"In 1949, after seeing a poem in the magazine 'Imagi,' a (jealous) Charles Olson paid Vincent Ferrini a visit..."
That is the gist of Wikipedia's 2010 version of the meeting between two poets who were too unconventional to call themselves poets, but called Gloucester their poetic home.
Now, more than 60 years after that meeting — in the centennial year of Olson's birth — Gloucester plans to make a permanent home for the two rebel-rivals, kindred spirits and, to quote a line from Ferrini, "gardeners of each other."
At Ferrini's death in 2007, the friends who flocked to Gloucester to celebrate his 93 years of life, hatched the plan that is now about $75,000 on its way to becoming The Vincent Ferrini-Charles Olson Writers Center — where the door will be open, as Ferrini would have it, for all to come in to learn and "make the alchemy of poetry."
It will not be a big deal, or a big place. It will be Vincent's studio and Charlie's hangout — just 600 square feet — at 127 East Main St., the little building that became Ferrini's home.
"It may be small in size," says Vincent's filmmaker nephew, Henry Ferrini, "but it's huge in meaning."
Olson may have been too unconventional to "define" himself as any one thing, including a poet. But he was competitive enough to spot in Ferrini a poetic talent that just might challenge his, particularly in Gloucester, the city both men had adopted, idealized and, in Olson's case, lionized.
Hugely prolific and influential to this day, Olson is best known for his ode to his beloved "sea city," "The Maximus Poems" — Olson's big, blunt ego booms through his otherwise lyrical lines, embodied as "I Maximus."
No one who knew the man, even his most ardent admirers, would deny that, at 6-foot-7 and 285 pounds, the only thing that was larger than Olson's physical presence was his immense ego.
Ferrini, on the other hand, appears in his photos as wry, wirily, joyful and jaunty in his wide brimmed hats, and nattily thrown together outfits. He was, by all accounts, "generous," "selfless," — a "gent of a guy," to Olson's gruff giant.
Both men's roots were blue collar New England. Born in 1910, the son of a mailman in Worcester, Olson was, by dint of academic brilliance, schooled in the classics with Boston's blue bloods at Harvard. Ferrini, born in 1913, was the son of Italian immigrants, and, as he liked to say, self-educated at "The University of Lynn Library."
Though their literary styles are different — Olson's poems informed by his classic education and politicized by his early years in Washington working for the government, Ferrini's infused with his love of life and all who people it — they shared a commonality of empathy for the common man, and it was that commonality that brought them both to Gloucester.
"O sea city," wrote Olson expansively, of his beloved, adopted town, "the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart."
Ferrini's Gloucester was more personal, his style smaller. In his little East Main Street studio where he framed pictures for a living, the door was always open to let the people of Gloucester in. And in they came, in all ages, sizes stripes and colors from every walk of life, to sit and create conversations Ferrini called paperless "poems."
Although Olson himself refused to be "defined" as a "poet," Ferrini revered Olson as a poet, perhaps because of his superior academic background. In an interview soon before his death in 2007 at the age of 93, he said of Olson, "He's a poet. I don't consider myself a poet like he was ... I'm an alchemist. Working with Matter and Spirit. Helping ears to move into the golden Here and Now."
A perfect example of what this "poet of the people" was all about, and why his friend, Olson perceived him as a powerful threat to his own perceived poetic supremacy, is clear to see in this one brief stanza:
"If you ever want to find me and know me leave behind yourself and enter the caves of other people there you will find me who is yourself."
Olson may have considered Ferrini competition, but he also considered him a friend. He took his friend up on his invitation to "find me who is yourself," and, when he wasn't sitting on a stoop up in Dogtown churning out poetry, he could often be found sitting in the little studio up on East Main Street, talking with his friend Ferrini.
"He was a brother, someone I learned from," Ferrini said of Olson. "And he was a lot of fun to be around."
Olson wasn't always so kind to Ferrini. Jealousy led him to take a mean poetic swipe at Ferrini in 'The Maximus.' Ferrini admitted he was stunned by this, but in the end he "threw him the other cheek," and disarmed the green giant with a "thirty page love letter."
"I was in his turf," said Ferrini, "I was in Gloucester. He loved Gloucester, but I did, too."
The long and short of it was that this town was going to have to somehow be big enough for the two of them. And in the end, it was.
The two remained "friends and brothers" until Olson's death in 1970 at 59. After that, Ferrini enjoyed a long and happy reign as Gloucester's poet laureate, something which, he admitted, would have Olson rolling over in his grave.
The new writers' center will be a place where two men who, in the words of Vincent, "startled the air with their fire and ether."
A place that can, in the words of Olson, become more "than memory, than place, than anything other than that which you carry, than that which is."
Joann Mackenzie can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3457, or jomackenzie@gloucestertimes.com.
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