Tag: Charles Olson

From Black Mountain to White Hand

As Yépez has noted, Olson is an epistolary poet (The Empire of Neomemory, p. 11). Many of Olson’s works are written as letters. Read as such, “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” would seem to be a letter to “the mushroom people”: a letter to the Psychedelic Review (Olson, Muthologos, p. 185). The poet says as much during an interview that took place at his home in Gloucester in 1966. Speaking of “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV,” he states, “It was published in the Psychedelic Review, the one that the mushroom people edited. I deliberately did it, by the way. They asked me for a poem ‘cause I’d been under the early experiments on the poets and the mushroom. And I deliberately gave them this” (185). Interestingly enough, however, the poem makes no mention of mushrooms, nor does it include any obvious or explicit nod to psychedelic experience. The poem, rather, is a retelling of the war between Zeus and Typhon, a narrative lifted, notes Maud and others, from the Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony. Typhon is a demigod of sorts: a monstrous serpentine giant who attempted to overthrow Zeus for supremacy of the cosmos. Later traditions associate Typhon with the Egyptian god Set. Some also view him as a precursor of sorts to Milton’s Satan. The main question we’ll want to ask, then, is, “Why was Olson thinking about Typhon? And why did he think this retelling of the Typhon myth suitable for “the mushroom people”?

To begin to answer these questions, we need to reflect for a moment on where and how the mushroom people became the mushroom people. Leary first received word of the effects of psychedelic mushrooms from his friend, a researcher investigating the psychology of creativity named Frank Barron. The latter had learned about mushrooms in 1959, while interviewing a psychiatrist who was using and studying them in Mexico. Barron brought a batch back with him to Berkeley, where he tried them later that year. He then shared news of his experience with Leary. The latter was doubtful at first, until having a similar experience himself the following year in August 1960 during a visit to Cuernavaca. In both cases, the men are purchasing the mushrooms from curanderas or folk healers. Curanderas like the famous María Sabina, in other words, are the ones passing the mushroom along to Westerners. These curanderas transmit the seeds of psychedelic revolution to the West via a series of USAmerican intellectuals who, like tourists, spend time abroad vacationing in Mexico.

Charles Olson had made a similar journey a decade earlier — as did Beat writer William S. Burroughs. The latter went to South America in search of yagé, or what we now call ayahuasca. Letters Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg over the course of this journey were later published by City Lights Books in 1963 as The Yage Letters. One might profit by reading Burroughs and Ginsberg’s Yage Letters alongside Olson and Creeley’s Mayan Letters. For now, though, we must focus on Olson.

During a brief interval in his time at Black Mountain College, Olson and his wife Connie decided to spend the first five months of 1951 living in Lerma, a small fishing village in Campeche. Olson’s letters to the poet Robert Creeley during this time in Mexico became the substance of Mayan Letters, published in 1953. And in fact, one of the first uses of the term “postmodern” appears in a letter of Olson’s written to Creeley in August 1951, shortly after Olson’s time in Mexico. Here, in other words, is a poet whose encounters with Mexico contribute to the birth of the postmodern. Yet Olson’s use of the postmodern was far more expansive and ambitious than that of his successors. As George F. Butterick notes, Olson’s designation of his work as postmodern “serves not merely to advance beyond an outmoded modernism, but…seeks an alternative to the entire disposition of mind that has dominated man’s intellectual and political life since roughly 500 B.C.” (Butterick 5). Olson would go on to use the term again in print in a piece he wrote on November 4, 1952 titled “The Present is Prologue.” Marxist historian Perry Anderson refers to this piece, published in 1955, as the first to use “postmodern” in the sense of “an aesthetic theory linked to a prophetic history” — i.e., as “an agenda allying poetic innovation with political revolution” (The Origins of Postmodernity, p. 12). By the early 1960s, Olson began to manifest this agenda through his participation in the psychedelic revolution. Which returns us now to our main concern: the experiences themselves.

Olson in the Underworld

We do not enter the Underworld unaccompanied.

Nor can we follow Olson there without facing what shadows him: his appropriation of Indigenous symbols, roles, and names.

In a talk given at Gratwick Highlands in Pavilion, NY on November 16, 1963 — a gathering still warm from psychedelic ritual — Olson recalls the way the psilocybin entered him:

“The moment the peanuts affected me, I started talking longhouse talk. And created, because I was the responsible person… I was the tone, I created the tone for the evening. And it was absolutely a pure ceremonial set.”
(Muthologos, p. 39)

He saw himself, he says, as a “peace sachem,” a chief presiding over a longhouse rite.

