Bringing a poet back to the people

Herman Melville was out of fashion when a young Massachusetts scholar named Charles Olson began studying the author in the 1930s. Olson's first book, ''Call Me Ishmael," completed in 1945, was a critical reassessment that would help establish a new era of Melville appreciation.

Sixty years later, it is Olson's reputation that could use a boost. In his lifetime, he had plenty of admirers. His theory of spoken poetry cleared the path for the Beats and performance poetry, and Olson's was the leading voice in the groundbreaking 1960 anthology ''The New American Poetry." In academic circles, he is often counted as one of the most influential poets of the 20th century.

Yet Olson, who died in 1970, is largely forgotten by the reading public. Even in his adopted hometown of Gloucester -- the subject of his greatest work, the epic series of laments known as the ''Maximus" poems -- he is scarcely remembered by the ordinary citizens for whom he felt he was writing.

Gloucester filmmaker Henry Ferrini wants to usher in a new era of appreciation for the writer. Ten years in the making, Ferrini is in the final phases of ''Poet & the City," a documentary on Olson and his beloved seaport. This Saturday, the filmmaker will host an event at the Cape Ann Historical Association including a screening of his work-in-progress and readings by Olson scholars.

Ferrini hopes to complete his film by April 2006, which is National Poetry Month. But he has labored to convince potential investors that Olson's vision of Gloucester's modernization is not just a local story.

''It's difficult to get people to understand that this man spoke for everyone," says Ferrini.

A past finalist for a major grant from the Independent Television Service, which connects producers with public television stations, the filmmaker hopes to land the prize this year.

In the meantime, he continues to raise money as he has for a decade -- by soliciting donations, however modest, from Olson enthusiasts, Cape Ann preservationists, and other friends of the arts.

From the ground-floor workspace of his old hillside home in Gloucester, Ferrini points toward the waterfront along Rocky Neck. ''There's usually a $14 million yacht parked out there," he says. Laughing, he recalls the time he tried to enlist the owner as an investor.

For Ferrini, the presence of that yacht is a constant reminder that Olson's work was about the changing face of Gloucester and, by extension, the country -- the problems of urban renewal, absentee ownership, and the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Olson himself, says the filmmaker, sometimes lived in ''abject poverty." The poet Diane DiPrima told Ferrini about hosting a rent party in New York for Olson in the late 1950s, when he needed $29 for the landlord.

DiPrima is one of countless poets for whom Olson's writing was a revelation, a crucial link between T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and the colloquialism of the Beat generation and other postwar iconoclasts.

''Olson found a way to write poetry that combined an interaction with the subject with what was going on in his mind," says Peter Anastas, a Gloucester native who edited Olson's ''Maximus to Gloucester" letters to the Gloucester Daily Times, in which the poet argued for the preservation of the city's heritage in verse. ''It was a mind in action with the world. It was a tremendous breakthrough in poetry."

After studying at Wesleyan, Yale, and Harvard, Olson embarked on a promising career in politics, serving in Franklin Roosevelt's administration and for the Democratic National Committee. In 1944, however, he resigned from his post at the Office of War Information in favor of the literary life.

During his tenure in the 1950s at Black Mountain, the experimental North Carolina college, Olson influenced many future writers and artists with his impassioned, marathon classes. Jack Kerouac once made a pilgrimage to Olson's kitchen in Gloucester, where the poet settled for good in the 1950s, and Allen Ginsberg read at Olson's funeral. But despite such widespread influence, Olson is not nearly as familiar to the reading public as many of his followers.

''His work is being concreted over in this media age," says Ferrini, who has secured a narrating commitment from the actor John Malkovich to help get his film noticed. A onetime music teacher who has found a niche in film by setting writers' words to images, Ferrini is perhaps best known for ''Lowell Blues," his lyrical ode to Kerouac's hometown. Another Ferrini production, ''Poem in Action," is a profile of Vincent Ferrini -- Gloucester's irrepressible poet laureate and Henry's uncle.

The life of the elder Ferrini, now a hearty 92, is forever entwined with Olson's. Olson, born in Worcester, vacationed as a child in Gloucester, establishing his lifelong attachment to the place. As a young man he summered in Gloucester, working as a substitute letter carrier.

On a return visit in 1949, Olson sought out Vincent Ferrini. Olson began his ''Maximus" poems -- named in part for his own mountainous body -- as letters to Ferrini.

Though their relationship had its troubles, the two men remained friends. The problem, Vincent Ferrini says today, was that he had already settled in Gloucester. When Olson arrived to stay, he wanted the city all to himself.

For the elder Ferrini, the perception that Olson is a poet of the elite -- revered in the ivory tower, but irrelevant to the working class he defended -- is accurate. ''I reached people he could never reach," he says.

But for Anastas, who knew Olson during his later years, the poet's writing could be powerfully direct. As an example he suggests an infamous line -- ''Oh city of mediocrity and cheap ambition" -- from one of Olson's angry letters to the local paper, after the demolition of a historic home.

''I mean, that's pretty straightforward," he says. ''And people paid attention. People knew that something important was happening when Olson was speaking to them."

For the past two years, Gloucester High School English teacher James Cook has been using Olson's writing as part of a program designed to teach students new ways of looking at their surroundings.

''A lot of the kids have a sense that there's something limited about living in a mass-mediated world," he says. ''They know more about TV characters than they do about their neighbors or the local government. Olson proposes a method of living in a place and responding to it."

Cook says his students have discovered that Olson's poetry can be as practical as it is heady. ''The fact that he is sometimes credited with popularizing the word 'postmodernism' -- they don't care." The students are much more interested, he says, in the idea that Olson thought Gloucester's iconic ''The Man at the Wheel" statue was bad art.

Like that statue, Olson himself could become an attraction for the city if all goes well with Ferrini's film. With seldom-seen archival footage of the poet and moving images of Gloucester set to his words, the filmmaker hopes his documentary might do for the city what the Kerouac legacy has done for Lowell.

''Gloucester," as the poet Ed Sanders told Ferrini, ''doesn't know what a tremendous tourist attraction Olson could be."

Henry Ferrini will present a rough cut of ''Poet & the City" at 3 p.m. Saturday at the Cape Ann Historical Association, 27 Pleasant St., Gloucester. Readings will be given by Olson scholars, including Gerrit Lansing, Schuyler Hoffman, Charles Stein, and James Cook. The program is free.