With Dr. Miriam Nichols, Professor Emerita at the University of Fraser Valley, in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Held in collaboration with the Gloucester Writers’ Center.   
Saturday, February 8th, 2025
1pm – 2pm
Gloucester Stage Company, 267 East Main Street, Gloucester, MA 01930
Free and Open to the Public, $10 donation suggested.
Registration is required

Miriam Nichols, Professor Emerita at the University of Fraser Valley, will give this year’s annual Charles Olson Lecture, presented at the Gloucester Stage Company in partnership with the Gloucester Writers Center. Nichols will discuss Charles Olson’s early poems written during World War II and the ways he re-imagined the possibility of agency in the public sphere under seemingly impossible conditions. For more insight, please view Nichols’ abstract below.

In connection with this lecture, the Museum will be offering a tour of the Maud/Olson Library the day prior at the CAM Green on Friday, February 7th at 3:00 p.m. To learn more about the Maud/Olson Library and its acquisition, click here. To register for this tour, please email: [email protected]

Related books available in our online store:

T.S. Eliot And Charles Olson: Young Tom And Charlie, Two American Poets At Home In Gloucester, Introduction by Ann Charters

Charles Olson: Letters Home 1949-1969, edited by David Rich

After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff, edited by S.Thesen & R. Maud

Purchase on our online store and pick up at the CAM Green or the lecture!

2025 Lecture Synopsis:

Between Worlds: Olson and Us

having descried the nation
to write a Republic
in gloom on Watch-House Point (Maximus Poems 377)

Olson’s early poems record his view that the camps of World War II required a rethinking of the premises of western civilization from the ground up and in particular the positioning of humanity in relation to the living planet. The instrumentalizing habit of mind that Olson identified with the western tradition had played out during the war not only as it always had, as domination of nature and war between people groups, but as an ultimate reduction of persons to “fat for soap, superphosphate for soil, fillings and shoes for sale” (CPr 174). Olson’s wildly ambitious aim was to imagine a different mode of civilization and to do it as a poet and without the supports of religion or tradition. The problem, as Olson writes in “Letter 10” of the Maximus Poems, was “how, now, to found, with the sacred & the profane—both of them—wore out” (MP 49). Nichols takes it that Olson’s slippery postwar world is horizonal to our own and that its problematic is ours too. By horizonal, she means at-the-dawn of; by problematic, she means a set of material, psychological, and social-political states of affairs that bear on how the world can be understood and how one might contrive to live in it. If the sacred and profane are “wore out,” the poet who would perform a possible world for us can rely neither on God nor reason. Her talk will focus on the ways that Olson re-imagined the possibility of agency in the public sphere under seemingly impossible conditions and the bearing of his investigative poetics on our own speeded up, globalized, drunk-on-disaster human universe.

Miriam Nichols is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of the Fraser Valley where she taught literary theory, Canadian and American literature, and international modernism. Her publications include scholarly editions of the poet Robin Blaser’s The Fire: Collected Essays and The Holy Forest: Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and The Astonishment Tapes (University of Alabama, 2015). She is the author of Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Alabama, 2010) and A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor (Palgrave, 2019). Her work on Olson has appeared in Radical Affections and in Contemporary Olson (ed. David Herd). She currently works for Harbour Publishing in Madeira Park on the Sunshine Coast of B.C.

The annual Charles Olson Lecture is a wonderful opportunity to refresh your understanding and appreciation of Olson. To that end, below are links to several resources discussing the poet that you may wish to consult.

• CAM Press Release on the acquisition of the Ralph Maud/Charles Olson Library
• Maud/Olson website/catalog
• Past Olson Lecture recordings
• Recommended Reading:
  • Charles Olson: Letters Home, 1949-1969– edited by David Rich
  • After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff – edited by Sharon Thesen and Ralph Maud
  • Wild Intelligence: Poets’ Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America. – by M.C. Kinniburgh (chapter on Maud/Olson Library)
  • Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life – by Tom Clark
  • Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography – by Ralph Maud

• Other online resources regarding Olson
  • The Poetry Foundation
  • The Sawyer Free Library’s Charles Olson Collection
  • Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
  • The Charles Olson Society
  • The Charles Olson Research Collection at the University of Connecticut

Photo Credit: (left) Charles Olson, c. 1960s (right) Olson’s apartment at 28 Fort Square, Gloucester, MA, January 11, 1970s. Photographs by Charles A. Lowe for the Gloucester Daily Times. Gift of the Gloucester Daily Times / Eagle-Tribune Publishing Company, 2004 [Accession # 2004.12].