The shop smelled of old books and brine. Sunlight pressed through a tint of dust on the front window, and the cry of gulls was audible in the poetry section, where I knelt looking for The Maximus Poems to replace the photocopied version I owned Prague. Late July, 2009. A month before, my father had retired after almost 40 years as an engineer on an oil tanker. He and my mother joined me on a Sunday drive to Gloucester, Massachusetts, 90 miles up the coast from Plymouth, my hometown, where my parents still live in a brown shingled house overlooking the harbor. I was curious to finally visit the place where the poet Charles Olson had lived, and written most of The Maximus Poems between 1957 and his death in 1970. I’d grown up close to the town Olson immortalized in his series of more than three-hundred poems addressing his adopted home, but had never read his work until I moved to Europe. Walking through the brick and granite city center, it’s easy to imagine the splendor of 19th century Gloucester at the whaling industry’s peak, before over-fishing decimated what had seemed an endless resource. Mansions mark the hill that rises inward from shore, and each has a porch squared around its brick chimney–widow’s walks, where the wives of sea captains could see to horizon and, hopefully, their homecoming husbands. Closer to the water, the hardtack lives of fisherman, many of them Portuguese immigrants, are still evident in the murky bars and clamshells crushed against asphalt parking lots where iced crates of fish and lobsters are loaded onto 18-wheeled trucks for shipping twice a day. Squat houses with dusty, chain-linked yards border the lots, many of them peopled with bathtub Madonnas: Virgin Mary statues pitched in claw-foot bathtubs. The name of the bookstore, Dogtown Book Shop, derives from a settlement on the edge of Gloucester, now abandoned. For me, the name conjures dogfish, and Captain John deep sea fishing trips my father piloted out of Plymouth harbor when I was a child. Dogfish, hooked, swim in circles, and will, given time, tangle every line on a fishing boat, making a mate’s life misery. Dogfish are enemies therefore, and deserve the harshest treatment. “The Gumby,” they called it. Grabbing a caught dogfish by the gills, pressing four fingers and a thumb in, the deckhand would force back the square nose until it snapped. Then he’d stick a lit cigarette into the dogfish’s
gaping mouth and throw it overboard. Each time, the dogfish would swim a few small circles, broken nose stuck above water, shudder hard and stop moving. There wasn’t a single book by Olson on the shelf. The owner of the bookshop, a man with goatee and long, gray hair, an old salt of a man, admitted that a steady stream of customers come in asking after the author of The Maximus Poems. The problem is, he explained, most are either scholars who own everything Olson wrote, or young students who can’t afford the rare editions the shop carries. He did, however, have something to show me: he peeled apart two sheets of cardboard, revealing an olive-green, hand-bound, limited edition chapbook printed for a reading Olson gave with Stanley Kunitz at Boston University sometime in the 1950s. 100 dollars. I asked if he could point out some Olson sites nearby. On a blank receipt he drew a rudimentary map to Olson’s Fort Point apartment, just a few blocks away.
Maximus, to Gloucester
...as I sit in a rented house on Fort Point, the Cape Ann Fisheries out one window, Stage Head looking me out of the other in my right eye (like backwards of a scene I saw the other way for thirty years) Gloucester can view those men who saw her first...
Charles Olson lived at 28 Fort Point for 13 years, on the top floor of a humble split family apartment. The building is literally on the edge of land, one of the southernmost tips of Gloucester, where the Annisquam River meets the ocean. From his living room, Olson saw fishing boats sliding out to sea in the predawn hours, passing Tenpound Island, a green hump shrugging the tide just Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
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