGUAGE AS PHYSICAL FACT

Tenney Nathanson
Cole Swensen
Steve McCaffery
Barbara Henning
Anne Waldman

A CHAPBOOK

Nothing is in Here, by Andrew Levy

READINGS/ARTICLES

An Interview with Kevin Killian, by Tony Leuzzi
TEXT FOR A CUL-DE-SAC, by Wystan Curnow & Lawrence Weiner
The Functional Art of Bruce Nauman, by Jessica Hullman
A Topological Memoir by Penelope Bloodworth
Poetic Ecologies in Bruxelles, by Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Composition as Exposition: A Case File, by Bill Marsh
Paradox: The Diminishing Increase of an Author, by Tom Clark
Field Poetics (a compleat history of de-individualizing practices), by Donald Wellman
Raymond Roussel’s (New) Africa, by Louis Bury
Iterative View (of Brent Cunningham’s Bird & Forest), by Jesse Seldess
Double Review of Amy King, by Matthew Rotando
Review of Brenda Iijima’s Rabbit Lesson, by Geoffrey Olsen
Metapoetic Speculation In/On Tom Beckett’s “This Poem,” by Thomas Fink
Reading Julian Poirer’s Poetry, by Filip Marinovich
Review of Joseph Lease’s Broken World, by John Chavez

POETRY BY

Samuel Ace & Maureen Seaton, William Allegrezza, Renee Angle, Robyn Art, Ari Banias, Emily Beall, Roberto Bedoya, James Belflower, Graeme Bezanson, Carlos T. Blackburn, Kate Broad, Julian T. Brolaski, Ethan Saul Bull, Tetman Callis, Sean Casey, Stephen Chamberlain, Cheryl Clark, Kate Colby, Thomas Cook, Lisa Cooper, Barbara Cully, Mark Cunningham, Shira Dentz, Amanda Deutch, Michelle Detorie, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Moses Eder, Will Edmiston, Thomas Fink & Maya Diablo Mason, Greg Fuchs, Kristen Gallagher, Lawrence Giffin, Giles Goodland, Noah Eli Gordon, Stephanie Gray, Arpine Grenier, Gabriel Gudding, John Harkey, Jeff Harrison, Nathan Hauke, Stefania Heim, Derek Henderson, Michael S. Hennessey, Chelsea Hodson, N. M. Hoffman, Erika Howsare, Paolo Javier, Adeena Karasick, Michael Kelleher, Vincent Katz, Amy King, Paula Kolek, Mark Lamoureux, Dorothea Lasky, Gregory Laynor, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Ruth Lepson, Joel Lewis, Eric Lindley, Hillary Lyon, Kimberly Lyons, Jami Macarty, Majena Mafe, Jill Magi, CJ Martin, Filip Marinovich, Kristi Maxwell, Rachel May & Joshua A. Ware, E.J. McAdams, Pattie McCarthy, Chris McCreary, Nicholas Messenger, Benjamin Miller, Carol Mirakove, Rajiv Mohabir, Emily Moore, Glenn Mott, Uche Nduka, Gale Nelson, Maurice Olivier, Geoffrey Olsen, Monica Peck, Jennifer Petersen, Lance Phillips, Siri Phillips, Nick Piombino, Lanny Quarles, Jessy Randall & Daniel M. Shapiro, Karin Randolph, Karen Randall & Ross, Priddle, Michael Rerick, Christie Ann Reynolds, James Sanders, Sam Schild, Kyle Schlesinger, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Paul Siegell, Sandra Simonds, Joel Sloman, Rick Snyder, Alan Sondheim, Leah Souffrant, Sparrow, Christopher Stackhouse, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Eileen Tabios, Paige Taggart, Anne Tardos, Jeremy James Thompson, Elizabeth Treadwell, Matt Turner, Mara Vahratian, Nico Vassilakis, Andi Werblin, Sara Wintz, and Deborah Wood

VISIT EOAGH

KATHLEEN FRASIER ON OLSON AT PENNSOUND

2009-10-03T09:58:00.001-04:00

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Fraser/9-22-09/Fraser-Kathleen_Olson_KWH-UPenn_09-22-09.mp3

Call for Papers: Charles Olson and Influence

2009-10-03T09:50:00.000-04:00

Call for Papers: Charles Olson and Influence

American Literature Association, Hyatt Regency San Francisco, May 27-30, 2010

Charles Olson’s work gathers a vast range of sources that influenced his thought and poetry. Major influences on Olson’s work include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Melville, Carl Sauer, Jung, Hesiod, Alfred North Whitehead, Herman Weyl, and many others. Influences also include methods, concepts, and disciplines such as archeology, dance, projective geometry, and serial music. Olson’s work in turn influenced a number of poets, including Creeley, Duncan, Susan Howe, and others often overlooked in discussions of Olson, such as Rosemarie Waldrop and Amy Clampitt. Papers on these types of influence and the work of Olson are welcome.

Proposals of 250 words or less should be sent to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu and to Jeff Gardiner at Jeffrey.Gardiner@Sun.COM and jeffreyjgardiner@gmail.com by December 1, 2009. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

Henry Corbin & American Poetry

2009-05-19T10:19:00.002-04:00

We were alerted to these two links on Tom Cheetham's blog:

http://henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com/2008/11/henry-corbin-and-american-poetry.html

http://henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com/2009/05/henry-corbin-american-poetry-part-2.html

He would like to hear from anyone with an interest in Corbin ikn the context of writing, poetry, poetics.

tcheetham@gmail.com

News From Gloucester

2009-05-18T10:48:00.002-04:00

Councilors withdraw rezoning plan for Fort

By Patrick Anderson
Staff Writer
May 07, 2009 05:50 am

—

Amended, maligned and stripped of its hotel by more than a year of withering criticism, the city's plan to rezone the Fort neighborhood and ease restrictions on development is dead.

City Council withdrew the plan Tuesday after the latest round of talks with planners and Fort stakeholders failed to produce an acceptable compromise.

The plan had already been almost completely refashioned from the proposal drawn up by Mayor Carolyn Kirk's administration last year that centered around language clearing the way for a hotel on the former Bird's Eye warehouse building on Commercial Street.

Councilors on Tuesday said all of the changes and modifications to the plan had rendered it almost unrecognizable and at this point there was confusion about what the plan was supposed to accomplish.

"After a year-and-a-half of meetings, we all can agree a change is needed, but have lost all focus on what the change would be," Councilor Joseph Ciolino said.

"I think what became clear is that we were all heading in different directions," Councilor Philip Devlin said.

The Fort is zoned for marine industrial use, but includes dozens of non-conforming residential units.

While some property owners have looked for economic relief from zoning changes that will allow them to bring in residential and mixed uses, residents and other business owners argued that the changes would lead to condominiums, gentrification and a threat to the fishing industry.

The loudest outrage in the historic neighborhood, central to the city's fishing community and industry, has been reserved for the idea of a hotel.

Councilors indicated that they will request the Planning Board begin work on a new Fort rezoning plan.

Patrick Anderson can be reached at panderson@gloucestertimes.com

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.

