14th Annual Charles Olson Lecture

In the 2026 Charles Olson Lecture, James Cook will explore the ways that Gloucester has been a site of celebration, interrogation, explication, negation, and extension of Charles Olson’s work in the period from the near the end of the twentieth century (beginning with the Charles Olson Festival in August of 1995) through the first quarter of the twenty-first century. 

The talk will highlight Gloucester as a nexus of activity where local and visiting writers, artists, and educators have engaged with Olson not to memorialize the man and the work but to find and question what “is of essential use.” In the talk, Peter Anastas and Gerrit Lansing will figure prominently as guides, beacons, and exemplars who helped to create the conditions for a complex, multi-faceted, living engagement with Olson’s work.

As part of the program Amanda Cook, author of Ironstone Whirlygig, will read selections from her ongoing poem-by-poem response to The Maximus Poems, much of which has appeared in the literary magazine SpoKe. David Rich, author of Charles Olson: Letters Home (1949-1969), will provide context for Olson’s legacy in Gloucester and will participate in a Question & Answer session after the talk.  

James Cook is an English teacher at Gloucester High School. He was a founding editor of the literary magazine Polis. His poems and essays have appeared in SpoKe, Jacket2, Let the Bucket Down, Process, and other small magazines. He has lectured on Olson previously, most recently in a talk entitled “Harborside Civics Lessons: Gloucester Harbor in the Political Imagination of Gloucester Writers” delivered at the Jonathan Bayliss Society Conference in September of 2025.

David Rich edited Charles Olson: Letters Home, 1949-1969, published by the Cape Ann Museum in 2010 in support of the Olson centenary. He has also lectured at the Cape Ann Museum on Olson, Vincent Ferrini, and Gloucester’s fishing history.

Amanda Cook is sometimes in the water and sometimes underwater in Gloucester, MA. She has been in a long conversation with Charles Olson for some time now. Her 2018 book Ironstone Whirlygig was published by Bootstrap Press.