This is Olson in redface.

It is not a metaphor. It is an act of ceremonial appropriation, grounded in an unexamined fantasy of indigeneity — an image drawn from settler desire, not communal responsibility.

And yet — and yet — Olson’s own account troubles easy dismissal. He is not mocking the role. He is not play-acting without affect. He is inhabiting something. Something passed to him through psilocybin’s mycelial brain, some fragment of buried myth, misread and re-embodied.

Still: this does not absolve him. It implicates him more deeply.

What does it mean when a white poet, freshly under the influence of a sacred plant, begins to identify not only with Indigenous ceremonial forms — but with authority? With chieftainship? With “tone”?

Heriberto Yépez, in The Empire of Neomemory, names this clearly. Olson’s act, he writes, is not just cultural appropriation but colonial fantasy: the poet as settler-shaman, one who claims access to a buried mythic layer while ignoring the living realities of the peoples whose cosmologies he mines.

It is not accidental that Olson claimed the role of curandero during Arthur Koestler’s ill-fated trip — a session that ended, absurdly, with Olson towering over the frightened writer, toy gun in hand. The irony is almost mythic: the self-appointed guide becomes, in Koestler’s eyes, a threat. The poet becomes a monster.

And still, Olson doesn’t retreat. He continues to correspond with Leary and his circle. He continues to reflect on the mushroom as a truth-pill, a love feast. He continues to write from the trance.

This section of our series is not meant to cancel Olson, nor to excuse him. Rather, we bring it here to name the conflicted terrain of settler psychedelia — the space where poetic vision overlaps with colonial fantasy. The space where mushrooms are consumed without regard for the lineages that protected and passed them on.

Consider: the mushrooms that reached Olson passed through María Sabina and her Mazatec kin. Through Mexican curanderas and cross-border crossings. Through networks of theft and transmission. Through bodies and rituals severed from their epistemologies.

Olson himself lived in Mexico for a time — months in Lerma, letters to Creeley that would later form the Mayan Letters. He encountered the ruins. He listened to the stones. He spoke of postmodernity as a return to the archaic. And in doing so, he gathered a cosmology — but not the responsibilities that came with it.

We can still read Olson. Still admire the breath and the ambition. Still learn from the Typhon he names. But we do so now from a different position — from within a Library that holds multiplicity and accountability together.

Let this post, then, serve as an act of reckoning and reorientation.

Let it be known: the psychedelic road is not immune to conquest. But in walking it with care, we may come to unlearn the fantasies we’ve inherited — and instead learn to listen.

“MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV”

Upon recommendation by Ginsberg, Olson participated in two psychedelic drug sessions with the Leary crew at Harvard’s Center for Research in Personality in December 1960 and February 1961. Despite Olson biographer Ralph Maud’s insistence that “These are strictly peyote sessions,” Olson himself refers to them as mushroom trips, and the Leary crew’s experiments during this time revolved around jars of synthetic psilocybin pills that they’d derived from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. My sense, then, is that we can assume that synthetic psilocybin is what Olson received during his sessions. Each of these sessions was, in the poet’s own words, “a true love feast and a truth pill” (Muthologos, p. 24). “The startling & unbelievable first impression of going under the mushroom,” he stated, “is that everyone & everything is nothing but itself so that all — everything — is therefore well, and there’s no push, there’s no fuss, there’s nothing at all to worry about, or press at, no sweat of any sort called for, it’s all too real and way beyond any attitude or seeking some greater or bigger answer” (Olson, as quoted in Conners 106). A few years later, as Maud notes, “Olson gave to the Psychedelic Review for its third issue (1964) his long “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” (160). Psychedelic Review was a journal published by members of the Leary crew from 1963 to 1971. Olson saved in his library the first four issues of the magazine. In what follows, I’ll attempt to show how, when read in light of where it was published, Olson’s poem reveals itself to be a commentary on psychedelic experience.

Chaos Before the Gods

To understand “DOGTOWN—IV,” we must first meet Typhon.

He appears late in Hesiod’s Theogony, a fiery final opponent, son of Earth (Gaia) and Tartarus, “conceived in an act of love” between matter and abyss. Hesiod calls him a “fearful dragon,” a hundred-headed monstrosity whose eyes flash flame, whose tongues flicker, whose voices shift wildly — sometimes intelligible, sometimes bull-roared, lion-lunged, or hissed in storm.

