| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Movie Reviews

Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place. Dir. and prod. by Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf. Ferrini Productions, 2007. 60 mins. (Ferrini Productions, http://www.polisisthis.com/)
Polis Is This is an hour-long documentary homage to Charles Olson (1910–1970), whose breath-based theory of "projective verse" and "open field poetics"—reminiscent of New York School action painting in its advocacy of free expression in the context of Cold War politics—influenced alternative American poetry after World War II. A gregarious, chain-smoking, larger-than-life figure who stood 6 feet 7 inches, Olson, the film shows, held a paradoxical relation to Gloucester, Massachusetts, that led to his eventual disenchantment with the setting of his epic-length The Maximus Poems (1953–1968). "I don't have any roots in that city," he told his literary executor Charles Boer near the end of his life.	1
Educated at Wesleyan University and Harvard University, Olson imagined his interest in Gloucester's fabled history in terms of the Greek poet Hesiod's concern with origins in Theogony (c. 700 BC). Yet he saw himself as the genius loci of America's oldest seaport, the blue-collar fishing village thirty miles northeast of Boston. Olson, who authored a Ph.D. dissertation on Herman Melville, envied the unselfconscious naturalism of old salts who talked and smoked on the wharf after a long day at sea. Olson tried his hand—he admits unsuccessfully—at fishing, but, like his father, he was a postman for a time. As the historian and writer John Stilgoe reports, Olson's affection for place was informed by a postman's awareness of address patterns, the noticing of a sprouting plant, a sleeping dog, or yesterday's newspaper lying on a lawn. "In my father's mail pouch I learned the love of letters," he said.	. . .

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