CHARLES OLSON CENTENARY CONFERENCE

2009-05-04T10:59:00.000-04:00

CHARLES OLSON CENTENARY CONFERENCE
June 4-6 2010
Simon Fraser University
Vancouver British Columbia

One hundred years after his birth, and fifty years after The New American Poetry anthology transformed the landscape of contemporary poetry, Charles Olson, arguably one of the most influential figures in twentieth century literature, remains a puzzlingly marginalized figure. As Ben Friedlander writes in Olson’s Collected Prose, it is “as if the unread Olson were the necessary ¾ submerged berg making possible the ¼ ice floe.” In the spirit of bringing Olson back into the polis—and delving into the “3/4 submerged” portion of this “maximal” figure—the Charles Olson Centenary Conference seeks new readings of Olson’s poetry, poetics, and his influence on twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture. Topics to be addressed could include (but are not limited to):

● Black Mountain College reconsidered
● The New Canadian Poetry? Olson north of the border
● Olson, economics, and democracy
● Olson, geography, and the spatial turn
● Olson and American history
● Olson and the archive
● Olson / Melville / Shakespeare
● Olson and Mexico
● Olson, Women, and the Feminine
● Olson and his contemporaries
● Olson and 21st century poetry
● Olson’s influences/Olson’s influence
● Poetry as research
● Poetry and the polis
● The politics of poetic form

Please submit abstracts of 250-500 words to Stephen Collis at olson-conference@sfu.ca by October 1 2009. More information and conference updates will be available at http://www.sfu.ca/olson-conference.

POLIS IS THIS ON PBS DURING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

2009-03-11T13:39:00.004-04:00

From Henry Ferrini:

When Charles Olson wrote about television, he spelled it “tell-a-vision." Filmmakers Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf surpass the challenge of creating a vision of this giant and his ideas in cinematic form while expanding our awareness of how much the universal is contained in the local. For Olson, the local was Gloucester, Massachusetts, the polis (a body of citizens in a particular place) that shaped his life and poetry while creating a unique vision of America. It airs on selected PBS stations during National Poetry Month.

3/30 9:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00PM Iowa PTV World 3
4/2 8:00pm Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/3 2:00am KET-1, Kentucky
4/3` 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/4 2:00am Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/5 3:30pm KACV Amarillo,TX
4/5 4:00pm Detroit PTV
4/5 7:00pm WGBH-Boston, MA
4/5 8:00pm WKAR-E. Lansing MI
4/7 7:00pm Ozarks PTV-KOZK, Springfield, MO
4/8 11:000pm WCVE, Richmond, VA
4/10 10:00pm WGCU- Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 6:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 8:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/12 9:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/11 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/12 11:00pm WSIU-Carbondale
4/13 9:00pm Rhode Island PTV
4/13 10:30 WCNY-Syracuse, NY
4/15 8:00pm KMOS- Warrensburg MO
4/15 10:00pm KVCR-San Bernardino, CA
4/19 1:00pm WGBY- Springfield, MA
4/22 11:00pm KCSM - San Mateo
4/24 2:30am WNET, NYC
4/24 12:00pm KCTS-Seattle
4/24 1:00pm WHYY-Phila
4/24 8:00pm WDSC-Daytona, Fla
4/26 7:00pm CET-Cincinnati
4/26 8:00pm Utah Edu. Network, Salt Lake
4/28 midnight KTEH, San Jose/San Francisco
4/29 10:00pm VermontPTV
4/29 11:00pm KUAT Tucson
4/30 8:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers

Process Magazine

2008-12-19T21:57:00.003-05:00

Process is a Gloucester lit mag with a post-Olson awareness, and many of the writers they've published were directly influenced by him.

The Process online presence is: http://processliteraryjournal.blogspot.com/

More on Gloucester Harbor

2008-12-04T10:07:00.002-05:00

Click here for editorial linking Olson to Gloucester's future.

POLIS IS THIS at Woodland Pattern

2008-11-27T10:23:00.004-05:00

Sunday, December 7, 1-4pm

FREE TO THE PUBLIC

Come celebrate another year with Woodland Pattern at our Annual Open House on Sunday, December 7th! As always, there will be baked goodies and beverages, good conversation, books to browse, and an opportunity to check out Configurations, an exhibit featuring the artwork of Jane Dalrymple-Hollo and Anselm Hollo in the Woodland Pattern gallery!

It's also a great way to get a jump on your holiday gift buying and to sign up for the 15th Annual Poetry Marathon & Benefit (To be held on January 31st).

At 2pm, as part of the open house, Woodland Pattern in conjunction with the UWM Department of Film will be showing:

Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place.
(Henry Ferrini, 57 min., 2007)
a film by Henry Ferrini & Ken Riaf, featuring John Malkovich

http://www.woodlandpattern.org/gallery/open_house08.shtml

Gloucester Harbor: Insuring the Future

2008-11-05T14:43:00.001-05:00

A video by the Citizens for Gloucester Harbor, Gordon Baird, Marcia Hart and Ferrini Productions.

HOLD THE FORT!

2008-09-30T10:00:00.005-04:00

An emergency call to save Gloucester’s historic Fort Square

A group of people from Gloucester (David Rich, Peter Anastas and others mentioned further on) recently sent us the following material on new zoning and urban renewal/destruction plans for Gloucester, things that Charles Olson fought tenaciously against. Let us always remember that Olson’s legacy is as much on the ground, among the people of real places, as ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gift is on the page. Think of any imaginative coalitions, venues for publicity so that this story can get off Cape Ann to a wider constituency.

If you want to get involved, please contact:

Peter Anastas
panastas@comcast.net

or

Bill Johnson
willyj1281@yahoo.com

Ammiel Alcalay

________

First e-mail from David Rich:

The local press and controversy on the rezoning has been intense and consuming. Much written, but nothing that's made it off Cape Ann. Here's an article written by art critic Greg Cook about photographer Ernie Morin's advocacy through his art:

http://gregcookland.com/journal/2008/07/ernest-morin-and-future-of-gloucester.html

here's an article from the Gloucester Times about the very heated and contentious city council meeting where Fort residents showed up en masse to protest the proposed rezoning:

http://www.gloucestertimes.com/punews/local_story_267225505.html

On top of this, the mayor wants to lift the entire DPA: the designation that keeps Gloucester an industrial port, to transform the entire harbor into a recreational yachting and hotel center. For that she needs state approval, but to take Fort Square, which falls outside of the protected zone, she needs only a city council vote. We had a week's worth of meetings in Gloucester with a power-point presentation showing us renditions of what a 'renewed' Gloucester would look like: there was nothing left! All boardwalks and pleasure boats and quaint shops.

I could try to dig up those articles, regarding the DPA, from the summer. Right now, the Fort is her most vulnerable target.

Two articles that Peter Anastas sent in:

Fort residents deserve better than city's lip service

September 23, 2008 04:45 am
Gloucester Daily Times

To the editor:

This city is not a corporation that can be run by a CEO — and the rezoning of the Fort is a clear example of how not to conduct our business.