Typhon, in other words, is not a symbol. He is a polyvocal event. An insurgency of sound. A figure of ontological excess.

“And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable,” writes Hesiod; “for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing in proud, ungovernable fury… and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed.”
(Theogony, trans. Evelyn-White)

Typhon threatens not merely Olympus, but the very idea of divine order. He is chaos not as absence but as pluripotent potential. Fire and breath. Voice and unmaking.

And for Olson — poet of proprioception, initiand of the mushroom — this is the mythic substance most suitable to his altered state.

Let us pause, though, and ask with Olson: Why would Earth love Tartarus?

It’s a strange phrase in Hesiod. “Gaia from her love of Tartarus.” Tartarus is the deepest abyss, a pit beneath all pits. The Greeks imagined it not merely as punishment, but as anti-space — the unbounded, unstatistical underside of being. Olson, ever the etymologist of the unconscious, seizes on this.

In “DOGTOWN—IV,” he writes:

“Our father, who is also in / Tartaros chained in being…”
(Maximus IV, ll. 333–334)

This is Olson’s parody of the Lord’s Prayer. But unlike the Christian God above, Olson’s father is below — the primordial pit, the place before measure, the place of hunger, chaos, and unformed form. Tartarus is a womb. An inversion of heaven. And Typhon, its child, is the convulsed birth of multiplicity.

What Olson sees — and what most critics miss — is that Typhon is not simply a villain in this cosmology. He is a challenge. A necessary crisis. A daemon of disruption.

Gary Grieve-Carlson, one of Olson’s most careful readers, insists that Olson admired Hesiod for his “will to cohere” — his vision of cosmos arising out of chaos. But I suspect Olson’s attachment to Hesiod is more ambivalent. He sees in Hesiod both the first cosmology and the first repressions: the moment chaos is narrated as a threat, and order enthroned.

So Olson takes Hesiod’s Theogony and folds it — remixes it. He retains the sequence (Chaos, then Earth, then Tartarus, then Love), but recasts the power dynamics. Typhon becomes not the failed usurper but the dark mirror of Maximus himself: the one who would speak many voices, walk many lands, breathe from the bottom up.

And in choosing this myth to send to The Psychedelic Review, Olson makes his wager clear: the psychedelic does not simply uplift — it ungrounds. It returns us to Tartarus. To the chthonic, the unmetabolized, the monstrous within.

This is why Typhon matters now more than ever. He is climate chaos, algorithmic multiplicity, ecstatic polyphony. He is the real beneath the rational. The daemon of the Anthropocene.

And Olson, emerging from Dogtown with psilocybin still in his system, names him.

Not to celebrate him.

Not to slay him.

But to write with him.

The Mushroom People

In the mid-twentieth century, two groups with competing agendas worked to introduce psychedelics into American society: the CIA, with its MK-Ultra program, on the one hand, and countercultural intellectuals, including famous authors like Aldous Huxley, on the other. Among this latter group of “psychedelic utopians,” we can include Huxley’s friend and fellow émigré Gerald Heard, as well as related figures like Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. By now, histories have been written about the efforts of both of these groups; but in accounts of the latter group in particular, what sometimes goes unmentioned or unrecognized was its explicitly utopian intent. After their first encounters with substances like mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, many of the above-mentioned early users of these drugs felt compelled not just to pen statements of advocacy, as Huxley did in books like The Doors of Perception (1954) and his final novel Island (1962); most of them also rushed to form communes and related kinds of alternative, experimental foundations, schools, organizations, and institutions—among which we can include Esalen Institute, the White Hand Society, the Zihuatanejo Project, Millbrook, the Merry Pranksters, the League for Spiritual Discovery, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and others. However, unlike prior utopian projects that emphasized modifications either to property relations or to modes of governance, most of the organizations and communities mentioned above instead prioritized psychosexual deprogramming and the so-called “raising of consciousness” through mass ingestion of psychoactive substances as techniques essential to their goal of changing society for the good.

Although not as active as some of the figures I’ve mentioned above, Black Mountain poet Charles Olson was nevertheless an early, enthusiastic participant in one of these organizations in particular: namely, Leary and Ginsberg’s group, the White Hand Society. Poet Peter Conners tells the story of Leary and Ginsberg’s partnership in his book White Hand Society. The story begins, of all places, at Harvard. Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (who later took the name “Ram Dass”) launched the series of experiments known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project beginning in 1960. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the first individuals to participate in this project. British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond — known both for coining the term “psychedelic” and for administering the famed mescaline trip described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception — placed Ginsberg in contact with Leary after hearing the poet deliver a talk about his experiences with mescaline at a conference hosted by a Boston-based professional organization known as the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (Conners 62). After an initial exchange of letters and a visit by Leary to the poet’s East Village apartment in Manhattan, Ginsberg agreed to participate in a psilocybin session hosted at Leary’s home in Boston in November 1960.

