Literature Trail

Charles Olson
Charles Olson (1910-70) was a second generation American modernist poet who postmodernists hold up as a key figure in their evolution. Born in Worcester, and educated at Wesleyan and Harvard, he studied American civilization and became politically active. Olson's early prose writing included: Call Me Ishmael (1947) and The Mayan Letters (1953), which he wrote while serving as rector of Black Mountain College, then a vibrant progressive college that nurtured many avant garde artists.

Among his great works was Projective Verse in which he proposed a different, more open way for readers to experience poetry. In the

1950s, Olson settled in Gloucester where he began his Maximus Poems—a series of letters written to his fellow poet and friend Vincent Ferrini, and through Ferrini, to Gloucester. Olson called this opus, unfinished at the time of his death, "a poem of a person and a place." The first poem, "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You" includes the invocation: "o/Anthony of Padua/sweep low, o bless/the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones/on whose ridge poles the gulls sit, from which they depart,/And the flake-racks/of my city!"

Home of Charles Olson
Address: 28 Fort Square, Gloucester (closed to the public)

Cape Ann Historical Museum Research Center
Address: 27 Pleasant Street, Gloucester
Phone: 978-283-0455
Website: www.capeannhistoricalmuseum.org
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 10-1 (closed February)

Sawyer Free Library
Address: 2 Dale Avenue, Gloucester
Phone: 978-281-9763
Website: www.sawyerfreelibrary.org
(The library owns the complete works of Olson.)

Poetry of Places in Essex County
Website: http://myweb.northshore.edu/users/ccarlsen/poetry/
(Created by Prof. Carl Carlsen of North Shore Community College, the site features works by and information about poets from Gloucester and Lynn who wrote about places you can visit.)