The Charles Olson Reader - Softcover

Olson, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857547845 ISBN 13: 9781857547849

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2005

Synopsis

Charles Olson (1910-70) believed that poetry exists in an 'open field' through which the poet transmits energy to the receptive reader. Olson's influence on the development of British and American poetry through his writing and teaching is immense. His work encompasses myth, history, scholarship and politics, grand theories and delight in the particular variousness of life, all marked by the curiosity and openness to experience that he asked of his readers. Olson grew up and returned to live in the seafaring town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and it was from the life and language of its citizens that his poetry drew its strengths.
The Reader includes extracts from the full range of Olson's poetry and prose, including letters, interviews and the full text of the key essay 'Projective Verse'. Ralph Maud, a colleague of Olson's from 1963-5 and the editor of Olson's letters, has supplied an introduction, supporting illustrations, notes and bibliography to this essential resource.

About this title

About the Authors

Charles Olson (1910-1970) is credited with inventing the term 'post-modern'. Father of the Projectivist movement and one of the great teachers of his age, he is also one of its great poets, a writer whose work has had an abiding impact on radical currents of American and British poetry. He owes much to Pound and Williams, but Maximus is not an unproblematic child of the Cantos and Paterson. What these poems have in common is that they are unfinished and unfinishable. Son of working-class immigrants, he grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, north of Boston, on the sea, and Gloucester is at the heart of his mature poetry. He studied at Harvard and became a scholar and teacher. He worked for the Roosevelt government during the war, and later taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where as rector in the early 1950s he attracted creative artists and spearheaded the campaign against the New Criticism. A number of important artists and writers were associated with Black Mountain: De Kooning, Kline and Rauschenberg, John Cage, John Dewey. Robert Creeley's Black Mountain Review was an ambitious magazine.

RALPH MAUD is Emeritus Professor of English and Associate of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He is a major editor of the work of Dylan Thomas. He is also author of Charles Olson's Reading: A Biography (1995), What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson's 'The Kingfishers' (1997) and editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000). He knew the poet from 1963 to 1965 when they were colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857547845
• ISBN 13: 9781857547849
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Maud Ralph