Editing the Maximus Poems: Supplementary Notes
by George F. Butterick

In a note to himself while working on The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson wrote: "It's all right to be difficult, but you can't be impossible." This volume, published in 1983 in conjunction with the publication of the collected edition of Olson's The Maximus Poems, attempts to explain the complexities involved in editing the work of Charles Olson. Butterick writes: "If anything, the editorial responsibility was to make [the poems] more like he wrote them, by observing as scrupulously as possible his spellings and punctuation and spacings, as well as the general order of the poems (which continues to be generally chronological)....Olson had given few specific directions at the end, but he had made amply clear the direction the poem had taken before his death. The contours were there to be filled in." [From the Introduction]

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