The first issue of This (1971) included a short photo essay and memorial to Charles Olson by photographer Elsa Dorfman, who died in May 2020. Bob Grenier, co-editor and mentor, had moved to a small house by the cove in Lanesville, Mass., on Cape Ann, and would have been in contact with Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, and, through poetry connections, Elsa Dorfman. Olson had recently died (10 January 1970) and I was in the thick of his influence, visiting Gloucester that summer and organizing a reading group on the “modern epic” at Iowa in the academic year 1971–72 that included renowned scholar Sherman Paul, who credited the group discussion in his book Olson’s Push (1978). A signal moment in that seminar was unfolding the Coast and Geodetic Survey map of Gloucester harbor, which I bought when I visited, to provide a “spatial reading” of the otherwise cryptic poem: “In the harbor // Can 9 Nun 8 / Nun 10 Can 11 //// Charles Olson / Friday, November 23rd //  #1” (Maximus IV V VI, n.p.; Maximus Poems, 302). From the map, one can track a sequence of buoys in the harbor (termed “cans” and “nuns” from their shapes, presumably) that transposes the subject-centered experience of sighting the buoys to a sequence of signs in space. It is tempting to imagine that Language writing was born right there, though there were many converging influences, never reducible to a moment of origin. In fact, it was the gap between what Olson was seeing and what his poem and the map record that signified, a way of reading that makes clear why the poem had to be written as it was. Many of the short poems from the second volume of Maximus, along with Creeley’s Pieces, were objects of fascination then. … More