© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2009 DOI 10.1179/147757009X442541 ‘Tansy City’: Charles Olson and the Prospects for Avant-Pastoral Joshua Corey Lake Forest College, Illinois, USA This essay examines the work of the American postwar poet Charles Olson as a site of convergence between the imperatives of postmodernism and pastoral poetry — discursive fields whose relation is generally constructed as one of mutual hostility or indifference. The postmodern difficulty, as des- cribed by Fredric Jameson, of constructing a viable relationship between individual experience and the conceptual totality of globalized capitalism, has tested the viability of naively referential pastoral as a mode by which the human relationship to nature can be represented. Within the poetic context of his hometown, the ‘tansy city’ of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Olson’s poetics suggest possibilities by which an ‘avant-pastoral’ might extend Jameson’s notion of ‘cognitive mapping’ beyond the totality of capitalism to the ecological totality that is the horizon of all human and non-human life, thereby creating a usable past for contemporary practitioners of an avant-garde ecopoetics. keywords (avant-)pastoral, avant-garde ecopoetics, cognitive mapping, Frederic Jameson, non-mimetic landscapes, (non-)organicism, Charles Olson, postmodernism Pastoral is never only the poetry of the natural world: it is profoundly ideological, embedding within itself a nostalgic stance of yearning for a past as vivid as it is imaginary. In the pastoral vision, human beings inhabit a gracious ‘middle landscape’ 1 between nature and civilization, taking the best of both while being spared their res- pective deprivations and depredations. The practices of postmodern poets, on the other hand, are oriented toward a present in flux, derived from what Andrea Huyssen calls the ‘technological imagination’ of the modernist avant-garde, ‘best grasped in artistic practices such as collage, assemblage, montage, and photomontage’ (Huyssen, 1986: 9 [NIR]). Postmodernism leans toward the cultural fragmentation characteristic of an urbanized, late capitalist modernity, a fragmentation postmodernist voices tend to celebrate as the unwriting of oppressive, hegemonic narratives, and therefore comparative american studies, Vol. 7 No. 2, June, 2009, 00–00 1 7-2-CAS 14 Corey.indd 1 7-2-CAS 14 Corey.indd 1 5/6/2009 6:36:17 PM 5/6/2009 6:36:17 PM