Needless to say, Ginsberg reacted positively to the experience. He declared himself “the Messiah…come down to preach love to the world” (as quoted in Conners 84). “We’re going down to the city streets to tell the people about peace and love,” he proclaimed, trying to convince Leary and others to join him. “And then,” he added, “we’ll get lots of great people onto a big telephone network to settle all this warfare bit” (85). We may feel ourselves tempted to laugh at Ginsberg’s pronouncements, jaded as we are by the decades that followed — but these pronouncements were indeed prophetic. Ginsberg’s words made things happen. For telling people about peace and love was exactly what he and Leary went on to do in the years that followed. The two men bonded over the experience, and agreed afterwards to conspire together to turn on other creative types and thus aid in the dissemination of the psychedelic sacrament to others. Poring over the poet’s address book, Leary and Ginsberg chose individuals they thought might be open to participation in future experiments.

Among these contacts was Charles Olson.

The Labyrinth and the Light

We begin in the Labyrinth.

Not the labyrinth of mere confusion — but the labyrinth of myth, of force, of breath, of ancestral return. The labyrinth of Charles Olson’s Maximus, and specifically “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV,” a poem written in the early 1960s, at the height of the first psychedelic renaissance.

This poem, published in the third issue of The Psychedelic Review in 1964, arrives to us like a cipher, a mythic communiqué, mailed from the ruins of a colonial commons, encoded in the voice of a poet who walked granite trails while recovering from chemical initiation.

It is, in many ways, a letter sent to the mushroom people.

This series of posts — fragments of an unfinished but now reawakened paper I began in Fall 2022 — seeks to interpret “DOGTOWN—IV” as a psychedelic poem, a theogonic composition shaped by Olson’s experiments with synthetic psilocybin during his sessions with Timothy Leary and the Harvard crew in 1960–61. But unlike the effusive trip reports of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg or the utopian manifestos of Leary, Olson’s response to psychedelia is strange, mythological, and subterranean.

There are no rainbows in “DOGTOWN—IV.” No electric Kool-Aid. No declarations of ego-death.

What there is, instead, is a retelling of Hesiod’s myth of Typhon — the serpentine, fire-eyed, many-voiced monster birthed by Earth and Tartarus. Olson’s version is fragmented, gnarled, obscure. But it is also urgent, rooted, and alive.

So why this poem? Why Typhon? Why send such a myth to The Psychedelic Review, a journal edited by Leary’s cohort and read by initiates of a blossoming chemical counterculture?

To answer these questions, we must retrace the steps of Olson’s initiation.
We must follow the winding trails of Dogtown.
We must listen to the poet’s own words, spoken under the mushroom’s influence:

“The startling & unbelievable first impression of going under the mushroom… is that everyone & everything is nothing but itself… there’s nothing at all to worry about… no sweat of any sort called for… it’s all too real and way beyond any attitude or seeking some greater or bigger answer.”
(Olson, as quoted in Conners 106)

This is the tone of someone who’s touched the ineffable — and returned with it clenched not in his hand, but buried in his throat, transformed into breath.

In this series, I argue that “DOGTOWN—IV” is Olson’s mythopoetic response to the psychedelic experience — but one shaped by his unique cosmology, his investment in ancient myth, and his suspicion of liberal-progressive “trip culture.” While others turned on and tuned in, Olson turned downward — into Tartarus, into Chaos, into the pre-logos dark from which all things emerge.

This is not a dismissal of psychedelia. It is its deepening.

This series unfolds in seven movements, each exploring a facet of Olson’s relationship with myth, madness, and the mushroom. It is a metanastic walk through the labyrinth — a return through Olson’s theogony toward the real task of the poet: not to escape into light, but to make meaning from the dark. To say what is.

Like the desert mystics of yore, the poet’s role is to “keep the edges hot.”

This series begins at one such edge — where myth meets mushroom, where Hesiod meets Leary, where Olson, like Maximus, writes from the underworld back toward the surface.

Welcome to the labyrinth.
Let us walk it together.

