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“Staying Open, Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences” investigates the inter-disciplinary influences on the work of the mid-Century American poet, Charles Olson. This edited collection of essays covers Olson’s diverse non-literary interests, including his engagement with the music of John Cage and Pierre Boulez, his interests in abstract expressionism, and his readings of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essays also examine Olson’s pedagogy, which he developed in the experimental environment at Black Mountain College, as well as his six-month archeological journey through the Yucatan Peninsula in 1950 to explore the culture of the Maya. This book will, therefore, be a stron...
Annotation "Through a detailed and thoughtful study of the impact of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy on Olson's aesthetic theory, this book points out the conceptual unity underlying what seems to be a sprawl of fragments in Olson's major work, The Maximus Poems." "On the one hand, concrete poetic units of The Maximus Poems serve as a starting point for clarifying how different elements are joined together in one unity. On the other hand, the book traces the blending of the whole poem at the macro level, following its course through a temporal progress in which the poem moves from one poetic unit to the next; that is, from a unity (of multiplicity) to a new unity (in which the previous unity is already part of the multiplicity building the new one). Thus the book illuminates Olson's theory of the Long Poem as an "all-containing" corpus, governed by metaphysical principles, equal to life itself, enacted in the process of working on The Maximus Poems."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Maud (English, Simon Fraser U.) offers a narrative account of the life and work of poet Charles Olson, focusing on the poet's lifelong reading material as a basis for understanding his work. Drawing on an annotated listing of his library, as well as his childhood books and poetry by his contemporaries, he links the books to the poet's intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The author demonstrates that "The Kingfishers," as Olson's first long poem, is so crucial to understanding his development that a study of it (along with "The Praises," cut from the same cloth) takes one into every aspect of Olson's early life and thought. Insight into Olson's apprenticeship and purposes has been somewhat blurred because "The Kingfishers" has not been entirely understood.
First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences—especially Shakespearean ones—on Melville’s writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the “theory of the two Moby-Dicks,” Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville’s reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: “the first book did not contain Ahab,” writes Olson, and “it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick.” If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with var...
Edited by poet and scholar Ryan Dobran, this volume of correspondence between the American poet Charles Olson (1910–1970) and the English poet J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) sheds light on a little-known but incredibly influential aspect of twentieth-century transatlantic literary culture. Never before published, the letters capture their shared passion for knowledge as well as their distinct writing styles. Written between 1961 and Olson’s death in 1970, the letters display the mutual admiration and intimacy that developed between the two poets after Prynne initiated their exchange when pursuing work for the literary magazine Prospect. This work illustrates how Olson and Prynne influenced each other, and it represents an important step toward understanding their contributions to poetics on both sides of the Atlantic.
The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910–1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse. The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of...
The Maximus Poems is one of the high achievements of twentieth-century American letters and an essential poem in the postmodern canon. It stands out, in Hayden Carruth's words, as "a huge and truly angelic effort," matching the dimensions of its hero's name and returning poetry to its Homeric and Hesiodic scope. This complete edition of The Maximus Poems brings together the three volumes of Charles Olson's long poem (originally published in 1960, 1968, and 1975, and long out of print) in an authoritative version edited according to the highest standards of textual criticism. Errors in the previous editions have been corrected, twenty-nine new poems added, and the sequence of the final poems modified in the light of the editor's research among the poet's papers. --University of California Press.
Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work. Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical examination, Olson emerges as a stunning theorist and poet, whose erratic and often unfinished writings obscured his provocative intellect and the coherence of his perspective on the arts. Soon after World War II, Olson emerged as one of America's leading...
Letters written during the spring and summer of 1951 convey the artistic concerns of the two writers and share commentary on their poems and essays in progress.