Contemporary Olson / edited by David Herd.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Herd, David, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Olson, Charles, 1910-1970--Criticism and interpretation.

Olson, Charles.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 326 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

As a poet, critic, theorist and teacher, Charles Olson extended the possibilities of modern writing. Conceived as both a re-assessment of Olson's place in recent poetic history, and also as a way into his work for those not already familiar with his writing, this book invited three kinds of contribution. First, there are contextualising chapters, discussions that situate Olson's thought and work. Second, there are chapters that have as their focus individual Olson poems, whether from Maximus or shorter lyrics. Third, there are chapters by writers for whom Olson has proved a crucial interlocutor. The different kinds of engagement with Olson are grouped according to key themes and preoccupations within his work. The chapters of the first section probe Olson's relation to knowledge, dwelling in particular on the way he looked to make poetry answerable to other ways of knowing. They underscore the degree to which Olson's work was founded in dialogue: with myth, with science, with poetic antecedents. The second section, on Poetics, brings the matter of dialogue to the fore. It provides a reading of the poets' often fraught relationship that shows clearly how questions of poetics crossed lines of affiliation. If the feminine emerges in Olson as a discernible absence, his concern with History is plain. Like Pound, he took the epic to be a poem containing history, a position he modified by the exploration of historical agency he characterized as istorin. The book concludes by considering the matter of relations within and across space.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Section I Knowledge

1. Myth and document in Charles Olson's Maximus Poems / Miriam Nichols

2. Discoverable unknowns: Olson's lifelong preoccupation with the sciences / Peter Middleton

3. 'Empty Air': Charles Olson's cosmology / Reitha Pattison

4. A reading of 'In Cold Hell, in Thicket' / Michael Grant

Section II Poetics

5. From Olson's breath to Spicer's gait: spacing, pacing, phonemes / Daniel Katz

6. Poetic instruction / Michael Kindellan

7. Reading Blackburn reading Olson: Paul Blackburn reads Olson's 'Maximus, to Gloucester: Letter 15' / Simon Smith

8. From Weymouth back: Olson's British contacts, travels and legacy / Gavin Selerie

9. A fresh look at Olson / Elaine Feinstein

Section III Gender

10. Olson and his Maximus Poems / Rachel Blau DuPlessis

11. 'When the attentions change': Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff / Robert Hampson

12. 'The pictorial handwriting of his dreams': Charles Olson, Susan Howe, Redell Olsen / Will Montgomery

Section IV History

13. The contemporaries: a reading of Charles Olson's 'The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs' / Stephen Fredman

14. Futtocks / Anthony Mellors

15. Death in life: the past in 'As the Dead Prey Upon Us' / Ben Hickman

16. 'To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe's Things of Which He Has Written Us in His "Brief an Creeley und Olson'": Olson on history, in dialogue / Sarah Posman

17. 'Moving among my particulars': the 'negative dialectics' of The Maximus Poems / Tim Woods

18. A note on Charles Olson's 'The Kingfishers' / Charles Bernstein

Section V Space

19. Transcultural projectivism in Charles Olson's 'The Kingfishers' and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Warlugulong / Peter Minter

20. The view from Gloucester: Open Field Poetics and the politics of movement / David Herd

21. Why Olson did ballet: the pedagogical avant-gardism of Massine / Karlien van den Beukel

22. On the back of the elephant: riding with Charles Olson / Iain Sinclair

23. Charles Olson's first poem / Ralph Maud.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 Jul 2026).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781526110787

1526110784

9781526110794

1526110792

OCLC:

1507865015