American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light Read Free

be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.’
    The Sicilian quarter, the tight community on Fort Square, where Charles Olson found a safe branch on which to perch, with Betty, in August 1957, was still very much present when I walked there from my roadside hut in October 2011. First floor, balcony on the side, new names on mailboxes:
Frontiero
,
Sova
,
Borichevsky
. And a harbour view that hits home, both directions in time and space: the workaday shacks, rust running from metal fence into stone wall, fishing boats putting out, seasonal pleasure boats at anchor. In the last years, when the task went sour on him, and Olson was alone, it was an exile interrupted by visitors, New York poets or Warhol’s acolyte Gerard Malanga with a thirsty camera.
    Olson’s son, another Charles, a Gloucester carpenter who shunned literary events and tributes, was proud to put his hand to the simple memorial plaque, pressing it into wet cement: CHARLES OLSON POET 1910–1970. He said a few words to the gathering of enthusiasts.
    Below the apartments, in their brightly painted nonconformity, up against the fence, on the edge of the sea, was an abandoned blockhouse, a whitewashed post-industrial Alamo. The former packing plant of Clarence Birdseye, pioneer of the global frozen-food operation. So Olson becomes an alternative Captain Birdseye, commander of a ghost fleet, wacky admiral on the hill. Or Captain Iglo, neighbourhood eccentric, pipe and flapped Russian cap, sliding down steep steps in the snow, a foot and more taller than the men of the interlinked Sicilian families. Cold cartons of fish fingers no longer thump from the assembly line. There is talk of converting Clarence Birdseye’s plant into a smart hotel. Even Gorton’s, the big Gloucester employer, are cutting back. The paying product these days is cat food. Canned mush for America’s kept-at-home pets. The pampered muses of writers.
    At the end of the curve of the gracious marine boulevard, after crossing the bridge over Annisquam River, I arrive at Stage Fort Park. It is no difficult matter to identify the gap in the trees at Half Moon Beach, the bench where the young Olson stood listening to
the two old men, as they smoked and talked. This is the pivotal point where, feeling the immense weight of the land behind you, the overriding impulse is to turn and face the sea. The boy, whose wrists were already too much for the sleeves of his tight jacket, said that he was spellbound by what he heard: that male need to talk the day down. He knew their names, Lou Douglas and Frank Miles. A lazy, companionable exchange, in the face of lengthening shadows, as they draw on pipe or cigarette. For Charles Olson, this is where it all begins. Unnoticed, he listens. Then he turns back, up through the deserted park, where earlier he had played baseball with his friends, and across Hough Avenue to the holiday cottage. To his family, the summer community.

Frozen Air
    The force of Olson as a personality was so potent, back then, because our estrangement from the local product was absolute. We didn’t buy English anger, which seemed to be nothing more than a media-friendly staging post on the way to peevish rural retirement, empty bottles on the porch, second wives in red fur nursing black eyes. We didn’t buy class envy or class entitlement as a thesis. We didn’t buy the campus (or any other form of convenient bureaucracy) as a setting, a vehicle for satire, or comforting murder mysteries. Which is to say, we were denim-and-corduroy puritans with Diggerish aspirations, overread, underused. Wide open to the enticement of the Other, emanations of prairie Spirit; charisma, vision, prophetic pronouncements. Peyote shamanism. Territorial adventures. Peru. New Mexico. The genealogy, laid out with intricate lines and boxes, ran from Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis to Olson and Ed Dorn. Which is why, with no