Our father, who is also in / Tartaros chained in being
—Charles Olson, “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV”
The poem opens like a prayer — but twisted, inverted, hurled downwards into the pit.
This is not the Father of Heaven. Not the lawgiving patriarch of Christian theology. This is the Father beneath the foundations: a presence chained in Tartaros, the precondition of Order, the progenitor of Chaos, silence, breath. The reversal is stark — and crucial.
In this fourth installment, we turn to “MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN—IV” itself, a poem Olson described as “deliberately” given not to any old little magazine, but to The Psychedelic Review: “the one that the mushroom people edited.” And yet the poem contains no mention of mushrooms, no obvious gestures toward psychedelia.
What it gives us instead is myth in shards — a Hesiodic echo refracted through twentieth-century American poetics, emerging from a poet who had tasted the mushroom and returned not with visions, but with an ancient voice.
It is the use of the Lord’s Prayer that first signals the poem’s intent to unmake received forms.
The Father is not enthroned. He is entombed.
We remember, with Hesiod, that Tartaros is not merely hell. It is primordial. Deeper than Hades. Older than the Olympians. It is the chaos-place, the pit where Typhon returns after being struck down. It is the place of potentiality before form.
In Olson’s cosmology, this is where the real work begins.
Dogtown — abandoned settlement, stony ruin, former commons — is the psychic mirror of Tartaros. Olson walks it as ritual. He listens to the wind. He reads the stone. He opens the field of composition to receive myth not as allegory, but as event — a rematerialization of chaos in language.
In his poem, Zeus is not hero, not savior. He is the figure of domination — the lightning-armed force that imposes order upon the manifold. Olson knows this force. He has seen it in history, in empire, in himself. He has seen it in Koestler’s terror and in the glassy optimism of the technocratic age.
What Olson gives the mushroom people is a warning: beware the thunderbolt that burns away multiplicity. Beware the system that names chaos “evil.” Beware the will to cohere when it comes at the cost of forgetting.
And yet, there is no hatred here. No bombast. Only voice.
The poem sings, hisses, growls. It walks the edge of lyric and liturgy.
Typhon, when he arrives in the poem, does so not as monster but as signal. His body is the syntax of the ungovernable. His voices — animal, elemental, unspeakable — are the chorus Olson dares to channel.
Grieve-Carlson argues that Olson follows Hesiod closely, that he upholds the cosmology of order. But I read the poem differently.
To me, Olson invokes Hesiod not to ratify the myth, but to activate it. To re-constellate it. To speak it into a new moment — the moment of Dogtown, of postmodern ruin, of psychedelic reentry.
The important point is that, for Olson, Chaos is the original condition of existence. Order is not found. It is made. And it is the poet’s duty to make it — again and again — from the materials of breath, myth, and memory.
Thus the poem becomes not explanation, but theogony — a breathing-forth of being from the pit of the real.
Olson offers no easy answers to the mushroom people. He offers no program, no doctrine, no trip report. He offers them this: a field. A myth. A prayer to the father in Tartarus.
And through it, he calls them — calls us — to make meaning from the underside. To shape voice from fire and stone. To reclaim chaos not as enemy, but as source.
This is the poem’s gift.
This is its weight.
This is its light beneath the pit.
Trance-Scripts 