I can't agree with the surprisingly confident statement by Peter Riley that
Maximus "fall[s] apart about two-thirds way along its course, (like
Gunslinger) and end[s] as random notes towards possible poems." This
sounds as authoritative as Donald Davie on the _Cantos_ (cf. Davie's _Poet
as Sculptor_); to wit, his claim that EP's poem collapses with _Thrones_.
Peter's statement presupposes his equation poem=completed product; perhaps,
with _Maximus III_, Olson (unwittingly or not) gives us a different sense
of poetry, or an alternative experience of a text/writing (are they "poems"
in any conventional sense?). Yes, Olson told his quacks that he needed
another 10 years in which to complete the poem; and thus evidently felt it
was unfinished. But Peter himself points out how irrelevant authorial
intention can become as a poem's horizon of production recedes ever further
from its horizon of reception. Like Ric C, I rather like the fragmentary
quality of the end of _Maximus_ (Or the _Cantos_ for that matter). I think
I prefer it to the more "finished" earlier volumes.
The fact that Butterick and Boer had to edit the third volume of _Maximus_
brings us to Peter's dismissive comment that "The idea that the reader
somehow *completes* these unfinished structures (which people have been
saying for at least thirty years) seems to me to be out of line with any real
description of the act of reading, since the reader by definition does not
have access to the psychic sources of the text and would have to translate
first." I don't know if I follow the end of this remark ("transalte"
what?); but, it would _appear_ to contradict his earlier comments on the
relative unimportance of knowing an author's intentions. Just as Butterick
and Boer had to attempt an arrangement of the text, the reader has to try
and make sense of their tentative arrangement. Such an experience is,
surely, one of the pleasures of this kind of writing. I'm rather glad I
don't have access to Olson's psyche: but I do enjoy what Ingarden called
"concretizing" these wonderful late poetic shards.
(_Gunslinger_ is another matter, perhaps. . . .)

Alex Davis



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