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.
Trance-Scripts 