The residents and businesses were not consulted until September in a process that started in January and was conducted in an ivory tower. The city's economic development office did not visit the largest business on Commercial Street, an abutter to the hotel site, until the day after my slide show presentation to City Council on Aug. 19.

As far as I know, none of the residents were apprised of the city's work on the rezoning either. Posting something on a Web site for a neighborhood that is "old-school and offline" is not inclusive management.

An unprecedented 200 people showed up at a City Hall, organized, articulate, stating multiple times and for multiple sound reasons a strong and over-arching opposition to the hotel in a way that clearly was not merely a not-in-my-neighborhood stand, but one suggesting this would not be best for the city.

Yet, our mayor writes in her e-mail memorandum (The Times, Friday, Sept. 19), that "concerns raised about a potential hotel at the Birds Eye site I heard as questions — questions about traffic, coexistence, protecting the business interests, beach access, etc."

That is a problem; you cannot dictate from above to residents and the strongest part of your working waterfront.

Kirk makes the claim "I still believe a hotel is the highest and best use of that property." Yet the city has produced no financial data to back that claim — nor should it rezone based on one parcel's best use, even if she were correct, which is a moot point.

A city is a community of people first. We are not employees. This is not how you conduct public policy. Harbor hearings where you have three minutes to speak about "your relationship to the water" are nice events, but when you cannot ask questions, are told not to speak about zoning, and cannot have rebuttal — that is not a forum for generating this type of public policy proposal.

The people of the Fort are not living in denial. They know they need some change. But they want slow change, responsible, compatible change. They want what is best for their families, their businesses and for their city.

They have contributed a lot to this city. They love Gloucester — they have to live with circumstances most of the city would never want to endure in terms of traffic, noise levels, fish smells, and Fiesta's thousands of tourists — and they have learned to live and let live with the industry.

They deserve better from the city, and the city hasn't done jack for that neighborhood in years. Go look at the sidewalks, ask about water pressure, ask about the age of the sewer line, ask about the contaminated land, ask about the utilities for the industry, ask about the dredging, ask about any number of infrastructure issues.

These issues go back 25 or more years. The city wants to solve it with a quick fix. Well, the cure may well be worse for the patient than the disease.

We do not need political spin, we need and deserve a real analysis before we grasp at the quick fix.

The people of the Fort do not deserve a mayor who does not hear them speak when they speak in 100 percent unison. Anyone in Gloucester will tell you how impossible it is to get conflicted parties to an agreement. Here you have them in agreement with industry in a neighborhood where they have argued with each other for years. That should speak volumes.

This neighborhood should have the right to self determine what is an appropriate rezoning. I have trust in the Planning Board and Planning and Development Committee. They will now allow for a real process and involvement at this stage.

Ernest Morin

Gloucester

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.

Fort residents on hotel plan: 'No, no', 'no and never'

By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer

September 24, 2008 05:35 am

—

Worried about being gentrified out of their neighborhood and angry at a plan engineered elsewhere to rezone their world, residents and businessmen of the Fort mixed soaring rhetoric and pep rally techniques to tell city planners to go away and leave them alone.

"Everybody say 'no'," resident Clayton Sova implored in the middle of the three-hour meeting Monday night. "No, no," responded nearly everybody in the crowded Kyrouz Auditorium at City Hall.

They were saying no to the widespread notion that what the office of Mayor Carolyn Kirk and her Community Development Department have in mind for the Fort is an eminent domain sweep and new purpose — as the future home of a Marriott hotel on the site of the former Birds Eye Foods property and condos that will rob the isolated neighborhood of its gritty authenticity and soul.

City officials conceded that the hotel — a well-publicized possibility for months — played into the decision to begin the economic redevelopment of the waterfront at the Fort. But they did what they could to shoot down the rumors of condos, property takings and a try at ending the way of life on the Fort.

"There are deep-rooted misconceptions and lots of unfounded fear," Shawn Henry, a member of the Planning Board, which was meeting in conjunction with the City Council's Planning and Development Committee, said in an interview yesterday.

"They think they're getting the bums' rush," the Planning Board's Rick Noonan said yesterday.

A third meeting was scheduled for Oct. 20. The Planning Board is obligated to recommend a rezoning plan to City Council which has the authority to change the present all-encompassing marine industrial zone.

The passion of the moment was even hotter Monday night than it was a week earlier as the board and committee resumed the task of inching toward modernized zoning for a marine industrial enclave that includes archaic infrastructure and homes overlooking heavy-duty fish processors and empty lots. Kirk had raised the intensity with an e-mail following the first rezoning meeting a week earlier. In her message to the Planning Board and council, the mayor revealed that she hadn't heard adamant opposition to the hotel.

"I did not hear a resounding 'no or never,'" she wrote.

She did Monday night.

"Mayor Kirk," said Leonard McCollum of Ocean Crest Seafoods, one of the industries of Commercial Street, "I am here tonight to make sure you hear us this time. I give you my resounding 'no and never.' A luxury hotel and luxury condos would be a huge mistake on a road called 'Commercial Street.'"

He predicted the sensibilities of hotel guests would be offended by the sight, sound and smell of the industrial port, which has established a powerful line along the pier properties of Commercial Street.

Yet Kirk, the audience and city officials also heard a plea for a year-round hotel as an economic stimulus for the city from group tour operator Linn Parisi, who this summer created Seaport Gloucester, a destination marketing organization.

"We're not reinventing the wheel, there are hotels all over the universe," said Parisi, who this summer brought more than 400 motor coaches into the city and guided many of their passengers on foot through the Fort to get the flavor of the port.

She estimated each bus load was worth $10,000 in an overnight stay in a future hotel.

"It's a real place with real people and a working community," she said. "Because of what we are," reaction to the experience is "stellar," she added.

Hotel developers, who have met with Kirk, are watching the rezoning hearings carefully, according to Sargent Goodchild, the agent for the Illinois bank that last month took title to the former Birds Eye property from longtime owner Peter Maggio, Maggio continues to operate a cold storage business in the building where the concept of flash-frozen fish was perfected in the 1920s.

"A week to 10 days ago," Goodchild said, "negotiations were proceeding smoothly. Recently, they seem to have slowed down."

Kirk told the gathering that anyone for $3.5 million could acquire the property, which — while it is in a marine industrial zone — cannot be rebuilt as a hotel or used in ways that don't fit snugly with the row of businesses across Commercial Street. Those include Intershell, Mortillaro's Lobster Co., Felicia's, a full service facility for draggers, North Atlantic Seafood, Ocean Crest, Neptune's Harvest's fish product fertilizer, Cape Pond Ice and Parisi's off-loaded and retail fish.

"I don't think a hotel is going up there in six months, one year, five years or 10 years based on what I heard tonight," said Councilor Jason Grow.

The prospect of a hotel in the Fort is the most compelling but far from the only zoning dilemma facing the board and the council committee.

The marine industrial zone also encompasses the Fort's citadel of more than 70 closely packed, non-conforming homes and apartment buildings.

