I discovered this poem while preparing for my interview with the incredible Debbie Millman, the visionary artist and thinker who hosts Design Matters. It was hugely formative for her - in fact she chose a poetry anthology by Hayden Carrut in which it is published as one of her most formative books for 3 Books for that very reason - and does a beautiful reading of it for us during our conversation. I found this poem incredibly rich, layered, and deep. I'm sure I don't understand half of it but the bits I did manage to catch really lingered.
This poem was published as part of The Maximus Poems collection, written by Charles Olson in 1983 and published by the University of California Press.
Poem:
I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross
a wet deck.
The sea was not, finally, my trade.
But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged
from that which was most familiar. Was delayed,
and not content with the man’s argument
that such postponement
is now the nature of
obedience,
that we are all late
in a slow time,
that we grow up many
And the single
is not easily
known
It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote)
I note in others,
makes more sense
than my own distances. The agilities
they show daily
who do the world’s
businesses
And who do nature’s
as I have no sense
I have done either
I have made dialogues,
have discussed ancient texts,
have thrown what light I could, offered
what pleasures
doceat allows
But the known?
This, I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world.
Tokens.
But sitting here
I look out as a wind
and water man, testing
And missing
some proof
I know the quarters
of the weather, where it comes from,
where it goes. But the stem of me,
this I took from their welcome,
or their rejection, of me
And my arrogance
was neither diminished
nor increased,
by the communication
2
It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet
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