Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
David Herd is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent
Table of Contents
Introduction - David Herd
Part I: Knowledge
1. Reading Olson with a double vision - Rachel Blau DuPlessis
2. Adventures in energy: Charles Olson and science - Peter Middleton
3. Maximus and knowledge - Allen Fisher
4. Myth and document in Charles Olson's Maximus Poems - Miriam Nichols
5. Practical and rhetorical: Charles Olson's cosmology - Reitha Pattison
6. In pieces: reading the fragments of The Maximus Poems - Anthony Mellors
7. A reading of Charles Olson's 'In Cold Hell, In Thicket' - Michael Grant
Part II: History
8. A note on 'The Kingfishers' - Charles Bernstein
9. Diversional events: singularity and multiplicity in Olson's poetics - Carla Billitteri
10. The contemporaries: a reading of Charles Olson's 'The Lordly and Iso late Satyrs' - Stephen Fredman
11. Having words with Europe: A reading of 'To Gerhardt, there, among Europe's things of which he has written us in his 'brief an Creeley und Olson and 'The Death of Europe' - Sarah Posman,
12. Death in life: the past in 'As the Dead Prey Upon Us' - Ben Hickman
Part III: Space
13. Olson, the ocean, and figures of outward - lain Sinclair,
14. Writing country: Olson's open field and indigenous poetics - Peter Minter
15. Polis is this: open field poetics and the status of documents - David Herd
16. Poetic instructions: a reading of 'I have been an ability - a machine' - Michael Kindellan
17. Charles Olson's 'Applause' - Karlien van den Beukel
Part IV: Contemporaries
18. A fresh look at Olson - Elaine Feinstein
19. Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff - Robert Hampson
20. From Olson's breath to Spicer's gait: spacing, pacing, poetics - Daniel Katz
21. The pictorial handwriting of his dreams: Susan Howe's Charles Olson - Will Montgomery
22. Olson thru Blackburn: a reading of 'Letter 15' - Simon Smith
Index