There has been a chill in the heart of the polis for weeks.
~
from George Bowering on the Buffalo Poetics List:
The language is much larger, much older and much stronger than I will ever be. That is a reason for profound respect. If it lets me talk about a recipe for beef stew, I am thankful. If it lets me venture into the kind of experience that poetry is for, my eyes are wide open like those of a kid who has just seen a ghost. In fact, when you consider where Yeats, Shelley, Blake, Rilke, Duncan and Blaser say that their poetry comes from, one would be a fool not to be scared. {Add Spicer, no? Add, also, Mark Lamoureux.}

Elsewhere on the list--in fact in the post immediately following Bowering's--Kirby Olson asks about Charles Olson's take on Unitarian-Universalism. For now I'll only take up: "I hate universalism."

Three poems into Volume Three of the Maximus Poems (p. 379 of the collected Maximus Poems) one finds:

The Big False Humanism
Now on

to the left of the page & connected (by a two-way arrow) with the seventh line (beginning "universalization") of the following:

Bono Dea (Athena
Polais) the polity
is necessarily as stretched
I am a ward
and precinct
man myself and hate
universalization, believe
it only feeds into a class of deteriorated
personal lives anyway, giving them
what they can buy, a cheap
belief. The corner magazine store
(O'Connell's, at Prospect and Washington)
has more essential room in it than
[mentally indent the following five spaces or so]
programs. The goddess
of the good doesn't
follow any faster
than how a person may
find it possible to go out,
and get what it is they do want
wherever they do go

Olson connects "the Big False humanism/now on" to "universalization". (The "now on" and the "-ization" {instead of -ism} emphasize the point that whatever Olson is observing was {perhaps is} happening, the way urban renewal was {& in new ways is} also happening. Something was/is being paved over, so to speak.)

So this

I am a ward
and precinct
man myself and hate
universalization

Chracteristically, Olson expresses an affinity for the local--"ward/and precinct"--the physical ground one covers w/ one's feet (or today in Gloucester even the ice one might dare to walk across) & also w/ the local ward and precinct as a "group with will" (a definition of polis from Olson?s "Definitions by Undoings") So to me his hatred for "universalization" (a linked w/ false humanism) has more to do w/ a defense of the particular and local & less to do w/ an attack on Unitarian-Universalists (more later). The hatred of "universalization" is a hatred of that which abstracts, abuses (as "(the trick/of corporations, newspapers, slick magazines, movie houses,/the ships, even the wharves, absentee-owned?" {LETTER 3}does), or diminishes (as "The Big False Humanism" does) the "ward/and precinct": one's particular ground, polis, and "polity".

Back to the ground. Bono Dea (the "goddess/of the good" w/ whom Olson begins the poem & to whom he returns toward the end) is a fertility goddess and a "goddess of fields" (the wards and precincts). If Olson's hatred of "universalization" can be said to critique "Universalism" (one half of the U-U dyad); he is not critiquing the denomination-as-such so much as the denomination as {specifically} an outgrowth of Humanism, which strips the earth of its deities--deities that for Olson are not abstractions nor strictly spiritual entities but seem to be related to human movement, action, attention, and agency, all of which take place on particular (not universal or abstract) ground:
The goddess
of the good doesn't
follow any faster
than how a person may
find it possible to go out,
and get what it is they do want
wherever they do go

{which reminds me of this from Projective Verse: ?if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share?; it is the participation in the larger force?and the listening for secrets?wherever one is that is lost w/ the rise of humanism and universalization. Or to come at it another way think of Olson's "Causal Mythology":
The Earth
The Image of the World
The History or City
and The Spirit of the World
It is this view--and its attendant method!--of mythology w/ which he seeks to replace the false humanism/universalization now on.}

(As for any question about the connection between humanism and universalization: the arrow connecting "universalization" with "The Big False Humanism/Now on" is the poem's boldest formal element.)

