The Distances

This is a difficult poem about desire, death, and the unwholesome effects these realities can have on humans. The cure to the afflictions they bring, Olson suggests, is love. Indeed, while the poem’s mood could be justly described as fairly dark, it ends on an optimistic note by invoking the miraculous power of love.  

Summary

‘The Distances’ first appeared in 1960 in the journal Yugen, edited by the Afro-American writer Amiri Barka (back then, still known by his birth name, Leroi Jones). It reappeared that same year in a collection Olson brought out with Grove. The poem brings the collection to a close and gives it its name.

The poem is composed in the form of a cyclical meditation on emotions. It is a series of general and somewhat enigmatic thoughts on love at the start and is followed by what one might call a story of love gone (way) too far.

Subsequently, a semi-allegorical sequence is described. The poet depicts young men visiting what appears to be a kind of underground shrine. Further proclamations of a more general nature accompany this episode. Finally, the Goddess Aphrodite is invoked and asked to heal the “impossible distance,” which is the poem’s actual subject. She appears to grant the wish.

Structure and Form

The poem is written in free verse, common for its time (and still largely used today). Staples of older poetry, like meter and rhyme, are set to the side in favor of this form.

Olson is famous for his influential essay “Projective Verse” (1950), the insights of which “flowered,” as the critic James Rother prettily puts it, “into a mantra that was to clutter the hind end of verse anthologies for decades.”

In that essay, when speaking about his opinion on poetic forms, Olson noted that “the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes” rather than from the set patterns handed down by tradition. This effort to build a poetic form out of the poet’s (and the reciter’s or reader’s) “breath” is perhaps this poem’s most distinctive formal feature.

Literary Devices

Along with the older rhythms, conventional poetic figures and effects are also missing in this poem. Metaphor is glaringly absent, and one would be hard-pressed even to find an image or two whose quality or function corresponds to the more usual expectations one might have of a poem.

In a lecture he gave a couple of years after the publication of ‘The Distances,’ Olson would present all these as tired tropes meditating, and therefore inhibiting, one’s direct experience of the world – as factors, indeed, of “distance.”

The poem systematically avoids what is traditionally held to confer poetic quality on a text. Nevertheless, one might identify traces of this shunned poeticness, though for that, one would have to go beyond the poem’s immediate deployment. In a broader sense, for instance, one may note that the alignment of sculpture and its material, stone, to an idea of distance is metaphorical.

Detailed Analysis

Since Olson also spurns the use of stanzas, this analysis will divide the poem into thematic sections to be discussed in some detail.

Section 1: Lines 1-13

So the distances are Galatea
(…)
– Pygmalions  

The critic Gary Grieve-Carlson has written that “Charles Olson’s poems are notorious for their obscure or esoteric references, and for their clotted, sometimes bizarre syntax and punctuation.” The opening line of ‘The Distances‘ would arguably serve by itself to vindicate this appraisal, being sufficiently obscure, esoteric, and syntactically bizarre at the same time.

Galatea is a mythic figure: a statue coming to life following a prayer to Aphrodite by Pygmalion. The latter was a sculptor who created the said statue in accordance with his ideal of female perfection. Without going into detail about this Greek myth and its variations, one may note, first, the idea of adoring the inanimate (or indeed the dead) and, secondly, the idea of the latter coming to life.

The fact that “the distances are Galatea” but at the same time “Love knows no distance” might already indicate that one’s supposed love may actually not be that but rather an adoration of lifeless matter, idolatry, and a drive to “mastery” on the part not only of Pygmalion but of men young and old, fathers and sons, “Old Zeus” and “young Augustus.”

Men, entranced by a projected ideal of beauty and thereby diverting themselves from “the horror” of death (which is in this sense “a loving matter”), are thrown into a “greedy life” in which “all living things” (a fine figuration of the objects of a greedy individual’s desire) are “precious.” Given the context of greed, “precious” probably retains here something of its literal meaning of “costly.” Indeed, one is tempted to think of the way the term is used by Tolkien’s (cinematic) Gollum!     

Section 2: Lines 14-18

a German inventor in Key West
(…)
he stole the body again from the vault

Thanks to scholarship on Olson’s work, we know that this is, in its substance, a true story from 1940s Florida. It seems, indeed, that, as if to heighten the anecdote’s relevance to Pygmalion’s myth, the “inventor” in question (actually an X-ray technician called Karl Tanzler), at some point, started replacing the decomposing parts of his dead paramour with plaster casts!  

Another literary “intertext” here is, of course, Faulkner’s famous short story “A Rose for Emily”. In both cases (but also, if to a lesser extent, in Pygmalion’s myth), love as “control” and “mastery” reaches a gruesome extreme.

Section 3: Lines 19-45

Torso on torso in either direction
(…)
o Caesar?

It seems that for “young Augustus,” there are two possible paths – “out” and “in” – which one could call, respectively, action in the world and soul-searching. The second path takes one “down La Cluny’s steps.”

Again owing to scholars who have tilled the field, we know that Hotel de Cluny is a medieval Parisian building and that this is a reference to Moby Dick (Olson was an expert on Melville, who was the subject of his first major book publication). Melville, and Olson after him, envisages an underground descent (a classic figure for descent into the self). There, one encounters “a god throned on torsoes” (Olson’s retention of the archaic, Melvillian spelling was presumably a hint as to this sequence’s origin) who is, of course, “old Zeus”.

This subterranean journey to the patriarchic origins of manhood, however, fails “to undo distance.” In the end, “[y]ou can teach the young nothing,” while the old fare no better either. The latter achieve an understanding of love when it is too late, when it no longer has an “object,” when distance can no longer be undone.

The former, victims of “the distances” in another sense, “have all pressed” to their “nose / which is too close.” This is surely a fine figure for what one conventionally thinks of as the myopia of young age. Both, then, are doomed to the necrophiliac pleasure of keeping “the corpse live by all” their “arts.”

Section 4: Lines 46-55

O love who places all where each is, as they are, for every moment,
(…)
stone. Love this man.

Faced with actual failure and bleak prospects of success, the speaker resorts to a reprise of Pygmalion’s prayer to the Goddess that stone become flesh, “that the impossible distance / be healed.” Magically, it works!

FAQs

Similar Poetry

A few examples of poems one could read alongside ‘The Distances‘ are:

• ‘The Rain‘ by Robert Creeley – another poem about love which the speaker compares, through an extended metaphor, to rain. Olson and Creeley were friends in life, and the latter edited two “selections” of Olson’s work.
• ‘Elegy for Jane’ by Theodore Roethke – is a poem about the platonic love Roethke entertained for one of his students. ‘Elegy for Jane’ (like Creeley’s ‘Rain’) is a much less cerebral poem than ‘The Distances‘ and, in this sense, provides an interesting contrast to the latter.
• ‘Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’ by Robert Duncan – an intricate poem about poetic inspiration and dreams. Duncan and Olson corresponded extensively, and a comparison of the two poems may indicate some interesting parallels in terms, for example, of their idiosyncratic syntax.