The Battle of Gloucester: Vincent Ferrini Meets Charles Olson

Of the ancient Maximus “nothing more is known, than that he was by birth a Tyrian; that he lived under the Antonines and Commodus; that he for some time resided in Rome, but probably, for the most part in Greece; that he cultivated philosophy, and principally that of Plato.” Of Charles Olson, who cultivated “Projective Verse” and dubbed himself a Maximus in the genealogy of homo maximus, much the same could be repeated: that he was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910; that he came of intellectual age under the four terms of FDR; that he early on resided in Worcester, but spent his boyhood summers, and probably, the most formative passages of his life, in Gloucester, the seaside Massachusetts city — site of “Tyrian Businesses” — that’d become his coronation place. Olson was privy to its entanglements and halibut, its salt airs and gull cries, and he set out to form the province in his image. But he encountered another poet, who had published in and of Gloucester shortly before him, and who presented Olson with a counter-image to his own: Vincent Ferrini.

Charles Olson

Ferrini — who’d become Gloucester’s first Poet Laureate only after Olson, his friend and master, had passed away — wasn’t born in Gloucester either, he was born in Saugus in 1913, the son of Italian immigrants from the Rome and Abruzzo provinces; Ferrini’s Massachusetts was also Sacco and Vanzetti’s Massachusetts. Olson’s papa was of Swedish stock, a letter carrier who taught his son the value of knowing one’s streets by heart, by walking them, imprinting their cartography into the soles of your step. Ferrini’s old man was a hard-drinking, aria-singing, atheist shoemaker, who indirectly taught his son the art of appropriating images from brick yards and trash heaps, from the rich refuse of everydayness and proximity. The story of Olson and Ferrini can be read as the story of magnitude meeting locality. The largeness of Olson — all 6-foot, 8-inches of him, the kingliness, the mythos, the spaciousness — contrasted with Ferrini’s sleekness, his sensuality, his qualities of tight and small composition. Their story climaxes with a self-appointed king leaving his homeland, like Alexander, to wrestle with the histories of other nations, other landscapes, so as to return and know his own place thoroughly; and it ends with a humble but prolific frame-maker who inherited a throne late from having stayed local (and loyal) all his life.

Vincent Ferrini

Ferrini moved to Gloucester in 1948 after a fan of his poetry, a painter living there, had invited him over for a visit. Back in Lynn, Massachusetts, Ferrini, self-taught and public-library-educated, had initially fashioned himself a proletarian poet baptized in “the Church of Politics” and Communism; whose first book No Smoke had earned some considerable fame for him. His first five books of poetry (published before Olson had managed to put out his first one) established Ferrini as a voice of political unrest and the working class. Settled in Gloucester, however, Ferrini began to find a different rhythm, inwardly motivated by his daily contact with the Atlantic spray and the fishcutters and “the triumph of the Soothsaying Waters”; this new relationship compelled the inveterately anti-doctrinaire Ferrini to quit what appeared to him as the falsified dogma of Communism, whose “roots… are in Russia, and… have an alien smell.” Nor was that break enough: Ferrini eventually quit his 9-year stint at a GE factory in Lynn (to which he commuted from Gloucester), and later took up a new vocation as a self-employed maker of picture frames, with a married domestic life withal. Ferrini’s life wasn’t truly changed however (and in some respects his craft wouldn’t have sharpened) if he had never encountered Charles Olson. Besides publishing plays, Ferrini continued to write and publish poems, one of which showed up in a local poem mag, Imagi. Olson Maximus, self-crowned Poet King of Gloucester (but at this time fairly unknown to his subjects), happened to read that poem, which set his hairs on end. The piece was good, not only good, but it said enough of Gloucester as any woman-born man could speak of it, who was born there, ate there, and slept there. Olson paid Ferrini a visit; he had his intel, he knew the streets and addresses of that sea town by heart, and he found Ferrini easy. The latter explains:

A man’s whole lifetime is affected by another person, who enters the stream of his days and years and stays in these waters. That’s how Charles Olson visited me, stayed, and keeps flowing, as in life so in death… We were living on Liberty Street near St. Ann Church when coming home one night from the General Electric Company where I had been working for the last nine years, Peg told me about a Poet who had almost broken his head getting through, and I could not fathom who it might have been and I was curious and sorry to have missed him. He came back the next night, a Giant! to pay a ‘fan call’ to another poet because he was smitten by a poem I had written and which had appeared in IMAGI. I was pleased by the size of the man and the compliment.