Returning to "universalization" as possibly a reference to [Unitarian-]Universalism, Olson writes that universalization (& by extension humanism) "feeds into a class of deteriorated/personal lives anyway, giving them/what they can buy, a cheap/belief." Those words, "cheap/belief," might lead us to see the poem as a critique of Unitarian-Universalism but what then might he mean by writing that the cheap belief is "what they can buy"? I feel I'm on sturdier ground when I read the "cheap belief" as a belief in consumerism. (Eliding the argument quite a bit, it might be said that in the big false humanism causal mythology is replaced by a belief in products, that which can be bought?that which is advertised on the billboards Olson so often attacks {his windmills?}.) After all, Olson follows "cheap/belief" by writing about "The corner magazine store" (though to be honest I?m not sure what he means by "essential room" and "programs". {My Butterick is out on loan somewhere, so I'm flying solo.} Importantly, he does not follow up his attack on universalitzation/humanism with any references to the first Universalist church which is but a stone's throw from O'Connell's at the corner of Prospect and Washington. *{A side note: O'Connell's is now either Ed's Mini Mart or if it was on the opposite corner of Prospect and Washington it is now a Pump ?N Pantry gas station.}

I must return to other duties but I?d like to follow up (tomorrow? later?) by discussing the "deteriorated/personal lives" (into which the river of universalization/humanism feeds) on the one hand and the experience of the Bono Dea in one's wards and precincts on the other. I believe (after a quick re-reading) that much of Volume Three deals w/ these and often enacts the later. {Volume Three might also be productively read in terms of the aforementioned four pillars of causal mythology.}

There is a great deal that is lost by not reading the poems in their contexts. It is limiting I think to excerpt only the sections of poems that mention Unitarian(ism)(ists) Universal(ism)(ists) as well as all variants there of {including perhaps Unitarianism as it relates to Harvard} & to then read them in relation to each other instead of in relation to the poems, sequences, and books in which they?re found. If we were "Christian Studies" scholars (or {Gender} Studies scholars or {Race} Studies scholars for that matter} we might hunt through the poems as one hunts through an index, looking only for words and phrases related to our area of interest. While I think this type of reading might be interesting or even productive for some, I think it leads to misunderstanding. One simply has to overlook so much while hunting for the needle.

Finally then, there is the matter of another bit from Volume Three quoted by Kirby: "I believe in religion not magic or science I believe in society/as religious both man and society as religious". This seems to bring us back to the Bono Dea of the polity and of our wards and precincts but also to "God/as fully physical" (381; III.13) so we find "blossoming apple trees/in the Paradise of Dogtown" (391; III.22) bringing the Christian myth to Gloucester ground, but Olson also brings Enyalion {Ares} (III.38) to Stage Fort Park. Later Olson revisits the "Vessel/in the Virgin's/arms" (referring to the Our Lady of Good Voyage statue of Mary holding a schooner which can be found on Prospect Street) which is also related by way of anaphora to Gloucester's geography, its "tidal river" and "dog-rocks", but Gloucester is also "sea-shore where/Ganesh/may be"; St. Sebastian "body as/shot full of holes" appears in the same poem. I feel rushed. (I've spent at least two hours longer than I'd meant to on this note.) In isolation the excerpts above don't do justice to Olson's use of the material but the point I'm trying to make is that Olson to my mind and ear seems to be using all available materials (including ample historical material related to Gloucester) to create a myth that takes into account
The Earth
The Image of the World
The History or City
and The Spirit of the World

In Volume Three I don't see him attacking Unitarian-Universalism or, by proxy, Harvard University. & if there is any attack it is upon Unitarian-Universalism and perhaps even his Harvard Education as a manifestation of humanism which would seek to replace "causal mythology" with "cheap/belief".

O.K. Enough. It's clear I'm in over my head.
Hope you are all well.
Any and all responses are greatly appreciated.

slan,
James