Charles Olson, Part 2 — USA: Poetry, NET Outtakes Series: July 24, 1965 and March 12–13, 1966

Edward Dorn opens, standing before an informal audience, stating "I don't want any poems at this time...except those that are given to me," and insists that "private is absolutely public." After declaring "I think that we're all beautiful people," Olson and he are then recorded while seated in the shade of some trees, with Dorn returning to the private-public division: "Only if it's private can it become public."

Olson tells of a desire to go to England, and of J. H. Prynne finding and sending to him shipping records on the ships of Gloucester Harbor, and from the names of the "catches....fishing sloops," he relates the concept of the bounds or "end of the world" to Hesiod, then to "The Enchanted Pony" children's story, read by his son ("Charles Henry”). Richard O. Moore, off-camera, asks how the two of their lives came together.

Dorn tells of visiting the Shoshone people, how their [he and photographer Leroy Lukas] trying to meet with one group of Shoshoneans, who had been visited previously by anthropologists, failed due to the indigenous people knowing in advance what outsiders wanted to hear: "...like suddenly they had been made volunteers for their own [embarrassment]." They speak to the idea of "the West," with Olson lauding Dorn's short story "CB & Q.” He alludes to Drummond Hadley, apparently present off-camera. Dorn tells of visiting an old Shoshonean man near his dying, and his song or "death chant" — leading Olson to speak of "the song lying in the thing itself...too easily called magic of song, but really what song is is something that goes right through everything."

Considering Allen Ginsberg's reading at the Conference, Olson tells of walking afterward "with Allen and John [Wieners]" and talking to Ginsberg of "discernment," and cautioning him against the danger of "using words to include every thing in the world.”

Olson relates a story of Richard Duerden coming to him asking for the meaning of Enyalion (a.k.a. Enyalios).

Alluding to Icelandic American anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s My Life With the Eskimo, 1912, Olson tells of how, according to Stefansson, seal hunting is taught to indigenous children. Olson speaks of the writing and publishing of his "Letter to Melville," printed by Dorn at the Black Mountain College Press, 1951. Alluding to the circumstances and activities of that school, Dorn says "We were the Indians.” He recalls a story related by American anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter of an Inuit song ("Eskimo" he says) sung by a woman when someone is stranded on an ice floe "and nothing can be done" to save them. 

Against Ginsberg's tendency toward a "popular" all-inclusive "socializing of language," Olson holds up Robert Creeley, ”who isn't trying to mob bomb the cities.” He speaks to his own attempt, the prior night at his own reading, to offer something to the large audience. The segment ends with Dorn telling briefly of "Elaine [Feinstein]'s father" being "swept out of the church" by two nuns, in Germany.