Gary Grieve-Carlson is Professor of English and Director of General Education at Lebanon Valley College. In addition to his work on Olson, his publications include work on William Carlos Williams, Carolyn Forche, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, Arthur Miller, Edmund Wilson, and Susan Sontag.

"Charles Olson is part of that knotty, unpredictable and enduring "American grain" growing out of Melville and Whitman—idealist and materialist at once; wildly imaginative yet profoundly rooted in place. With this volume, Gary Grieve-Carlson has collected eleven essays that add significantly to our understanding of this quintessentially American writer. Focusing on Olson's rich and wide-ranging prose, these essays probe the various ways in which Olson explored the boundless encounter of language with experience. "Bonnie Costello, Boston University"For anyone reading Charles Olson, sustained attention to the prose along with the poetry is essential. Grieve-Carlson's collection offers a wide-ranging and systematic review of that prose certain to be helpful to our understanding of Olson's significance. This timely collection takes its place in the continuing critical revaluation that is beginning to displace the confessional lyric from its central position in the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and establishes Olson as one of the mid-century's most complex, difficult, provocative, and influential literary explorers."William Waddell, St. John Fisher College

Gary Grieve-Carlson is Professor of English and Director of General Education at Lebanon Valley College. In addition to his work on Olson, his publications include work on William Carlos Williams, Carolyn Forche, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, Arthur Miller, Edmund Wilson, and Susan Sontag.

"Charles Olson is part of that knotty, unpredictable and enduring "American grain" growing out of Melville and Whitman—idealist and materialist at once; wildly imaginative yet profoundly rooted in place. With this volume, Gary Grieve-Carlson has collected eleven essays that add significantly to our understanding of this quintessentially American writer. Focusing on Olson's rich and wide-ranging prose, these essays probe the various ways in which Olson explored the boundless encounter of language with experience. "Bonnie Costello, Boston University"For anyone reading Charles Olson, sustained attention to the prose along with the poetry is essential. Grieve-Carlson's collection offers a wide-ranging and systematic review of that prose certain to be helpful to our understanding of Olson's significance. This timely collection takes its place in the continuing critical revaluation that is beginning to displace the confessional lyric from its central position in the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and establishes Olson as one of the mid-century's most complex, difficult, provocative, and influential literary explorers."William Waddell, St. John Fisher College

Gary Grieve-Carlson is Professor of English and Director of General Education at Lebanon Valley College. In addition to his work on Olson, his publications include work on William Carlos Williams, Carolyn Forche, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, Arthur Miller, Edmund Wilson, and Susan Sontag.

"Charles Olson is part of that knotty, unpredictable and enduring "American grain" growing out of Melville and Whitman—idealist and materialist at once; wildly imaginative yet profoundly rooted in place. With this volume, Gary Grieve-Carlson has collected eleven essays that add significantly to our understanding of this quintessentially American writer. Focusing on Olson's rich and wide-ranging prose, these essays probe the various ways in which Olson explored the boundless encounter of language with experience. "Bonnie Costello, Boston University"For anyone reading Charles Olson, sustained attention to the prose along with the poetry is essential. Grieve-Carlson's collection offers a wide-ranging and systematic review of that prose certain to be helpful to our understanding of Olson's significance. This timely collection takes its place in the continuing critical revaluation that is beginning to displace the confessional lyric from its central position in the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and establishes Olson as one of the mid-century's most complex, difficult, provocative, and influential literary explorers."William Waddell, St. John Fisher College