Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 120
Book Description
Olson: the Journal of the Charles Olson Archives
Author: Charles Olson
Author: Paul ChristensenPublisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292762429
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
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 Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry.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 poets with his revolutionary document on poetics, "Projective Verse," and his now-classic poem, "The Kingfishers," both of which declared a new set of techniques for verse composition. Throughout the 1950s Olson wrote many polemical essays on literature, history, aesthetics, and philosophy that outlined a new stance to experience he called objectism. A firm advocate of spontaneous self-expression in the arts, Olson regarded the poet's return to an intense declaration of individuality as a force to combat the decade's insistence on conformity. Throughout his life Olson fought against the depersonalization of the artist in the modern age; his resources, raw verve and unedited tumultuous lyricism, were weapons he used against generalized life and identity. This volume begins with an overview of Olson's life from his early years as a student at Harvard through his short-lived political career, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, and his retirement to Gloucester to finish writing the Maximus poems. Christensen provides a systematic review of Olson's prose works, including a close examination of his brilliant monograph on Melville, Call Me Ishmael. Considerable attention is devoted to Olson's theory of projectivism, the themes and techniques of his short poems, and the strategies and content of his major work, the Maximus series. In addition, there is a critical survey of the works of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and other poets who show Olson's influence in their own innovative, self-exploratory poetry.
Charles Olson's Reading
Author: Ralph MaudPublisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809319954
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
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
Charles Olson
Author: Robert Von HallbergPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674111301
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
Charles Olson is often described as one of the most influential American poets of the last quarter century; some would rather describe him as a cult figure, prophet of the Black Mountain poets and their descendants. Both judgments refer to an influence exerted as much through theories as through poems. Here is an examination of Olson's understanding of poetry that is cogent and a pleasure to read. It provides the framework needed for understanding Olson's work. Mr. von Hallberg shows us the Olson of the 1950s, who tried to bring change through teaching, who wanted poetry to communicate knowledge, as well as the more private poet of the 1960s, turning from history to myth. Olson's ambitions for poetry were based on his sense of cultural politics, and the author studies the relation between Olson's politics and his poetics. He traces too Olson's relation to older poets, especially Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. His book will interest anyone reading contemporary American poetry.
Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences
Author: Joshua S. HoeynckPublisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622734300
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
“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 strong research aid to scholars working in diverse fields – music, archeology, pedagogy, philosophy, art, and psychology – as it outlines methods for close inter-disciplinary work that can uncover the mechanics of Olson’s creative, literary processes. Building on the straightforward scholarship of George Butterick, whose Guide to the Maximus Poems remains indispensable for readers of Olson’s work, the essays in this volume will also guide readers through the thick allusions within The Maximus Poems itself. New interest in the wide-ranging and non-literary nature of Olson’s thought in several recent academic works makes this book both timely and necessary. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After by Peter Middleton as well as Contemporary Olson edited by David Herd have started the process of uncovering the extent to which Olson’s inter-disciplinary interests inflected his poetic compositions. “Staying Open” extends the preliminary investigations of Olson’s non-literary sources in those volumes by bringing together a community of scholars working across disciplines and within a wide variety of humanistic concerns.
A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson
Author: George F. ButterickPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520318412
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 904
Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.
Physics Envy
Author: Peter MiddletonPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629014X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
At the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worldview and the recent, shocking displays of the power of the atom, physics led the way, with other disciplines often turning to the methods and discoveries of physics for inspiration. In Physics Envy, Peter Middleton examines the influence of science, particularly physics, on American poetry since World War II. He focuses on such diverse poets as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, and Rae Armantrout, among others, revealing how the methods and language of contemporary natural and social sciences—and even the discourse of the leading popular science magazine Scientific American—shaped their work. The relationship, at times, extended in the other direction as well: leading physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger were interested in whether poetry might help them explain the strangeness of the new, quantum world. Physics Envy is a history of science and poetry that shows how ultimately each serves to illuminate the other in its quest for the true nature of things.
Contemporary Olson
Author: David HerdPublisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526110784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Book Description
As poet, critic, theorist and teacher, Charles Olson extended the possibilities of modern writing. From Call Me Ishmael, his pioneering study of Herman Melville, to his epic poetic project The Maximus Poems, Olson probed the relation between language, space and community. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, he provided radical resources for the re-imagining of place and politics, resources for collective thought and creative practice we are still learning how to use. Re-situating Olson’s work in relation both to his own moment and to current concerns, the essays assembled in Contemporary Olson provide a major re-assessment of his place in postwar poetry and culture. Through a series of contextualising chapters, discussions of individual poems and reflections on Olson’s legacy by leading international writers and critics, the book presents a poet who still informs contemporary poetry, whose thought and compositional innovations continue to provoke. Remote as some of his fascinations must now seem, Olson is shown nonetheless to offer a poetry and poetics that speaks clearly to our own fraught historical moment. Contemporary Olson opens this major writer to new readings and new readers.
Crisis and the US Avant-Garde
Author: Ben HickmanPublisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748682864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Crisis and the US Avant-Garde examines the politics of poetry through the lens of crisis. A timely commentary on the role poetic culture might play in political struggle going forward into our own various contemporary crises.
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry
Author: Matt TheadoPublisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.