The largeness of Olson was the immediate thing one learned of him. Olson’s largeness, his magnitude, was felt in speaking with him, in seeing him, and if lacking that, in reading him. Ferrini sought out what Olson had mentioned of his that was available: Call Me Ishmael. “He told me about this book he had written, Call Me Ishmael, which I found in Cairnie’s bookshop. It was the second time I felt the girth of the man, the first was HIMSELF… Charles being by nature big, just took up and spread himself all over the pages as he did in his kitchen, his sleepingroom, and the house of any guest he was with.”

Olson returned the favor: “Then he dug me up. He ransacked my background and the early writings, he scoured Lynn, like the Archaeologist he is. Everything was stored for its uses in that mindbin of his. He never forgot anything and his memory was sleepless… He read all my earlier works in the Library and the first book, No Smoke…” A correspondence was thereafter struck up; the two began as friends, and the first Maximus poems, framed as “Letters”, originated in this friendship:

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

jewels & miracles, I, Maximus

a metal hot from boiling water, tell you

what is a lance, who obeys the figures

of the present dance

This “metal hot from boiling water” that was Olson’s harpoon struck Ferrini deeply and irrevocably, in the way an old god’s torso tells the poet that “you must change your life“; something had to be reformed, reshaped, readjusted in Ferrini, something proximate to the movement (an arrowhead too fast to catch) and to the form (a space too vast to contain) that Olson pondered and played with, almost physiologically, in his projective girth. “How had he affected me as a working poet? By the way he used his harpoon, ACCURACY.” Most accurate when one has archived the radial immensities of space, of pure irresistible forwardness, in which all targets are hit because all targets are every compass point swollen to a cosmic fineness. One has only to study the constellations to know what their shapes are capable of, to make them lunge out of their shells; so also a city’s range, its depths and distances, to know what eternity should mean in the present case, on a map of spatial geometries, real centripetal forms; on one side the city and its hard, true-to-life projections, and on the other end the ocean (and lush oblivion). Gloucester was all this, for the two adoptees, a land at once splendidly physical, historical, walkable, the first phrase in a magnetic backward clause stretching out to the West and even further, toward the Pacific; but also a purview (the lighthouse!) of the farsighted mystic potentialities mariners and Ahabs know firsthand, sometimes tragically but always by their own lights. A division in space (land & land’s end) which could be called uniquely American. Olson:  ”I take SPACE to 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. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYxpSjkyAg&feature=related

But their friendship turned combative quick, and Olson, often a man keen and to-the-point, who feared no one since all feared his whale-sized intellect, wrote “Letter 5,” addressed to Ferrini, in which he excoriated the latter for staying too local, too small-minded, too peevishly concerned with the politics of favor. Gloucester was either too small a place for two poets, or Olson too large a man to accommodate another. Robin Blaser relates how he once hinted to Olson he would look into Gloucester’s history as one of America’s first fishing towns, but was quickly turned off the scent by the other: “‘Oh don’t do that! This is my place. You go do it for yours.’” But Gloucester also happened to be Ferrini’s place, and Olson was resolute to test this other man’s will & erudition, disappointed as he was with Ferrini’s lack of vision for his own circumference:

(I am not named Maximus

for no cause

Gloucester, circa 1915

But Ferrini was fortunately of an empathetic and resilient class, who took slights only slightly, and respected the “Maximus” in Olson as much as he venerated the “Polis” in Gloucester. “Letter 5″ was a harsh jolt to his pride, but Ferrini responded as only a man of some humility — as one who knows his limits — can: with an outpouring of love. Ferrini’s “response” was titled In the Arriving, a 32-page “love poem” that contains some of his very best work, a different strain from the “working class” poet of the 40s who wrote on smokestacks and union bosses and shoe-workers. This was a Ferrini who suddenly, like a man washed in a clear spring whose eyes are cleansed of smog-motes, starts seeing the recumbent forms etched on the x and y axes of the city; a new Ferrini, formally speaking, born from contact with a man considerably larger than himself, whose “maps followed him everywhere like budding poets wanting that water of his nourishment.” Rather than compete with a poet qualitatively different than himself, Ferrini foresaw that THE POEM was not what was at stake but perception itself; the Gloucester which Maximus had erected was just as much Ferrini’s as Olson’s property, because “There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of” (Letter 6). Ferrini had only to reposition his stance, adjust his lens, refocus the principles of his craft:

I say this

so it sticks in the mind’s craw

each

in his own

weight

& specific

value

on his individual terms

to be hammered

out on the

anvil

of

experience

into his usable metal

thus

created

from his

ore

so each one

counts

(…)

love does not

judge

he

is

too busy

making

anew

(…)

As the keel of a

boat is submerged in water

so are we in death.

(…)