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A Charles Olson reader
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- Charles Olson (1910-70) believed that poetry exists in an 'open field' through which the poet transmits energy to the receptive reader. Olson's influence on the development of British and American poetry through his writing and teaching is immense. His work encompasses myth, history, scholarship and politics, grand theories and delight in the particular variousness of life, all marked by the curiosity and openness to experience that he asked of his readers. Olson grew up and returned to live in the seafaring town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and it was from the life and language of its citizens that his poetry drew its strengths. The Reader includes extracts from the full range of Olson's poetry and prose, including letters, interviews and the full text of the key essay 'Projective Verse'. Ralph Maud, a colleague of Olson's from 1963-5 and the editor of Olson's letters, has supplied an introduction, supporting illustrations, notes and bibliography to this essential resource.
- About The Author
- 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.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9781857547849
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Carcanet Poetry, (31 August 2005)
- Number of Pages
- 217
- Weight
- 304 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 216 x 135 x 15 mm
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