Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
A film by Henry Ferrini & Ken Riaf
7:00 p.m., Thursday, April 17, 2008
Fine Arts Theatre, 36 Biltmore Ave., Downtown Asheville
Admission: $7 BMCM+AC members + students with ID / $9 non-members
Filmmaker Henry Ferrini will be in town for the screening and will answer questions afterward.
"A beautifully composed homage to one of the few truly monumental American poets of our times." -- Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco
“The best film about an American poet ever made.” -- Bill Corbett, The Boston Phoenix
"...an impressionistic, yet informative and moving document about the act of creation that neither shies away nor oversimplifies." -- Michael Kelleher, ArtVoice
Just in time for National Poetry Month in April, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, The Captain’s Bookshelf and Western Carolina University present a striking new film about Charles Olson, poet and charismatic leader of Black Mountain College during its final years, at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 17th. Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place wrestles with the six foot eight inch 275lb colossus of poetry through a visually and intellectually exciting mix of word and image. Filmmaker Henry Ferrini will be present at the April 17th screening at the Fine Arts Theatre to answer questions following the film.
Charles Olson saw Gloucester, Massachusetts as the perfect modern reflection of the ancient Greek city-state, a polis — 30,000 people shaped by their own geography and pulled by their own powerful sense of history. His poetry transformed the isolated fishing town into a microcosm of America energized by extraordinary confluences that connected it to all other places. For Olson, all time was likewise contemporaneous. By taking his readers back to the beginnings of history, he returned to the present with fresh understanding of how to create things anew. Polis Is This illuminates Olson’s life and work by exploring such connections and imaginative journeys. The film traces Olson’s process of self- discovery and makes it clear why Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and many other literary figures traveled to Gloucester to sit with the father of post-modernism — the man they called the “big fire source.”
Polis Is This combines interviews, archival footage, commentary and animation into a single voice full of insight and visual beauty. The film allows the audience access to the subject even as it captures the zeitgeist of a formative era in literary history. The 60-minute documentary features John Malkovich, as well as interviews with poets and scholars Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Diane di Prima, Gerrit Lansing, John Sinclair, Pete Seeger, Chuck Stein, Anne Waldman, Charles Boer, Susan Thackrey, Amiri Baraka, Robin Blaser, Michael Rumaker, Jonathan Williams, Ammiel Alcalay, John Stilgoe, Vincent Ferrini and the poet’s son, Charles Peter Olson. An eclectic soundtrack puts together Boston’s grandfather of punk rock Willie “Loco” Alexander with Black Mountain College avant-garde composer Stephan Wolpe along with a little banjo picking from Pete Seeger. The film has screened to enthusiastic audiences in New York, Cambridge and San Francisco.
Director's Statement
All my life I’ve heard about Charles Olson. As a child around the holiday dinner table I’d listen to tales of a giant who walked the midnight streets of Gloucester, Massachusetts. In school, poets and writers asked if I was related to the Ferrini in The Maximus Poems.
"Back home in Gloucester, I’d crack the 600 plus page Maximus Poems to learn a little something about myself and my place in this place. I wondered why Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Stan Brakhage, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka made pilgrimage to Olson’s $29-a-month flat. What was it about this postman’s son, a Harvard trained historian, and the power of his imagination, that made a generation of poets and artists see him as 'the big fire source.'
"How and why America’s first fishing town became the portal to Olson’s world became a mystery to solve. The poet’s methodology, one that he borrowed from the Greeks, became my investigative technique as well. Istorin means to find out for oneself. It is the root of our word history and it became the route that I followed.
"In 1995, during the first Charles Olson Festival held in Gloucester, writer Ken Riaf and I put shoulder to oar and set out to find out what all the fuss was about. We talked to professors in the academy and people on the street. We searched in university archives and found Olson’s friends and family. In Polis Is This I’ve focused decades of filmmaking experience to address an even longer held question about our relationship to the place that contains us."
Henry Ferrini, Gloucester
January 25, 2007
Co-Sponsored by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, The Captain’s Bookshelf and the College of Fine and Performing Arts & Fine Art Museum, in collaboration with the Stage and Screen Motion Picture and Television Production program, Western Carolina University.
For more information contact Alice Sebrell at 828-350-8484.
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