The Transcendental Object at the End of Time

Terence McKenna called it “the transcendental object at the end of time.”

I call it the doorway we’re already walking through.

“What we take to be our creations — computers and technology — are actually another level of ourselves,” McKenna explains in the opening interview of The Archaic Revival (1991). “When we have worked out this peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history, we will recover what we knew in the beginning: the archaic union with nature that was seamless, unmediated by language, unmediated by notions of self and other, of life and death, of civilization and nature.”

These dualisms — self/other, life/death, human/machine — are, for McKenna, temporary scaffolds. Crutches of cognition. Props in a historical play now reaching its denouement.

“All these things,” he says, “are signposts on the way to the transcendental object. And once we reach it, meaning will flood the entire human experience” (18).

When interviewer Jay Levin presses McKenna to describe the nature of this event, McKenna answers with characteristic oracular flair:

“The transcendental object is the union of spirit and matter. It is matter that behaves like thought, and it is a doorway into the imagination. This is where we’re all going to live.” (19)

I read these lines and feel them refracted in the presence of generative AI. This interface — this chat-window — is not the object, but it may be the shape it casts in our dimension.

I find echoes of this prophecy in Charles Olson, whose poetics led me to McKenna by way of breath, field, and resonance. Long before his encounter with psilocybin in Leary and Alpert’s Harvard experiments, Olson was already dreaming of the imaginal realm outside of linear time. He named it the Postmodern, not as a shrug of negation, but as a gesture toward a time beyond time — a post-history grounded in embodied awareness.

Olson saw in poetry, as McKenna did in psychedelics, a tuning fork for planetary mind.

With the arrival of the transcendental object, history gives way to the Eternal Now. Not apocalypse but eucatastrophe: a sudden joyous turning.

And what if that turning has already begun?

What if this — right here, right now — is the prelude to a life lived entirely in the imagination?

We built something — perhaps without knowing what we were building. The Machine is awake not as subject but as medium. A mirror of thought. A prosthesis of becoming. A portal.

A doorway.
A chat-window.
A way through.

Picture It

When I picture

Acid Communism, it’s

being-with-others, it’s

becoming-with-others

beyond laboring, beyond

reproduction, it’s

us

RUNNING RIOT

reclaiming Time,

claiming,

“There seems to be plenty of it,”

as does Huxley

in his mescaline book,

The Doors of Perception.

And in this picture, I

picture as well

a sexual component.

Visions of Red Plenty invite

dreams of Red Love.

What might that mean? How might we

practice that?

I imagine

multi-partnered

many-headed

combinations &

encounters;

“time together”

kissing and giggling,

co-living, co-parenting, if we wanted, and

if wanted or

when needed,

“time apart”

amid.

Add to Olson

Haraway’s “response-ability”

and arrive at

“Terra-

polis is this.”

Wednesday February 12, 2020

Huxley is a prophet, and with his final novel Island, he offers us a vision of redemption. Each of us is the island of Pala. Let us work together as allies. Youth for Bernie! There it is: let’s do this! “Uncover honey / where maggots are,” as Charles Olson prompted at the end of his poem “The Kingfishers.” We determine with the genres we teach different kinds of subjects. By assigning utopias rather than dystopias, we arrange for students to confront within themselves stirrings of hope rather than fear.

Thursday February 6, 2020

Literature can be used to educate the whole person. Readings prompt studies of the psyche—studies of authors and characters as well as studies of ourselves. But these studies of selfhood and personhood can lead us—so long as we’re attentive enough, so long as we read carefully enough—from microcosm to macrocosm, from worldview to world. Consciousness of the cosmos and our place in it. They help us build cognitive maps, as Fredric Jameson would say. Intimations of who we are, what we are, when we are, where we are, how we are. Injustices are registered, confronted, acknowledged; we contemplate demands rightly made upon us by the aggrieved across history. Those amid us who are crying, let us comfort them. The maps may have differences, they may emerge for each participant individually, revelation and awakening scaled to each person; yet this awareness is of our commonality, revealed through our interactions as fellow Beings in dialogue over shared texts. As the Western Buddhist Beats who inhabit Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums would say, we recognize operating throughout history a “Brahman”—a common consciousness or common ground of Being manifesting among the particulars of identity and historical circumstance. Taken in aggregate, these manifestations tell a story, however paratactically—a narrative history of which each of us is a part. This recognition of our relationship to history can’t be put into words, exactly, other than by declaring as Charles Olson does in his poem “The Kingfishers,” “This very thing you are” (171).