Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007) User Reviews

A perfect realization of the principle: "Form is an extension of content."

[joel-rosenberg · 10/10 · 12 April 2008]

This film is extraordinary. Meticulously photographed and edited, interwoven with archival footage and filled with the briny textures of Gloucester, Mass., it opens up the writing of Charles Olson in a way few films have done for a poet. It is the flawless embodiment of a core principle of Olson's work (here in the words of his friend and fellow poet Robert Creeley): "Form is an extension of content." In Olson's Gloucester, there breathed the rhythms of the ancient Greek city state and the myths of Hesiod, cast into a mordant, salt-bitten Yankee English that rings more powerfully than ever in our present era. As he brought Gloucester alive in poetry, Olson waged a losing battle with pancreatic cancer, urban development, and the reign of "pejorocracy," as bulldozers and dynamite brought down historic buildings and superhighways connected Gloucester with greater metropolitan blight. This film deserves a larger audience. It tells a tale that is American down to the bone.