Residents objected to the Kirk administration's proposal to make the enclave a neighborhood business zone that welcomes residences and allows small businesses, an option that became the R-4 residential zone. But it would come with noise ordinance protection that could give residents a weapon to use against the industrial base along Commercial Street and Harbor Cove.

Then, there is the trial balloon for a theoretical harbor district zone along the largely derelict wharves along the outside of the Fort, where fishing boats off-load into Parisi's facility for shipment to the Boston Seafood Display Auction.

The new zone would add to the marine industrial zone use schedule by allowing recreational as well as commercial boating business activity. But property owner Rosalie Parisi said she preferred to keep the limitations of the old zone, except for a liberalization to allow for residential use on the second floor.

In contrast to the elected City Council, which writes zoning, the appointed Planning Board, charged with making recommendations, is expected to "look past the emotional arguments and do what's best for the city and the neighborhood," Henry said.

Board members Henry McCarl and Noonan used nearly similar words to assert their willingness to insulate their thinking from expressed emotion.

"People of the Planning Board definitely feel that way," said McCarl.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.

Peter Anastas, Gloucester:
Testimony for joint meeting of Planning Board and City Council P&D
September 15 and 22, 2008
City Hall, 7 p.m.

There are two questions about the proposed rezoning of the Fort—and of the waterfront itself—I'd like to address briefly.

The first is about the language we're using. Slogans like "putting the harbor back to work" or "turning the lights back on on the waterfront" presuppose that the harbor isn't working and that the lights of commercial activity are out. Neither statement is true. Even with the worst federal regulations ever imposed on the fishing industry we're still working on Gloucester harbor. Millions of pounds of fish are being landed, boats from other Massachusetts ports, Maine and Rhode Island are unloading, there are two fish auctions, businesses like Neptune's Harvest are thriving and new businesses are starting up. This is not a dead seaport; neither is the fishing industry moribund or the waterfront "stagnant." These negative myths need to be refuted because they don't provide the facts on the ground we need for intelligent planning. Instead, they create a crisis atmosphere that allows only for knee-jerk solutions.

What I'm suggesting is that we reframe the issue, from crisis to opportunity. The collapse of stocks and the advent of restrictive federal regulations to ensure they recoup has forced the industry to downsize, creating hardship for boat owners, processors, ancillary businesses and individual fishing families. Fishing is not what it was thirty years ago. But Gloucester, a city of courageous, inventive people accustomed to hardship, has kept its waterfront working, knowing that our city still is and will continue to be an important hub port. We want to renew existing infrastructure and invest in new docking and processing facilities, not only because we need them now (every docking space assigned to fishing is currently in use—and we need more, right now) but because when the stocks recoup (scientists tell us they will by 2014—only six years from now) we want to be the people fishing for them, landing and processing them, not some other community.

Meanwhile, we're all working together, planning together, to protect our maritime heritage, our hardy character, and to bring in new marine industrial business, creating by-products and value-added commodities and encouraging hi-tech, research and bio-genetic facilities, all related to the sea. What we want to tell the world, and ourselves, is not that Gloucester is on the way out, but that we've turned crisis into opportunity and we're on the way up. Come and see for yourselves!

This is just a sketch, but I can envision it as the basis for a whole new pitch for Gloucester—re-branding the city, if you will, from a negative image of "the town where fishing once was," as so many people around the country have been led to believe by the Media, to a positive picture of Gloucester as "one of the premiere hub ports in the country," where citizens have taken their future into their own hands while preserving the best of their historic past.

With this in mind, let me turn to the zoning. The current proposal for the Fort puts the cart before the horse. It doesn't look at the fact that there are currently thriving businesses on the Fort, with the potential for more to come (how do we help them to stay here and grow); or the fact that real people with real lives live on the Fort, people who pay their taxes and are committed to their neighborhood. It is really a re-zoning proposal that would primarily open the way for a hotel with condos to be developed, no matter what negative social or economic impact they would have on the residents and business owners of the Fort. It is disingenuous to think otherwise. It's a case of development driving planning. Jam in a hotel and let the chips fall where they may.

This is not good planning. Real planning lets the community say what it wants where it wants it, and from there we go out and get what we need. Real planning looks at what's currently working, what is its history and how does it fit into the total ecology of the community. Real planning is not a knee-jerk response to a myth: fishing is dead, the waterfront is stagnant, let's sell it out for a hotel.

Real planning asks what should we be doing to promote Gloucester as a place to move or start a business in. Real planning asks how can we make it easier to get permits to fix up and maintain current properties. Real planning asks if we need to change the DPA, or if under the current DPA we already have the flexibility we need to keep the waterfront working. Real planning answers the question of how we get businesses to come to Gloucester right now, businesses that are compatible with the economic, social and physical character of the city; business that create year-round jobs with good pay and comprehensive benefits, not the service jobs of hotels that depend on the ups and downs of tourism.

Let's address these questions before we start rezoning the Fort and the rest of the waterfront out of existence.

I received an email last week from a close friend, a Gloucester native, who lives with her family now in Florida. She writes: "If Gloucester becomes soulless, then what hope is there for the rest of the country? This is what is wrong with the place where I live. It doesn't have a soul, and there is no one I've met who would even know what I'm talking about. It's heartbreaking." The Fort is the heart and soul of Gloucester. Let's keep it that way.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

The Fort and our Sense of Place, by Ernest Morin

A few weeks ago, I presented a slide show at City Hall to a few hundred people on a stormy Thursday night.

That show is rooted in a deep sense of place — the place being the Fort section of Gloucester. It is a part of town you could drive past and never really notice on land, yet it is quite prominent by sea or from the Boulevard.

One of the points I made during the introduction was that you could cut the Fort away from Gloucester and it would still be Gloucester.

It would still contain all the essential elements we have come to hold together as our notion of place.

It has industry, a tight-knit neighborhood with economic diversity, fishing boats, fuel docks, ice company, lobster sheds, a beach, the greasy pole, a brewery, a deep freezer, a playground, artists in residences, even a synagogue now, the Chamber of Commerce, Tally's Towing, St Peter's square ... How much more Gloucester could it be?

But if you take the Fort out of Gloucester then what does she become?

It is a valid question to pose because the mayor has asked the city to "fast track" a rezoning proposal for the area which inevitably will foster a lot of change.

What type of change is a matter of concern and deserves far more public debate.

The city wants to grow tax base, which is understandable; the question is how can you move forward and yet retain your sense of place?

How do you allow for change and yet retain your core values? How do we do it without selling our soul?

The fort is the most interesting place in the city — visually, economically and culturally it is a major contributor to the life of Gloucester.

The businesses on Commercial Street work at night or in the wee hours of the day while we sleep.

They generate more revenue and jobs than the State Fish Pier does for the city and they are family owned and operated local businesses.

They ship product world wide every day. If you drive down there though, you would swear it is empty because the activity is not visible on the street side — you have to go indoors to see the action.

The neighborhood has a long and rich history and a way of life and quality of life that is hard to match. It is perhaps the last working class neighborhood with ocean views and reasonably priced apartments on the entire East Coast.

