After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0889227063 ISBN 13: 9780889227064

Casa editrice: Talonbooks Ltd, 2012

Riassunto

Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldere?, a book designer and typographer, Joyce scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis.

After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldere? follows on from an earlier edition, Charles Olson and Frances Boldere?: A Modern Correspondence, that spans three years and more than three hundred letters. Published in 1999 by Wesleyan University Press, that edition concludes with a crisis that amounted to a “completion” of one of the major phases of their relationship. After September 1950, no longer would Boldere? believe so wholeheartedly in Olson’s work – or in his promises to spend time with her.

After Completion picks up the correspondence post-crisis, and consists of letters written between 1950 and 1969 – approximately 140 letters over a nineteen-year span. In this period of the correspondence, we witness the intensity of the letters ?are intermittently, sometimes explosively, as Olson and Boldere? try to maintain some continuity in their separateness. In these later letters, we also experience their magni?cent mutual embracing of Arthur Rimbaud.

The correspondence taken as a whole presents a passionate relationship realized mostly in letters – letters that were to become essential to Olson’s working out of his poetics. Boldere?’s interventions, which provoked Olson to articulate a projectivist poetics, claims for Frances Boldere? an incalculable e?ect on twentieth-century poetry.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Born in 1910, Charles Olson’s first two books, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Melville’s Moby Dick, and The Mayan Letters (1953), written to Robert Creeley from Mexico, cover a range of subjects—mythology, anthropology, language, and cultural history—and use the fervent informal style that were to distinguish all his discursive prose. Olson’s manifesto, Projective Verse, published in 1950, was quoted generously in William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography (1951). Olson was rector of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1951-1956, and taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, 1963-1965. Settling in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he devoted most of his time and energy until his death in 1970 to The Maximus Poems, his most substantial work.

Educated at the University of Michigan, Frances Boldereff (1905–2003) was a James Joyce scholar, typographer and book designer, and single mother who raised her daughter in Brooklyn, New York, while working in the male-dominated publishing industry of the 1940s and 1950s.

Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was based in Vancouver, BC, before joining the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, in 2005. She is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent The Good Bacteria (Anansi). Her books include a selected poems, News & Smoke (Talonbooks), Aurora (Talonbooks) and several titles from the 1980s and 1990s from Coach House Press. She has been involved in the Canadian and Vancouver poetry scene for many years.

Ralph Maud (1928–2014) was the author of a number of books on Charles Olsen as well as the editor of a number of books on Dylan Thomas. He was also a noted ethnographer and editor of ethnographic books. Maud was a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

[a letter from Boldereff to Olson, during his years at Black Mountain College]

Brooklyn to Black Mountain
[26 November 1953]

Thanksgiving

Charles dear—

A very nice black special delivery man brought the exquisite package last night—and I stayed up to read it through—It is now before breakfast and I hasten to tell you, though as you can guess, there is very much which I am not sure of at this first reading, that the primary adjective which comes up to me is clean—that in some marvelous transposition the very air of a Gloucesterman's boat has somehow been made to blow—that the pages are intensely clean and male. That they come to me as Ishmael did with a wondrous healing at an hour most needed (I had precisely at five last night a big blow out with my boss). But above all, I want to tell you that this last two weeks I am steeped in Rimbaud's La Chasse Spirituelle which I ordered from France and in the light of all that sacred holy thing discloses of Rimbaud's sufferings (I cannot wait to show and talk to you about it) in that high light--where I was touchy and fussy as a priest in his sanctuary—Maximus seems the next direct step—it comes over big, Olson--clean as clean—and while it requires, as always, very much hard work on my part to decipher in detail--it has already delivered its message to me and I would say comes out as in absolute, direct succession to La Chasse.

I have found a book which you also must see, "The Sacred Tree Script"—explains things in Rimbaud, in Plato and refers in ways I want to discuss with you to your "Gate and the Center"—very wonderful discovery, to me, and I now think--I can practically draw a literal line of exactly how and where the thing has traveled from the beginning of "man's motion"—is not that what you called it?

There were several beautiful things that struck me as I read so hastily—

"In the midst of plenty, walk..."

this whole passage through to the end of this Song is genuine song and I hope will be made a song and sung by someone who feels its music as I do and can hum a tune, as I can not.

It is a strange thing to be a woman—to be as full of your thing you could burst—and yet to have no outlet—I feel my thing growing to a size and a clarity inside me that you'd think it would have to break through in some form—yet I can neither sing, compose, write prose or verse, draw, sculpt or any of all those blood passages--perhaps I can squeeze it out into my house, which I am still determined to build before I die!

One other thing—I have an article from the architect Deitrick, on his terrific State Fair Arena at Raleigh, N.C. Most exciting building of the modern world—go to Raleigh if you possibly can—and see it—as I plan to whenever I can swing the money—Charles—in that building you will find everything which makes genuine polis--one of the great achievements. And the result of what cooperation and creative joint activity. Please hunt up Engineering News Record—February 5 1953 an article "Curved Roof on cables spans big arena" and you will thrill to see proof that Gloucester is now in Raleigh, N.C.

Your loving Frances

I only realized a few days ago that the dwarf letter disturbed you --that was not innuendo, Charles—it was straight child—and referred to physical head only—and my remarks, to trying to delve into cause, why, against the obvious, I felt it to be so physically accurate. It all has to do with a play I saw as a child which has become a kind of legend to Lucinda and means something neither of us can convey but which we are clear about, completely, entre nous.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Talonbooks Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0889227063
• ISBN 13: 9780889227064
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 293
• Redattore: Thesen Sharon, Maud Ralph
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile