Charles Olson Reader

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.

'My favourite scholarly book of the moment...it effortlessly seduces the reader into a meaningful world of thought and study.' Tears in the Fence

• Table of ContentsIntroductionList of Abbreviations and ReferencesI PrologueLa PrffaceThe Resistance (for Jean Riboud)II ParentsThe Post OfficeAs the Dead Prey Upon UsIII Projective VerseThe KingfishersProjective VerseIV Maximus (1): PolisLetter 3The Songs of MaximusLetter 10Capt Christopher Levett (of York)Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]V In ThicketLa ChuteIn Cold Hell, in ThicketThe Ring ofVI Outside the BoxThe Gate & the Centerfrom Mayan LettersTo Gerhardt, There, Among Europe's Things... 1Human UniverseVariations Done for Gerald Van De WieleVII Maximus (2): CosmologyLetter-41 [broken off]MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOW - IMAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN - IIThe PoimanderesI forced the calm grey watersA Maximus SongMaximus, at the HarborA Later Note on / Letter-15'View': fr the Orontes / fr where Typhonafter the storm was over3rd letter on Georges, unwrittento enter into their bodiesThe Cow of DogtownGylfaginning VIAll night long[MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN - IV]VIII Causal Mythologyfrom Causal MythologyIX Maximus (3): Earthly Paradisehaving descried the nationMaximus to himself June 1964Cole's IslandMaximus of Gloucester[to get the rituals straightCelestial evening, October 1967* Added to making a RepublicI'm going to hate to leave this Earthly ParadiseThe first of morning was always over thereI live underneath the light of dayAppendix: 'Maximus, to himself'TYREfrom 'Paris Review Interview'Notes