The people are very real, know each other, help each other and look out for each other, which is rare in 2008. It is not a gated community of cookie cutter condos.

It is the neighborhood that contributes strongly to produce the Fiesta — that has a real cultural and economic value for Gloucester.

Can the area use improvements? Sure it can. Is there a way to move forward without clearing the decks and gentrifying the area? That is a real question for Gloucester.

So please go read the proposed changes for zoning on the city Web site and think about what the city is wanting to fast track. Are we indeed going to go forward in a way that retains our sense of place? Or are we going to begin the end and become another Newport, R.I., Monterey, Calif., or future bedroom community?

Will the rezoning affect and act to push out the waterfront business? Will they move to lift the DPA once they rezone?

We have real advantages as a regional hub port with our own fish auction.

We should not give up on our working waterfront quite yet, nor do anything that would serve to weaken our most economically viable area of the waterfront, either.

We are now truly standing at the crossroads, Gloucester. What is a city or its people without a deep sense of place?

This city is a very real place. We should be working to keep it that way.

(Ernest "Ernie" Morin is a Gloucester photographer, engaged in documenting the American experience, focusing first and foremost on the working life of his native city, especially Gloucester's marine-industrial waterfront, which is endangered by a fishing industry in transition and current plans for rezoning that could, if not carefully undertaken, threaten the heart and soul of the city. The above essay by Ernie appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times and the Cape Ann Beacon just as the city is poised to consider new zoning proposals for the Fort area of Gloucester Ernie writes about and has documented in individual photographs and a highly acclaimed slide show. Below is a review of Ernie's slide show by artist and critic Greg Cook, from his blog The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.)

Watching my Gloucester photographer pal Ernest Morin's "Sight Lines" slideshow at Gloucester City Hall Thursday night, I was struck again by how comprehensively and richly and honestly he has captured the city of Gloucester. It starts with his sharp eye (note the careful arrangements of lines and shapes, the use of signs to comment on the scene) and technical excellence, and winds up with him getting so deep into the marrow of the community that his photos, as a group, seem (even to Gloucester's residents) like some essence of the city itself.

We don't have artist laureates, but if we did, Morin would have to be the artist laureate of Gloucester. It is rare for an artist to be so thoroughly and successfully engaged with the nature of a community. In Gloucester, it's something of a tradition – from painter Fitz Henry Lane to poet Charles Olson to photojournalist Charles Lowe to poet laureate Vincent Ferrini (a great character, excelling more as a laureate than as a poet, who died last December). There is something about Gloucester being big and complex enough to be a city, but also finite because it is ultimately an island (there are only two roads – bridges – in or out of the place) that make it seem both intriguing and possible for a person to know it in its entirety (or at least feel they do). Its artists are drawn to take up this challenge.

Morin grew up in Gloucester, lives downtown, and haunts its streets. He's come to know the city as a boy and as a man, to know it with his feet and his camera. The result – if I may be allowed a pretentious literary allusion – reminds me of a passage from T.S. Eliot's (who summered in Gloucester while growing up) "Little Gidding":

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

--Greg Cook, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research

And this, sent in from Peter Anastas,
the testimony of a Fort Square resident:

To add to the material we sent re Fort rezoning, here is testimony presented by a Fort resident at Sept. 15 public hearing. It was great to hear the neighbors speak up, dozens of them all wearing "Hold the Fort" T-shirts, which Bill had created for the campaign to save the Fort. Bill lives next door to where Olson lived at 28 Fort Square.

Hello,

My name is Bill Johnson, my wife Jennifer and I own 26R Fort Square. The property has been in her family since the 1930’s, I have to admit, I am a transplant from Pigeon Cove, my grandparents worked for the quarries and the B&M railroad- but I love the Fort, I personally don’t think there is any place like it. Jen is the fourth generation to grow up in our home, and we are hoping to begin raising a fifth there very soon. Jen’s uncle owns the house next door, where her Aunt and Cousins live. The situation is not dissimilar all the way around Fort Square, many of the families have been in their homes for several generations, and many of those families have their working roots in the currently faltering fishing industry. We are both working class people, Jen is a visiting nurse, I am a technician at Varian- we run our household on a budget. Most of the neighborhood is composed of working people. It is truly a unique area; and I am still learning to appreciate all of the relationships and workings of the neighborhood. I have to make it clear to everyone here that our house is our home, and what I mean by saying that is it is not a starter house or an investment property- if we can help it we intend to live out our lives there, and hand the property on to our children, or grand-children.

That being said, I feel as though the zoning plan which the city is proposing harbors dark consequences for maintaining this atmosphere. I have seen the harbor scenarios PowerPoint; it appears to have been created by people who are not familiar with the neighborhood. It seems as if someone thinks that by rezoning the neighborhood portions of the Fort to allow businesses in (shops, boutiques) that people will come and shop and enjoy the view. This sounds very much like another neck of land on Cape Ann which we are all familiar with- Bear Skin Neck.

The zoning proposal also brings many questions to mind- Has the city fully studied the economic impacts of these changes to existing businesses? A disturbing portion of the harbor plan shows a rendering of Commercial Street, across from the Fort Square entrance where several fish based businesses are operating and putting their land within the DPA to good and appropriate use, turned into shops! When the shops on Main St. can barely survive as it is, and the upcoming development of Gloucester Crossing threatens to potentially take even more business from Main St, Why do we need more shops? More shops are exactly what Gloucester doesn’t need. A question to the Planning board, does the current zoning proposal take these factors into account?

What of the 1999 harbor plan, and it’s 2003 addendum which states that the fishing industry will be in an upswing in 2014, when groundfishing quotas will increase…. Will this city’s waterfront be prepared to accommodate the increase in volume, or will the fish have to be landed and processed elsewhere? I am sure there are people in Boston, New Bedford, and Portland who would be glad to land that business, will the fleet have to be serviced elsewhere? All because we have re-zoned a vital Marine Industrial space to accommodate for the perceived need of tourism?

As for the hotel, does Gloucester need more hospitality jobs? Jobs which probably do not pay enough to pay rent let alone a mortgage on Cape Ann? We should look to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard to our south, there are charities on those islands to try and maintain a population of native, skilled working people who cannot afford to live there due to median home prices being too high. Why can’t the city, perhaps with help from a citizens group, or a state grant for high tech jobs find an investor who would be willing to develop a mini business park here? Real, skilled jobs- let us look to the future, there are companies out there right now, working to develop algae that can grow diesel fuel as a renewable energy source- wouldn’t Gloucester be the logical place for a company like that to develop real, renewable energy from the city’s greatest natural resource- the Atlantic ocean? Let’s find a use for this property which coincides with the businesses and neighborhood which already exist on the Fort.

Do we need another hotel property which must closed in winter time, or worse, must develop condos and time shares to make its business plan work? Has the city studied the year round realities of the proposed hotel on Commercial St? Will the tenants and condominium holders of such a property put up with the 24/7 traffic which exists there? The occasional smells of a working waterfront? I personally think that what Neptune’s Organic does with fish waste is fantastic both environmentally and economically, but, it does smell once and a while….. If the former Birdseye property becomes inhabited by a hospitality based industry, with potentially high priced clients, how long will it take before complaints are made about noise and the traffic and the smells? These are all things that all of us on the Fort are familiar with, and for the most part embrace as coming with the territory.

