Olson’s life: Charles Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of a postman, & after completing two degrees at Wesleyan was among the first students in Harvard’s doctoral program in American studies. After a brief political career in the early 1940s (he was assistant chief of the foreign language section of the Office of War Information, OWI), he left to devote himself entirely to the literary life. He taught at Black Mountain College & retired to Gloucester, Massachusetts after the school closed.
Olson’s poetics: Olson’s first published book was Call Me Ishmael, a study of Melville which connected Moby Dick to the history of American (actually, human) civilization. In 1950 he published Projective Verse, a manifesto which demanded that poetic meter arise from the rhythms of breath, and that poetic syntax be built from sound & linked perceptions rather than logic or meaning. A poem is a transfer of energy from poet to reader, in “open form.” Olson coined the terms “post-modern” & “composition by field.”
Olson & Black Mountain College: Olson was invited to Black Mountain College in 1951 as a visiting professor on a faculty which included Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Franz Kline & other important artists & poets. It was at Black Mountain that Olson developed important relationships with Robert Duncan & Robert Creeley. He later served as rector of the college until it closed in 1957. Olson was the embodiment of Black Mountain -- its social consciousness, interdisciplinary nature, its experimentalism, its informality.
Olson’s poems: Olson is best known for his Maximus Poems, published in three volumes but meant to be read as a single epic spoken in the voice of his alter-ego, Maximus, who addresses himself & the town of Gloucester, mourning the loss of small-town community & the ways in which American society is becoming commercialized, depersonalized, damaging to the places where Americans live. But though they are socially conscious, Olson’s poems are not essentially narrative -- the words jump & echo across the page.
Books by Charles Olson:
- The Maximus Poems (ed. George F. Butterick, University of California Press, 1983, reprint 1995)
- The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, excluding the Maximus Poems (ed. George F. Butterick, University of California Press, 1987, reprint 1997)
- A Nation of Nothing But Poetry: Supplemental Poems (ed. George F. Butterick, Black Sparrow Press, 1989)
- Selected Poems of Charles Olson (ed. Robert Creeley, University of California Press, 1993, reprint 1997)
- Collected Prose of Charles Olson (ed. Donald Allen, University of California Press, 1997)
