Presented in Association with The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University

From postman’s son to Postmodernism’s founding father, and from schooner fisherman to scholar, this hulking six-foot eight Harvard-educated historian drifts back to the hard-luck New England fishing port of his boyhood summers after the 1956 close of Black Mountain College. There, surrounded by the cruel poverties and sorrows of a town at war with the sea for over 300 years, Charles Olson creates a unified and transcendent vision of a besieged people caught between tradition and modernity. Featuring John Malkovich, Amiri Baraka, Jonathan Williams, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Pete Seeger, and others, Polis is This investigates the seminal avant-garde poet, Charles Olson, in conjunction with his enduring connection to his place and origin of inspiration, Gloucester, Massachusetts.