If Gloucester really and truly needs a hotel downtown, why not work to make I4C2 (the abandoned lot between Gloucester House and the Building center) more attractive. The infrastructure in that area lends itself better to supporting a large business, it is centrally located, and there are less conflicting interests with abutters. There is even a dock there where the often mentioned shuttle from Boston could land, sheltered from the waves of the outer harbor, and also allow the dock to continue to operate as it is now. There must be a way to work with the state to cut through the red tape to put that site to an appropriate use.

How will Commercial St support the proposed Central Business Zoning and the myriad of traffic it could bring? In case anyone here is not aware, it is a dead end, which has only one way in and out- past Tally’s, where the tow trucks are perennially double parked, as those guys are just doing their job. Anyone here who has tried to get onto Fort Square at any point on any given day knows that the trucking traffic from the functioning fish based industries which currently exist on the street creates tie ups as it is. If a multi-story hotel is built on the Birdseye property, how wide will Commecial St have to be? And, If it must be widened, will the cuts be made into the Chamber of Commerce?, or perhaps Mortillaro’s…..is that really productive? Does the city leadership really prefer to make further hardships for companies which are currently doing their best to make a profit during the fishing downturn the industry is living through? I would also like to pose a question to the entire assembled group here- have you ever tried to make a left hand turn from Commercial St onto Western Ave on a Saturday during the summer? It is very difficult, as the local ecomomy exists now- this will no doubt become exponentially more difficult should further traffic load be added. These changes will also effect traffic on Washington St, Rogers St, and Western Avenue. This topic deserves much study before such drastic changes are enacted.

.How about Parking? If Fort Square and the eastern side of Beach Court are zoned to allow shops, where will their customers park? Obviously some will walk in, but we all know the city is not prepared to offer any more parking than already exists in the downtown area, this is another problem we are all familiar with. The zoning proposal on the table mentions no solutions to this obvious problem, this must be addressed before moving forward.

Not to mention the effects to the people of the Fort, whose families have been inhabiting the area for so many years. And what of the hotel which Sam Park intends to place at Gloucester Crossing- How many hotel rooms can exist in one place in the current business environment?

It strikes me that this change is a move for the quick money which the city so desperately needs- this need is undeniable. But, also to be considered is the bigger picture- the picture where our economy whether it be local, state, or federal is becoming increasingly service based. I don’t think we need more shops, more hotels, more restaurants, more boutiques, or more banks. We need industrial and technical jobs, in industries that don’t easily wax and wane with the state of the economy, the price of fuel, or whatever happens to be chique at the moment. We need to find and encourage jobs and industry which provide food, and the staples which everyone needs in their lives regardless of the state of the economy. Let’s find a company which does that and offer them a TIF, let’s not make it any more difficult for businesses already struggling to stay afloat. This is not done as easily as it is said, but, if the city continues to increase tourism’s piece of the local economy I believe we will see even greater swings in revenue than we do now. The importance of a local economy which is diversified cannot be ignored. Places with less resource and built in skills and talent come to mind, like Jamaica, where an impoverished lower class works in an almost completely tourism based economy. We have skills and resource here in Gloucester to do better than adding a handful of $10 per hour chambermaid and desk clerk jobs that could come with a hotel.

It is amazing to me that this proposal was put together without anyone asking direct questions to the residents of the Fort up to this point- money and time were spent drawing this proposal- city resources were used! Why weren’t I or my neighbors contacted directly, as we have a very large stake in what happens to our neighborhood.

What about character and originality? The current rezoning proposal represents a slippery slope towards taking away one of Gloucester’s greatest assets- it’s uniqueness. The friendlier we make our waterfront to high end condos, the more attractive it will become to this development-and a precedent could be set. It would not be an incredible reach to see the waterfront start to unzipper and fold under the attractive and lucrative one time profits that waterfront condos represent. Let’s keep the working waterfront working. Let’s work on the recommendations of previous harbor plan revisions- don’t toss them out for the possibility that a Marriot could end up in Gloucester.

All of the issues above are of great importance to the city, in both the long and short term, and decisions on issues of this magnitude should not be rushed. I respectfully submit the following requests:

-A traffic study, with full details showing how Central Business Zoning could exist on Commercial Street.

-Within that traffic study, an explanation of where and how parking will work, not just for the CB zoning on commercial street, but the proposed NB zoning on Beach and Pascucci courts, as well as Fort Square.

-An Economic Impact Study, for both Main St, and the Marine Industrial Businesses which are making their living already on Commercial St.

-Alternative concepts- give the citizens of Gloucester more than one option- this land can be put to good use, we need to be responsible about how we do that. I feel that there is a use for this space which compliments the existing conditions of the area.

-Direct contact and involvement with the citizens who lie directly in the area to be rezoned is critical- we have a lot to lose or gain from these changes.

- I personally want to know what is going to happen to my taxes if this zoning change takes place- I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only one.

- How exactly, specifically legally, is Pavillion Beach affected? Who owns the water, the sand, and to what level? How will access to the beach be guaranteed to the public after development begins? Will a seawall have to be built on the beach to protect such a property? Are we, as an entire city, willing to give up this beautiful beach?

- How are rights of way affected?

There are a lot of groups on the Fort with sometimes conflicting priorities, but we all seem agree on one thing- the zoning proposal as it stands does not work for any of us. I would like to finish by re-iterating my position, which is that I just want to live here peacefully, and raise my children on a piece of property which will have been in their family for five generations. I would like to see the neighborhood preserved for what it is, a culturally unique enclave. I would like to see the city move forward, and some development is necessary for that motion- but let’s look really closely at it, don’t disregard former harbor plans and input from citizens and businesses, especially those most affected by the changes.

I thank the Council and the Planning Committee for their time and consideration.

Call for Papers

2008-09-24T11:32:00.000-04:00

Call for Papers: Charles Olson’s Poetry in “This now. This foreshortened span.”

American Literature Association, Boston, Westin Copley Place, May 21-24, 2009

Given Olson’s statement in The Maximus Poems—“an actual earth of value to / construct one”—the Charles Olson Society seeks proposals from emerging poets currently engaging specific elements of Olson’s poetics, such as use, measure, breath, line, sound, and speech. Proposals should address the direct relations between the poet-writer’s developing poetics and Olson’s prose or poetry—and how such a relation to Olson still projects itself, still figures, now, 38 years after his death in 1970.

250-word proposals should be sent to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by December 15, 2008. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

The New American Poetry: Call for Work

2008-04-09T10:59:00.001-04:00

Essays are sought for a collection of critical essays on Donald Allen’s 1960 seminal anthology, “The New American Poetry,” an anthology that Marjorie Perloff called in a 1995 essay, “[…] the fountainhead of radical American poetics.” Such an edition should be very well received and will add greatly to poetry scholarship today due to the monumental influence the original collection has had. Allen’s anthology was the first to widely distribute the poetry and theoretical positions of poets such as Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and it was the first to categorize these poets by the schools (Black Mountain, New York, San Francisco, etc.) by which we know them today.

