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23 Charles Olson Ø Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or a winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences!1 A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is— Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. 1964 CHARLES OLSON 1910–1970 Charles olson brought epic ambitions, comprehensive intelligence, and rugged intensity to his work as a poet, as a literary critic and theorist, as a teacher, and as a mentor to younger poets. His signal accomplishments in all of these fields mark him as one of the leaders of the influential Black Mountain school of poetry and as one of American poetry’s most forceful and important midcentury figures. Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts—also the birthplace of his fellow poets and close contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop and Stanley Kunitz— and received a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University. He began work on a 1. Sensory links connecting nature with human thought and emotion. See French poet Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century sonnet “Correspondences.” Ø Charles Olson 24 Ph.D. in the brand-new program in American studies at Harvard University in 1936, but he left in 1938 without completing the degree. His graduate school research on Herman Melville, though, later resulted in the remarkable critical volume Call Me Ishmael (1947), the first publication to bring Olson significant literary attention. In the early 1940s, Olson became involved in campaign work for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and served, during World War II, as assistant chief of the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information. Olson left Washington in 1945 over objections to the more conservative turn he felt the Democratic Party was taking under Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman. In 1948, Olson took a position at the innovative Black Mountain College, which attracted such major artists and intellects as Josef Albers, John Cage, Franz Kline, Merce Cunningham , and Buckminster Fuller. There Olson met and worked with various poets, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Olson served as rector of Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1956, when the college closed. Olson’s influential 1950 essay “Projective Verse” helped to define the core concepts of the Black Mountain school, including the principles of “open verse” and what he termed “composition by field,” which he defined as being “opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the ‘old’ base of the nonprojective .” Olson was deeply concerned with associating the poetic line with the breath of the poet and reader, and he noted, “It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time, the poet has the stave and bar a musician has had.” Olson’s own work reveals an ongoing fascination with the interaction between syllable and line as they register and articulate the fluid interplay between feeling and thought. While studying Mayan ruins in the Yucatán in the early 1950s, Olson engaged in an extensive correspondence with Robert Creeley while continuing to develop the principles outlined in “Projective Verse.” This correspondence was published in 1953 as Mayan Letters. During this period, Olson also reached full maturity as a poet, creating such distinctive lyrics as the powerful “As the Dead Prey Upon Us,” a poem based on a series of vivid dreams involving the apparent return to life of Olson’s deceased mother. Poems like “The Distances” explore the haunting contemporary presence of mythic and historic figures of the ancient past, such as Zeus, Galatea, Pygmalion, and the Roman emperor Augustus. At the same time as he was crafting these innovative lyrics, Olson...

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