NSLT links

• Bonnie Hurd Smith on Salem's many self-guided walking trails, including ones about Nathaniel Bowditch and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as women's history and African-American history. Many of these tours are available to download for free from places like the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.
• North Shore Art Throb posts a review of Ralph Maud’s new biography, Charles Olson at the Harbor.
• The Boston Globe on the symbiotic marketing of Brunonia Barry's The Lace Reader and Salem tourism. (This is from last summer, but just turned up in RSS feeds today and is still an interesting tidbit.)

Polis Is This on YouTube

If you missed the WGBH broadcast last week like I did, Polis Is This is available in its entirety on YouTube.

Polis Is This on WGBH

Via GoodMorningGloucester (a blog that is very friendly to my other major pursuit in life), WGBH will be screening Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf's film Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place on Sunday, April 5 at 7 pm. Boston.com reviewed the film today.

Charles Olson reads

Still frequently discussed by the internet literati, Charles Olson tidbits turn up on blogs and websites often. Since I have yet to do more than casually dip into his massive body of work, here are a few YouTube clips of Olson and others reading his work that have turned up recently.





As a teenager, I went to many an open mic night at the coffee shop downtown and loved the Nuyorican poets, but most of the time the slam poetry cadence sounds like a silly affectation to me now—easy to parody, hard to make it feel like it is The Right Way to perform a piece. It's nice to hear a poet read his work without feeling shouted at, or jerked along from comma to comma waiting for the punchline to drop.

"Gloucester's 'Polis' moving forward"

Michael David Rubin reflected on James Cook's recent lecture about Charles Olson's "The Maximus Poems" in yesterday's Gloucester Times.

Gloucester's 'Polis' moving forward

I learned little, Saturday, about Olson or "The Maximus Poems;" However, I saw and heard a community-within-a-community, of people who know and care about poetry; many of whom had met and valued Charles Olson, a large and large-hearted thinker who once dwelt among us. It showed me the diverse, multileveled character of our city, and why I love being a part of this place. Imagine — how wonderful is it? — to have fishermen, and poets, painters, playwrights, craftsmen, and history, architecture, woodlands, and the whole damn ocean: what a place!

The character Maximus embodied Olson's own fear about the encroachment of sameness in Gloucester. Rubin articulates well his regret that Olson chose poetry—often difficult, hard to parse, sometimes easy to become dated or seem irrelevant—over direct prose... even though some surely disagree with this literary criticism.

My own wish is that he had kept to that strong talent, and committed his deep fears about loss of Gloucester's character — loss of our authentic culture — to the form of direct essays, to convey clearly his great heart and generous convictions. It would have provided for both his talent and his ethical concerns a well-delineated voice, easier to protect from critics' smothering, modernity's homogenizing, or, worse, being ignored by us.