As you may have recognized, Allen’s anthology is approaching its fiftieth anniversary. This collection, The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, will seek a variety of scholars and artists to speak of the influence of Allen’s text in the literary and academic world as it reaches this landmark date. This anniversary provides a unique time for reflection; this volume will generate great interest in renewed study of the American avant-garde, past and present, by literary scholars and historians of American culture.

Though the book has not yet been contracted, it is believed a major (university) press will sponsor this anthology. Query letters are in the process of being considered.

Completed essays will range from 7,000 to 10,000 words, though provisions may be made for longer essays. The aim is to
complete the manuscript by early 2009 for 2010 publication.

Interested authors are to submit a 500-word abstract, as well as a current CV, in MS Word format by May 15, 2008.

For submission of proposals and/or inquiries, please contact:

Dr. John R. Woznicki, Associate Professor of English, Georgian Court University:
woznicki@georgian.edu

Alternate email: jrwoznicki@gmail.com

Essay: Towards a Theory of Time in Olson

2008-04-09T10:57:00.002-04:00

http://jacketmagazine.com/35/olson-by-pritts.shtml

Towards a Theory of Time in Olson by Nathan Pritts

Charles Olson Centennial Conference

2008-02-24T12:48:00.005-05:00

Curriculum of the Soul

Charles Olson Centennial Conference

4 - 6 June 2010

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

The call for papers will go out about a year from now. The conference will combine scholarly papers with poetry readings, a display of materials in Special Collections at SFU, and other events.

Paul Delany, Professor Emeritus
Department of English, Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive, Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6
Tel: 604 264 1113

olson2010-1@sfu.ca

Vincent Ferrini, 1913-2007

2007-12-27T09:57:00.001-05:00

Vincent Ferrini has died. His nephew, the filmmaker Henry Ferrini, sent me the following obit, which he wrote himself:

Vincent Ferrini died December 24th. His death was the result of a recent heart attack and bout with pneumonia. He resided at Den Mar Nursing home in Rockport since last May after returning from his latest reading at Beyond Baroque Literary Art Center in Los Angeles. He was 94 years old. For anyone who knew Mr. Ferrini his passion and engagement for the art of living will always be remembered.

If the poet were writing this obit he would say he did not die but rather merged into the pleroma. The pleroma was a word on his mind during the last few years. In Greek it means, "fullness.” The early Christian Gnostics saw it as the dwelling place of spirit and to scores of people in his community Vincent was the spirit & conscience of Gloucester.

Venanzio Ugo Ferrini was born in Saugus, Massachusetts on June 24, 1913 to John and Rena Ferrini. His parents emigrated separately from Abruzzi, Italy to work in the shoe factories of Lynn. Vincent’s own experience in the shoe factories and during the Great Depression instilled a great sensitivity for the life of the working poor.

In high school he found that books contained the keys to discovery and it was then that he resolved to become a writer. Ignoring his father’s admonition that a son of a shoe worker could never become a poet, he graduated from Lynn Classical and not having the money for college, pursued his education in the Lynn Public Library spending each day reading, studying, looking for answers to illuminate why humanity settled for poverty and war. When the Great Depression hit, the young bard worked as a teacher in the WPA as he worked his first volume of verse about the people of Lynn. In 1940 at the age of twenty-seven he published “No Smoke.”

A simple poem by the poet tells a great deal about the man.

Folk Song.

I pass
by day
and by night
no one has
seen me

If you ever
want to find
me and know me
leave behind
yourself
and enter
the caves
of other
people.

There you
will find
me
who is
yourself.

Mr. Ferrini married Margaret Duffy a schoolteacher in 1942. The couple had three children Sheila, Owen and Deirdre. In 1948 his young family left Lynn for Gloucester. Working at the GE by day, he soon gave up the security of a weekly paycheck to make a living as a frame maker. As he said in his 1975 autobiography, Hermit of the Clouds, being an independent craftsperson provided “the freedom to write when the poem is hot within.”

Mr. Ferrini’s move to Gloucester marked a shift in his poetry from the political and social to the personal and cosmic. Gloucester became a dream place that he made his place. Here his poetry and his life would find no separation.

In the late 40’s after reading a Ferrini poem in a small magazine the poet Charles Olson paid the poet a fan call. Olson first addressed the Maximus Poems as letters to Mr. Ferrini and even after an excoriating attack; the two men remained lifelong friends.

In the sixties after the death of his daughter Deirdre from leukemia, Ferrini’s marriage ended. He later married the artist Mary Shore. When his second marriage ended in divorce he moved back to his frame shop at 126 East Main Street. The little shop became a nexus for many artists and writers who came to Gloucester.

Vincent’s view of the individual, the family, the community and the nation working together for the common good compelled him to write not only to the Gloucester paper but the Globe, the New York Times and the Nation. At city hall he voiced his concerns at hundreds of council meetings. His focus was always the preservation of his city from the wildfire greed that will destroy the spirit and originality of his city.

Overcoming all odds Mr. Ferrini chose life as a poet. He was an academic outsider who lived with no financial remuneration from his labor. His vigor, unbound creativity and compassion kept him publishing for over 67 years producing 31 volumes of poetry, four volumes of plays and an autobiography. He is the subject of his nephew Henry Ferrini’s film, “Poem in Action.”

Mr. Ferrini leaves his daughter Shelia Ferrini of Boston, his son Owen Ferrini from Gloucester, two grandchildren, Ben and Cara Ferrini and dozens of extended family and friends whom he will continue to inspire. His younger siblings Yolanda, Dante and Lindo predeceased him.

A celebration of Vincent Ferrini’s life will be held at a forthcoming date. His upcoming book of poetry “Invisible Skin” is slated for release in the spring of 2008. Literary requests can be sent to Sheilaferrini@aol.com

--Henry Ferrini

You can also read the Gloucester Times obit here:
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/punews/local_story_361000712.html

New Olson Title from Stanford U Press

2007-10-11T10:52:00.000-04:00

Beyond Maximus
The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry
Anne Day Dewey

Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry is the only study of Black Mountain poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn—to explain their association from the 1950s to their break-up after the Vietnam War.

Dewey uses the poets’ correspondence and other archival materials to illuminate their mutual influence and the crucial significance of “field poetics” to their careers. While previous criticism has focused on the poetics of the force field as a model of nature, Dewey understands the force field as a model of social force that all five poets articulate and incorporate into poetry in ways that compete with artistic craft. Their different conceptions of social force explain their divergent careers. The development of “field poetics” also sheds light on these poets’ attempts to create an alliance between experimental poetics and public voice, a difficult agenda that speaks to Black Mountain poetry’s crucial contribution to the artistic and political struggles of New American poetry.

“Beyond Maximus is the most perceptive and informative analysis to date of the poets conventionally grouped under the label ‘Black Mountain.’ Virtually every page of the book opens up fresh and exciting ways of looking both at the works of these poets as individuals and at the relationships among the poets. We have here a book that makes a vitally important contribution to the critical study of twentieth-century American poetry.”
—Burton Hatlen, University of Maine

Learn more...

