14th Annual Charles Olson Lecture w/Amanda Cook, James Cook & David Rich

The Olson Lecture began in 2010 when the Gloucester Writers Center invited Diane di Prima to Gloucester. The local UU Church generously offered its space for the reading, and that evening marked the beginning of what has since grown into a remarkable collaborative series with the Cape Ann Museum. Since that first lecture with Diane, we’ve welcomed poets and scholars from around the corner and around the world. Among them have been Iain Sinclair, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Michael McClure, Hettie Jones, Ann Charters, Ed Sanders, Stephen Fredman, Ammiel Alcalay, Sharon Thesen, Charles Stein, and Miriam Nichols. We are grateful to the museum for continuing to provide a venue for this event. Today we hear from Amanda Cook, James Cook, and David Rich—three writers rooted here on Cape Ann. For many years Gloucester has served as a site of celebration, interrogation, and renewal of Charles Olson’s work. James Cook will consider Gloucester as a living nexus of poetic exchange, where writers including Gerrit Lansing and Peter Anastas entered into dialogue with Olson and continued to ask, in his words, what remains “of essential use.” Amanda Cook, author of Ironstone Whirlygig, will read selections from her ongoing poem-by-poem response to The Maximus Poems. David Rich, editor of Charles Olson: Letters Home, 1949–1969, will provide context for Olson’s legacy in Gloucester and will join us afterward for a question-and-answer conversation. Thank you all for tuning in, and thank you again to the Cape Ann Museum for hosting the annual Olson Lecture.