“My old man’s got a boat…”

On “A Little History,” by Ammiel Alcalay

This hybrid book takes the poetry of Charles Olson as a starting point for a meandering series of reflections on postwar poetry, politics, free speech, and the history of protest and radicalism from Vietnam to 9/11. Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, and professor associated with City University; a deeply honorable man, one suspects, widely read, passionate, erudite, and sardonic by turns, who writes expressively and vividly. A Little History, however, seems to me to flawed in several fundamental ways. The most central of these is the unconvincing, almost desperate way that Alcalay tries repeatedly to position Olson’s poetry, especially the Maximus Poems, as a proto-protest leftist voice that rages against state power and oppression. The author puts himself through all kinds of verbal contortions reshaping Olson into an oracular voice crying out against imperialism and the war on terror avant la lettre. To me the Maximus Poems show no such bent. Olson was no reactionary, but Alcalay seems to elide the fact the Maximus Poems describe in abundant detail the settling of New England by men — white, Anglo-Saxon men — who were embarked upon the original colonialist venture. Olson himself could be cruel and dismissive of women writers and would-be writers, and his poetry, as much as I love it, bears the mark of an older, savage, violent sensibility that is not consonant with the progressive vision that Alcalay hews to. I suspect that given the chance in 1969 the gritty immigrant fishermen of Gloucester that Olson idolized would, like their working-class compatriots in Oakland and New York City, fall upon the antiwar protestors Alcalaly memorializes with scorn and physical violence. Nonetheless there is something tonic and engaging about A Little History, which was edited by Fred Dewey and published by re: public / Upset Press — if only for the opportunity it presents for reflections and counter-argument.