Cloth ISBN: 08047-5647-3 $60.00

New on the Documents Page

2007-10-11T10:48:00.000-04:00

Peter Bearse discusses Henry Ferrini's Film in an essay on the documents page.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/olson/blog/

Call For Papers

2007-10-11T10:47:00.001-04:00

Call for Papers: Charles Olson: Extra-Literary Influences on His Poetry and Poetics

American Literature Association, San Francisco, Hyatt Regency at Embarcadero Center, May 22-25, 2008

The Charles Olson Society invites proposals that focus on the extra-literary influences on Olson’s poetry and poetics: non-Euclidean geometry, serial music, dance, philosophy, or any of the “new sciences of man,” such as archeology, mythology, history, psychology, and geography.

250-word proposals should be sent to Jeffrey Gardiner at Jeffrey.Gardiner@Sun.Com and to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by December 15, 2007. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address, and AV needs (if any).

MICHAEL BOUGHN/REVIEW OF POLIS IS THIS

2007-08-08T15:21:00.000-04:00

Olson at work: a review of Polis Is This by Henry Ferrini
by Michael Boughn

Undertaking to make a film about Charles Olson is a bit like deciding to take the Ford out for a Sunday drive—in Afghanistan. At first glance, it seems like a straight-forward idea. But before you know it, you’re facing a, shall we say, explosive situation. In the case of Olson, the minefield has to do with the expectations of the community of Olson’s readers. They are a loyal and sometimes even obsessive bunch. Perhaps more so than any other poet of his generation, Olson invoked extraordinarily passionate responses from his readers. Partly this was due to his immense magical presence. And partly it was due to the power and provocations of his writing. Both facts instill many of his readers with a kind of intense, focused concentration most poets can only dream of.

That’s the up side. The down side is that the knowledge that comes with that concentration of attention has been known to breed a sense of—say, ownership, or identification. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It would be a wonderful world if more people felt that way about more poets. But knowing obscure details about Olson’s geographies, or equally obscure details about his life or the proliferating significance of some gnomic utterances sometimes leads Olson’s readers to assume their Olson has an authority that trumps all others. It can lead to an obstreperous narcissism that fails to see other possibilities. For this reason alone, we owe Henry Ferrini an enormous vote of thanks for his courage in undertaking such a project at all, knowing as he no doubt must have, that many of the people who should have been supporting him would instead be condemning him for not making a film about “their” Olson.

This obviously raises the question of “which” Olson Ferrini gives us in Polis Is This. I would actually restate the question and ask, for whom has he made this film, because you can’t understand which Olson he gives us without understanding to whom that Olson is addressed. Not to put too fine an Arnoldian critical point on it, this is an absolutely crucial move as a basis for having anything useful to say about the work, as opposed to general griping that finally amounts to nothing more than the complaint “this Olson isn’t MY Olson.” As Alice famously pointed out when the baby in her arms turned into a pig, “If it had grown up, it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes a rather handsome pig, I think.”

Ferrini’s baby is a complex occasion, but I think it’s fair to state a couple of obvious points right off the bat. It is not a film that was made for the specialists of the Charles Olson Society (which, let’s hope, doesn’t turn into the kind of beast Olson excoriated in the Melville Society). Nor is it a film made for the MLA, that other group of different specialists. Neither of these bunches really needs more information on Olson. For better or for worse, they have plenty, and if they want more, they know how to get it. The film is not even, I would argue, primarily for poets, although it’s full of wonderful images of them, including Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Ed Sanders, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, and a terrific reading of Olson by Gerrit Lansing. Given the film’s defining gestures, its structure, its imagery, and its tone, it seems primarily addressed to people who not only are unfamiliar with Charles Olson, who in fact probably never even heard of him, but are resistant to the very idea of reading poetry: young, curious, but ignorant, not just of poetry, but of history—unsatisfied with many of the circumstances they find themselves in, but largely unaware of how they came to be.

Into this condition, Ferrini’s film intercedes in a number of ways. It uses the occasion of presenting a view of the life of the poet as an opportunity to make a basic argument for—not just the importance of poetry, but its absolute, Emersonian centrality to the lives of ordinary people. It does this quite effectively by making many of the spokespersons in the film ordinary people from around Gloucester: a barber, a waitress, a fisherman, a truck driver. Some of the interviews may have been less spontaneous than the film makes out, but ultimately that seems irrelevant to the force of their presences. For me, the biggest knock-out was the waitress who quotes, not Olson, but Emily Dickinson, in order to talk about Olson’s lack of self-aggrandizement: “I am Nobody / Who are you” she recites from memory in her diner with exquisite delight and recognition. It is equally marvelous when the truck driver talks excitedly of inhabiting the landscapes of Olson’s poems with his friends when they were kids, noting that Olson even included them in the work. You don’t get much further away from the self-confirming coteries of inbred poetry than that. And it usefully locates Olson exactly where he wanted to be.

Ferrini doesn’t stop with making an argument for the importance and relevance of poetry, however. This is an activist film. It is deeply concerned with the intersection of Olson’s poetry and politics. But it doesn’t simply present Olson’s politics as an academic abstraction. Rather it intervenes directly into the issues that so concerned Olson, especially as they circulate around the loss of place to a criminally careless and stupid adoration of development at any cost. This is the sense of polis that anchors the film. It is not primarily a technical exposition of the complexities and contradictions of Olson’s thinking on place. Rather it is an invocation of an actual sense of loss aimed at making that connection in the minds of its viewers.

Ferrini approaches this issue through very powerful imagery of the actual physical destruction of Gloucester juxtaposed with passages from Olson’s poetry and a commentary on his local political engagement. The effect is to present Olson as a deeply human, approachable character, appealing in his commonness, his commitment, his concern, and his language. Many of us who live and work with poetry, or who have long been committed to Olson’s work, may forget how terribly esoteric it all can seem to the uninitiated. Many of us may no longer care. But this film does, and that is its strength.

Ferrini’s portrait of Olson moves persuasively between theses various dimensions, linking together the magic of poetry, the ornery immediacy of Olson’s politics, and the world which is the daily experience of ordinary people. Someone who has never even heard of the Pleistocene will find themselves introduced by this film to an astonishing moment in which it shines through the present, locating them not just in history but in a moment in history when suddenly their own anxiety and uneasiness about the way things are going takes on a depth and resonance previously unsuspected to them. The final scene of the young people in Ammiel Alcalay’s poetry class animatedly discussing their discovery of Olson and his significance to them is in that sense a particularly fitting and moving close to the film. Ferrini has carefully crafted a tool for reaching precisely the uninitiated, arguably those who, if not in need of poetry in general and Olson’s poetry in particular, might at least have some scales drop from their eyes by their exposure to it.

Ben Friedlander's Photos

2007-06-01T08:47:00.001-04:00

From the Olson Panel at the ALA in Boston:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mongibeddu/tags/ala/