Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Enikő Bollobás: "My son is a Magyar": Ideas of Firstness and Origin in Charles Olson 's Poems
Heavy sea, snow, hail. At 8 AM a tide rip. Sounded. Had 20 fath. decreased from that to 15, 10. Wore ship. (They knew Cap Raz (As men, my town, my two towns talk, talked of Gades, talk of Cash's drew, on a table, in spelt, with a finger, in beer, a portulans But before La Cosa, nobody could have a mappemunde The poem is from the first book of Maximus, written in early May 1953 at Black Mountain College. We have, among the concrete details of the various instances registered in the poem, the abundance of fish (cod), the sounding of St. George's Bank for fish, Columbus' insistence on the pear shape of the earth (that of a woman, with nipples), the stormy ocean, the worms literally eating up the ship, ships and fishermen going down the Atlantic, and finally the Gloucester ceremony of July or August when they remember, by throwing flowers into the outgoing tide, those fishermen lost at sea. George Butterick's Guide to The Maximus Poems is helpful, as ever, in identifying the facts here: la Cosa's mappemunde , map of the world, the first to include the New World; seaports from which Breton, Basque, English fishermen sailed to North America in the 15th and 16th centuries; Nathaniel Bowditch's journal; the promontory of Cap Raz in southeastern Newfoundland as referred to in Hakluyt's map of 1587; the abstraction involved in mapmaking concretized here in the form of the portulans or periplus, as well as spelt; the Phoenician Herakles as prototype of Odysseus; Newfoundland as the Land of the Cod-Fish. 10
