Ammiel Alcalay’s A Little History Reviewed

Ed Sanders, the Beat Generation as a group. Alcalay draws on his European heritage throughout and con- stantly questions the status quo in American poetry, perhaps trying to push it to a more central and influential position, with the types of poets that will not accept the landscape as it is. He’s talking about control, about imagination, maybe how our imaginations are controlled – often without us having an inkling that they are. I’m short changing Ammiel Alcalay’s book, it is bold, investigative in a way I think Ed Sanders has been for decades. Olson is at the heart of the book, Alcalay has been inspired by him, a poet now dead for almost 45 years. Yet his searching mind still impacts today. I spoke to Ammiel Alcalay recently to try and clarify aspects of this provocative book.

Kevin Ring: You obviously consider Charles Olson as a pivotal figure in Twentieth Century poetry. He’s the central figure of your A Little History book. Do you think he’s ‘relegated’ by critics in the USA?

Ammiel Alcalay: He has definitely been, as you say, ‘relegated.’ I think there are a lot of different reasons for that and I’m not sure if I even touched on all of them in the book. Simply put, in an age of very diminished horizons, I think the scope of his thought is simply too broad. He turned away from what could have been a very successful academic career and then, to compound matters, he turned away from what could have been a very successful political career, all in order to become a poet. And this just at the start of the Cold War. Given that he is a major source for all that has been most vital in North American writing during that crucial period from 1950 till his death in 1970, and that everything he did was directly antithetical to the ways knowledge was being sliced and diced and shunted off to cordoned off disciplines and terminologies, it’s no wonder he’s been, as you say, relegated.

Kevin Ring: The scope of your book is vast, a little like Olson’s scope. Did his mind, his vision, frighten people? I mean the people trying to read him. As well as the CIA possibly?

Ammiel Alcalay: What I hope I did in this book, I think, was to simply clear some of the debris surrounding Olson and establish the political and historical context for the radical nature of his work, and how large a force he was in creating the conditions for things that would follow, through the 1960s and beyond. This takes into account his transition from a New Dealer working for Roosevelt to someone who understood, at a very basic policy level, what the impact of the Cold War would be. It’s no accident that Olson seeks out people with experience from the 1930s: Muriel Rukeyser, Edward Dahlberg and, perhaps most significantly, Vincent Ferrini in Gloucester. Vincent had been a union organizer and conscientious objector during World War II and I think their friendship, more than any literary relationship, was key. As someone from a working class background, Olson was also trying to re-establish his affiliations by refusing any and all advantages that the structure of the society was ready to give him, as an educated white male. Of course, he also saw all these societal changes in the way he conceptualized the “human universe,” what that might mean in terms of pedagogy, politics, and historical consciousness. Such things, of course, would be scary to all governmental agencies of intelligence gathering and repression, as Olson’s primary focus was on personal empowerment through each person’s own ability to gather and, more importantly, USE intelligence! We can see this in the work of people who were so fundamentally influenced by him: Ed Dorn, Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, and so many others.

ISBN 978-0-9760142-6-3) Paperback www.upsetpress.org